Nicole Byer regularly gets asked for dating advice. “Not by my friends,” she says, “because why would you ask a person who’s single about dating? But strangers ask me so many questions. I’m like, my podcast is literally called Why Won’t You Date Me? I don’t know anything about dating! If I knew, I would be dating somebody.”
The podcast she is referring to is one of the world’s funniest and most vulnerable; for the past two years, she has been sitting down with friends and fellow comedians to discuss her search for love, and theirs, and is soon to hit her hundredth show. As the description of the podcast has it, Byer, who is now 33, has been single for decades, despite being smart, funny and sexually voracious. Her honesty about this makes the podcast feel radical. She is open about her yearning to be loved and her frustration at how difficult it is to find the right man or woman. At a time when dating is arguably more difficult than ever, she offers candour from the trenches.
The podcast hasn’t boosted her success at dating, but she doesn’t find this surprising. “I’m not delusional,” she says. “I live in LA, where you have the creme de la creme of bodies to choose from. If you are a shallow person, body type is a thing. Being a black woman is a thing.” In 2014, OkCupid released data showing black women were judged “least attractive” by users, receiving the lowest number of matches. “I understand I’m not the ideal standard of beauty. I’m not someone who people want to bring home to their mother. There are so many things working against me.
“I think that having my own money is demeaning to some guys, as well as being loud and someone that other people like. This sounds full of myself, but my fans really like me. They come to my meet and greets and want to connect with me, and I try to give them a little bit of myself, because I appreciate them. So any date would have to understand that the people who watch my content share my life, too. That’s asking a lot.
“And if my date was a woman, she’d have to understand that I have a lot of female fans and she wouldn’t be able to get jealous every time a woman talked to me.”
The fact that Byer has been single her whole life is baffling; she is beautiful, hilarious, warm and in every other area seems pretty close to taking over the world. She is the host of the popular and extremely silly baking show Nailed It, on Netflix, in which contestants who are not exactly capable bakers are asked to make, say, a cake in the shape of Napoleon or a phenomenally lifelike shark. Since taking her first improv class in 2008, Byer has had roles on 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live; she has written and starred in her own semi-autobiographical comedy show Loosely Exactly Nicole for MTV, and later Facebook; and, this year, her standup special was released on Netflix.
On the podcast, Byer is hilarious and boisterous. Her guests critique her dating app profiles, often expressing particular admiration for a picture that shows her climbing up a bookshelf in a catsuit. She talks about sex toys and sex acts, pornography and pole dancing – as well as her conversations with her therapist.
Byer discovered her gift for making people laugh as a child. “My grandmother is from Barbados so she says things Americans don’t really say. If she found something funny, she’d say: ‘Oh, you tickle me,’ and I liked that. So my goal was to get her to say that as much as possible.” Byer has attention deficit disorder (ADD), and she says that medicating for it changed her life, allowing her to organise her thoughts and finish tasks. But her highest praise is reserved for the therapy she has undertaken over the past two years. Byer’s parents died when she was young – her mother when she was 16, and her father when she was 21 – and therapy has helped her work though those unresolved traumas. “There’s the saying: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. No, it makes you internalise, act out and maybe harm yourself.
“I said to my uncle: ‘I’m on ADD medication.’ He said: ‘You don’t need that.’ I said: ‘I’m going to see a therapist.’ He said: ‘Why would you do that?’” she says. “In the black community, medication and therapy is stigmatised, but I want to talk about it because my therapist has given me the tools to succeed. So why wouldn’t you do [the same]?”
Byer is also co-host of Best Friends, a podcast exploring modern female friendships, which she presents with fellow comedian Sasheer Zamata. I ask her whether there are parallels between dating and forming friendships.
“I think people are just as scared to make a move on a friendship as they are with a relationship. I think we are all terrified of being rejected.”
Could this be a reason why people won’t date her? That they are simply afraid of being rejected by such an impressive, magnetic person?
“So you’re saying these people maybe think I’m going to reject them?” she muses. “Hmmm. That would be an interesting flip. I do sometimes have people ask me on the apps: ‘Is this really you? Are you really Nicole Byer?’ So I’d say: ‘Why would I use Nicole Byer as a catfish?’” – ‘catfishing’ is where someone presents themselves as a different person online by using someone else’s picture – “And they’d reply: ‘Why wouldn’t you?”’
“But if I was going to pick a catfish,” she continues, “I would use a white lady’s picture. That’s how you would get more traction. A hot white lady.”
I tell Byer there is evidence to suggest that the algorithms some dating apps use further entrench social hierarchies based on factors such as race and body type. The theory goes that as black women are chosen less – arguably due to white and Eurocentric standards of beauty and femininity – they are given a lower “score” for their desirability. This score in turn helps determine who they are shown, as apps want to show people others with similar scores, in the hope this will encourage matches. In effect, this keeps everyone “in their place”.
“What?!” Byer screams. “My day is ruined. I had no idea, but it makes so much sense now that black women have such a hard time on apps. It’s because the algorithm is racist!”
On the podcast, her life is her material. Does she ever feel tempted to make things up or construct reality somehow – has she ever gone on a date with someone who sounded unpromising, for instance, just to have something to talk about? “No! I want to be in a relationship,” she says. “I will go on a date with a weirdo because maybe they could be my weirdo. And yes, they may be very fun to talk about, but I will go just in case they are perfect for me.”
Byer remains upbeat and optimistic. “I do think love is real,” she says, “and I do think I’m going to find it.” How does she stay positive? “I have bad days, like everybody else, but I also have ADD, so I’ll have a bad day and then something good will happen and I’ll forget about the badness.”
