Lindy West and Meagan Hatcher-Mays’s friendship

Lindy West and Meagan Hatcher-Mays’s friendship began when they recognized in each other an uncommon intensity that had often set them apart. First formed through a school project and deepened by a shared devotion to comedy, their bond made humor more than a private interest: it became a language of recognition, a source of companionship, and a way to inhabit the world together.

Meeting and Recognition

West met Meagan Hatcher-Mays in Shakespeare class during the months before their high-school graduation. They had moved in overlapping social circles without connecting. From a distance, West found Meagan intimidating; Meagan, West recalled, had not noticed her. West understood that kind of invisibility as familiar: she could feel both too visible and overlooked.

The change came when they were assigned to the same group project. In close company, they were drawn to one another with an intensity West describes as platonic. Each seemed relieved to find someone else who was, in West’s phrase, a bit much in the same ways: loud, awkward, boisterous, and intense. Their connection began not with either of them toning those qualities down, but with the discovery that the other person understood them.

Meagan’s exuberance was matched by a directness that impressed West. She spoke honestly, did not pretend to like people she disliked, challenged authority when she thought it was talking nonsense, and could say no without retreating from it. West had become less shy by then, but Meagan’s confidence offered a more forceful example of how a person could take up space without apology.

Comedy as a Shared Language

Their friendship quickly acquired a practical, almost archival form. Both had spent years recording comedy from television onto VHS tapes and carefully labeling their collections. Meagan’s bedroom held thick stacks of tapes, and West was struck by the resemblance between Meagan’s handwriting and her own. The collections made their affinity tangible: each had independently devoted time and care to preserving the same kind of material.

They drove around for hours in West’s Volvo listening to comedians, and, once Napster made it possible, made one another mix CDs assembled from audio clips of The Simpsons. Meagan spent fifty dollars on eBay, a substantial sum for them at the time, to obtain a bootleg VHS copy of every Tenacious D episode. They watched the tapes so often that they wore them out. These were not simply shared recommendations; they were objects and rituals around which the friendship kept building.

Over the course of a few months, their vocal cadences began to merge. Their conversation became so saturated with references and inside jokes that, as West remembered it, they sometimes seemed to be speaking a private language. They were voted funniest in their senior class poll. West’s blunt follow-up—that the pair were unbearable—preserves the comic self-awareness of the memory: their intensity could be exhausting to others, and that excess was part of what they enjoyed together.

For West, the friendship also illuminated what comedy could do. As a lonely child who felt ugly and caught between being invisible and too conspicuous, she had experienced comedy as a companion. It demanded a response and made the person laughing feel less alone. In Meagan, West found someone with whom that response could become shared practice: not only watching comedy, but keeping it, trading it, remembering it, and extending it through their own riffs and references.

A Friendship That Continued Beyond School

The comic shorthand remained present after high school. Years later, at a live show West regularly attended, she found herself seated beside Andy Richter and his wife, Sarah Thyre. A bit from a comedy clip they had watched at home came back to her, and she ran to the bathroom to call Meagan. Meagan answered with a brief, mock-aggrieved dismissal. The joke depended on a history already understood; West did not need to explain why the moment mattered or why she had to share it with her.

That recollection also shows how their closeness could travel across distance and time through a small cue. Their friendship was not described through a sequence of later milestones, but through the persistence of a common comic memory: an old routine could still summon the same recipient, and the same familiar response. Their shared references had become a durable form of contact.

The friendship also appears in West’s account of meeting Ahamefule J. Oluo. After a conversation at an open mic changed his impression of her, West and Aham spent the rest of the weekend together; she called Meagan from the arcade while they were playing Plinko, and Meagan’s reply again took the form of teasing resistance. The episode places Meagan within West’s adult life and romantic beginnings, while keeping the friendship’s characteristic mode intact: important news and comic occasions could be brought back into their private exchange.

Lasting Significance

In the book’s acknowledgments, West thanks Meagan Hatcher-Mays directly, calling her a better version of herself and recalling that Meagan ate the thirteenth biscuit. The affectionate joke is small but revealing in its form: after the grander account of their high-school bond, West still marks their closeness through a particular shared memory and a teasing detail. She identifies Meagan not merely as an influence from adolescence but as a friend worthy of explicit gratitude at the book’s close.

Their friendship’s significance lies in the combination of likeness and permission. They recognized each other in qualities that could make a person difficult to accommodate—volume, awkwardness, intensity—and treated those qualities as material for connection rather than reasons to withdraw. Comedy furnished their common vocabulary, but the relationship was not only about having the same tastes. West also admired Meagan’s honesty and refusal to yield when she meant no. Together, their story gives a concrete shape to the companionship West associated with comedy: the relief of being met by someone who understands the joke, the reference, and the person making it.