Whitney Cummings

Whitney Cummings was born in Washington, D.C., and has described a childhood in a household troubled by alcohol. She studied communications at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 2004. She then moved to Los Angeles, worked on the MTV prank show Punk'd and began performing stand-up.

In 2011 two of her sitcoms reached network television. She co-created 2 Broke Girls with Michael Patrick King, which ran on CBS for six seasons, and she created and starred in Whitney on NBC, which critics received poorly and which ended after two seasons. She has released stand-up specials on Comedy Central, HBO and Netflix, and since 2019 she has hosted the podcast Good for You.

I'm Fine...And Other Lies (2017), her first book, grew out of an essay about her codependency. It mixes memoir and comedy with what she learned in therapy about people pleasing, an eating disorder and childhood trauma.