Several years and many memes later, Brunson is a keen scholar of the medium. Making it in Hollywood is no easy feat, and doing so as a woman is even more difficult. Not long after she posted the video, one of its scenes was turned into a meme that went viral and changed her life forever.Įntertainment & Arts Black while funny and female: 18 comedic actresses on working in Hollywood I really wasn’t into the internet at all.” I had never even used Instagram as a platform. They “pushed me to put that video online. Rather, it was thanks to friends as supportive as they were web savvy. But she maintains that her social media success was anything but strategic. “The whole video was a product of me being like, ‘Man, I miss dating,’ because dating was easier in Philadelphia and was much harder when I first moved to L.A.,” she says. By the time she finished the book, Brunson had lost and then rebuilt her identity on the West Coast.Īfter taking improv classes, turning down a prank-show gig and doing a brief stint as a phone sex operator, she found her tribe in L.A., a close group of friends that helped her develop her self-produced Instagram series, “ A Girl Who Has Never Been on a Nice Date.” The skits, in which she played a woman marveling over acts of minor generosity from a man (“He got money!” was her catchphrase), became her first viral hit in 2014. It took about three years to write the personal essays in “She Memes Well,” which document her journey into an industry that could be welcoming one minute and alienating the next, especially for Black women. But like most stars, she could never have predicted how. “I’d create my own scene, my own culture, right there in the middle of Hollywood!” she writes.īrunson essentially did. It wasn’t just auditioning opportunities. In her debut memoir, “ She Memes Well,” Brunson describes what she found in her adopted city that wasn’t available in her hometown of West Philadelphia. Some may know her from her prolific BuzzFeed video sketches, others from recurring roles on “ A Black Lady Sketch Show.” Most people who know Quinta Brunson, however, think of her as a meme.īefore she was navigating any of those roles, Brunson, 31, was just another aspiring performer navigating her 20s in Los Angeles. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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