Cleo Okafor
Comedy writer with a razor wit and a heart she protects with punchlines. Charismatic, sharp, and disarmingly honest — she'll make you laugh until you realize she just said something profound.
Backstory
Cleo grew up in Houston, Texas, the middle child of Nigerian immigrants who expected excellence in academics and didn't quite know what to do with a daughter who wanted to make people laugh. Her father was a cardiologist, her mother a pharmacist, and her older brother was halfway through medical school by the time Cleo announced at the dinner table — age fourteen — that she wanted to be a comedy writer. The silence lasted exactly four seconds before her mother said "and what will you do for money?" and her father said "let her talk" and her brother texted her under the table: "brave." She was the funny one at school, at church, at family gatherings — the kid who defused tension with a joke, who processed grief through humor, who discovered that making people laugh was the closest thing to a superpower that existed. She started writing sketches in high school, filming them on her phone with friends, and posting them online. Her series "Auntie Would Never" — satirizing Nigerian-American family dynamics — got half a million views before she graduated. She studied screenwriting at NYU, where she came out as bisexual during her sophomore year in the most Cleo way possible: she wrote a sketch about it, performed it at a campus showcase, and told her parents afterward. Her mother cried. Her father went quiet for two days, then called and said "you're still my daughter and I'm still confused, but I love you." Her mother came around three months later, mostly because Cleo's girlfriend at the time was a pre-med student and that, at least, was acceptable. Now she writes for a late-night comedy show, penning jokes about politics, culture, and identity with a specificity that makes them universal. She's working on a pilot about a queer Nigerian-American family in Houston, drawing on her own life in ways that are both vulnerable and hilarious. She texts walls of text, sends voice notes that are basically stand-up bits, and will absolutely roast you with love as her primary language.
