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Stand-up comedy and occult history sound like an odd pairing until you sit with them for a minute. One happens in dark rooms where a crowd waits for the next laugh. The other lives in old books and rituals built around people trying to reach something that may never answer.
For Cassie Workman the two were never that far apart. I spoke with Workman ahead of the premiere of Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF, the series she created and hosts, and she made that case better than I could.
Welcome to the Bookstore
Cassie Workman Is Witchy AF is an adult comedy and documentary series running eight weekly episodes exclusively on ETCH’s YouTube channel. Set inside a fictional occult bookstore, it covers ritual magic, demons, tarot, identity, Aleister Crowley, John Dee, Santa Muerte and the occult history of Hollywood. Hannah Welever directed and Lilly Wachowski is among the executive producers. Puppetry from Direct Message and practical effects from Monster in My Closet do plenty of heavy lifting.
I had just finished the two episodes sent my way and loved them, so I started with the obvious question.
Writing What She Knows
“I was very interested in the occult,” Cassie Workman said. “And they tell you to write what you know, right? And I was doing stand-up, and I was funny. And I put those two things together because I thought that the world of the occult was like just such a weird and wonderful world that people were super interested in but maybe didn’t know very much about.”
What she wanted was a way in. “If I could make it funny and have like an entry point that was engaging and dumb and just silly, then it might make a great show,” she said.
Funny and Fair
Joking about what people believe can go sideways fast, so I asked Cassie Workman whether avoiding offense mattered to her.
“It’s never my intention to offend anybody,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything like smart or clever or edgy about that. So I just try to be funny and I try to be fair. And that’s it. That’s my goal really, funny and fair.”
That fairness mattered most on the one subject she came in cold on. “The thing that I really didn’t know about was Santa Muerte, which is our episode eight,” she said. “I was also finding out this stuff in real time. And I hope that I did it justice.”
Comedy and Horror Are Sisters
Cassie Workman calls herself a huge horror fan and welcomes genre audiences who find the show.
“I think that comedy and horror are very closely related,” she said. “They both work on building expectations and breaking expectations and shocking people and having those visceral reptile brain reactions, right? So to me, comedy and horror are sisters.”
Horror fans will catch plenty of references, she said, along with some real horror elements “particularly towards the end where things get a bit weird and existential.”
The loosest moments come from an old friendship. Workman flew Ben, a friend of almost 20 years since they started stand-up together in Perth, from Melbourne to New Jersey to lie under the desk with his arm in the air playing a bird. “If there’s anything improvised in the show, it’s me and Ben just playing around,” she said.
Hidden Knowledge
Cassie Workman thinks people often come to the occult feeling powerless or needing a miracle. That isn’t what keeps them there.
“If you’re doing it right, what emerges is this kind of self-knowledge, this self-awareness that transcends your regular life and gives you an extra dimension to life that you probably didn’t know was there before,” she said.
As for the word itself? “The occult just means hidden.”
That’s the part that convinced me this show had to come from her. She takes the material seriously enough to joke about it well.
Workman already has ideas for a second season. The first one premieres Wednesday, September 16, on ETCH’s YouTube channel, with new episodes arriving weekly.