It’s been more than 20 years since Rachel Dratch first rolled out Debbie Downer during an episode of Saturday Night Live, and the character is so embedded in pop culture that you still hear everyday people refer to real life pessimists as Debbie Downers. Like all the best SNL personalities, there’s just something about her that rings so true and feels so relatable, probably because she’s based on a real-life moment that happened to Dratch.
The comedienne was recently on her former SNL co-star Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang when the subject of Debbie Downer came up. Dratch busted into the backstory, and it is absolutely wild. Apparently her therapist recommended she go on a solo vacation, and because she didn’t want to encounter honeymooners or traditional vacationers, she decided to take a trip to a really remote part of Costa Rica. While there, she encountered plenty of odd characters, and it was during a shared dinner with these bizarre strangers that she got hit with a really awkward follow-up question. Here’s a portion of the story…
