Comedian Kat Timpf has welcomed her first child — a baby boy. She has also been diagnosed with “a little bit” of breast cancer, she says.
The “Gutfeld!” panelist and Fox News contributor on Tuesday confirmed both updates with what she called “An Unconventional Birth Announcement” posted to her social media pages.
“Last week, I welcomed my first child into the world. About fifteen hours before I went into labor, I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” Timpf, 36, wrote in a statement, confirming the arrival of her son with husband Cameron Friscia, a former Army Ranger whom she wed in 2021.
Advising her followers not to worry, Timpf said her cancer is considered Stage 0 and her doctor is “confident that it almost certainly hasn’t spread.”
“As I’ve explained to the few people I’ve managed to tell about it so far: Don’t freak out. It’s just, like, a little bit of cancer,” she wrote, noting in her statement that the best course of action for her was to have a double mastectomy. She did not indicate what type of breast cancer she had.
“Still, it was not a chill day,” she wrote. “I mean to say the least!”
Timpf, who announced her pregnancy in July, said she woke up the morning before she gave birth more than a week past her due date and was “consumed” by doing everything she could to “get the baby out.” By that afternoon, she was instead “waddling around from appointment to appointment, talking about how to get the cancer out.” In the middle of the night she went into spontaneous labor.
“The good news? People who work at hospitals make excellent audiences for dark humor — and, as someone whose first book was about the power of jokes to get through traumatic situations, there was really no better place for me to be,” Timpf said. “Just minutes after my son was born, I was talking with the nurses about what a birth announcement in my situation might look like.”
Some options: “Mom and baby are doing well, except maybe for mom’s cancer” or “The baby after breastfeeding is stunted by her double mastectomy.”
The “You Can’t Joke About That” and “I Used to Like You Until…” author said the next three months of maternity leave would be different from what she anticipated as she’s “still getting used to my new reality.”
“As I navigate new motherhood (and new cancer) I’m learning to celebrate everything I can. I’m lucky that we found the cancer so early; I’m lucky to be my son’s mom. I mean, I know I’m biased, but the little dude absolutely rules — and not just because he might have saved my life,” she said.
The “Sincerely, Kat” host thanked her fans and followers for their support as she embraces “this wildly unexpected chapter.”
“Here’s to resilience, to miracles in the midst of chaos, and to finding humor and hope even on the toughest days.”
In a July piece for Fox News announcing her pregnancy and declaring that she was neither a Republican or Democrat, the libertarian performer wrote that she never wanted to have kids until she met her husband.
“[M]eeting him made me feel like it could actually be a cool thing to do,” she wrote at the time. “Part of it was feeling like something was missing in my life. Part of it was simply that I was curious. Part of it was that, well, I low-key felt like I had done everything else already. Part of it was, as ridiculous as this sounds, I thought that it would be funny.”
Timpf also opened up about her pregnancy in a September interview with The Times, describing how for years she would be called out for not having children.
“For years I was getting these hate comments … then I got pregnant, and you would have thought that this is what these people wanted, right? I mean, I didn’t do it for them, but now people are saying, ‘Can you just shut up about being pregnant already?’ Some of them are the same people!” she said.
“Some people are just gonna be haters no matter what. I just hate the whole, ‘Oh, you’re not the first person in the world to be pregnant.’ I know that! But it’s the first time I’ve been pregnant! Life can be so monotonous and there are so few things that inspire a sense of genuine wonderment and amazement about life and being alive. I’ve been so dead inside that sometimes I’m just like, let me have this! You’re mad that I’m happy and excited about having a baby?”
