Maureen Monahan is a corn-fed child of the Midwest, born and raised in Beloit, Wisconsin. As a teen, she divided her time between being the worst employee at her local Culver’s and trying to sneak paper copies of the Onion to read at school before they got confiscated. Her love of the Onion led to her enthusiastic involvement in her high school newspaper’s annual joke issue, which included hard-hitting satire about hallway water fountains suddenly flowing with purple gatorade, and the school’s entire security force being replaced by a single buff football player. That guy ended up becoming a professional MMA fighter so it actually may not have been a bad idea, but anyway, this isn’t about him.

Maureen’s interest in comedy soon took her to Chicago, home to a world-renowned comedy scene. While attending DePaul University, she spent four years as captain of the women’s rugby team, learning teamwork and tenacity and how to cheerfully brush dirt out of an open wound. She also continued to hone her writing and comedy skills, interning at The A.V. Club and Mental_Floss and performing in the first-ever stage production of Andy Kaufman’s Other Plays with special permission from the Kaufman family. Post-college, she dove headfirst into the Chicago comedy scene, taking classes and performing at storied institutions The Annoyance, iO, and The Second City. As half of the sketch comedy duo Spooky Dookie, she also performed at comedy festivals around the country, including San Francisco Sketch Fest and the Women In Comedy Festival in Boston. She later fulfilled a childhood dream in being selected for the Onion Writing Fellowship, eventually working her way up the ranks to become a full-time Senior Contributing Writer at the Onion.

After honing her satirical skills at the Onion, Maureen set her sights on the world of TV, writing multiple episodes of Showtime’s Our Cartoon President and later joining the team at the Emmy, WGA, and Critic’s Choice award nominated Stephen Colbert Presents: Tooning Out The News, an animated satirical news show on Comedy Central. There, she worked as both a writer and voice actor behind the leading roles of Sarah Sabo (a beltway elite Mika Brzezinski type) and Kyle Weaver (an utterly self-obsessed “blue check” Twitter liberal) conducting live-recorded, largely improvised comedic interviews with a wide array of newsmakers. The gamut of guests included politicians (Adam Schiff, Cori Bush, Gretchen Whitmer, Cory Booker, Harry Reid, and more), actors (Mark Hamill, Tiffany Haddish, Jeff Daniels, Norman Lear, and more), journalists (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Ken Burns, and more) and ice cream magnates (Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield—yes, the Ben and Jerry). In the fall of 2022, the show flew Maureen to Washington, D.C. for a sit-down interview with former presidential candidate and current U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. They had a lovely conversation but ultimately, there wasn’t much of a spark there.

Now residing in Los Angeles, Maureen continues to perform sketch comedy, improv, and standup around town while continuing to hone her writing skills. She has written several acclaimed comedy TV pilots in a diverse array of genres, from a sci-fi featuring a futuristically hellish Silicon Valley, to a mid-1800’s period piece with echoes of Sex And The City, to a dark showbiz comedy set in what’s left of the entertainment industry after an apocalyptic event. Her animated comedy-mystery pilot Visit Sludgeberg! won first place at the 2022 Los Angeles International Screenplay Awards. Always drawing from her midwestern roots, she loves to play with genre and satire, and is drawn to stories that are cuttingly funny while retaining a gooey core of human goodness. She’s currently writing a movie about Bigfoot.