River Butcher

River Buddy Butcher (formerly Rhea Harriett Butcher, born August 12, 1982) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, producer, and podcast host.

Butcher is best known for personal, observational comedy focused on his vegetarianism, feminism, love of baseball, and experiences as a queer person.

Butcher was raised in the Kenmore neighborhood of Akron, Ohio, an only child whose parents divorced when Butcher was one month old.

He attended Our Lady of the Elms High School and graduated from Archbishop Hoban High School in 2001.

While attending the University of Akron, Butcher worked at a skateboard shop named Summer Squall and an indoor skating facility called Joe's Skate Park, and helped design a skatepark that opened in Akron in 2001.

He graduated from the University of Akron with a degree in printmaking in 2005.

Butcher attended graduate school at University of Notre Dame.

In 2006, Butcher had an exhibit at a printmaker’s show called "Prints at an Exposition".

This exhibit, which was a series of prints on muslin showing the body's organs, was inspired by his own appendectomy.

Butcher began his comedy career performing improv in Chicago at The Second City and has since performed stand-up at clubs including Zanies, the Jukebox, and Flappers, as well as Chicago Underground Comedy, The Hideout, The Lincoln Lodge, UCB, Cole's, and Meltdown.

In the fall of 2014, Butcher appeared alongside Cameron Esposito in a series of videos for BuzzFeed Motion Pictures titled "Ask a Lesbian".

Butcher and Esposito also co-hosted the web series "She Said" for Amy Poehler's Smart Girls Network.

The two wrote and starred together again in Take My Wife, on the comedy streaming service Seeso.

On December 12, 2015, Butcher and Esposito married onstage at The Hideout in Esposito's hometown of Chicago, Illinois.

He made his late-night debut on Conan in June 2016.

His first comedy album Butcher was released in August 2016 by the independent record label Kill Rock Stars.

The set was performed at Mississippi Studios in Portland, Oregon.

It debuted at number one on iTunes.

In 2016, he appeared in 8 episodes of the first season of Adam Ruins Everything.

He returned in 2017 for one additional appearance.

In 2018, he started hosting a baseball-focused podcast called Three Swings.

In 2021, he appeared on Comedy Central Stand Up Presenting called A Different Kind of Dude.

As stated in an interview, Butcher said his strongest comedy influences are Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Brett Butler, Elayne Boosler, Maria Bamford, and Paul F. Tompkins.

In August 2018, Butcher and Esposito announced their separation to "live individual lives."

Their split was covered in a Vanity Fair article.

Butcher also co-hosted the stand-up comedy podcast Put Your Hands Together with Cameron Esposito, which was recorded weekly in front of a live audience at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles until it ended in July 2019.

In September 2019, Esposito wrote an article for the New York Times discussing the couple's pending divorce.

Butcher is a trans man and uses he and they pronouns.

In November 2021, Butcher announced that he had changed his name to River.

Butcher is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

He endorsed Kenneth Mejia and Eunisses Hernandez during the 2022 Los Angeles elections.

Butcher provided the voice for Asher, a fictional nonbinary character, for the animated series Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, released in 2020.

Butcher met fellow comedian Cameron Esposito at an open mic hosted by Esposito.

The two soon started collaborating and then began to date.