Rachel Brosnahan Based Midge’s Personality On A Real Comedian

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There are only four days until the fifth season of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel premieres its first few episodes on Amazon Prime. If you remember, the show's last season 4 episode left audiences with a glimpse of Midge getting back on her feet after some career fails. And this upcoming season will reveal the legendary Midge Maisel's final destination, or I guess I should say marvelous!

Sadly, this is the final season for the show, but lead Rachel Brosnahan hints that this will be quite the finale for Midge. In an interview with Extra in June 2022, Rachel said MMM fans will get to "watch Midge's star rise."

If you've been a fan of the show for a while, it would be hard to ignore some obvious historical parallels between Midge and famous comedians from the 1960s. However, Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband (co-creator Dan Palladino) have some very personal and specific inspiration for Midge's character on top of historical figures. Plus, actress Rachel Brosnahan, who plays Midge, had her own blueprint for bringing the character to life.

Here's everything to know about how Midge's character came to be and who she's based off of, from the creators and Midge Maisel herself:

Midge is, first and foremost, just Midge.

"She's her own gal," Amy Sherman-Palladino told Women's Health of the woman she's made her own, Midge Maisel. That's true—to a point.

Midge isn't fully modeled on any of the real women who once upon a time knocked the comedy world on its overwhelmingly male ass simply by telling jokes in a dress (though they were a heavy inspiration). The character is actually heavily based on a real person from Amy Sherman-Palladino's life: her father, Don Sherman. "It's weird, but it's true," Amy says.

Midge—a beautiful, young mother of two and brisket-cooking-housewife-turned-stand-up-comedian, was inspired by stories of Don Sherman and "his cronies," as Dan Palladino calls them.

The setting for MMM is based on stories from Don Sherman's time as stand-up comedian in 1950s New York.

"Once [Sherman] moved to L.A., all his cronies would sit around and talk about the good old days in New York," Dan Palladino explains. "...That was really stand-up comedy central during the '40s and '50s and going into the '60s." (Indeed, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel takes place in the late 1950s going into the 1960s.)

Those were the days when "music and comedy kind of went hand in hand," he continues, often in a "basket house" (à la The Gaslight Cafe in New York City and The Gaslight in Maisel season 1), where unpaid performers would pass around a basket in hopes that audience members would fill it with money.

"Comedians would open for jazz singers. Amy's dad opened for the singer Dinah Washington. He opened for Johnny Mathis. He opened for a lot of musical entertainers," explains Palladino. "Through his experience, we got to know the highs and lows of a working comic. And we certainly got to know [it] up close—like, Amy grew up with it—but I got to see it from a more objective place."

Sherman's real-life experience gave the Maisel team uncanny insight into the mind of a comic.

From hearing Sherman's war stories, the couple got "to learn the psychology of a working stand-up comic," says Dan Palladino, which invariably informed not only Midge's character, but also her trajectory in the show.

But the "lessons" didn't end with Psych 101. They also learned "what it means to try to be funny," as well as "how hard it is to turn that off" when it's time for the spotlight to shine on someone else. Sherman also showed them the inherent difficulties of putting yourself in a position to be judged and how, when that ruling falls in your favor, you can become used to being the center of attention, no matter where you are, says Dan Palladino.

Midge is heavily inspired on Joan Rivers, too.

Although much of her career and the show's setting is based around Amy's father, a lot of Midge's experiences are based on the life of Joan Rivers.

Similarly to Midge, Rivers was born in New York to Jewish parents who disproved of her career in comedy. Rivers also attended Barnard College, per PEOPLE, an all-women university in New York. Veteran MMM fans will remember that Midge attended Bryn Mawr, a similar all-women college in Philadelphia.

Most importantly, however, Midge's big break at The Gaslight Cafe in New York in season 1 reflects Rivers' own performances at the same club. Plus, both Midge and Rivers were personally aided by comedian Lenny Bruce.

In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2017, Amy spoke briefly about how she crafted Midge's comedy sets to reflect Rivers, but not completely mimic it:

"[Joan Rivers] had that wonderful mix, that battle of wanting to be accepted on a feminine level—[but] you can’t have that many balls and be accepted on a feminine level," Amy told Vanity Fair. "It just doesn’t work that way. It was such a wonderful dichotomy, and she crafted those monster jokes. And because we knew we were going to get an actress to do [this part], we felt like it needed to be more of a rant, of a monologue. Going forward, that’s how we’re looking at Midge’s humor. She’s going to learn how to control that and craft it a little more."

Clearly, as the series has progressed, Midge has come into her own!

Rachel Brosnahan crafted Midge's disposition on a lesser-known woman comic.

At a recent press event for the upcoming season of MMM, Rachel said she crafted a lot of Midge's personality off of comedian Jean Carroll. "I was convinced for a short period that Midge was based on a lesser-known comedian named Jean Carroll, who was so talented," Rachel said. "I hesitate to even say this, but if you watch the very few videos of Jean Carroll that are available on YouTube, I borrowed everything she does with her hands and arms from the first season."

In the above clip, you can totally see how Rachel used Jean Carroll to bring Midge to life. Dan Palladino also said that Amy and he used Jean Carroll's glamor and humor as an inspiration for Midge's personality.

Ultimately, Midge Maisel is in a league of her own.

"A lot of that [Midge's character] is drawn from Don, and some of it's drawn from stand-ups that we've known over the years," Dan Palladino adds. "And...while there's a bit of all these female comics in Midge, there's not a lot in Midge. We've kind of made her up out of whole cloth."

And, in fact, that may just be exactly what makes Mrs. Maisel so marvelous. "It's great for us to have no one story that we're following for her," says Dan Palladino, "because we can take her wherever we want."

While she's made up of many people, Midge is truly one of a kind!

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