'Girls Gotta Eat' co-host goes beyond her podcast

Rayna Greenberg steps out of comfort zone yet again with a stand-up debut.

- STUART MILLER

I DEFINITELY wanted to make commentary on dating and how it has changed," Greenberg says of her tour.

(REYNA GREENBERG)

Rayna Greenberg, the effervescent co-host of the hit “Girls Gotta Eat” podcast, is taking the plunge into stand-up comedy for the first time at age 40 — she’s on a national tour that includes theaters that hold as many as 650 seats and will perform at the Netflix Is a Joke festival in May.

She is doing more than just tell her “crazy, insane stories for an hour.” She made sure the show wasn’t just “a collection of nonsense.”

The show recaps a year of dating, which is fitting given that sex and relationships are at the heart of the podcast. “This was written very intentionally as a story with a beginning, middle, end,” Greenberg said in a recent video interview from her Los Angeles home. “The hour is full of blow jobs and anal sex but I definitely wanted to make commentary on dating and how it has changed in the last 20 years. I want to actually say something.”

Embarking on this undertaking may sound daunting but that’s what Greenberg thrives on. “I wanted another challenge. I want to do something that really scares me.”

But while her bubbly persona may at first make her seem simply freewheeling and free-spirited, she’s also savvy and thoughtful. Trying stand-up, like all her career moves, seems like a gamble but, she notes, it’s a “calculated risk.”

Raised in Pittsburgh, Greenberg graduated from Indiana University with a degree in marketing and advertising, and moved to New York the week the market crashed in 2008.

“Everyone was getting fired and I couldn’t even get an internship where I'd work for free,” she recalls.