Caribbean Roots Meet Comedy Royalty: Everything We Know About Michelle Buteau’s Family

The Breakdown: Michelle Buteau is a comedy queen with a long list of impressive credits to her name. But when she’s off-stage and off-screen, she’s a family woman. Get to know Michelle Buteau’s parents and their influence on her humor, plus the husband and kids that complete her beautiful family.

If you’ve never seen Michelle Buteau do stand up, you’re missing out, because she is laugh-out-loud funny. Buteau is a pro at turning stories from her personal life into hilarious jokes, and she does it all with candor, confidence, and a healthy serving of Jersey attitude.

But stand-up is just one part of Buteau’s growing comedy empire. She’s leveraged her on-stage experience into multiple ventures, including her memoir, Survival of the Thickest. The book is the inspiration behind her Netflix comedy series of the same name, and she’s both co-creator and leading lady of the show.

Don’t get it twisted, though: while this comedian is a professional success, she’s equally committed to family matters. Let’s meet Michelle Buteau’s parents, husband, and kids, and the support system behind her boss moves.

The first word of Michelle Buteau’s memoir is “Jersey.” That’s because she was born in the state, and its unique culture has influenced how she shows up in the world. But Buteau’s parents hail from the Caribbean, and that has had an impact on her too.

Buteau’s mother is Jamaican, and her father is Haitian. The couple raised their daughter with strict Caribbean and Catholic values, and Buteau was held to high standards. In an interview with The Cut, she said, “There was no monkey business going on ... Don’t eff up, get your education, don’t embarrass us. That was sort of the mantra growing up.”

Though Buteau jokes about her upbringing, it’s clear that her parents’ lessons stuck. She did get an education at Florida International University where she studied television production. She didn’t become an entertainment reporter like she once dreamed, but she’s earned her fair share of film and TV appearances, including roles on the Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005-2014) and Netflix’s Always Be my Maybe (2019) and Russian Doll (2019).

In her comedy, she often pairs her jokes with advocacy for marginalized groups. That’s something she got from her parents too. In a heartfelt Instagram post, she shared a video of her father, who now suffers with dementia, discussing LGBTQ+ allyship. She writes, “The people that raised me and the people that raised them stand on business when it comes to love & equality.”

As Buteau’s career has blossomed, she’s added titles like actress and producer to her resume. But there was one role she struggled to attain. Though Buteau wanted badly to be a mother, infertility issues made it difficult. After four rounds of IVF and as many miscarriages, Buteau was frustrated and exhausted. She and her husband were preparing to sell their home to afford surrogacy when her parents stepped in.

In a moving personal essay for Elle Magazine, Buteau recalled her mother saying, “Stop doing this to your body. Your father and I have taken money out of our retirement; don’t refinance your house or anything. We’ll pay for a surrogate. Find and agency and let’s make our dreams come true.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Buteau’s mother had intervened for her wellbeing. In her memoir, Buteau wrote about how her mother once gifted her health insurance for Christmas, which led to the diagnosis and treatment of a benign brain tumor just three months later.

The gift of surrogacy paid off too. Buteau and her husband welcomed their twins via surrogacy on January 20, 2019.

When you watch Buteau’s stand-up specials, it’s clear how much she loves her husband, Dutch photographer Gijs van der Most. Buteau and Most have been married since 2010. She often does bits about their cultural differences and misunderstandings, but she’s also open about his support throughout her career. The couple even co-owns a furniture store called Van der Most Modern.

Most was also supportive as he and Buteau navigated their fertility struggles. Now that the pair have twins, they are finding the balance between Buteau’s hands-on Caribbean parenting style and her husband’s more laid-back Dutch approach to raising kids. Still, Buteau celebrates her husband as a great dad.

People often expect twins to be similar, but Buteau shares that her kids — Hazel and Otis — couldn’t be more different. For one, they’re fraternal twins (one’s a girl and the other’s a boy), and they also have very different personalities.

Ever the comedian, Buteau hilariously describes Hazel as having “the energy of a 53-year-old Black woman that works at the DMV," while Otis has “the energy of a tired husband holding his wife’s purse at Macy’s.”

But Buteau loves them both entirely. She has written often about the joy she felt at becoming a mother. When she landed her first cover shoot with Parents’ Magazine, she proudly showed off her babies. And when she was asked about balancing her career and motherhood, she told 21Ninety that “being a tired mom is a privilege.”

Like so many other working mothers, Michelle Buteau is juggling it all and making it look good. She’s a powerful reminder that women can have professional success, a beautiful family life behind the scenes, and a whole lot of laughs along the way.