Sarah Adelman is a comedian and writer based in NYC who wrote and stars in “Busted!” which is now making the festival rounds and will next play at the New York Comedy Film Festival.
“Busted!” is the true story of how I got fired from my dream job at a prestigious NYC hospital. I’d been working as a research scientist studying male infertility, running a human subjects trial at a sperm bank.
While I found working at a sperm bank to be hilarious, my uptight coworkers didn’t. Looking for an outlet, I started going to stand-up comedy open mics after work.
What started as a fun release quickly became an obsession, and for almost two years I worked 9-5 at the lab and then ran to do comedy gigs downtown.
Everything was going swimmingly until Human Resources found my stand-up set online. They sat me down and, together, we watched my material about being a female scientist studying male fertility. They were not amused, and I was promptly fired.
My years of work — undergrad, grad school, and PhD plans — came crashing down in an instant. I spoke to a lawyer who said I had two choices: I could either sue for wrongful termination, or write about the experience, but not both. I chose the latter.
Sarah Adelman on Collaborating With Emily Everhard and Lisa Cossrow on ‘Busted!’
I wrote the first draft of “Busted!” about a year later: a loosely-fictionalized version of the day I got fired. I knew I wouldn’t be able to make this alone, and immediately thought of Emily Everhard, a super talented filmmaker who I’d gone to Dartmouth with. I’d seen Emily perform on the college improv team and knew she had comedy chops, and she’d just started a Sundance x Sloan Episodic Fellowship, which focused on science and film, so I hoped she might be interested in collaborating on a Women in STEM project.
I also was a big fan of Lisa Cossrow, a really talented creative producer who had collaborated with Emily on previous films. I was drawn to Lisa because she’d worked on multiple studio features like Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, as well as hit series such as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Billions, while producing really amazing indie projects in her limited free time.
Over a plate of french fries at the Three Decker Diner in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Emily, Lisa and I met up on a rainy night and dug into the script. I could immediately tell that they were the perfect partners for this project: Emily has a track record of writing and directing pieces about funny and flawed women, and she had hilarious stories about always getting busted when she was up to no good as a kid.
Lisa was super passionate about telling coming-of-age stories, and both came on as the other co-creators of the short, with Emily set to direct and Lisa to produce.
One of my favorite parts of this initial stage was getting to workshop the jokes in the script on stage at comedy clubs. Our big scene in the conference room, where Sarah is fired, was initially a seven-minute long stand-up bit where I play all the characters, and it was so cool to watch that come to life with a full cast.
As with every short, budgets are super tight. Somewhat serendipitously, in the weeks leading up to our shoot I’d been making UGC content for BlueChew, a men’s health brand, and Lisa and I had the idea to offer them product placement in “Busted!” in exchange for some extra funding. They graciously agreed, and the brand ended up covering one-third of our total cost.
Shooting “Busted!” in just three days was daunting; The story takes a lot of twists and turns and spans multiple tricky locations. Our all-star comedy cast was a real lifesaver: Judy Gold, Emil Wakim, Savannah DesOrmeaux, and Dan Toomey are all stand-up powerhouses who were able to nail the jokes in minimal takes.
To help Emily prepare her shotlist, our production designer Marissa Todd created 3D models of the different sets so that Emily could block before our shoot days. Marissa also created our amazing fake-sperm mixture, which is a combination of egg whites and yogurt. Our awesome DP, Aaron Champagne, worked with Emily to make sure our sperm stunts looked awesome on camera – every time we screen “Busted!” I love hearing people’s gasps when they see it on the big screen.
Watching Emily work with our incredible editor John Raffaneli was a real masterclass in story and structure. While we had to make some hard decisions to cut jokes to keep the momentum moving, watching them work to carve a really funny but still structurally tight 13-minute story was amazing to see. Kyle Ogren’s original score really puts a polish on everything, and I love how the music carries you through the comedy moments to the heartfelt ones.
We premiered “Busted!” at SeriesFest 2025 and were completely blown away to win both the Audience Award and Jury Award for Best Writer in the digital shorts category. Since then, we’ve screened at multiple Oscar-qualifying festivals and our next screening will be at the inaugural New York Comedy Film Festival this coming Presidents Day weekend. Alongside our festival run, we have been pitching “Busted!” as a TV series, with the short as a proof-of-concept.
In a time when the film and TV industry is going through massive changes and it feels nearly impossible to get your foot in the door, I’m really proud of the “Busted!” team for just making an independent project ourselves that’s now reaching audiences across the country.
This November, we screened “Busted!” at the legendary Union Hall to a sold-out crowd, followed by stand-up performances from cast members. It was such a special moment to have “Busted!” play at a packed out comedy club; two-and-a-half years earlier, a live comedy set that I somewhat foolishly uploaded online destroyed my entire life. But standing in that room, hearing the audience crack up at the same jokes that got me fired, felt like redemption.
As we say in the “Busted!” crew: Sometimes you have to get busted to find out who you really are.
“Busted!” plays the New York Comedy Film Festival Tuesday, February 17 at 10 p.m. and Saturday, February 21 at 8 p.m. as part of the “Punch the Clock” block.You can learn more about Sarah Adelman here.
Main image: (L-R) “Busted!” creators Emily Everhard (director), Sarah Adelman (writer and actor) and Lisa Cossrow (producer). Photo credit: Devin Armstrong, courtesy of “Busted!”
