Heroic Chicago trans comedian recalls saving infant from ice-cold Lake Michigan: ‘I guess I’m going in’

A Chicago comedian is speaking out about a daring rescue that left him in the freezing waters of Lake Michigan, and saving an infant from drowning.

Six days before his February 24 birthday, on a bright winter afternoon along Chicago’s Lake Michigan waterfront, Lio Cundiff had a thought that now reads like a setup to a joke. “I was on the phone with my friend, looking at the water, and I was like, ‘Man, that looks so beautiful. I just want to jump in,’” he told The Advocate in an interview on Friday. Little did he know.

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Cundiff, 31, had arrived early for work on February 18 near Belmont Harbor and wandered down to the water, as he often does. He loves the lake. He loves floating in it in the summer — ideally, he says, “with a beer.” He had been taking phone calls, sitting on a bench, “vibing,” he said.

Then he heard screaming. “I just look up, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’ I just saw a stroller headed straight to the lake, just blown by the wind,” he recalled.

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In that instant, the punchline vanished. There was no bit to craft, no self-deprecating aside about his baby face or his anxiety about sending emails, both staples of his stand-up. There was only motion. He threw down his jacket and phone and ran.

“I was like, ‘I guess I’m going in.’ And I jumped in and just tried to keep us afloat as much as possible,” he said.

Early media reports suggested that Cundiff did not know how to swim. He bristles at that characterization. “I can swim,” he said, explaining that in the hospital he told a reporter he wasn’t the strongest swimmer and preferred “to float with a beer in my hand.” “They ran with, ‘I can’t swim,’” he said.

“I can swim. I just prefer not to,” he said through a chuckle.

The baby, eight months old, was zipped inside the stroller. Cundiff had to keep the entire frame buoyant while treading freezing cold water. At one point, both of their heads went under. He describes the memory in fragments, as though replaying a film whose ending he already knows but still cannot quite believe.

“There were a few minutes where I didn’t know if we were going to be able to keep afloat,” he said. “I grabbed her hand for a second. Her tiny little fingers. I rubbed them for two seconds, and I was like, ‘Okay.’ … ‘All right, we got to keep going.’”

A bystander named Lou dropped a jacket; later, a life buoy arrived. They were about thirty feet from a ladder. Cundiff’s muscles were tightening. When they finally reached it, and the baby began to cry, he felt something like release.

“As long as she’s crying, when she gets out, that’s all I needed,” he said.

In the days that followed, Cundiff became something he does not quite know how to inhabit: a hero. “It’s weird,” he said. “I just did something that I would think anyone would do. What do you mean you would watch a stroller and a baby just sink?”

The shock of the cold didn’t fully register until afterward. After emerging from the lake, an ambulance transported him to the emergency room. At the hospital, doctors monitored him after his cardiac enzymes spiked to more than thirteen times the normal level, a marker sometimes associated with heart distress. He stayed about twenty-eight hours. He was not allowed to eat, in case doctors needed to perform a heart catheterization.

“I was so sad,” he said. “I love to eat.” When he was discharged, he went straight to Redhot Ranch for the cheeseburger he’d been craving. “I just experienced some trauma. I wanted this cheeseburger,” he said.

The line could easily land in a set.

Cundiff has been doing stand-up in Chicago for nearly eight years, on and off, grinding through open mics and building a thirty-plus-minute set. Born in Russia and adopted by American parents, Cundiff grew up in Kansas before moving to the Windy City to pursue comedy. It was there or New York City, which he said is more for “seasoned comics.” His comedy is personal and observational, edged with sarcasm. “I definitely talk about being trans probably the most and also having a baby face and stuff like that,” he said.

He transitioned during the pandemic, first identifying as nonbinary before recognizing, with a clarity that now sounds almost comic in its simplicity, “I’m definitely a man. It’s pretty obvious. I’m a boy, I’m a dude.”

Asked which comedians he most admires, Cundiff doesn’t hesitate. “Tig Notaro is my absolute favorite comedian of all time,” he said, also naming River Butcher, a transgender comic whose work has helped shape a generation of queer performers.

There is something disarming about him: the soft features, the quick smile, the way he drifts between sincerity and punchline. He is open about his anxiety, particularly about self-promotion. “For some reason, it’s scarier to send an email than jump in the lake right now,” he said

The rescue has, inevitably, altered his set. He has already been working it into open mics.

“Oh yeah. I’m kind of addicted to it,” he said about immediately returning to perform for audiences.

In the current American climate, in which transgender people are relentlessly legislated against, debated, caricatured, Cundiff’s story is something else: a corrective, a counternarrative, a reminder.

He resists that framing, even as he understands it.

“Me being trans has nothing to do with me jumping in a lake and saving someone who can’t save themselves,” he said. “If anything, take away the fact that I’m a human being who did a human act, and my gender has nothing to do with it.”

Then, unable to resist a sharper note, he added, “How many cis people can say they saved a baby?”

It is, in its way, a perfect joke: pointed, irreverent, and grounded in something undeniably true.

The baby’s father has since reached out. They have met. They plan to remain in contact. “He was just like, ‘We’re family. We’re in each other’s lives.” Cundiff hopes to watch the child grow up.

For now, he is back to doing what he was doing before the lake, performing, thrifting, watching sports, hanging out with his girlfriend and their Bernedoodle, and trying to manage the flood of attention that still feels, to him, disproportionate.

He insists that the story is not about bravery. Not really. The headlines, the donations, and the applause are noise to him.

For someone reluctant to be called a hero, the aftermath has been surreal in other ways, too.

Cundiff doesn’t have health insurance. A friend and his girlfriend launched a GoFundMe page while he was still hospitalized, noting that Cundiff lives paycheck to paycheck. The fundraiser quickly surpassed its original goal, drawing thousands of small donations and several large anonymous gifts. Cundiff has described the outpouring as “insane” and “overwhelming,” emphasizing that he never expected such attention for what he considers “a human act.”

As of publication, a fundraiser started by Cundiff’s best friend has raised almost $73,000. Cundiff is almost embarrassed by the amount raised and said he had thought his friend set it to stop accepting donations.

But somewhere in Chicago, a comedian who once joked about floating lazily on the lake with a beer now has new material: about cold water, tiny fingers, and about how quickly an ordinary afternoon can change.

“The most important part of this entire story is that the baby is okay,” Cundiff said.

Watch Lio Cundiff perform at Laugh Factory Chicago below.

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