When she moved away from Chicago ten years ago, Poppy Champlin never imagined she'd be returning one day to perform before an audience of 40,000 at Wrigley Field. But that's exactly what was in store for the L.A.-based comedian, who was recently a featured performer in closing ceremonies for the Gay Games.
“Making 40,000 people laugh at once? I think my hair is going to fall out and I'm going to pass out!” Champlin said the week prior to the big event. “I'm probably going to start crying.”
Champlin is no newbie. She has performed on VH-1, Comedy Central, A&E, and Lifetime, and she has opened for Ray Romano, Denis Leary, Bill Maher, and Rosie O'Donnell.
She is known for her energetic performances, quick wit, and rapid-fire pace—and for peppering her performances with songs and impressions, including musical parodies.
She sings “I'm a (Gay) Woman,” a modified version of a Peggy Lee classic. She has reworked “42nd Street” into a song about food and re-titling it “Who Likes Meat?” And she has tailored her own rendition of J-Kwon's “Tipsy” to describe the Dinah Shore Weekend experience.
Calling herself a good mimic, she has long been known to do a formidable Joan Rivers and has recently added Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote to her repertoire.
Champlin has come a long way since her first foray into comedy: “In college I was doing this cabaret sponsored by the oceanography department and we were all fish. I was a standup fish and I did a fish shtick,” she quips.
“The amount of laughs and the reaction I got was so exhilarating,” she says. “It was about '77 and comedy was just taking off, and I just wanted to jump on that and go with it.”
Champlin wound up graduating from the University of Rhode Island with a B.F.A. in theater, although she hadn't arrived on campus with that goal in mind.
She was a basketball star at South Kingstown High School in Wakefield, R.I., once scoring a school-record-setting 33 points in a single game. “There wasn't a professional league back then so I didn't know what I was going to do,” Champlin recalls. “I just thought I was going to college to play basketball.”
Now Champlin plays more racquetball than basketball, and she even has a Rhode Island Women's B championship trophy to show for it. “If I had played in the Gay Games this year it would've been racquetball,” Champlin says. But she had a comedy show to focus on instead.
In addition to her spot in the Games' closing ceremonies, Champlin produced two shows earlier this week, performing with Sapna Kumar and Michele Balan as “The Queer Queens of Qomedy.” It's an act that will soon hit the road, with the next scheduled stop in Alexandria, Va. on August 25. Champlin has plans to include other performers and other cities in the future.
After college Champlin moved to Chicago and performed with the Second City Troupe. Eight years later she made her way to Hollywood and started with a stint writing for a television network.
But Champlin prefers gigs that afford her a larger share of the artistic control. “I liked the structure, but I didn't like their sense of humor as much as my own,” she admits readily. “Plus, I really like to be in charge of things.”
Along these lines, she and some friends will soon be pitching a sitcom about a lesbian and a gay man living together. As Champlin describes it: “It's kind of like The Odd Couple. The Oddest Couple, really.”
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