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The Long Laugh: Comic Karen Williams

Karen Williams has been practicing Nichiren Buddhism for 35 years and performing standup comedy for 22. There’s a deep connection between the two vocations.

“I got the courage to be out and to be a lesbian comic–and to continue to be who I am as a human being, manifesting my full potential–based on everything that I’m learning from Buddhism,” she says.

“One of the things I learned about my life in the course of my Buddhist practice was that I have a lot of fears,” Williams says, “and these fears were keeping me from living the life I wanted to live.” So she decided to work through her own fears by conquering number one on most everyone’s list: public speaking. “And I decided I was going to just take it to the nth degree and make people laugh,” she adds.

Williams’ comic sensibilities were nurtured early on, at home. “My family was as dysfunctional as the next but there was this underpinning of being able to laugh at situations,” she recalls. “And both of my parents are very funny.”

She remembers listening to “blue comics,” such as Redd Foxx, Slappy White and Moms Mable. “I think in black culture there’s just a strong identification with comedy,” Williams says. “That influence was always there.”

Now 53, Williams got married when she was just 19. Then, as she puts it, she was “feminized” in the early ’70s.

The Bronx native attended a one-time meeting of the National Black Feminist’s Organization in New York City, where she met many African American lesbians. She struck up a relationship with one and wound up divorcing her husband.

“I don’t think people realize that it wasn’t quite the shock value that people presume it was,” she says. “That stuff was pretty common in the seventies. I even remember Newsweek or Time had a cover story on runaway wives.”

Williams says her husband was floored when she told him she was gay, “but we were friends so there was just this acceptance of me finding out who I am.”

“It’s important to point out,” Williams adds, “that there just aren’t these same fine-line distinctions within African American culture between gay and straight. It wasn’t until some of us, by being part of the women’s community, got exposed to a white version of the feminist movement–and white women who hadn’t talked to their parents in 19 or 20 years–that we saw more distinct lines. That’s less likely to happen in the Black community.”

“I don’t know a lot of black lesbian separatists,” Williams continues. “They exist, but you’ll still find their brother coming over to their home. Our family connections are so strong.” Williams has three sons and eight grandchildren. She and her ex-husband remain friends to this day.

Williams moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after her divorce. Once she had decided to challenge herself to stand before people and get them to laugh, she wrote herself “a little act” and rehearsed it for her friends.

One day an acquaintance came by and said he was going to be performing comedy at a club out by the Oakland airport. “I burst out with ‘I do comedy too,'” Williams recalls, “and all my friends were like, ‘No, you don’t!'”

But her new friend agreed to give her five minutes of his act at this club, which was housed within an inn that had rooms with red heart-shaped beds and mirrors on the ceiling. “As Marga [Gomez] says, they used to put the women on last and we performed to drunks and tables and chairs,” Williams says.

“I went on at midnight and maybe five people were listening,” she recalls. But she wasn’t discouraged: “I was dressed up like a model in this beautiful outfit, and I got my five minutes and I felt fantastic.”

For the next few years, Williams went around performing in black clubs in the Bay Area. Then Gomez asked her to perform at San Francisco’s gay pride, cautioning that it would be in the papers and everyone would know that she was gay. Williams was undaunted.

“I made the switch to performing on the women’s circuit as opposed to sticking with the black comedy competitions and the black comics, basically because of the homophobia,” Williams says. “I wanted to be out, and even though there’s racism in the LGBT community, I still felt that there were more opportunities for me to be able to be who I am than listening backstage to all the negative commentary about gay people.”

It was the early ’80s, “when GRID, gay-related immune deficiency, was showing up,” she recalls. “I’d be going to the clubs and we’d hear that Michael was sick, or this one was sick, and in a week or so they’d be dead.”

Along with Gomez, Karen Ripley and other fledgling women performers in the area, Williams took part in some of the earliest AIDS benefits. They were grassroots affairs, usually raising money for just one individual. “Early on, producers figured out that if they could make $1,500 at a benefit, they’d make twice as much if they had a comic, and it was low-end to produce,” Williams says.

That was the start of a longstanding project for Williams, using comedy to work toward social justice: “My activism was really born in the lesbian feminist arena, and then being a comic has given me lots of opportunities to be a social activist within the community.”

Williams believes she was in the right place at the right time when she started out: “My coming into comedy coincided with the whole lesbian and gay movement. I think there was sort of a ready-made atmosphere in the Bay for what has come to be known as lesbian comedy.”

She had gigs at the Baybrick Inn and Valencia Rose, and was the first performer to take the stage at Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint. “Josie’s was a home base, like a workshop/workout space for a lot of us in the area,” she says. “Every comic I know has performed there.”

“The club wasn’t entirely ready to be open yet but they had me perform, and no one showed up,” Williams recalls. So the owner promised her that from then on she could perform there whenever she wanted to, and she did so frequently over the next 12 years.

The legendary Josie’s has since given way to a restaurant. Williams laments: “I’ll be in the Bay Area next week and it’s quite a sad thing for me to go over to that place now. It was such a cultural icon in San Francisco for lesbian and gay comedy.”

Williams has moved on too. In 1992 she relocated to a Cleveland suburb, where she founded the HaHA (humor and healing arts) Institute, for the “study and active use of humor in the healing process–personal, societal and planetary.” The institute provides workshops, lectures, keynotes and online tutoring.

Williams has also taught comedy at Cleveland State University, where she created her own major, “Humor and Healing,” and graduated summa cum laude. She also holds a master’s of education from the university’s adult learning and development program.

Williams can be seen in Laughing Matters, a documentary on lesbian comics, alongside Gomez, Suzanne Westenhoefer and Kate Clinton. She and Gomez have remained friends over the years and still find themselves on the same bill from time to time.

On her upcoming tour Williams will be the keynote speaker at San Francisco’s Dyke March Rally later this month. She’s also slated to perform at the National Women’s Music Festival in Bloomington, Ill., in early July, and then on two Olivia cruises in Europe during the last two weeks of the month.

Next on the schedule is Montreal’s Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, and then the Michigan Women’s Music Festival in August. In addition to performing standup at the Michigan festival, Williams will lead two workshops: “Let’s Laugh About Sex,” and “Comedy 101.”

“My idea about humor is that it opens people’s hearts and it opens people’s minds,” Williams says. “With that they can laugh at themselves and share more freely than if it’s delivered as straight commentary.”

And Karen Williams knows what it means to have an open heart and an open mind. “I’m one person who never, ever, ever felt bad or ashamed or any negativity about the fact that I love women. Never. From day one.” Now, that’s something you don’t hear very often.

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