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Five Lesbian Comics You Might Not Know but Should

It’s been said that women aren’t funny. It’s also been said that lesbians have no sense of humor. If those ridiculous statements were true, stars like Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Kate Clinton, Suzanne Westenhoefer, Michelle Balan and Julie Goldman would all be unemployed. Thankfully, that’s not the case.

With nothing but a brick wall and a mic, future Ellens and Rosies are performing nightly in clubs all across the country. Whether you like smart, observational humor or dark, twisted riffs, there’s a lesbian comic for you.

Here, in alphabetical order, are five lesbian stand-up comics, some you may know, others you may not. There are dozens of hard-working, hilarious women out there who deserve recognition, but due to space limitations, we couldn’t fit them all in. If you have a favorite comic or know an underground sensation in your city, let us know! Claudia Cogan is a native New Yorker with an “award-losing” blog and a loyal and ever-growing fan base. Riffing on everything from being mistaken for Jewish (she’s not), to idiotic temp agency names, to her wistful desire to be a stripper, Cogan brings a wry, snarky sensibility to her act and writing. When she’s not performing in and around New York, Cogan is putting together a tour called Under the Gaydar. AfterEllen.com: How long have you been doing stand-up? Claudia Cogan: It’s been almost six years of crafting the yuk yuk. I was already doing improv and sketch and I got the itch to work on my own. My first ever set was at an all-women variety show called Pussy Power. It took place in a sketchy part of town. At least two pimps wandered in, I guess drawn in by the name. Or maybe they just enjoyed Melissa Ferrick covers.

AE: I’d go based on that title, too, but that’s just me. Did that first show go well? CC: The first joke I told was: “My mom keeps close tabs on me. In fact, she keeps the names of and numbers of all my friends under ‘R’ for ‘Rivals.'” I guess that’s what happens when you write jokes and live at home. It was a shaky beginning, but I felt so good afterwards. I knew I needed more.

AE: It takes a brave soul to do stand-up. Do you ever get heckled? CC:I never get heckled. No one defies me! [Long silence.] Excuse me while I gulp some more Xanax with this vodka.

AE: Do you think being gay limits a stand-up performer’s audience or opportunities? CC: It seems like it should, but I don’t come at it from that standpoint. You’re limited by what’s popular and whether you fit into that mold, so that’s why you have to work to make your voice, your offering, invaluable no matter who you are.

Honestly, I couldn’t say what effect is has in the minds of industry. I’ve always been out onstage so I could either attribute any career stalls to homophobia – but more likely [to] the fact that I forgot to send my comedy tape to a manager last week or something dumb like that.

AE: What do you find funny about lesbians? CC: I think it’s funny and very lesbian that The L Word has a vocal faction of fans that only want Tina and Bette to get back together. The “Tibetters.” They’re both still on the show, dating other hot chicks. But leave it to lesbians to get fixated on a couple.

You know, after Alice and Dana broke up, in order for the fans to consider allowing Alice to date other people, I think Dana had to die. That would explain it for me. Although some think Alice should have gone ahead and given Danish one more shot by moving up north to marry the waterfall.

AE: There’s’s an idea – a lesbian with water for a partner. Some people think the show could use more diversity anyway. CC:I also think it’s weird, with our reputation for diverse representation, no butches have produced an exploration of their naughty parts and called it the The Strap-On Monologues yet. It’d be a hit, right?

AE: Sure. Again, I’d go based on the title alone. Maybe that’s a show whose time has come. We’ve come a long way. Why do you think lesbians used to have a stereotype for being humorless? CC: Because they were too busy generating drama. Hey oh! Seriously, considering most jokes are at the expense of outsiders, like women and gays or any other group that doesn’t happen to be white and male – I’m sure this is setting off bitterness alarms already – and considering how vocal lesbians are, it just makes sense that we’d be the first to point out something is offensive. I think we’re like cultural umpires. “Foul joke!” we cry.

AE: At some point, I think any lesbian stand-up worth her salt gets to work an Olivia Cruise. Would you work on one? Would it be a great gig or a seafaring nightmare? CC:As most people know, I long to be a modern lesbian pirate. [In a pirate accent] If I could bring my eye patch and an accordion to play me favorite shanties, I would feel right at home on their craft.

AE: Keep talking with that accent and I don’t see how they can resist. What else are you working on besides your pirate-speak? CC:Something I’m really excited about is a tour that I’m producing that should be underway soon called Under the Gaydar. It’s going to be a showcase for gay and lesbian comics, ones who are not well-known yet but should be. Some fresh faces who could very well be the next generation of gay comedy. If there are AfterEllen.com readers who have a big old venue or college auditorium just waiting for some hilarious gay comics, contact me!

AE: If you weren’t in comedy, what would be your dream job? CC: Lesbian Recruiter, Department of Gay and Lesbian Affairs, Ipanema office.

A stand-up comic and television writer with credits such as South Park and Arrested Development, Karey Dornetto’s style is twisted, unique and hilarious. Taking everyday minutiae and wordplay to their most absurd conclusions, North Carolina native Dornetto performs in clubs “all over” Los Angeles. Dornetto recently wrote and illustrated her first book, 101 Ways to Shave Your Ass. AfterEllen.com: How would you describe your style to people who haven’t heard your act? Karey Dornetto: Someone once told me it was like Sarah Silverman Lite. It’s kind of dark, quirky and weird. I tell a lot of jokes about events in my life that haven’t really happened.

AE: So you’re basically lying? You’re making it up? KD: Total liar. I make s— up about my life, just anything I think is weird or funny.

AE: Do you have any new jokes you want to try out on me? KD: My favorite joke lately goes like this. Do you like parties?

AE: Yeah. KD: I really like parties, but I’ve come to find out not all parties are fun. For example, search parties — not so much fun. I was invited to one a couple of weekends ago in Riverside. I spent the entire time searching for alcohol and all I found was a dead girl in a ditch. And then everyone was crying and the party was over. I was like, “Hey guys. We found her. Now who wants margaritas?”

AE: [Laughs.] I watched your “Hi, I’m Ilene Chaiken” video and loved it. What kind of reaction have you gotten from it? KD: I’ve received no negative feedback at all. As a matter of fact, I still get emails from people. I just got an email from these girls in Germany who loved it and said they wanted more.

AE: You weren’t afraid of offending Ilene? KD: I love the show; I’ve been watching it since the very beginning. I didn’t think my short was mean-spirited. Ilene put herself in front of the camera and I thought it was kind of funny, so I went with it. I think you need to have a little bit of a sense of humor about yourself if you’re going to be throwing yourself on-screen.

AE: I like the part where you say you gave Dana “breast cahn-cer.” KD: Thanks. We all loved Dana, and she’s not on the show anymore. We all need to let her go. Just let her go! It makes sense for people who are invested in the lives of these [characters] to get upset about these things, even if it is just TV. I understand that.

AE: Speaking of television, you’ve written for a couple of shows. KD: Yeah. South Park was my first writing job.

AE: That’s crazy. KD: It was pretty crazy because I’d been working in banking for the past five years when I landed that job. I was working on a trading floor in New York during the day and doing stand-up at night. I was trying to figure out how to make a career move.

I wrote some short stories and personal essays, which got me an agent. He sent them to one of the executive producers at South Park; they liked my writing; I flew out to L.A. for an interview, got the job and just stayed. Two weeks before, I’d been laid off from my banking job. It all worked out really well.

AE: I’ll say. What other shows have you worked on? KD: After South Park I worked on the Jamie Kennedy Experiment, a couple of shows for MTV, Arrested Development, Dog Bites Man [on Comedy Central] and just last year, The Knights of Prosperity [on ABC].

AE: Which Arrested Development episode did you do? KD: I worked on all of the Season 3 episodes, but the episode I personally wrote was Prison Break-In.” The gist of the episode is that Michael has to break into the prison to save his mom from having sex with the warden.

AE: Did you get to meet Portia? KD: Yes, I did, but I was a big dork when I met her. I guess I’m shy. I just didn’t know what to say. At the first table read, Portia made a point to meet the female writers, which was me and one other lady. She said, “Hey, it’s great you’re going to be working on the show.”

And I was like, “Yeah.” And I didn’t say anything else. I just stood there like an idiot, when I should have said, “You’re really funny on the show” or “You have great hair.” But I didn’t. Oh well.

Sapna Kumar is a self-described “loud-mouth, pint-sized” lesbian comic who was born in India and grew up in Indiana. She has worked with the famed Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, as well as appeared on Last Comic Standing 4 and Oxygen’s Girls Behaving Badly. AfterEllen.com: Comedy isn’t a career path that most parents would wish for their children. But as an Indian, and coming from a culture where education is a priority, how do your parents feel about your telling jokes for a living? Sapna Kumar:Well, my parents are sort of unique Indian parents. They’re pretty liberal, pretty open-minded. My mom will make reference to how she regrets we weren’t some big corporate executive or doctor, but then I will hear her talking to a relative, “Well you know, you can’t stop your kids from doing what they want to do.”

AE: How do they feel about it when you talk about them in your act? SK:Well, my father passed away this April. I have rewritten my act to sort of write him out of the act. I feel [the way to] pay reverence to him is not necessarily [to] make jokes about him.

My mom — she doesn’t love that I talk about her in my act. [But] she thinks my act is funny, and she loves to see me have success in it. I don’t get too personal. I tell anecdotal things that point out the things I love about my parents.

AE: Were you a class clown? SK:When I was in high school, I ran for a student government office just so I could give a speech, because for me, it was a comedy act. I ended up getting elected, and it was great. Then, when I went to college, I was a theater major but I really missed writing my own material, that feeling the punchline gives you when the whole audience laughs at the same time, that sort of high you feel. I knew that’s what I really enjoyed, and so I started doing stand-up in college.

AE: Who are you comedy influences? SK:It always seems to change. It depends on my mood.

AE: OK then. What about today? SK:I’ve done a one-woman show, so growing up I was a huge fan of Lily Tomlin and the character work she’s done. My stand-up is not character-based, but I love her character work.

As far as stand-ups that I currently admire, I really like Louis Black, Jon Stewart and Demetri Martin. None of my material is like these comics’, but I aspire to be like them because they’re truly great.

AE: I like Demetri Martin too. What about lesbian comics? SK:I know [those were] all men, but I truly love the commentary that they make. As far as lesbian comediennes, Kate Clinton is fantastic. And I always enjoyed Vickie Shaw’s act. She’s created a whole story about Sergeant Patch.

AE: Would you say you have two versions of your act: one for straight audiences and one for gay audiences? SK:Not necessarily. [But] I have certain jokes that I only tell to gay audiences.

AE: Give me one. SK:There’s a difference between lesbians and gay men at holiday parties. I went to a holiday party hosted by gay men, and it was catered; there was a live pianist; there was a gift exchange with gifts from Abercrombie & Fitch and Armani Exchange.

Then I went to the lesbian holiday party. It was a potluck. There was a gift exchange, except the gift had a five-dollar limit. There was a drumming circle.

And the conversation at lesbian parties is a lot different than the conversation at the parties of the gay men. When I was at the gay male party, I heard guys saying, “Did you see what he was wearing?” And then, “Oh forget about it. Did you see his ass?” I think lesbians need to spend more time talking about ass and less time aligning our chakras.

AE: That’s what I’m saying … SK: Lesbians would really be into a game of strip Scrabble®. “I just spelled ‘cat’ and ‘codependent.’ That’s a Double Word score. That means you strip, Lisa. Take off your cardigan and your sweater vest” — because you know she’d be wearing both. That would be one of my gay jokes. Straight people don’t quite get that.

Sabrina Matthews has a casual, laid-back delivery that borders on the deadpan. Her honest and insightful wit earned her a spot on this season’s Last Comic Standing. She made her acting debut on America’s Most Wanted playing a lesbian comic, then further stretched her acting chops by playing the role of “Suburban Dyke” in Margaret Cho’s Bam Bam and Celeste. Most recently, she played a lesbian used-car dealer on The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman. AfterEllen.com: What was it like being on Last Comic Standing? Sabrina Matthews:It was actually a lot of fun, getting to work with all those comics and getting to meet some new comics. [But] the show itself is an art competition — I’m not sure how well those two things interact. The best thing you can do is compete with yourself.

AE: Did you make your set less gay because you were going to be on mainstream television? SM:I changed my set eight hundred and four times, but I never changed it to make it less gay. My set is never really entirely gay. and my set is absolutely never devoid of gayness. I was really glad the network kept the out jokes in my sets because I wanted my fans who were watching to [know] I would [never] chicken out just because it’s national television. And I wanted new people to get a sampling of all of me. I think more than anything, I wanted to represent.

AE: When you said, “Do we have to have a special moment where I announce I’m gay?” it got a huge laugh. SM:Some of your best jokes are jokes that you never knew were funny. That [line] was something I said one night on stage when I realized I was 15 minutes into my set [and] I hadn’t said anything about it. I thought I’d better get something in about this — better get to that stuff because I want [it] in there. And it got this huge laugh, so it stayed. I don’t actually usually do that line, just where it sort of comes up organically.

AE: What do you think are some of your best bits? SM:There’s a line, I think it may have even made it onto Last Comic Standing: “You know what I hate about lesbian stereotypes? They all apply to me.” But I said that and I didn’t mean it to be funny. It was about a year before I figured out why it was funny.

AE: Self-deprecating humor is disarming, too. SM:I have a really strong belief that changes are made in two ways; either huge things happen and people try to recover from them as best they can, or small, little advances are made and then people change [the way they think].

Being an openly gay comic … has been a type of activism. I’m going in and getting straight people who think they don’t know about gay people, and laughing with a gay person — me. I have people come up to me after shows and say, “I never met a gay person before.”

And I say, “Yeah, you did, you just didn’t know it.” Those people begin to see gay people as human … [and] have some empathy for them.

AE: Have you ever not used gay material in your act? SM:I never didn’t do it. Actually, that’s not true. I tried not being out once, and it wasn’t because I was worried about the room. I tried it to try it. It was severely creepy. I had no idea how to feel about it. I hated everything about it. I just wanted to get back on stage and say, “Wait! Wait! Wait!”

Truly, the best comedy shows will have a woman on the bill, a person of color on the bill, a gay person on the bill, maybe someone who talks about being Muslim on the bill. You know what I mean? The more different realities that come to the bill, the better it is. People all have things in common, and that’s where comedy comes from — being inside someone else’s head. You can’t laugh at something you don’t understand.

AE: What do you have coming up? SM:I’m leaving for an RSVP cruise to Alaska in a few days, and then I’ll be doing two shows for Hampton Roads Pride in the Virginia Beach, Norfolk area. In October, I’ve got shows in Provincetown. In November, I’m headlining at the Houston Laff Stop.

AE: The last time I was in P-town, it looked like it was taken over by straight people. Have you noticed this? SM:It’s fun to scare the s— out of the straight people. One year, this guy was wandering around and he was pointing at the gay people in a derisive way. He was with his wife and his two kids; one of them happened to be a daughter. While he was waiting to cross the street, I came up behind him, leaned up to his ear and said, [ominously] “How much for the girl?”

Bridget McManus is not your mother’s stand-up comic. Then again, maybe she is, if your mother enjoys provocative, balls-out, say-anything humor that knocks convention on its ass. (“I have a big problem with the word ‘cheating’ because of the negative connotation. Why can’t they call it ‘juggling?’ Or ‘multi-tasking?’ Or ‘ being f—ing awesome?‘) In addition to performing and songwriting, Bridget was recently kicked off the stage at the Laugh Factory. AfterEllen.com: When did you realize you wanted to be a comic? Bridget McManus:When I was 5 years old, I used to run around with a turkey baster pretending I was a stand-up comic, thinking I was Carol Burnett. When I was 17, I tried but I was young and I didn’t really know how. Ten years later, I was [still saying] I want to be a comic. My girlfriend of four years said: “You keep talking about being a comic. Just do it. And if you suck, then you suck. Get it over with and move on.”

AE: So you found your voice? BM: A lot of people say I’m like a straight guy when I talk about things like: “Why can’t we just do it? Why do we have to love each other?” I do a joke about how we should stop using the word “love.” Everyone uses it so nonchalantly. We should only use it for important things like traveling, food and oral sex.

AE: [Laughs.] Back to the turkey baster comment; are you sure you were channeling your comic side and not your baby lesbian side? BM:Touché. Well, I’m not very maternal, so I’d definitely say it was my comic side. But yeah, I used to run around chewing on a turkey baster. I was always meant to be a lesbian. I never had a chance.

AE: What was your best comedy moment? BM:Absolutely getting kicked off of the stage at the Laugh Factory.

AE: What happened? BM:After the Michael Richards debacle, they imposed a rule that you couldn’t swear. So I changed my set. … But you could [still] say sexual things. The guy onstage before me … was pretty graphic. So, I get on and I said, “Some guys don’t believe that I’m gay, and I have to break it down for them.”

I said, “Me being gay means you can’t put your penis here,” and I put the mic in my mouth, between my legs and between my tits and I [simulated a sex act with] the microphone. The owner [of the club] got on the intercom and said I had to get off the stage. Everyone in the audience booed, and I was shocked.

I was 45 seconds into my set and a huge section of the audience — lesbians who came to see me — just walked out. It was very biased. If Dane Cook pretends a girl is giving him a blowjob, they’re like, “Oh, that’s so funny.” But if a girl blows the microphone, she’s a slut. So I started doing a blog called Comedy Double Standards.

AE: Do you find lesbian audiences are tougher than your garden variety straight audiences? BM:I have a great lesbian following. Lesbians are so wonderful, and I think that they embrace it. Some of them, you know, give me s— because I ride on my girlfriend. I talk about how my girlfriend and I have different sex drives.

Aside from little critiques from my friends and acquaintances which help better my routine, I’ve never had any negative feedback. I’m very, very fortunate. [Also,] I always run all my jokes by my girlfriend because you kind of have to [to] know you have a place to sleep at night.

AE: Good thinking. BM:I wrote a song called “I’ll Love You Until the Lease Runs Out,” and I sing it with the tambourine. I make the audience sing along, and that’s just great. Everybody really gets going for that song.

AE: Whenever there’s a tambourine involved, it’s a good time. BM: Exactly. We need more tambourines in the world. I think it would end war. Honestly, if you send tambourines and not guns over to the Middle East, I think we’d be happier.

AE: What do you do when you’re not getting thrown out of comedy clubs? BM:I was fortunate enough to work on Wanted, which is the new Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy movie with Morgan Freeman — an action movie coming out next year from Universal Studios.

AE: Did you get to meet Angelina? BM:I met Angelina, I met Mr. Maddox, Pax. They were all there.

AE: How was Angelina? BM:She was actually very, very sweet. She’s a very sweet woman. She’s very focused. She has strong opinions because she knows how she wants to be marketed. And she’s smart, she’s really smart.

AE: Does she have a sense of humor? BM:Unfortunately, it was more like a business thing. I just didn’t pull out any of my lesbian jokes for her. I wanted to.

AE: That’s too bad. How many opportunities do you get to tell Angelina Jolie lesbian jokes? BM:Exactly.

To find out about lesbian or queer comedy shows and tours, visit Gay Mafia, The LOL Tour, We’re Funny That Way or Queer Queens of Qomedy.

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