I was immediately transfixed by Eddie Izzard, a gorgeous, dorky British genderqueer standup comedian. I had seen the words Dress to Kill handwritten on the spine and figured it was some James Bond movie or a foreign language film I wouldn’t be able to follow.īut as the tape whirred to a start, I realized she was right. I yawned as she popped the homemade VHS tape into the VCR. Eddie Izzard in Dress to KillĪ few months later, my best friend informed me I had to go to her house, right away, to watch something very, very important. That night I started a new list in my comedy notebook: Other Places to Perform That Might Be Weird But Won’t Lead to My Death.Īnd so I started what became my actual comedy career, telling jokes in between drag queens at LGBT pride events, organizing shows in free-trade coffee shops, doing sets at the polyamory nerd conventions and emceeing everything from expensive fundraisers to group acupunctures workshops and livestock auctions. I needed to adopt a training program to increase my sprinting speed and stamina, hire private security or find some better venues. The angry comic later chased me around the parking lot, yelling and brandishing a broken beer bottle.Īs I zig-zagged through the cars and hid behind a dumpster, it occurred to me that my comedy career (especially when coupled with my smart mouth) was quickly becoming a health hazard. I know now (and, if I’m honest, probably knew then) that calling someone a pedophile when they’ve merely called you ugly is a substantial overreaction. One night at an open mic, I started my set with, “I need you to do me a favor and ignore all physical cues and believe me when I say I am an adult female and not a 12-year-old boy.”Ī drunk comic yelled, “You’re not a 12-year-old boy, you’re a big fat ugly dyke,” and I responded, “You’re just sad I’m not a 12-year-old boy. It was all pretty grim, but I have an unfortunate amount of deep biological optimism, so I tried to think of it as comedy boot camp and resolved to keep fighting for my stage time. We were Philadelphia’s foremost authorities on the smell of women’s vaginas. We were all newly out, young, horny and having sex with every queer person in the Tri-State area. His response – “What the hell do you fugly women know about vaginas?” – was especially hilarious because he was addressing almost the entire organizing committee of the Philadelphia Dyke March. He seemed so unclear about cisgender women’s anatomy that one person at our table queried, “Dude, are you sure you’re talking about her vagina?” ![]() Kelli Dunham (Picture by Robin Fradkin Mathews.) As 15 of my most generous friends ate whatever pasta they could afford after coughing up the $25 cover charge, the comic who performed before me described the objectionable odor of his girlfriend’s vagina. ![]() I did a “bringer” show at an Italian restaurant in South Philly. Sometimes it was within the highly original premise of imitating embarrassing dog behavior, but I also remember him doing it in the middle of a bit about dental floss. Sometimes they included a comic who opened each set with, “I went parking with my girlfriend and she said, ‘Oh, I’m not that kind of girl,’ so I took out my knife and said, ‘Yes, you are.'”Īnother dude around the scene at that time thought the most hilarious thing a comic could do on stage was to hump a female audience member. Almost everywhere I attempted to perform seemed to be running the same show. ![]() A young Kelli Dunham performing at Colorado State University.Įxcept it wasn’t really random. I joked that surely angry butch lesbians are close enough to qualify.īut the demographic – and more markedly the tone – had been so consistent, it took me nearly a week and a great deal of swearing on my father’s grave to convince her that no, this had been just a random open mic night. “So,” she queried afterward, as we cut through the lobby of the rundown chain motel which had the dubious honor of hosting the comedy club, “how exactly did you get on the bill for the Angry Men Show?” The first time I took a friend to one of the few open mics for new comics in Philadelphia, circa 2001, she was confused.
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