Photo via Facebook / Kathleen Madigan
“Comedy is a great escape,” Kathleen Madigan shares, reckoning that it is “like a movie or something, just time away from any thoughts you don’t wanna be having.”
Madigan has been providing such escape with enough insight and hilarity for over two decades to make her one of the most respected comics among her peers and other comedy lovers. She plies her gift of humor in Milwaukee on a date in her “Do You Have Any Ranch" (she really likes that dressing) at The Pabst Theater on Friday, Oct. 8 for an 8 p.m. show.
The process by which she refines her material for maximum impact is no different now than when she started being professionally funny. “I’m just more picky now with the junk that flies through my head. And there's a lot of junk, meaning funny to me but not everyone,” she observes. Madigan is direct about her impetus for entering the business in which she is now among its top exponents, too.
Making Money
“Money. I was motivated by the fact I could make an extra $250 a week if I could emcee with just 15 minutes. Bartending and waiting tables was much harder,” she recalls. Her bank account isn’t so great a motivator, however, for Madigan to become one of those comedians who seeks after fame in multiple formats. So, anyone enjoying her sense of humor shouldn’t expect her to ply it much outside the field in which she’s best known.
“I have no patience for filming anything. It’s brutally long,” she explains, adding, “if you ever see me in a movie or a sitcom, it was just a favor. It’s just not what I like so I just skipped all that and stayed with what I liked,” Plus, she would rather go furthest with what she knows best. “I’m also a fan of being super good at one thing versus just OK at a bunch of things.”
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That dedication can keep her on the road for the majority of any given year. Among the trade-offs her often itinerant lifestyle necessitates, the one she speaks of first is canine companionship. “I still want a beagle but have to wait till retirement,” Madigan says. But that yearning comes with an understanding of she’d be putting her pooch though. “You can’t have pets when you're gone this much. Well, I could, but it wouldn’t be fair to the pet.”
Irish American Family
She may not yet have a dog, but Madigan still has plenty of her Irish-American family around to keep her grounded. They won’t let her to put on any airs either. As she relates, “I have six siblings and like a billion cousins. I think when there's that many kids, you just stay more normalized because no one really cares what you become as long as your behavior around them doesn’t change. If you don’t ‘act normal,’ they will all definitely call you out on it.”
If her heritage figures into how she stays down to earth, she believes it also influences the humor her next Milwaukee audience will soon experience. She says of her time in her ancestral homeland, “I’ve been to Ireland a zillion times. I’ve never been in one of their pubs and not heard funny stuff. I think being able to tell a story is a craft, and they are very, very good at it; and maybe it's just trickled its way to the American Irish.”
Here Madigan references fellow comic Lewis Black, their joint USO touring to entertain foreign troops and her Roman Catholic upbring, leading up to why she would make a terrible terrorist...
Kathleen Madigan Would Be A Terrible Terrorist - Kathleen Madigan: Madigan Again
