La Raza Comedy Show at Zocalo Food Truck Park

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Photo via Eliana La Casa - Facebook

Eliana La Casa

Eliana La Casa

If it’s self-evident that spoken language is a necessary tool for a stand-up comedian, it may be less obvious to assume that translating jokes from one language to another would be the tallest professional hurdle for a bilingual comic. Or so concludes Argentina-born, Chicago-based Eliana La Casa. 

“Surprisingly,” La Casa declares, “it’s not the language that I struggle with the most. It’s the perception of my identity by others that I’m still trying to sort out.” As a performer who regularly delivers her wit in her native Spanish as well as English, a greater challenge has been how audiences in the U.S. view her.

“It’s the perception of my identity by others that I’m still trying to sort out. Part of being a stand-up comedian is that you are speaking from yourself, your experiences and your point of view. That is shaped by who you are, from how you look, to how you sound, to where you are from” La Casa says. 

Ethnic Perceptions

“Before moving to Chicago I’d been doing comedy for over 10 years as a white, middle class, progressive woman from the city," La Casa adds. "Now that I live in the US, a lot of that has changed. I’m white to some, but I’m foreign to everybody. I dream of being middle class here. I might be perceived as a communist to some and as a moderate to others. But overall, the label Latina and Hispanic stand out. I’ve never had to own that in the past since the audiences I was performing for were also Latinos and Hispanics."

La Casa will be part of La Raza Comedy Show, the latest event being put on by Milwaukee’s Maria Acosta’s La Maria Comedy. The all-Hispanic bill—also featuring Acosta, Gabriel Alvizo, Luis Arevalo, and Abi Sanchez—comes to Zocalo Food Truck Park on Saturday October 7 at 8 p.m. “Maria Acosta is a regular in the Chicago comedy scene. I was lucky to perform alongside her a couple of times, and now I have the honor to be coming to her hometown,” La Casa says. 

“I wouldn’t consider what I do on stage activism," she continues, “but a reflection of the issues I find important as a person. It would be extremely hard for me, being an outspoken person, to keep my opinions to myself.” And though she’s vocal on-and offstage about issues such as veganism and equality, “there are many others that even if I don’t actively mention them, they shine through the way I talk about other things. People are smart and they pick up on that. All of us have an ideology, but some hide it better than others.” 

Sexual Politics?

Sexual politics, as in the negotiations and intricacies involved in getting it on, figure prominently enough in La Casa’s act that one might think her candor might inspire a cadre of groupies to form around her. Not yet, anyway. “Some people might think that because I speak openly about my dating life, people might come to me after a show with that intention. 

“It’s funny because men comedians who talk about their sex life get a lot attention from women. However, female comedians who talk about their sex life on stage scare men. Overall, a woman talking openly about sex is still taboo. Men worry about being the subject of the next joke,” La Casa observes. 

Though she has had exposure, in Spanish, on Comedy Central Latinoamérica, “The biggest challenge has been making this career profitable,” La Casa laments. As her notoriety grows, though, she has found rewards other than monetary ones. “What I’m the most grateful for is that I’ve become close friends with people that I truly admire.” 

Here La Casa speaks of being arrogant about her herbivorous diet and Leonardo Di Caprio movies, among other topics...