Jen Kirkman is Influenced by Standup Comedy, Period

×

Expand

Photo Credit: Robyn Van Swank

Jen Kirkman has mastered the art of comedy across many mediums over the course of her nearly 20-year career. She has released three comedy albums, was featured regularly as a panelist on E!’s “Chelsea Lately”, appeared on Comedy Central’s “Drunk History” and has written two books full of self-deprecating wisdom, including the New York Times bestseller, I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids.

We caught up with Kirkman ahead of her headlining show at this year’s Milwaukee Comedy Festival and discussed her start in comedy, new material and her writing career.

What should we expect from your Milwaukee Comedy Festival performance?

Well, here’s the thing. Some of it you guys saw a few months ago back in September when I was touring Milwaukee with new stuff because my Netflix special had come out. So, what people could hear are two bits I did back in September, but they have been expanded on and the whole hour has a theme of personal imperfection, how people treat one another, how we behave in the street from harassment to my own personal foibles with strangers, a new tattoo, hypochondria and I do actually have a joke about my period and I don’t give a shit if people think women talk about it too much. I don’t think we talk about it enough. It’s a funny bit that actually is relatable to anyone, anyone who is a mortal and has blood in their body, and I think that’s all of us.

How did you get started in comedy?

I went to an open mic- that’s the only acceptable answer. If any comedian ever tells you differently they’re lying. So what I’ll respond to is there is “the start” which is the first time you ever go on stage, and then there is the life of comics, and dare I say all artists, who always have new starts and the least interesting start to them that really wasn’t anything was their first time performing.

Having new starts once it becomes your job is so scary. Right now I’m getting started on the great unknown. I have a new comedy special to record, and I have to start touring with the material aggressively to perfect it. How do I do that? Lots of working with my agent to book comedy club dates, lots of spending time away from home, lots of talking for two shows a night just hoping inspiration strikes on stage for new jokes or new beats to a joke. I’m also starting on writing another one-woman show that I can do around Los Angeles next year to use as a jumping off point for any kind of other development.

The starts never stop!

Who influenced you when you were first starting?

I get asked this every single time I do an interview and I don’t know if people want to me say Sam Kinison and then they’ll write a headline like, “Jen Kirkman Loved Sam Kinison,” but I don’t have an answer like that. Although many people think that because on my Wikipedia page it says he is the first comedian I remember seeing that he’s one of my influences. I can’t even deal.

Comedy isn’t being in a cover band. We don’t imitate people. We have to find out who we are, and inspiration can come from the weirdest places. Sometimes it’s literal. Sometimes you’ll be doing your comedy and telling bad jokes, and one night you’ll see a storyteller comedian and think, “Oh, that resonates with me. I think I want to tell stories,” but the influence usually ends there.

I just did an interview where I told them I was influenced by stand-up comedy, period. I wrote in my first book that there were so many influences during so many different periods. The story I told was that I saw a comedy show at a place called Fez in downtown NYC back in 1998 when I moved there. The people I saw on stage are now friends of mine- The Sklar Brothers, Janeane Garafalo, Michael Ian Black- but I wasn’t influenced in the sense that I wanted to behave or do material like them. I was just like, “I want to be on stage in this super cool room! Wow! Look! They all do different kinds of comedy from one another. They all have their own style!  What’s my style? I want a style! Who am I!? I am no longer enjoying this show as a patron! I want to stand up and yell, ‘I haven’t done anything yet but I am a stand-up comic! I know it!’” I didn’t yell that, but I continued going to open mics.

Now that I can look back over my life and create any narrative that I want, one thing I really do think and mean is that Morrissey and his lyrics influenced my sense of humor. He was plugged into my ears all day, every day from age 13. Those are really formative sense of humor years, and I had this dry, self-deprecating, death obsessed, witty, funny, Manchester man in my ear. Am I anything like him? No, but in a way, I know he influenced me.

I do what I find funny and I let the weirdos find me. 

How did your first shows go? Are there any particularly memorable stories?

My first show was awesome but that story is out there a lot in the press so I’ll tell you a more harrowing one. When I first started in 1997 in front of small audiences made up of my peers, not friends, but people in my exact demographic, 21-24 year olds who were broke, artsy, and liked non-traditional comedy, things were going well. It didn’t dawn on me for one second that it had to do with time and place. I thought it was an indicator that I was ready, after only six months of experience, to be the kind of comedian who has nationwide recognition, fame and her own Broadway show.

So, I took a bus to New York City with my friend, comedian Eugene Mirman, and we did a "bringer show” (where comedians can perform for five minutes if they bring five people) at a comedy club on the Upper West Side. I was working on a bit where I had a boom box, an actual boom box, those still existed, and I would play James Taylor music, cut it short and announce that he’s shitty to women. Then I would pick apart women’s magazines. That used to get big laughs from the just out of college crowd in Cambridge, but not in New York City. The audience was kind, in that they were just totally silent.

The host spent five minutes making fun of me after he got back on stage. That’s when the audience finally laughed. That one hurt. It was also almost twenty years ago, so of course it’s now funny. Actually a month after it happened it was funny. Comics have to constantly be self-aware and able to realize when they fucked up big time. 

What made you want to get into writing?

I have no idea. I wrote something for Dynamite Magazine (a children’s magazine that was published from 1974 until 1992) that I don’t remember writing. I have it framed on my wall at home. It was in their Letters to the Editor section, and I wrote, “Dear Dynamite, Here are three things you would never hear one grown-up say to another grown-up!” One of them was, “You deserve a spanking,” which I said so innocently and had no concept of the hilarious irony. I wonder if the person who published it did. 

I have zero memory of writing that. I was just a creative kid. I also took all kinds of dance lessons, piano lessons and wanted to be a pro-golfer, a showgirl or on pre-existing TV shows. A passion for writing wasn’t something that dawned on me. I won a writing contest at my school when I was eight. Again, it didn’t dawn on me that I was “into” writing. My senior year in college I had a professor ask me to consider switching my major from acting to writing because he thought I came alive more when reading things I’d written in front of the class. 

I just thought I was doing what I was told in my non-elective creative writing class. I had no idea I was into writing. I think because, like all writers, I procrastinate, I have writer’s block and I think I suck. I don’t see that as someone who is “into” writing. But it is, because that’s what being into writing looks like. It looks like someone who just writes, every day. Even if no one will ever see most of it.

What did you learn from writing and releasing your first book that you applied to your second?

So much, thanks to my great editor who got me my first book deal with Simon & Schuster, Sarah Knight. She has a book of her own now called The Life Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck.

She taught me how to add jokes in places where I would rather have had sentimental feelings, knowing that I could do both in the same sentence. I learned about how to end a chapter so that someone would want to turn the page or at least know when they did turn the page that the story is continuing, and it wasn’t just a random essay they just read. The same old problems always arise though; self doubt, procrastination, etc. You can’t learn not to feel that way the next time. It’s always there. 

As long as we’re talking, my second book, I Know What I’m Doing & Other Lies I Tell Myself, has been out since April and is available everywhere books are sold, and I will be selling and signing copies of the book after my headlining show at Turner Hall!

Has your writing influenced your standup? Or vice versa?

Not really. I really don’t pit my different genres against one another or see them in this way. I’m so hippy dippy. I just do. I just do what I love whenever I want, and for me book writing is different. When I’ve tried to put jokes from my act in my books sometimes it doesn’t read the way I want it to. If they do it’s so subtle I would need a scientist to tell me.

It’s just simply that I do many things and they are all different. But they’re all very much a part of me.

Jen Kirkman will perform at Turner Hall Ballroom this Sunday, August 7.