By: Ben Kharakh

“Funny” is just a perspective you have on a thing or event in your life. Take a comedian like Jen Kirkman. She’s told her stories across the nation, on television, and on her critically lauded CD, Self Help. Some of her stories are about things that once made her angry, anxious, or embarrassed, but now they just make her laugh. This wasn’t just something that happened overnight but rather was a skill she developed over the course of countless performances.

Being able to find the funny in something is an important skill. After all, if you’re a comedian, then you’re primary goal is to make people laugh. If people come to a comedy show and you give them something that makes you angry without any jokes, then they’re just going to get uncomfortable with your anger. If that’s what you’re going for, then maybe you should look into stand-up infuriation. Jen Kirkman is a stand-up comedian. She finds the humor in the things that anger or embarrass her. As Jen has learned, “Things are funny because I say they are.”

Ben Kharakh: You mentioned, in a recent blog entry, that a science teacher once told you that the reason you weren’t paying attention was because you were “dreaming about quitting school, finding a husband, and getting pregnant.” When did this happen?

Jen Kirkman: His name was Mr. Stucci. I don’t know if he is still living, and I actually don’t know how to spell his name, so at least we won’t get sued for libel. This guy didn’t like me because I was kind of a big-mouth. What I thought was funny about that comment was that I was so the opposite of that kind of kid. I was more like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird – independent, outspoken, and kind of gender neutral. So it is very interesting, and obviously outrageous, that he said that. He was talking about something that didn’t interest me and he asked me if I knew the answer, and I was like, “No. I’m sorry, I haven’t been paying attention.” He was being a little fresh, and he says, “Oh, you were daydreaming!” and then he went on kind of a rant: “The problem is that girls think they don’t have to know science and they’re sitting there dreaming about getting pregnant, having babies and, like, you want it both ways.” And then there was our ancient typing teacher, and he was like, “Don’t worry, boys, if you don’t catch on, you’re not going to need it anyway. You’ll have a secretary. That’s what the girls are for.” [Laughs] But this was the early ’80s. It was maybe the last generation where people said shit like that and got away with it.

BK: So, this was a common occurrence?

JK: No, I don’t think common, but there wasn’t “Girl Power!” You know [laughs], there was none of that. I’m sure if kids went home and told their moms, their moms would’ve been like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” but I don’t think kids even knew to say anything. It was just an adult talking. Kids are going to tune out or just listen to what they say anyway. My parents had a little bit of irreverence for authority themselves. So I just kind of had that too. I felt very entitled to speak out against adults.

BK: So this wasn’t something that demystified the whole education process.

JK: No, I had already been disappointed by teachers and their behavior, so it wasn’t a big deal.

BK: When was the moment that you caught on to this?

JK: In fifth grade, I was kind of a weird kid — just an eccentric; I did whatever I felt like doing. I loved writing and I was just so happy when I wrote, and I always wanted to share it with the class. I wrote short stories and poetry. I was also kind of an outcast because my mom was a volunteer recess woman. She would go outside and discipline everyone in my class during recess. She was volunteering because she was trying to get a job in the school system and she was just working her way up, because that’s how you did it. So anyway, my teacher — I would say to her, “Can I read this thing I wrote?” “Oh, well that’s not really an assignment.” “I know, but I just love it and I want to read it to the class.” “Okay Jen,” and I would do it. I wrote a poem, one time, about a lighthouse, and I guess it sounded a little phallic. I was so innocent; I didn’t know it did, but the boys caught on to me describing this shape of a lighthouse, and they starting throwing paper at me and yelling all these terrible things. I was humiliated and they just kept picking on me all the time. But I still woke up with this feeling of, “Oh, this is the day! I’m going to read them this short story.” It got really bad, though, and my mom had to have a meeting with the principal, and I was starting to act out violently because the boys were picking on me and following me home, and putting rocks in snowballs and throwing them at me. My teacher sat them down and I was listening outside the window, and she said, “Boys, we all know Jen is a little sensitive and she’s a little out there so, you know, just don’t make fun of her because her mom is here.” It wasn’t anything like, “This is wrong, please do not chastise a girl physically. Please do not crush someone’s hopes and dreams.” So then she took me aside and said, “Do you ever notice, when you put yourself in these positions of reading in front of the class, that it doesn’t go well? Maybe you need to stop putting yourself in those positions.” I was heartbroken, but I agreed. A couple weeks later, a poet visited our class to teach us about how to write poetry and she read some of my stuff. She went up to the teacher and said, “This girl is really good.” My teacher came over and went, “I know, I’m always encouraging her to write,” and I fucking lost my shit! I screamed, “No you don’t!” and I freaked out, left the room, and went to the principal’s office to complain about how the teacher never defended me. There was nothing that could be done, and I had to start what I think was thinly disguised anger management. The counselor at school would come and eat lunch with me. Eventually, I just thought, “These people are fucking fucked.” [Laughs] And I really started to notice that they were just small-minded people who had no idea what to do with an unusual kid and they’re scarring people. So I connected with a few teachers, but everyone else I just didn’t pay attention to.

BK: You tell a number of stories on stage that stem from things that, initially, were difficult or unpleasant experiences for you, but then you transform them into humor. What is it like to share something like that on stage?

JK: I’m usually really happy that they can go with me and not be really sensitive about it. A lot of comics have not worked through their pain and they deliver something that sounds more uncomfortable than funny. But if I’m doing a good job and I’m delivering maybe a squeamish or bittersweet anecdote, I’m really happy when the audience laughs at it, and I credit the audience as much as myself for writing and delivering it in a way that doesn’t make people sad. I think it’s great when they can laugh at that because, ultimately, it’s fine. The teacher sees my mom all the time and asks, “How’s Jen?” She loves hearing about my career. It’s sort of like, at some point, your past just doesn’t exist. I’m getting e-mails from people that used to be mean to me and I don’t even know if they remember being mean. Instead of saying, “You were always weird,” it’s become, “I always admired that you did your own thing, and now you’re doing your own thing again and going for your dreams. I have three kids and I have no complaints, but I’m a little bored. So I’m just keeping up with what you’re doing and living vicariously through you.” When that happens, I can no longer take my past seriously.

BK: How do you feel about this whole serious/funny dichotomy in general? It seems like, if you tell many of your stories differently, they’d end up serious rather than funny.

JK: Yeah, I pick and choose. I mean, I don’t ever actually do anything serious. I don’t really have an outlet to do anything serious, but let’s say I wrote a screenplay or something, I could probably use a lot of moments that are in my stand-up and just take the perspective out of it. Ultimately, things are funny because I decide they are. The reason, for example, that the stories about me dressing up like Mozart and going to school are funny is because I’m fine with it now. And, in a way, I’m almost proud of it because it doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that “This was part of her path to being able to make a living doing comedy.” It all worked out. It’s not like I tried to shoot myself and I’m in a hospital with brain damage. [Laughs] A comedian can make a lot of things funny just by putting a modern-day perspective on something that happened a long time ago. So, in my stories about “Hey, I went to school dressed like Mozart,” a lot of the laughs come from people thinking about a little girl dressed up like a composer. Some of the other laughs are from the “What was I thinking?” part of my brain, where I think, “My God, what must have been going though my mother’s mind?” and “Gee, a better thing to do would’ve been this…” I just apply logic to it and it becomes funny. I also leave out how I felt. I just tell you what I did and how people reacted and how I’m feeling now. Maybe if I wanted to tug on your heartstrings I might tell you how I felt in those moments, because that’s not that funny. Those are the sad parts.

BK: But if you were doing a one-person show, then would that be okay to be sentimental?

JK: Yes, it’s encouraged. There’s even a formula to it — the half-hour show where, in the 20^th minute, you take it down a notch, something sad happens [laughs], you know? And then take it back up, end on a happy note! They love that. For years, I was trying to get different versions of the same show into the Aspen Comedy Festival, and the notes they kept giving me were, “We liked it, but we need more peaks and valleys,” and I think they wanted more, actually, of the dramatic moments where the lights dim, maybe you sit down and you say, “And then my grandmother died and I realized why I was so focused on nail polish.” And then you say a sad story, two funny things, and the show is over and everybody is properly manipulated. I could never do it because I actually don’t have stuff that’s really that sad. That’s what I’ve discovered.

BK: Is your comedy ever therapeutic?

JK: No, I don’t think it is. I do actual therapy. I don’t even have any feelings about the past anymore. The stuff I’m trying to do now, where I talk about all the ridiculous things people say to me when I tell them I don’t want kids, it’s funny and pretty fleshed out, just kind of mild-tempered, but now I want to go deeper because people are starting to say weird shit like, “But you’re going to die alone if you don’t have kids.” And that’s pretty intense. I’m trying to talk about it on stage, but I haven’t worked through how I feel about it yet, so that’s why I don’t think it’s that funny yet. I think that when I work through it in my personal life, I’ll figure out how to make it funny. Finding people who agree with you is actually therapeutic. I think we all crave to be validated. For some people, if they didn’t do stand-up, they could go to work all day, see their family, but never really feel validated. You would never just get up in front of a room full of people and say your opinions and have them laugh or agree. If I feel at all alone in the world on a topic and I find the audience that gets it, that is very therapeutic, just that validation, but it’s not therapeutic in the sense of “I got it out of my system and now I’m okay.” That I have to do in another way.

BK: Often, when I say that I think there’s too many people on Earth and that, as a result, maybe someone shouldn’t have six, five, or four kids, I get dirty looks.

JK: I know! People are really sensitive about it. I have jokes about it in my act and the audience gets quiet, and I don’t understand. Why can’t we face this? I heard on the radio that, I think, the last time the Earth was at a comfortable place with the population, it was maybe before World War II and we had, I can’t remember if it was two or four billion people, but either one of those numbers is a comfortable place, and we are three billion over that. It’s disturbing. I understand that we can’t all stop breeding, but I wish there was some conscientiousness to it. If you want a kid, must it be biological? And I know it’s very expensive to adopt and that’s kind of a pipe dream in its own way, but it just seems really unbalanced. And, yeah, when I mention the environment, it’s like, “Well, I use cloth diapers and ultimately I’m just going to replace myself.” But I’m thinking, “No one needs to be replaced if there’s too many.” I’m always involved in these conversations with people who have children, and they’re like, “Why no kids? Oh, you’re just trying to be cool.” I don’t want to say to them, “Actually, I think it’s irresponsible.” How can I say that to someone? It’s like I’m insulting them.

BK: Do people actually accuse you of taking this stance because they think you think that this is going to make you cool?

JK: Yeah, I had someone say to me, “Well, you know that you don’t have to become like a soccer mom. You could put a Ramones t-shirt on your kid,” and I’m like, “Oh my God! Is this what you think of me?” [Laughs] Some people say, “People like you should have kids because you’re smart and thoughtful,” and that’s very nice, but that doesn’t mean my kid’s going to be a good person because I would raise them in Los Angeles, and I don’t know if they have a whole hell of a lot of positive stimuli around here, so how the hell am I guaranteed to have a good kid, you know?

BK: What sort of affect does the negative stimuli of LA have on you?

JK: When I got here, I was in my mid 20s; my identity was already established. But the little things weigh on my psyche, like pollution and the excess. I live in a neighborhood that has very trendy stores and people sleep out overnight for the opening of the store, and I get a little judgmental when I see that. I’m like, “Do they even know what is going on in the world? Would they sleep over at a protest? Would they sleep over night to make sure people voted?” And then I think, “Well, maybe they do both,” and then I go, “No. No fucking way do they do both,” and then I just get really depressed. So in that way, that kind of stuff starts to bother me. I also see a lot of excess. If you live in a small, rural town, I don’t know if the divide between rich and poor is so obvious, but LA is a city where you have eight people living in a one-bedroom apartment, and elsewhere there are these lavish mansions that are, for the most part, not even occupied three months out of the year. If I choose to think about it, I find it really upsetting.

BK: How do you deal with these upsetting things?

JK: My initial human, imperfect response is to feel like I’m the only one who understands this problem. “Why doesn’t everyone get it?” Then I realize, “Well, I’m not really doing anything to stop it. I don’t even know what I would do.” I go from judgment to powerlessness, and then I try to add a kind of spiritual spice on top of it. I go to my kind of stuff that I believe in, which is just that I can’t worry in terms of if we’ve hit Peak Oil or something like that. I feel like it would be terrifying, but I guess it is all in perfect order and it’s how it should be, and I’m not in control. So I eventually come to a place of understanding.

BK: Have you ever tried to tackle a subject that you hadn’t yet come to terms with?

JK: Yes, I’m currently going through that now, and when I first started doing comedy, that was definitely kind of like an angry little lady. Then I realized that a lot of stuff that I’d written at the beginning of my stand-up life is actually much funnier now because I’m not so pissed off about it. [Laughs] I think that’s a mistake every stand-up makes. You might be really passionate about something, talk about it on stage, and later you realize, “Oh, it’s not that I’m not funny, it’s that I’m so tense right now that these people are probably like, ‘What the fuck?’”

BK: How much working through it on your own, if you’re going to approach an issue, do you find you need to do? How much, say, emotional distance do you need from the subject?

JK: This one issue with the kids thing…I need to find a way to deal with it in my personal life so it no longer bothers me. Like I was saying, I need to find an answer to give these people so that they shut the fuck up and stop bothering me with this stuff, and I just need to learn to distance myself. Even if I find the perfect thing to say and people still bother me about it, I have to let it go. It could be like meditating on it, or just wishing them well, or I don’t know, even just the passage of time and a little maturity. The day that I can think about it without feeling a fire in my stomach is the day that I know I can make it funny.

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