Marina Franklin
written by Ken Carlson
“In stand-up you get an immediate reaction,” says comedian Marina Franklin. “You know whether the crowd likes your or not. But, nobody cares about your lighting or your microphone, or whether or not the audience is talking. I always hate it when they just put a light on a comic, and it’s blinding. There’s a different level of respect with the theatre. If this was a theatre, they would put a gel on that bitch! [In clubs] They say, here’s your light, now be funny! Go! Bridging the gap between the two, I’d like to work in a theatre where the people come to see me, where the sound and light quality is great.”
With a decade of performing stand-up in New York and recent appearances on The Jay Leno Show, Marina is taking some serious steps in building her name to the point where she will return to the theatre, her original focus, using her current vehicle.
Franklin minored in theatre at The University of Illinois, specializing in, as she puts it, angry black plays, like The Invisible Man for Black History Month. She went on to Syracuse to get her MFA. She taught theatre for three years then moved to the Big Apple to ply her trade. As stage opportunities failed to materialize, she turned to stand-up and flourished. Curiously, she chose not to utilize some of her strengths to help her along.
“I hid my acting background for a long time,” says Franklin. “Other comedians have a tendency to psyche you out from what you’re actually good at. If you’re good at puppets, they may tell you nobody wants to see that. I was actually a pretty good actress but used to hide it in my stand-up. I’m just starting to bring it into my act. Someone once compared it to a black quarterback who refuses to run, just to prove he’s a real quarterback. For years I was trying to prove that I could be just as verbal as physical on stage. Now, there are moments where I’m acting, like I have a bit where I play a woman yelling at a child. It’s weird but I’m just now learning how to do that.”
Jekyll & Hyde. To some it represents two sides of a coin, the good and evil in all of us, the life we’d like and the reality we lead. To Marina it wasa dayjob she got when she came to New York to fulfill the dream of acting for a living, and realizing that dream in the form of waiting tables at the Jekyll & Hyde theme restaurant on 6th Avenue between 57th & 58th.
“I hated it and cried a lot,” recalls Franklin from an Upper West Side coffee shop where jazz flute drifts easily over the room. “It’s still there but I don’t like walking in the area. I came to New York, and was still very midwestern, kind of shocked. I had a broken heart and was going back to Chicago. But I ended up rooming with a guy, an old friend I ran into while he was trying on a pink boa in the Village. I began talking to him about my Grandma Moot, one of these characters I used to do. I had done about a half hour of material when he told me he had an apartment and needed a roommate. It was $430. I moved in right away.”
While Franklin was able to find an affordable place to live when she got to the big city, a huge roadblock for many, acting work eluded her. She did a play here and there; a piece at the Henry Street Theatre where she played a young Spanish girl that was being molested in a basement every week stands out in her mind. But, she lacked a coordinated plan. “The first thing I thought was, ‘I need to get my equity card,’ says Franklin with a laugh, “but I didn’t know what that meant. I was crazy and younger.”
She turned to stand-up for the same reason many others do, she had something to say and nothing to lose. Bringer shows at the old Gotham Comedy Club were her starting point. From there it was coffee houses and downtown black boxes. “Brody Stevens used to run a room. Another guy named Chris DeLuca. They had been doing it a little longer than me,” says Franklin. “It would be in some bar or performance space like Surf Reality. I came from what’s called the alternative scene, but you wouldn’t think that. I’d go to Surf Reality or Collective Unconscious and put my name in a hat. I loved it. There was the Gershwin Hotel, where Pat Borelli used to run it. There would be guests staying at the hotel from all over the world. I remember going to work, by then it was in an office, a consulting firm, telling my boss that it was weird that they like me. I was accepted. ”
The more shows Franklin did, the more time she put in, the more fellow comics began to take notice. “I remember doing a show at a Starbucks, and a guy named Johnny Spanish came up to me and said, ‘You’re getting funny now.’ He said that,” Franklin says. “Later at the New York Comedy Club, Seymour, who still runs it, had a show on Friday and Saturday nights at 12:30, and you didn’t have to bark. I would go up, maybe last, every Friday or Saturday. One night, maybe two years later, Tracy Morgan was there and he was sitting in the audience. He was going on after me. He came up to me and said, ‘Yo, you’re gettin’ funny now.’ That’s when I knew I was onto something, because Tracy Morgan said that first before he said he was going to get me pregnant. That was when I started to develop. It’s confidence and experience. There’s a book (Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell) that asks if it was the Beatles’ talent or their tenacity to do well that made them successful. I put in the hours. It helps to be funny, obviously. I know some people who put in the time but haven’t improved. I worked really hard. I worked during the day and drank tons of coffee. Sometimes I thought I was bombing because I was so tired. You work during the day, go up on stage, go home, and get up again. I became somewhat obsessed with it. That’s what comedy does.”
“Marina’s comedy is incredibly honest,” says comedian Rachel Feinstein, “and organically funny. She let’s you in and she’s not afraid to reveal stuff. She’s not trying to be a character and she’s never flippant or detached on stage. She doesn’t write from the outside in. She’s just an incredibly smart, appealing person with a really unusual, vulnerable and hilarious perspective on everything.”
The week before our conversation, Franklin had been headlining in Richmond, Virginia. Prior to that, she opened for Bill Maher at Avery Fisher Hall. On this evening she was preparing herself to go back to the standard ten-minute segment across the street at The Comic Strip. Lately, her focus has also involved pitching new comedy segments as correspondent for The Jay Leno Show.
“They send me out for whatever they’d like me to do,” says Franklin. “I pitched the first one (report). Basically that was my audition. It was shot to air. I wrote it out, had the point of view, asked people if I could use their space. I was a last minute add-on. I work organically. I try to work as fast as network people do, but my pieces are focussed, I try to see the funny in other people, like to pull that out. Then you get my reaction to it. I’m not trying to be the funny comedian on the show, it annoys me. I’m just trying to be myself which is subtly funny. We’ll see where the show goes. They’re experimenting. We’ll see what direction it takes. Every week I talk to my director and submit ideas which he pitches. Then we’ll see what happens.”
A big part of Marina’s act is her ability to dissect and ridicule the expectations society has about black women and about black women who are comedians. For a business that pats itself on the back for mocking the stodgy rules of establishment, those attitudes are what greeted her in stand-up.
“When I first started doing comedy,” says Franklin, “I was also doing the urban scene or black rooms. They gave you stage time. You didn’t have to have your own TV show to get on. All you had to do was be funny. But the guys would say I wasn’t dressing right. ‘Oh, you’re wearing your sneakers like white people do; you’re actually using them. You’ve got one sleeve up, one sleeve down. You have to dress better than the audience. Use your screaming voice! Be loud!’ That was a note I received. I thought, really? I came from a theatrical background and know that’s not what it’s about. It’s about being more connected to my material. That’s all I cared about. But, for some reason, in white rooms, because it would get a laugh, I would sass up my punchlines, like ‘You know what I mean, mm-hmm!’ It just seemed easy. Finally, a comic pulled me aside and asked, ‘What are you doing? That’s not you. You don’t speak like that. You sound like a white girl trying to sound black.’ He was actually quite annoyed. I fought it for a while, but I listened and noticed I got more respect from both crowds. It took a long time to figure out what my voice was. I came up with a joke about it, not being the sassy black comedian. It really does come from the expectations of the audience has of black entertainers, black performers, black women. If you look through the history of comedy and black performers, they always tend to want the sassy Mm-hmm! from black women – that attitude. I would go to auditions and get annoyed because they’d ask if I could give them a little more, you know, [see Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle]. My friends didn’t talk like that. It was a strange thing I explored, something I found interesting. But I still get comments about my wardrobe. Some guys still say, especially about a black audience, that you have to look better than they do. ‘If you don’t look good, they’re not going to respect you. They’ll say, you can’t dress like a white boy. They can dress like that, you can’t. It’s an expectation of the black audience as well. They expect a white guy to dress down. It’s a cultural thing. An ex-boyfriend told me, you always have to look good around white people, more polished and professional to get somewhere. What I think is, it’s a cultural fear maybe, or something that they assume they need to do to get somewhere.”
“I didn’t grow up like that,” Franklin continues. “I grew up in a white neighborhood. I didn’t have one of those mothers who said you always have to dress nice. I was earthy, wore plaid, dressed like a heavy metal kid sometimes. Some say I need to look more sexy on stage. I tried it once. Charlie Murphy told me, ‘C’mon you got to show people what you got!’ I did and bombed because I was showing too much. I wasn’t comfortable.”
“Marina Franklin is a genuine comedian. She’s not one of those comics who thinks she has to cater to the audience to get laughs,” says comedian Jermaine Fowler. “She can pretty much get away with anything onstage because of her smile and charm. And nothing changes about her when steps offstage either, she is the still the same person you were laughing with moments before.”
Franklin cautions that the trap of changing what’s real about you or your act to attract a certain element can happen to anyone. She points, as an example, to a white guy she knows who was playing a black room in Harlem (Mocha’s). “He’s a friend and really funny,” says Franklin. “His stories are really funny. But he got up there and was talking about the difference between black asses and white asses. It’s not complicated. The simpler and more honest, the more people like it. That’s what I get from people when I come off stage. ‘You know what I like about you? You were so real. You just talked to us.’ I like to say that I exaggerate a lot of my act, but I don’t think so. I started out putting it together autobiographically. I just write based on what I’m feeling at the time. You just come from the truth. That’s always more interesting and different. If you try to make it more interesting, you lose. You only can come from your own experience. That’s what makes it unique. You have to tell your story the way it happened.”
As we close out our interview, Franklin is back stage, joshing with other comics, looking for a safe place to leave her coat in the cramped surroundings. It’s the early show on a Friday and Marina’s thinking about the crowd she’ll face tonight and looks ahead and how it may get better when she takes the stage in the near future. “Friday, it’s people coming from work,” says Franklin. “A 10:30 show on a Friday can be tougher because the crowd’s been out longer. They’re different sorts of people who come out then. They don’t know why they’re still out, they’re crazy. To be out that late on a Friday, you’re either really young, or you don’t get out that often and you’re going to take it out on that comic at midnight. I could be more brutal and call them dredges of society, but that’s not always true. A packed show at midnight can be fun. Sundays are the best audiences. Sunday they went to church maybe. Drinkers come out Friday and Saturday. People who come out on Sunday came out to listen.”
For more on Marina, visit MarinaFranklin.com.