Jen Kirkman
written by Annabelle Quezada
Growing up in the working class part of a Massachusetts town that was very aware of class, automatically and immediately set Jen Kirkman apart. The elementary school outsider recalls: “Ten year olds were into who had money. It was really weird, 1980s kinda stuff... I always wanted to be a performer. I swear to God, I really thought I had great ideas. And I would just do stuff with no shame and no sense of ‘Maybe this won’t work.’ Once I went to school as Mozart.., that used to be a big joke I had in my act, and I didn’t bring a change of clothes. I thought that the class would love it. We were doing book reports on composers, so I thought I’d also dress like him... and people were like, ‘You’re an idiot.’ The jock boys would make fun of me a lot and their girlfriends would go along with it. I was so confused, I thought that was gonna go so well. And then doing a tap dance in the talent show – I thought here it is! Everyone’s gonna see this and I’m gonna be so popular. And everything backfired... But I always followed my heart and was never sad about it. I just didn’t get what those people liked!”
She wasn’t a smart-at-math kind of nerd, nor of the dungeons-and-dragons variety. She did have friends, but they were like the three social pariahs on Freaks & Geeks, except they’d listen to comedy albums. In her high school years she became a deliberate outcast, embraced the grunge era and concluded her experiences in academia with an obligatory feminist phase . And it was in college that she decided to pursue comedy.
Inspired, after reading an article about the New York City club, Luna Lounge, she set off to pursue her new goal as she was certain she’d be good at stand-up. But, instead of starting out small in the local Boston area, she had the chutzpah to move straight to New York. “I was just a typical, young, cocky jerk. [I knew] I would be good at this, so, let’s take it right to New York! Let’s not even screw around in Boston. I went to a club and started talking to the bartender [about wanting to do the comedy night] and he’s said, ‘I have nothing to do with that. That’s its own thing.’ And I was so disheartened. Maybe I thought he’d be like, ‘You’re probably great!’ I mean, I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. And then he said, ‘I think you need to make a tape.’ And I was like ‘I’m not making a tape!’ I don’t know where this came from, but I was just instantly a jerk!”
She moved back after literally one week, a humbling experience to say the least, right? But she eventually moved back for three years, although she says “I never really wanted to move to New York, I just did it for career reasons. No one asked me to move there, I just knew I wanted to do stand-up in New York. But, I never wanted to stay there long, I wanted to be out here in L.A. So, moving here, even though it was totally different, it was exactly where I wanted to be.” Judging by the looks of her current residence, a neatly kept West Hollywood setting where she resides with her fiancée, she seems on top of it. There are matching red themed settings on her dining room table and decorative holiday wreaths (one of which she still has hanging on her door well into January) suggesting a comfortable home. She offers me coffee, and in my head I’m thinking anyone that is capable of making coffee at home for guests has their act together more or less, but that’s just speculation. The insight she provides throughout our interview confirms it.
Since childhood, Jen has had an affinity for performing, whether through dance or musical theatre. She dabbled in improv and sketch after college and even tried her hand at serious acting. But, she soon discovered it was doing the “funny stuff” where she excelled. In addition to stand-up, Jen writes for and appears in “funny stuff” on the TV show, Chelsea Lately. “I only like writing when I’m writing a short story, or sometimes I’ll write articles for magazines, and obviously at work my job is writing for somebody else. Personally, with my stand-up, it’s more about the performing or at least it’s coming up with ideas, but I’m not a very disciplined writer for my own stand-up.”
She easily looks as though she could have just graduated college. Her misleading neotenous disposition has inspired her to dress up and look more feminine onstage. “I’ve been talking about how I don’t want kids,” she says, “for like 12 years in my act and now that I’m older and I may wear a nice outfit on stage, I think people think, ‘Oh well she seems like a normal age where you know what you want or not and they’ll listen to me and laugh.’ ”
If you search on YouTube for Jen Kirkman, the first clip that shows up, titled “Female Masturbation”, illustrates her raconteur nature. As a solution to having difficulty doing the deed, her friend proposes she think of Johnny Depp, to which Jen responds that she can’t simply think of Johnny Depp in some vacuum. She asks, “How did I meet Johnny Depp? Is he famous? I thought he dated models. Does he suddenly want to keep it real?” The bit goes on to highlight over-analytical tendencies, while demonstrating her conversationally engaging style. LA based comic Morgan Murphy, who Jen often performs with, elaborates, “She’s a completely engaging and honest story teller, but on top of that, she knows what a great joke is and weaves perfectly into a story about what happened that day, what happened 20 years ago, what happens when you die. Jen is one of those people who just gets it.”
Murphy continues, “She has inspired me to tell more stories and not stick so rigidly to one-liners. When we do our talk show together, and she always comes out as the first guest, I often think, I could just sit here and talk to Jen for the whole show. It feels like you’re watching your funniest friend talk about their day in your living room. Unless you live in a studio apartment, in which case you are probably sad and cannot laugh.”
Not wanting babies, living with your boyfriend and female masturbation are typically not topics guys can easily relate to, but as she’s developed into a stronger comic, she’s learned to deliver her experiences in a way everyone can find funny. In fact, the majority of her fan letters and support are from younger 20- something guys. “That seems to be who has reached out to me the most. I used to do a lot of stuff about being dorky when I was younger so a lot of guys seemed to relate to that.”
Her stand-up is already more personal than speculative, recounting experiences from daily life. She reminisces, “I used to go to this hippy dippy church where you get in groups and talk and try to help other people and this guy started hitting on me because he thought I was hitting on him, but I was assigned to go and ask him about his day. So I’m working on this routine that’s about how women can’t be like Jesus cause he had a penis and no one would try to rape him. Like if he was trying to cure a leper they weren’t thinking, ‘Oh, he must like me.’”
Friend and fellow comic Maria Bamford says, “Jen Kirkman is on my vision board of the kind of lady and comic I want to be. Magnificent, hilarious and real.”
“Lately, I’ve been incorporating my values more, I’ve been letting people know,” says Kirkman, “for example, where I stand politically. I think my values are almost 100% – they’re the huge umbrella – over my act.”
When asked if her debut album, Self Help, served as a cathartic experience in any way, namely because of the title, she responds “I actually see it more as validation than catharsis. I don’t feel better by getting it out on stage or worse if I don’t. If I’m really passionate about something and I feel like I’m alone on it, I talk to an audience. If they laugh and agree with me... that’s hugely validating. I get a huge boost from that.” This is something that might have come in handy while dressed up as Mozart.
Jen Kirkman’s been in the comedy scene for almost a baker’s dozen years now, enough for her to fairly assess how things work in this industry. She’s learned the realities of the comedy world, unforeseeable during her “Pfft, I’m not making a tape” era. She cites the first six years as the first major obstacle, albeit a mental one. “I’m sure all comics can relate. [It’s] where you think you’re better than you are and you know you’re gonna be good, but you’re not good yet. So all the obstacles are pretty much in your head. Like, you’re jealous of everyone and you want this and that person has that. You just have to get over it.” She goes on to mention an actual obstacle that exists and will always exist whether you’re in comedy or clean boats for a living. “You don’t always get what you want, you don’t always get work. I had a day job a few years ago that was serious. It was 40 hours a week and it could have been a career. I’m sure somebody would have loved this job. I was working as a web producer for a television network. It’s a fun job if that’s what you wanna do, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I’d have to do shows at night and I was exhausted, uninspired. I thoughy, ‘How long can I keep this up?’ Maybe it would be less painful if I just forgot that I had this goal and threw myself into a job and just forgot about it. And I really went that far with it and I decided to take a break [from stand-up].”
So she took a break – for one week. “I didn’t do anything except go to work and come home. Then I was inspired with all these different ideas and I started doing stand-up again.” Fortunately for her, she understands how things balance themselves out; to not get bogged down by the occasional “no.” “That doesn’t stop me. I know that can change. They’ll say NO one minute then something will go well and your name is out there and they say, ‘Oh, can you do this?’ That shit always happens.” She advises younger comics to, “Pay attention to the comics you admire that you end up with in the green room. If they’re complimenting you then you’re obviously doing something right.”
With regard to negative female stereotypes in comedy, she hasn’t really found them to be as rampant. It was a concern while touring with Greg Behrendt last year. While confident in her ability, she nevertheless felt as though the audience wouldn’t want a woman onstage. She soon discovered it was never an issue. On the contrary, she finds most of female stereotypes lie closer to home – literally – in LA, with regard to the nasty show bizness stuff. “I can’t tell you how many auditions I’ve gone on, and other female comics have gone through this, where they’ll say, ‘We need a funny woman for this script’. When you get to the audition and you get the script and the women’s lines are not funny at all. They’re kinda just tools sitting there asking what time it is. The lines are terrible and the description is like hot, blonde, thin, bikini blah blah blah. So, of course they’re not finding funny people because models’ agents will see that physical description and call the tall blonde; not that you can’t be funny and hot like a model, just technically the breakdowns go to people that look like that. When they have comedians come in, we walk in the door and you can see their faces just drop, ‘Where’s the model?’”
“There are still some clubs around” says Kirkman, “where you still hear ‘Are you ready for a woman?’ when they’re bringing one on stage, and you wouldn’t go ‘Are you ready for a Chinese person?’ ” She describes the hardships of being a woman in comedy as relatively minor, “I would say rules are changing, but there’s still very subtle sexism out there.”
“The key is patience,” says Kirkman, “and keep believing in what I do and to keep doing it.” Most likely this is the same attitude she had after her poorly received talent show tap dancing debut, but more importantly it’s that same mentality that has enabled her to do the thing she loves for a living.
For more information, visit JenKirkman.com.
Annabelle Quezada is a writer from California.