Barbara Holm
written by Tom Mohrman
Barbara Holm is compelled to perform stand-up the way junkies are compelled to shoot heroin. She performs practically every night. (As often as possible, more than once per night.) Right now she is in that all-important highly obsessive phase of a young comedian’s life. It’s all about getting stage time, writing every day, honing, practicing, and discovering her voice. In two years she’s gone from a timid performer delivering one liners to a self-assured comic deeply ensconced in the Seattle comedy scene. Her comedy has become much more personal, daring, and really, she’s just begun.
When I met Barbara for coffee right in the nexus of hipsterdom that is Capitol Hill (the Williamsburg of the Northwest), she almost immediately apologized for not being more famous. Then she gave me that ear to ear grin that she gives her audiences after her punchlines. I could tell that in addition to being funny, she was going to be frank and candid. In person, Barbara, a native of North Bend, WA, is verbose and articulate, but her mannerisms betray her youth. Her black framed glasses are thick and her grins arrive one after the other. During our conversation, the way she kept her hands folded in her lap gave her a distinct childlike quality. Upstairs at the coffee shop we discussed her thoughts on the art of comedy, her experiences, and her hopes for the future.
I asked Barbara, 24, how she got her start. “When I was in second grade,” she said, “I was a perfect student, and it was the first time I ever got detention. Instead of paying attention in math class, I was writing a short story. I got sent to the Principal’s office, and the Principal read my short story and kept on laughing out loud, and she was like, ‘This is really funny.’”
She told Barbara that she should keep on writing stories. Then when she was about thirteen she saw Maria Bamford on Comedy Central. This was the light bulb above her head moment. After seeing Bamford, comedy took hold of her. She thought,
“Not only do I want to write short stories, but I want to make them that funny.”
Barbara had social anxiety as a child. She had really terrible stage fright and never really gave a second thought to becoming a comic. Instead, she decided to sell some jokes to someone. She met a random road comic in a bar one night and had him read from one of her many notebooks. He indulged her, liked her stuff, and then told her to go to an open mic. She did and has performed pretty much every night since then. After her third open mic, she was hooked and knew stand-up was what she wanted for a career.
Comedian Emmett Montgomery caught her third attempt on stage and after that they became fast friends. Emmett has nothing but great things to say about Barbara. “If comedy had a punch clock and an odometer,” says Montgomery, “Barbara would have logged more hours on stage and distance travelled for the sake of comedy than most people who have been doing it for two to three times as long as she has. Her passion makes me wonder if she is actually just a cloud of insane bees in a cute lady suit. Her laugh is contagious, her work ethic is unbelievable and her mind is terrifyingly unique, I don’t know what she will be doing in the next couple of years, but I am sure it will be awesome.”
Seattle has a lot of opportunity for young comedians starting out. There are great comics living here like Rylee Newton and Mike Drucker, and there are people who started here and became more famous on a national level like Hari Kondabolu and Reggie Watts.
There are clubs, and open mics all over town, and Barbara knows them all. “There are so many comedians,” she says, “and so many comedy shows right now that it can be a little daunting.” She describes it as a comedy boom. This is great news for comedy fans, though it means there’s a lot of competition for comics.
Barbara’s always been a avid writer, but for her, stand-up is where it’s at. She writes sketches, and once tried performing one with a group, but in the end she decided that devoting hours of her evenings to practicing sketches meant giving up stage time. Also, after experiencing the steady laughs of stand-up, it’s hard to slow down that pace. “When you write a sketch,” she said, “it’s more normal to get a laugh per minute, and in stand-up that would be bad. You would be bombing if you were getting a laugh per minute. I don’t want to be on stage for a whole minute without getting a laugh. That would be so scary. I would hate it.”
In the early days of Barbara’s stand-up career she delivered one-liners and played a ukulele. I asked her if she still performs with it and that got a big laugh. “You’ve seen some videos,” she said. She had terrible stage fright when she started out and used the ukulele as a metronome on stage. “I still like using it with the one liners, but I’m writing kind of more long and absurdist things than one linersnow, so I don’t have the opportunity to do it as much. I still like it. I wish I did it more.”
Her act has taken a more personal turn these days. “I get more out of it,” she says. “My new favorite joke is comparing the emotional baggage of dating someone to being haunted by the ghosts of the Chirstmas Carol. It’s so much fun for me to tell, because it’s like a really real thing. She spoke about a comedian friend of hers who has a lot of cutesy jokes that do really well, and also a joke about being shy that speaks to her more. “It’s like, she said she’s not always sure if she should do the shy joke because she’s not sure if people will relate to that sort of thing. But that’s the joke that made me love her. The joke that’s too personal is the one that’s going to actually be the most relate-able. It would be like someone out there saying ‘Oh, you feel that way too! I don’t have to be scared and sad all the time.’”
You get the feeling that Barbara says beautiful heartbreaking things like that all the time. Her friend Mike Drucker seems to adds credence to this notion. “What I like about Barbara’s comedy,” he says, “is that her absurdity comes from a place of real innocence. It’s like watching a robot trying to understand the world.
The jokes have a real sense of wonder to them which makes them really fun to watch.”
I asked her if being this personal on stage ever makes her feel exposed. She though about it for a minute before answering. “Not when I talk about shyness, or sad things.” She feels that turning these things into comedy has given her power over them. However, she doesn’t really like talking about sexual things on stage. Sometimes she does it anyway, because crowds really respond to that sort of thing, but the feminist in her doesn’t like being reduced to a sexual object.
The larger issue with jokes like that though, is that she thinks they’re too easy, appealing to the lowest common denominator. After spending almost every night at open mics and comedy clubs for the past couple of years her comedy palette has become a little more refined.
“Some of that sexist stuff is so easy to write that people will write something that’s really really sexist, and then because it’s easy it will do well. Then, they’ll never re-write it, they’ll never tighten it up, and it’ll just be like the worst joke ever. It’ll just be so stupid. I don’t think that’s what art should be.” Then she took a beat, and added, “I’m a snob.” Then came her big smile again, and her self-deprecating laugh. “I would rather do really weird jokes about eating disorders and dinosaurs- I just want to do what I think is funny.”
Barbra knows that she is still a young comic. She concedes that where she’ll be as a stand-up in a few years might be an entirely different place than she is right now, but she has plans, and she’s working very hard to achieve those goals. One thing is clear: wherever Barbara Holm finds herself will be the result of her talent, hard work, and unique sensibility.
For more on Barbara, visit barbaraholm.wordpress.com.