The Little Comedy Show That Could

It takes balls to put on an all-female standup comedy show, especially when nine of the 12 comics have less than six months’ experience. Charge a ticket fee of $20 in tough economic times with full confidence that you’ll pack the house, raise money for charity and get solid laughs? It’s so crazy it just might work!

For our first blog, I wanted to share with you the story of how our show, “StandUp For Your Sisters: A Benefit for Gilda’s Club”, came to be.

All of the non-feature performers on this show met each other just this summer at stand-up comedy classes with Dawn Whitwell at the Second City Training Centre and Bad Dog Theatre. For many of us, it was a life-changing process. We are all over 25 (some of us well over) and come from a variety of life experiences,  the kinds of experiences which could lead one to either drinking or stand-up.   In some walks of life, aging is seen as a liability, but in comedy, age ain’t nothin’ but a bonus. If you’ve been paying attention, the older you are, the more likely you are to recognize and admit to your individual demons.

Following our mentor’s sage advice to tell the truth about life as we see it, we soon learned that we had no shortage of material to draw from. After weeks of working hard to develop our first five-minute sets, our student shows were packed to the rafters and echoed with encouraging laughs (no small feat when you consider that the Second City Mainstage seats over 300).

We got a surge of confidence to keep going, until some of us started hitting the open mic nights and reality hit – we soon realized that stage time is hard to come by. Especially, it seems, for new female comics. On any given amateur night at the mainstream clubs, you’re lucky to see 10% female comics in the line-up, yet women often make up at least half the audience.  If there were so many of us out there, why were we the exception rather than the rule?  We decided to put on our own show, and bring the audience to us.

It’s no secret that women travel in packs and can “bring the crowd”, in comedy parlance. Unlike the average twenty-something guy telling jokes at open mics, as women of a certain age we all have contacts in the various professional worlds we walk in. We knew from experience that we could fill a 200-seat venue like Hugh’s Room.  So when one of the comics, Leanne Mladen, said, “We should do this for charity… let’s call it StandUp For Your Sisters,” we were immediately energized to make it happen. We brainstormed various causes, and Gilda’s Club soon became the clear contender; we had all been touched by cancer in some way, and we had all been inspired to get on stage in the first place by female comedians like Gilda Radner. We were nothing short of honoured when Gilda’s Club said yes to our offbeat idea for a fundraiser.

We’re not hiding the fact that most of us are new comics – we’re banking on it.  We are hoping the curiosity factor of it all will pique a ticket buyer’s interest. When we asked Dawn Whitwell to headline and Elvira Kurt to host, and both agreed (with full knowledge of our material), we knew we definitely had a show worth seeing.

Shelley Kidwell Eckert kicked in two Raptors floor seats behind the visitors bench with full bar and dinner service, on the sole condition that we auction, rather than raffle, them off, and the Silent Auction portion of the evening was born.  Donations from other companies started coming in and the momentum hasn’t stopped.  Heidi Mole secured a generous donation from TPH for our printing costs, raising our potential proceeds, and Becky Bays stepped up to produce the Silent Auction full-time.

I’ve since taken a tour of Gilda’s Club and was able to see first-hand the wonderful work they do.  I was saddened to hear that the Montreal branch was closed down due to lack of funds; my heart started beating hard at the thought that this could ever happen to Gllda’s Club in Toronto.  We hope in some small way that our show is able to help keep Gilda’s dream alive: that no one should ever have to face cancer alone.

We hope you enjoy the show as much as we are enjoying putting it together, and we hope to do Gilda’s legacy proud.