Cover photo © Bruce Smith
A poor, anonymous writer once coined the adage: “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
Dr. Seuss took the credit and ran with it. (What a hack!)
Comedian Laurie Kilmartin will perform at Hilarities Fourth Street Theatre in Cleveland on Friday, May 22, just blocks away from Rocket Arena, who will be hosting THE BOSS, Mr. Bruce Springsteen himself. That’s some tough competition for any entertainer in town that night!
On the flipside, at the time of this writing, “Pit” tickets in front of the stage for Springsteen’s show are priced at $1,705! (To be fair, that includes fees). Get to Hilarities early enough, and the second-to-none staff could very well seat you in the front row for a ticket priced at $1,669 less than that for a comparable view of Bruce. (Not to mention that you’ll have a comfortable chair and wait staff at Hilarities! – Pro-tip: Try ‘Mr. Big’ on the drink menu, you won’t regret it!)
While the sold-out crowd leaving Rocket Arena on Friday night, though most will have had the time of their lives witnessing the music of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, will be smiling “because it happened,” they’ll conversely be crying for days….weeks…months…years….when they realize that loan they took out to purchase the tickets to pay for admission isn’t seeing a dent in the principal. Sure, they’ll look back and smile with fond memories from the show, but I’ll be damned if they aren’t crying when seeing that loan payment debited from their checking account for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps Seuss would have been more accurate with “Smile as it happens; cry like a baby when it’s over”(?)
Kilmartin is the anti-Seuss. Instead of shamelessly plagiarizing famed quotes from others, she is the woman working backstage, writing jokes for household names such as Conan O’Brien, and, perhaps most notably, penned some zingers for The Oscars.
Laurie phoned Team CleveRock to discuss her comedy career, comedic stylings, and even reveal what brand of hair conditioner she treasures.
As someone who does a great deal of work behind the scenes, the most savvy of stand-up comedy fans may not be familiar with her live set. Asked to describe the topics she addresses:
“I’m kind of sarcastic and dark, I would say,” Kilmartin described. “I don’t know that I talk about anything that’s super unique. I mean, we all lead kind of the same lives. We have sex or we don’t have sex. We have kids or we don’t have kids. We’re worried about money. We’re worried about everything. It’s sort of more how I do it; not exactly what I talk about. I’m a single mom. My son is 19. We watch anime together. He was one of the lockdown kids, which means he’s super weird.”
“Sarcastic and dark” may be an understatement based on the title of her 2016 stand-up special that provides a humorous outlook on something that causes most people struggling to cope.
“45 Jokes About My Dead Dad is my comedy special title. It’s all about the dying process and hospice and all that, and how crazy that was,” she said.“I mean, one just bananas story is that my dad’s funeral got bumped because a person with more visitors died, and so they’re like, ‘We need this person to have the Sunday funeral, and your dad can have the Monday funeral.’ And then it’s like, ‘Well, it’s impossible to get people to go to a Monday funeral, just like it’s impossible to get people to go to a show when Bruce Springsteen is in town, down the street.’ Anyone who’s lost somebody can tell you the accompanying stories and the surrealness of it all, or kind of make it bearable, because you just can’t believe how strange things are. That’s what my special is about.”
Kilmartin wrote a supplemental book, entitled Dead People Suck, that featured similar content.
“I just had more material that I thought would work in a book, and so I wrote a book about it, too.”
Sometimes one just has to laugh in dark and difficult times, regardless of how tough the struggles are. While Kilmartin doesn’t exactly pinpoint the jokes on this subject as a mere coping mechanism, it did aid in helping her cut through the grief,
“That’s just my sense of humor and my family’s sense of humor. That’s how we were raised. And to me, the funniest thing is to get right to the meat of it if you can, because we all sort of feel these things under the surface, and sometimes a good joke will unearth it and get it out of your system,” she said. “I guess I’m sort of naturally attracted to the dark angle of any sort of comedy topic.”
With experience writing for Conan O’Brien during his stint on TBS and composing jokes for one of the entertainment industry’s biggest nights, The Oscars, Kilmartin was asked to compare and contrast writing for others versus writing for her stand-up sets.
“They’re very different,” she confirmed. “For my own stand-up, I often think of stuff when I’m swimming or I’m in the shower or just doing something else. It’s almost like my brain starts writing when my body’s doing something else; just driving even, or shopping or something. For late night television, that’s like opening up a Word doc and reading the news and understanding these sort of in depth topics and seeing if you can break it down so that it can be made into a joke. Some of these topics are so dense. It’s crazy! We’re just trying to see if you can pick out enough easy pieces to put it into a joke or not. Sometimes, it’s too much for a joke, but that is very challenging, but it’s fun to do. It’s fun when you can get a good joke together out of current events, but it’s challenging in a very different way than massaging material night after night for your own set. Like for me, it could take me six months to get a three minute chunk of material, and that’s doing it five or six nights a week. With late night, you’re writing a joke that’s going to be said once and then never again. It’s really different. I don’t know which is harder. They use different parts of my very tiny brain.”
When asked to pick her favorite professional highlight, Kilmartin didn’t hesitate!
“Writing for the Oscars is so unique and strange that I really couldn’t believe it. It’s a show that you’ve watched your entire life and then to be backstage at that theater and having all these celebrities walk by you, I mean, I was like 25 feet from Barbara Streisand this year and she’s so tiny. It’s really a strange feeling. That was really fun,” she said. “Just the lead up to it, it’s kind of a weird bubble you’re in because you’re just writing jokes about movies, basically, and so you get to ignore the news, which I’m not used to in terms of being a late night writer.”
I’ve interviewed several current and former cast members from Saturday Night Live, had chats with Jay Leno and Paul Shaffer, and a variety of other writers who work on acclaimed television programs. There must be ironclad Non-Disclosure Agreements across the industry. I’ve asked each and every person involved in late night television that I’ve talked to for a great behind the scenes story. The general theme is some variety of “I don’t have one” or something so vanilla that I see more interesting things when at the self-checkout at Costco.
Perhaps Kilmartin can be the first to give me some tea?
“No! Look, let me tell you, if no one’s telling you a good story, it’s because they want to keep working, you know what I mean?”
Fair enough, Laurie. I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything different.
The chat concluded with Kilmartin being quizzed on if there is a question that she has never been asked in an interview that she would like to discuss. She did have an answer for this one. Nobody has ever asked her about her hair conditioner.
“It’s called Mint. It’s this blue conditioner and I swim a lot so my hair is subjected to chlorine and I finally found this stuff. I put a little dollop in after my swim and my hair brushes out perfectly and I love it.”
Someone get Laurie an endorsement deal. Better yet, somebody (and everybody) should grab tix to check out her great stand-up set at Hilarities on Friday, May 22! (C’mon, can anyone name one Bruce Springsteen song released in the past decade?)
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