Kelsey Cook Interview

Comedianstres, Self-Helpless Podcast host, and elite Fussball player Kelsey Cook will make her highly-anticipated return to Cleveland, Ohio for three nights in October (Thursday, 10/19 – Saturday, 10/21) at Hilarities Fourth Street Theater!

No stranger to the Hilarities stage, Cook has previously headlined Cleveland’s premier comedy club and also was in town as the feature act on Jim Norton’s shows. But…it has been a while! Cook has grown leaps and bounds as a comedian. Few social media users have missed her clips on Facebook/Instagram/TikTok, and her new special, ‘The Hustler’ is freely available on YouTube.

Cook has been part of the growing number of female comics achieving a high level of success in the past two decades. Today, many of the top touring comedians are of the female variety!

“It did feel pretty different 10 to 15 years ago,” Cook told CleveRock in a recent phone interview ahead of her Cleveland engagement. “I’ve been doing comedy for 14 years now and so I feel pretty fortunate that the past six years or so of headlining, it’s been during a time where you’ve seen that shift and there are so many female comics out there who are really doing great. I love being a part of it and seeing it happen.“

->WATCH KELSEY’S NEW YOUTUBE SPECIAL, THE HUSTLER<-

Presumably, Cook could have struck a deal with her choice of outlet to release ‘The Hustler,’ before deciding that the best path was to publish it to YouTube.

“YouTube is pretty great because it is free. It’s very accessible and that also makes it very shareable,” Cook explained. “It’s a lot easier for somebody to just send a link to a YouTube video than maybe something that’s on a streaming platform. I think that it can really help get the video into the algorithm and then have it kind of get pushed onto other people’s pages, too”.

The night after Cook takes her final bow in The Land, KISS will storm the stage at neighboring Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. Undoubtedly, fans will throw devil horns in the air and sing along to the classic hits belted out by Paul Stanley & his makeup-covered pals. Comedians don’t have that same luxury. Sure, Jim Gaffigan has been closing with the tired Hot Pocket bit for two decades, but most joke-slingers don’t have the ability to recycle and still draw crowds.

“When the special came out I was then very aware that people who were in the crowd could have watched the special already,” she said. “I had been writing a lot and really trying to get as much solid new material ready as possible. Right after the special came out, I had a good portion of new material, but I also found that there were a lot of people in the crowd who hadn’t seen the special, or even if they had, and I had done a few jokes from the special people would come up to me afterward and go, ‘Oh my God, I’m so glad that you told that one from the special because that’s my favorite one.’ It’s like sometimes people do actually want to hear something they’ve loved before, but in general, you have to have a lot of new material.”

->Subscribe to Self-Helpless Podcast<-

For those who can’t make it out to Hilarities to catch Cook this weekend or who need more to satisfy their Kelsey fix, you can catch her and co-host Delanie Fischer on their acclaimed podcast, Self-Helpless.

“We try to cover a different self-help topic every week. On every episode, we kind of give our take on it. We try to sometimes bring a little lightness to it if it’s something super heavy we have experts on, we will try a lot of the self-help things ourselves,” Cook said. “We want it to feel like your best friends trying out self-help things for you.”

Kelsey Cook will perform at Hilarities Fourth Street Theater from October 19-21. Complete show and ticket information can be found on CleveRock’s events calendar: RIGHT HERE!