How to Be Serious
The first episode of How to Be Funny (Right Now)
Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:
FINALLY! I am done with the first episode of How to Be Funny (Right Now). I’m sorry to every podcast-dude-bro that I made fun of in the past year (not really). As it turns out, it’s quite difficult to record and edit a podcast when you’re a 19th century Luddite stuck in a Gen Z girl’s body.
Apologies that the first five minutes were recorded with some audio difficulties. I did my best on GarageBand to make it audible. BUT I’m so so so glad that my mic was the only one with issues, because my lovely interviewees: Zilu Wang, Beatriz Pugeda, and Tooky Kavanagh, dropped the real wisdom about Comedy as forms of Communication and Creativity.
About the podcast & my guests
How to Be Funny (Right Now) is a podcast where I ask women in comedy—cartoonists, writers, comics, and more— about how humor makes us braver, stronger, hotter, for moments when we need it the most.
They say you shouldn’t dissect the frog because you’ll kill the joke, but I dig into the heads and hearts of hilarious people so you don’t have to.
Zilu Wang is an improviser and board-certified music therapist (MT-BC). She founded Let's/Zheng, a Chinese improv group that also holds bilingual improv workshops.
Beatriz Pugeda is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Little Old Lady (LOL), a literary humor and comics site. LOL is publishing an anthology soon! Stay tuned.
Tooky Kavanagh is a stand-up comedian and performer. She’s headlined shows all over New England and was a comic-in-residence at the Comedy Studio.
A surprising snippet from the first episode, “How to Be Serious”
Amy: You said earlier, it isn’t always about getting the laugh, it’s more about the creativity. So I’m curious, where is making people laugh—the means to an end, or is it the end? I know for me, I get such a high from hearing people laugh that that’s all I’m going for sometimes… But where does the laugh live in the process for you guys?
Tooky: So yeah, like you mentioned, I have a performing arts degree—so ironic an introvert got into theater. It was by accident, a happy accident, but I was writing a lot of plays in college, and I got frustrated because people are laughing.
But I realized, oh, okay, the laughter is the way through which they receive what I’m trying to say. So I had to come to a point of accepting that instead of taking myself too seriously— “No, I’m a thespian. Damn it!”— this is how I know that what I’m saying has not just landed, but has resonated with whoever it is that is interested in hearing what I have to say.
It’s not the end-all be-all for me because the goal is to connect no matter what, and to put on a good performance no matter what. That’s that theater training. They will drill it into you. But that end result of laughter means that I’ve executed my job, that the message has gone across, that somebody understands what I’m saying and what I’ve pointed out.
Amy: It’s like a human way to show understanding. It’s like nodding, but you can’t control when you laugh.
Beatriz: I also used to get that note in writing workshops. I like to make something so freaking serious. And people are like, that’s hilarious. I’m like, “Is it...?”
I’m just really pouring my heart out. Like if it’s a fiction story and something terrible happens. I think it’s like, it might just be a little absurd. So the reality is just a little shifted. And that’s the funny thing about it.
And in my head, that’s profoundly, deeply moving in a serious sense. But that’s so cool—it’s a little frustrating— but to someone else, it’s hilarious. Or a shift in perspective is something new and a way to react to that is to laugh.
Zilu: That sounds to me like stand-up comedy. Like you are sharing the deepest struggle and people are like, “Ha ha ha!” And I feel that’s like the sincerity of sharing it and also the vulnerability of sharing it.
And it’s so real. And nobody—like maybe they all experienced that, but they didn’t say it out loud. They hear somebody else sharing, so they’re like, “Ha! I can release.”
So that’s the burst. I feel myself to be a very serious person. And when I do comedy, I feel I’m also very serious. I’s not attitude-serious, but I feel my presence…
And even like in my writing, I used to think to myself like, oh, I’m being serious again. I want to get rid of it. But I don’t feel that there’s necessarily a boundary between serious and playful…
Hear the rest on Spotify and Apple Podcasts!
Updates
It took my whole month to edit the podcast and life has been moving fast since then. Is it normal to feel like a proud mom about all of your podcast guests? If you loved my guests as much as I did, you can follow along too:
I just watched Zilu sing about bears and butts in the Boston AAPI Comedy Festival. Beatriz just emcee-ed Little Old Lady Live in NYC last week and Tooky hosts another podcasts about Total Dad Movies.
And if you have a funny woman in mind for future episodes, please send them my way!
