I like joking about how my favorite scent is the processed bread radiating from a Subway sandwich store, but tonight I’m pitching the idea of adding Four Loko dispensers to our dining halls.
It’s a Friday afternoon in September, and I’m walking northbound on Figueroa Street towards Robert Zemeckis Center, home of the Ron Howard Theater. The heat is cruel. I worry that the rubber soles on my Mary Jane DocMartens will melt1;. My nose is irritated from the Santa Anas, and I feel like an intruder in my own body by not taking an exaggerated whiff passing the Subway on 32nd.
As I make it to the theater, I learn that imposter syndrome can take physical forms. No comic there looks like me. I’m the only female comedian. I’m one of three non-white performers in a 15-set show.
I’m at a school open mic in Los Angeles. I could be at a cafe in Denver, a club in Ann Arbor, or at bar in Park Slope. Nearly 90% of American comedians are men, and over half are white, statistics I would soon know as well as the ideas scribbled in my notebook.
There’s a boys club in front of me. The audience is mostly white. I’m unsure if I’m experiencing symptoms of heat-induced delusion. I could be in an 19th-century military barrack just as much as I could be in a performance venue.
I get up on stage when the host says my name, holding the same microphone the comic before me used to share his inability to get a date.
Each comic gets three minutes, and I nod when the light goes off two minutes into a bit about installing Four Loko dispensers in the dining halls. It’s tough to miss a phone flashlight in a theater, a room dark enough to make the band logos on audience’s T-shirts indecipherable, but the notion you’re now looking straight at the entire boot camp obvious.
My time’s up. I’m high on adrenaline, though nothing wanes euphoria faster than sitting through another half hour of college guys’ dating woes.
The mic ends and a man in Radiohead merch taps my shoulder. He compliments my set. But he lauds my decision to show up in the first place even more.
“We don’t usually get people like you here,” he says. “I’m sure you feel like you’re in Get Out.”
He laughs. I don’t
“I’m joking.”
Jokes work because they give us new perspectives into reality. A dad makes punchlines out of the obvious over lunch. A third grader experiments with homophones with a knock-knock joke.
A man comes up to the only woman, and person of color, at the open mic and compares her to the protagonist in a Jordan Peele film about racial fetishization.
But it was the “people like you” that hit the hardest. Like many in the theater that night, I wrote my name on the sign-up sheet, stuck to my three minutes and got the audience hollering.
Yet I still belonged to a different “people.”
When you’re 1/15 – and there’s a stage you get up on so this metric is, quite literally, spotlighted – you may feel like the joke isn’t the one-liner that came out of your mouth. The joke is you.
I step out onto Figueroa Street and the September air, while still cruel, is a relief.
It’s the alienation that’s unforgiving.
II. The Set-Up
Though overwhelmingly white and male, stand-up comedy has no entry barriers. No statutes or rules dictate who gets to perform, unless the venue is 21+ and the bouncer thinks your fake ID sucks.
Material can be written anywhere. For 25-year-old Sarah Cortina, that means brainstorming on napkins, drafting sets on fridge calendars and hoping the traffic light stays red for just a few seconds longer to finish typing out a concept on her phone.
“Coming up with [an idea] is the only time I’ve ever been thankful for LA traffic,” said Cortina. “When something clicks I can’t afford to forget it, even if it’s abstract, because that can be articulated later.”
Anyone can be a comic. In terms of the actual show, you only need a microphone, amplification system, and a stage of some sorts.
If you’re lucky you also have a sense of humor. And Cortina does.
“There’s a magic in saying something that can resonate forever in just five minutes.”
Everyone can be a comedian, but not everyone can be funny.
USC School of Dramatic Arts Professor and Comedy Historian Wayne Federman asserts how although joke writing can be learned, practiced and perfected, it’s an “intrinsic funny gene” that makes the comic.
“It’s in a comedian’s DNA,” said Federman. “You have to be born with it.”
Cortina is a stand-up comic, but she’s also a booker. On the first Friday evening of the month, Cortina hosts the show Chaps Comedy. Some nights it’s in a Hollywood theater. Other nights it’s in the back of a sushi spot – even the restaurants in LA moonlight in the entertainment sphere. She assembles local and visiting comics to the Chaps stage, a challenge involving sharp communication and organization.
“And also getting ghosted,” said Cortina. She is often “prepar[ing] for someone to drop out at the last second” or comics arriving past call time. “You can’t avoid it.”
Her thumbs brace her phone’s keyboard, positioned to send a cold DM, then extend her host set. She is busy, balancing a corporate job with booking comics. And also being booked herself.
Cortina has been a regular of the LA comedy scene for the past three years. Some people know the City of Angels through freeway exits, others orient themselves through cuisine. Cortina’s LA is mapped by marquee lights and the volume of a crowd’s laughter.
She has written jokes under deadline for The Comedy Store’s Roast Battle in Hollywood, “one of the only places you can be mean to a stranger and not get punched in the face.” She finetuned delivery skills at The Elysian in Atwater Village, where alternative comics, often representing “the film school graduate diaspora,” thrive.
And no matter Westside or Eastside, she has mastered the art of bombing.
“It’s inevitable,” Cortina said. “It can happen anywhere at any time, testing new material, facing an unrelenting heckler.”
Cortina is resilient, quick-witted and excellent at crowd work. But overcoming the worry of perpetuating the age-old “Women Aren’t Funny” stereotype is harder to rehearse for.
“Getting heckled for stumbling over a bit you just wrote is one thing. Getting heckled because ‘You should put makeup on’ is a different entity.”
Stand-up comedy came out of early-20th century vaudeville shows. Individual comics got up onstage sans the props and costumes most performers used, and addressed the audience directly.
Comics mixed vaudeville antics with long form monologue. “The first stand-ups were called monologists,” Federman said.
And these monologists included women.
“Jean Carroll became a star in the ‘40s,” said Federman. “Moms Mabley was a favorite in the 1920s Black vaudeville circuit,” finding ways to perform while segregation denied Black artists access to mainstream stages.
Carroll and Mabley became “heroes” for the young Totie Fields, Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers.
Discriminatory legislation was abolished in the mid-20th century, but venues continued to exercise prejudice against their performers and crowds. The New York Friars Club was famously male-only, “a stupid boys club that thought women couldn’t handle hearing certain four-letter words.”
Female comedians were booked “to add another dimension to the show, which was typically dominated by men.” Their names were added to show lineups for “the sake of variety, ensuring material wouldn’t overlap.”
Federman notes the paradoxical nature of traditional comedy booking.
“Women got an advantage of sorts in that comics were quick to book them, but as a way to draw in crowds who would be repelled by a completely male line-up.”
Female performers are held to a standard: A man’s.
III: The Delivery
For 24-year-old Ana Mercado, comedy is a vehicle for building “community out of the unlikeliest aspects of the human experience.” Mercado is a door girl at The Crow Comedy Club in Santa Monica, an artistic space designed for comedians of all perspectives to succeed.
Sometimes that unlikely aspect is a shared disinterest in astrology.
“When I’m onstage, I’m performing as me,” Mercado said. “I guess that’s a Taurus.”
Mercado began performing stand-up in 2024 after moving to LA from Indiana. With a background in sketch comedy, Mercado became enamored with “making people laugh by simply being [her]self” rather than a character or certain role.
Living in LA meant greater access to a comedy scene, but Mercado often found herself “the only girl on the lineup,” delivering the “night’s only jokes that weren’t dogging on women” at shows and open mics.
“There’s this expectation I’m some Margaret Choesque figure because I’m the sole Asian person performing,” said Mercado.
“You can be in the most crowded room ever and still be lonely when you’re expected to fit someone’s bias, a model they think you should mold yourself into.”
When Mercado came across The Crow, the prospect of conformity was no longer on the table.
As a door girl, Mercado serves as the face of a club championing comics historically on the margins of the entertainment world. She fosters a space where everyone is able to learn in laugh, greeting crowds at performances spanning college comedy festivals to “Token Straight Night” to Drag Cabaret.
“If [a performer] at The Crow is having a bad set, it’s because they’re having a bad set and not because someone’s yelling for them to take their top off.”
The Crow is an environment where failure is celebrated. The club is a comedic safe space, in the sense that “bombing encourages comics to grow” rather than deter them from future performance.
Stand-up is a medium inseparable from free speech. But when the viewpoints expressed are dominated by limited demographics, new spaces are created to ensure all speech is heard.
“Some people in the comedy scene hear ‘safe space’ and call us ‘The Woke Club’ or the ‘DEI Club,”’ said Mercado. “But the whole goal of a safe space is for something to just exist.”
The world loves laughing. Over 6,000 stand-up comedy shows were performed each year from 2022-2025, doubling the 3,000 range shows performed annually from 2017-2019. Four out of five American households subscribe to a streaming service, and watching stand-up specials no longer requires a ticket.
“People look for comedy during times of unease,” said Mercado. “We admire comedians for commenting on social, political and economic issues, serious topics, with humor.”
“When I perform at The Crow, I’m the one onstage, but it’s like the other comedians and the audience are up there with me,” said Cortina. “I get to learn, from other performers, from myself.”
Cortina has hosted Roast Battles at The Crow, where “even if a comic technically loses, they still leave the show with a sense of accomplishment.”
Freedom of speech relies first on the freedom to speak, which is present on a stage in Santa Monica, where stand-up routines are created in tandem with a more accessible comedy culture.
“I like creating,” said Mercado after adding bullet points to a dissertation long page in her notes app. “It makes the future brighter.”
IV: The Show Must Go On
I am graduating from the University of Southern California. For the first time in my school career, I am deemed “A pleasure to have in class.” This epithet is a departure from “disorderly” and “disruptive” that littered the behavior sections on my elementary school report cards.
Perhaps making a wisecrack about a bomb going off before starting a minute-long basic arithmetic competition is incompatible with a classroom full of 9-year-olds.
But it is perfect for a tiny stage in Silver Lake.
I am funny. A healthy dose of unrestricted internet access raised me on absurdisms of Family Guy and the Lena Dunham canon.
I cannot remember ever not drawing parallels between the seemingly asymmetrical. Nor a time where I wasn’t striving to make a room full of people laugh.
The last time I went to an open mic I forgot my set and bombed — and the prospect of winning a scratch-and-sniff sticker for solving my multiples of 12 the fastest was no longer in the cards.
It will happen again.
Despite free range childhood media consumption, I didn’t grow up watching stand-up specials or listening to comedy albums. I derived laughter from fantasy literature forums and YouTube stars performing body stunts that made David Cronenberg films look like Mister Roger’s Neighborhood.
On nights when browsing Harry Potter X Draco Malfoy fanfics lost its sparkle, I would eavesdrop on my parents laughing at stand-up specials from the living room. I am a journalist, of course I am nosy.
When you come-of-age in California, you are taught to crouch under a table if you ever feel your walls shaking. You learn “Drop, Cover and Hold” drills before you learn Salinger, or how it is inappropriate to ask a fifth-grade classmate returning from a Disneyland trip if they’ve contracted measles. You prepare for “The Big One.”
Or your parents cracking up at an Ali Wong bit downstairs.
I admired Wong’s ability to make strangers laugh, a skill that transcended the auditorium and infiltrated my living room, though I kept my humor contained to journals and book margins. I fell in love with post-punk and grunge rock a few years later, but the best music was always laughter.
I started stand-up as I started my journalism degree. It was like separating church and state; before college I had a habit of wheedling quips into essays and presentations, remarks unsuitable for an 100-level course research paper or introduction writing assignment.
Akin to news writing, joke writing requires succinctness and precision. Attention to nuance is crucial. Your objective as a reporter is to tell the audience what happened and why it matters. Your objective as a comic is to tell the audience what happened and why it matters.
Federman preaches that all stand-up sets rely on the “CBS principle,” an ethos of “clarity, brevity and specificity.” Like drafting ledes, selecting quotes and explaining nut grafs, comedy is formulaic: the term “routine” is literal.
The skills I learned in reporting classes transferred losslessly when put behind the mic. I challenged myself to write a joke for every assignment I was tasked with. I brainstormed, many times on walks, most likely turning onto Figueroa Street to smell the bread at Subway. I brought the material to stages, and learned that not every crowd is reminiscent of the almost 90% male statistic I faced at my first performance. Nuance at its finest.
The last time I bombed, I was performing my bit about lying to the priest at confession growing up. I was 8, and uncomfortable with vulnerability. I tried to cram in too many words before the punchline and it derailed my whole set.
I got off the stage, and another woman then stood behind the mic. Her set was amazing – not everyone can make a pun about the Strait of Hormuz remarkable. Forever can truly manifest itself in a five-minute set.
Today I am “A pleasure to have in class.” I’m bounds more orderly than I was in elementary school. I’m still a disruptor, just now with a stage and a microphone.
Because anyone can be a comic.