The BC Q&A: Wendy Liebman

Wendy Liebman can tell you the exact day she started her comedy career in Boston. A Long Island native, Liebman came to Boston to go to Wellesley College as a psychology major. She wound up getting hooked on comedy, joining a scene that included comedians like Anthony Clark, Dot Dwyer, and Brian Kiley, looking up to veterans like Don Gavin and Jonathan Katz.

Liebman credits Boston with showing her who she is as a comedian. “I think I would be a different kind of comedian if I started in New York,” she says. “The audience teaches you, and their sensibility is what I heard. And I think it made me a better comedian. I think I would be more sarcastic if I had learned from New York, and less just amused. So I’m grateful to Boston.”

Thursday evening, she’ll play a benefit at the Regent Theatre in Arlington. This is the third year she has organized the show for Community Works, an umbrella organization supporting social justice causes run by Fran Froehlich and Kip Tiernan, veteran activists Liebman met while working at Radcliffe. It’s a rare chance to see Liebman, who used to do an annual Valentine’s Day show at the Comedy Connection’s old Faneuil Hall location. I spoke with her by phone from her home in Los Angeles.

It seems these days you only get back into town when you’re doing benefits. Are you looking for other places to play here?

I actually did a fantastic gig at the Boston Convention Center for the Yankee Dental Convention, and there were like, I want to say, two thousand dentists there. At our show, but something like thirty thousand dentists from New England. And I’m like, I hope no one has an emergency, a dental emergency tonight.

It’s hard to conceive of that many dentists existing all at once, much less in the same place.

I know, and if only they would have put laughing gas into the showroom, that would have been phenomenal. But anyway, I did get to work there, it was at the Boston Convention Center, which wasn’t there when I lived there.

How much has changed here since the last time you got to explore and walk around?

Comedy-wise?

Either, comedy-wise or the city itself.

Well, the city itself, the whole Big Dig thing was not completed when I left Boston, and now it is. Isn’t it?

Yes. Now they’re just repairing it.

Well, that will go on, right?

Yeah. There’s pretty much ongoing work and construction here if you’re in that trade.

It’s like my act, it’s a work in progress. Comedy-wise, what I wish had been there when I was there the Comedy Studio in Harvard Square, which just sounds like such a phenomenal place for people to work on their act. I guess when I was there, there was not that room to do it.

What was the year you started here?

I started in 1984, October twenty-fifth, to be exact. Yeah. So a long time. More than half my life ago.



Do you keep in touch with any comics from Boston? Are you close to anybody here?

I just did a show in LA at something called The Fake Gallery. Not sure if you’re familiar with it, but Paul Kozlowski, who was originally in a comedy group with Bob Goldthwait and Tom Kenny, originally from Upstate New York – Paul moved to Boston and started doing stand-up there, and now he’s moved out here. He started something called The Fake Gallery, which is an art gallery, he’s an artist. It’s decorated with all his art and it’s also a comedy room. And I guess it’s close to The Comedy Studio, in that you can just go there and be random. And it was almost all Boston night. It was Brian Kiley, who’s now writing on Conan – he’s a good friend – and Fran Solomita, Ed Driscoll, and myself. So almost all Boston comedy night.

And then every once in a while I’ll run into Tony V, like on the streets of Las Vegas and we’ll catch up on the sidewalk. And I keep in touch with Julie Barr over Facebook.

Are there a lot of comedians you met in Boston you run into in LA?

I started doing open mics with a guy named Mike Martineau, and I see him every other week, I’d say, at either Starbucks or my supermarket. We live that close to each other. And I don’t know if you remember Brian Frazer, he went to Emerson and started doing comedy. He’s written a book called Hyper-chondriac and it’s just phenomenal. Anyway, he and his wife are both writers, comedy writers. I run into them as well. And Brian, Mike Martineau, and myself started doing the open mics together.

Boston has a reputation for brash, no-bullshit comics, but I feel like there are a few more traditions than that, you being in one of them, a sort of quick one-or-two-liner comedy. You have Brian Kiley, Don Gavin – who’s probably the source of a lot of it – and people like Myq Kaplan now, who’s a bit younger.

Jonathan Katz also comes to mind. He’s a good friend. Brian Kiley and Don Gavin, and also Kevin Meaney and Bill Braudis. Those were the comedians that I watched – Kevin, Brian, Jonathan, Don, and Bill Braudis. Those were the comedians I watched, because I loved their sense of timing and they’re wordplay, and they had tag lines. It’s almost like, those were the voices that I heard and I wanted to emulate.

What got you involved with Community Works?

When I worked at Radcliffe after college, I worked at the Bunting Institute, which is a fellowship program for women, and there were two women there who were community activists, Kip Tiernan and Fran Froehlich. I’m sure you’ve heard of Kip because she started Rosie’s Place. And both of these women are like modern day Mother Theresas. I think they were even once nuns. I would do anything for these women. And when I worked at the Bunting, I started talking about me doing a benefit, and it came to fruition three years ago. So this is the third year.

I do about twenty benefits a year in LA, and I’ll travel every once in a while. But this is my benefit, this is the one I organized. And this is the umbrella organization to many social organizations in the Massachusetts area. It’s a hard time economically for everyone, myself included, and I think the trickle-down effect must be horrendous. I feel like it’s not a huge commitment, it’s twenty-five dollars, and yet it goes so far, I think. I always feel like when I give, I get more back.

There are so many organizations involved with Community Works, I think it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around a benefit for it.

Well, they don’t like to be compared to United Way, but that’s how I explain it to people, because I think people get that. I know Kip and Fran, and just having them at the helm, I just feel safe that all the money that is raised goes to bona fide, above the board, helpful organizations.

Do you think you’d ever revive your Valentine’s Day show here?

I would love to. I just haven’t been invited. I guess since they moved to the Wilbur Theatre, it’s a different configuration. I would probably have to bring in a co-headliner because it’s such a big venue.

Anything else you’re up to?

Well, I’m turning 50 in February, and my plan is, although I’d better get started, my plan is to have a party but also record a DVD that night, to perform for my friends, and record a DVD. Because I don’t have a DVD. Even at my worst shows, or what I consider my worst shows, people want to buy something. So that’s my plan.

The BC Q&A: Tess Rafferty, Emerson grad and Soup writer

Forty-nine weeks a year for the past six years, Tess Rafferty has been a writer on The Soup, making fun of television for Joel McHale and company. You’ll sometimes see her on camera on the show, or sometimes on the Web as Grace Church FBI/CIA/SAG/AFTRA. But for a while, you haven’t been able to see her much in Boston. Tonight, you’ll get to see the Emerson grad back on her home turf, in Boston where she started comedy.

Rafferty’s first gig was at the Comedy Connection in the mid-nineties, which is where she met Frank Ahearn, whom tonight’s show at Tommy’s Comedy Lounge is benefiting. Ahearn had a massive stroke in December, and while he is recovering, he’s still not one hundred percent. So comedy friends like Rafferty, Gary Gulman, Steve Sweneey, Joe Wong, and others are pitching in to help out.

I spoke with Rafferty by phone from Los Angeles.

Do you get much time to go onstage, considering your day job and other obligations?

Not as much as you would in Boston. I get up a fair amount. I go up a couple of times a month out here still. There’s just not as much stage time out here anyway as there is in Boston. But it all evens out.

Do you consider yourself a writer first and a stand-up second or do they hold equal weight for you?

You know, I don’t really think of it like that, I guess. I do appear on camera on the show as well, and I do side projects, and I’m getting stand-up out there. So I don’t really think of it as any one thing. I think of it as, I kind of do it all, or it’s all part of the same thing that I do.

But there are different muscles you need to flex, doing stand-up, writing, and doing things like Grace Church.

It is different muscles, which is really what makes it fun. It’s fun to get your sea legs and get up and do stand-up again. It’s a completely different set of muscles than when you’re doing something on camera. Because stand-up’s so immediate. The first time you tape something that’s for television, you don’t have a live audience there. Film is even worse because you don’t have anyone there.



If I tape something for The Soup in the studio, there’s usually an audience there who’ll laugh. But if I’m taping something for Grace Church or another short film, there’s nobody there. You’re so used to that immediate response for stand-up, and it’s something that, if you make a joke on the set of a movie and it’s funny, you don’t get anything. It’s a very weird experience, especially for stand-ups. That laugh is what keeps them coming back.

A lot of comedians will say that instant gratification is what makes them prefer stand-up to anything else they do.

It’s the same reason why so many of them did so much coke in the 80s.

There’s that, as well. Is ‘The Soup’ like a giant opium den there, is that how the creative process works.

No. It is really funny because, you would hear the SNL stories and everything about, back in the heyday of comedy writing, there was coke everywhere. I wasn’t there, you just hear all the stories. And everyone on The Soup just really likes good wine. That’s our vice. We’ll pick a place for drinks, and it has to have good wine.



You’d hear stories about that in Boston, too. But you were at Emerson after all that had passed, correct?

I didn’t graduate from Emerson until the early 90s.

What was the scene like then? Were you doing stand-up or just studying it?

I did start doing stand-up there. It was an interesting scene. The boom had sort of passed for all of comedy. Boston has always been such an amazing comedy town, but, you know compared to the way it had been… You had to go out and find different venues. I was around when The Comedy Studio started. That’s kind of like my era. There wasn’t as much work in the clubs. Boston is a great place because they’re very loyal. The people who keep coming back want to see the headliners and the big guys and stuff.

So there’s not a lot of spots for as many new acts as there were. And a lot of the new acts were kind of… it was when alternative comedy was popular. People were trying to do different things, and so it didn’t really lend itself to the regular Friday night line-up at Nick’s, for example. I was doing more coffee shops, and The Comedy Studio. Those kind of venues. The Cantab. Different places where people would put up rooms and try to get people to come out.



It seems like at one point, you had people like Nick Di Paolo and Patrice Oneal at Nick’s, on that side of things, and you had clubs like, for a while, Catch A Rising Star and then The Comedy Studio providing different kinds of comedy, so you had a pretty diverse scene.

For me, I was after Catch, and Patrice and Nick had already moved down to New York. So it was a little bit later than that. But I always compared it to… when I was twenty-one and I was onstage somewhere in Boston – Boston gets so many people out to see comedy – I was onstage at 21 doing jokes about sex, and nobody wants to see me doing that. Because for most of the audience, I’m like their daughter’s friend who’s a bad influence.

I think it’s really hard, the more I do this, I think it’s really hard for a person who’s in college to really break through. And I think it’s amazing when college-age stand-ups do break through. Because the audience isn’t college-age, and I think there’s a disconnect with a lot of America. I mean, out in L.A., all they want to see a lot of times is youth. But I think for the rest of America, and the people going out to clubs and spending money, twenty-one year-old kids don’t have the money for a two-drink minimum and to pay for parking at Faneuil Hall.

That’s the story with sitcoms, too. The ones that are really successful are about the people who are in their 30s and more seasoned like the Roseannes, the Seinfelds, the Tim Allens.

Absolutely. Ray Romano, Ellen, Brett Butler. You don’t know who you are ‘til you’re that age. You don’t have a voice, you don’t have anything to say. Nothing’s happened to you. Well, things have happened to you, but nothing that the rest of the world can relate to. Or the rest of the country. It’s so limited, the things that I thought were funny, or the things that I had to talk about when I was first starting out. They’re no less real to you, but how many people can relate to the fact that your roommate stole your boyfriend or something. Or how many people want to hear it.



What did you study at Emerson?

I was a theatre major with an art history minor. I did some writing, I took some playwriting classes. I had an independent study my senior year in political theater. So I did some writing in that as well. But I wasn’t a writing major.

Did you study comedy there? I know there have been workshops and classes, and improv groups and such.

I studied comedy with this great teacher who’s name is Ron Jenkins. No relation to Rick. He has a degree from Harvard, a PhD from Harvard and a degree from clown college.

Right. He wrote Subversive Laughter.

Yes, absolutely. So he was a huge influence on me when I was at Emerson. So I took a comedy course with him. In a way, I was a late bloomer to comedy. I always really admired stand-ups, but I would be afraid to say I wanted to be a stand-up because I was always afraid that the way I saw the world wasn’t funny. But then I was doing theater at Emerson. And the roles for women in plays are by and large just atrocious. They’re just horrible. And I always say you’re playing someone’s mother, whore, maid, or wife. That’s all there is to do in these plays. And I just got so frustrated that I started writing my own stuff out of frustration.

If you go back far enough into the Greeks you can play all of those at once.

Right. Exactly. And still end up poking your eyes out. So that’s how I got into writing stuff for myself that became stand-up.

Was it something you were eager to try? Was it something you tried because you just needed the outlet?

I was doing sketch comedy, and the problem with sketch comedy is that you’ve got to organize five or six comics’ egos, and bring props. So that was kind of a nightmare. And I kind of had a thing that I was putting together and the right opportunity came, which was actually at the Comedy Connection. And a local comic at the time, Chris Maguire, who became my boyfriend later on, he said, we’re looking for new acts, do you want to audition? And I had something I could use. And it’s the same story every comic has. The first time, you kill. And then you never get those laughs again. There wouldn’t be a second time if you didn’t do well your first time.

But it was at the Comedy Connection, and Frank was the general manager at the time, and he’s always been such a supportive figure for myself and my life. It’s why I’m coming back Monday to do the show. I think of it as my home club. It’s where I started. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played a lot of places, and I owe a lot to Rick Jenkins, as well. If Rick has a stroke, I’ll be back on the plane for Rick, as well.

He’ll be glad to hear that.

[laughs] Yeah, I know.

Go ahead and have the stroke, Tess says she’ll be here. We know you’ve been holding out.

[laughs] Like I said, I still have the tape, and I looked at it again a few years ago. And I was like, god, that was a good set. I haven’t gotten laughs like that since. The Comedy Connection was a really special place for me. Frank and the rest of the staff, they mean a lot to us.

Have you kept in touch since you’ve been in Los Angeles?

Absolutely. Frank would go out to Las Vegas a couple of times a year. Kevin Knox, who was another really good friend of ours, would play Vegas a couple of times a year. And this other friend of ours, the two of them would go out and play golf and eat at great restaurants every night. My boyfriend Chris and I, we would go out to see Kevin and Frank and Joe.

We’d spend a couple of nights out there a couple of times a year. So we saw them more socially, not just around the club. I always credit Frank with making me a food snob. I’d never been to Vegas before, and he started taking us to all these great restaurants. They knew a lot about wine. I always say we have Frank to thank for the fact that I’m the pretentious snob that I am.

John Tobin on Frank Ahearn and Tommy's Comedy Lounge

Monday night, Tommy’s Comedy Lounge will host its last gig of the summer, a second benefit for co-owner Frank Ahearn, who had a massive stroke in December. The first event last month was sold out, and featured enough great local comedians in the audience and hanging around outside to put on second simultaneous benefit. Ahearn was also speaking to people through Skype at the show.

Monday’s show includes Steve Sweeney, Gary Gulman, Joe Wong, Joe List, Chris Zito, Tess Rafferty (read my interview with her on FGH tomorrow), Paul Nardizzi, and Harrison Stebbins.

I spoke with Tommy’s co-owner John Tobin after the first benefit, before it was announced that Tommy’s was going on a summer hiatus, so Tobin and Ahearn could reassess the club and see how Ahearn is feeling later this fall. I wrote about the club in Friday’s Globe, quoting Tobin that the intention is to reopen the club, and that he would feel it was a failure if it didn’t open up again.

Here’s the video of that interview:

Gavin, Rogerson, Sweeney, and Dunn play benefit for Kevin Knox tonight

Some of Boston's most tenured veteran comics are playing a benefit tonight for Kevin Knox. Don Gavin, Steve Sweeney, Kenny Rogerson, and Jimmy Dunn will top the bill for tonight's show at the theater that usually hosts Sheer Madness (a.k.a. The Cahrles Playhouse Stage II), organized by the folks at Tommy's Comedy Lounge. Tickets are available at Ticketmaster.com, or at the box office for $25. Tommy's Comedy Lounge, 74 Warrenton St, Boston. 800-745-300

On a related note, Dick's Beantown Comedy Vault won't host their running Monday-night benefit for Knox to avoid conflict with the Tommy's show.

Kevin Knox benefits this week

Veteran Boston comic Kevin Knox is battling stage four melanoma, and is in need of help, which he'll get from his friends at Dick's Beantown Comedy Vault and Giggles. Starting tonight, the Monday night show at the Vault, which Knox usually hosts, will be called "Knoxie's Team," and proceeds from the show will go to Knox. Vault owner Dick Dohrty says this will be the case indefinitely, as long Knox needs the help (see line-ups below).

Team Knoxie at the Vault:

OCT 5: Dick Doherty, Greg Howell, Jim Lauletta, and Corey Rodrigues
OCT. 12: Frank Santorelli, Dave Russo, Chris Zito, Mike MacDonald, Rodrigues, Doherty
Oct. 19: Paul D'Angelo, Mike Koutrobis, Doherty

Also this week, Lenny Clarke and Steve Sweeney headline a special show at Giggles tomorrow to benefit Knox. the site lists Clarke and Sweeney "plus ten other comedians," and from past benefit shows, I know a lot of comics show up at Giggles to do a little time. If you're a comic and planning on attending, feel free to e-mail me or mention it in the comments section here.

I'll post any more benefit info as it comes in.