CHICK SHTICK From AUSTIN WOMAN MAGAZINE, January, 2005

“You’ve got these lady comics who say stuff that would embarrass Redd Foxx, God rest his smutty soul, like who they slept with or what time they sit on the can. How do you expect to find a husband?” - Crusty the Clown, from “The Simpsons”

Aside from being a nutritional consultant, Dr. Abby November is an artist. She practices an art form full of contradictions.  She is artist whose craft requires originality and creativity and at the same time relies on popular appeal. Her work can be as tough as it gets with more scrutiny than perhaps any other job around, but it never works unless she makes it look easy. Artists like her are part actress, part social commentator, part observer and part story teller.

“I feel the warmth in this room. Don’t worry. I’m wearing Depends,” she tells the audience at Cap City Comedy Club. The sixty-year-old grandmother from Brooklyn, New York got laughs.

She moved to Austin in the late 1980’s and began some eleven years ago doing standup.Her New York accent makes her hard to miss here in the middle of Texas. Her motivation? “Menopause. It does strange things to women,” she said. “When I first got onto the stage I was petrified. I was like robo comic,” November said. But after hearing the audience laugh, she was hooked. She can find humor in her own life from being a “bubie” (Yidish for grandmother) to work as a nutritionist where she sees people trying every diet except for the ones that involve exercising and eating less.  

She credits the comedy scene in Austin being nurtured by Margie Coyle, owner of the Cap City Comedy Club and Sam Cox, owner of  Comedy Gym. “Sam is a very bright guy who helps with the logistics of being a comic,” November said.   

Every so often a group comics from different ages, races and back grounds, whose only similarity is they are all female, get together for “Chick Schtick” at Cap City. Their story is one of creativity mixed with a bit of a sisterhood.  

Carrie Sapp

She is often seen at Austin’s  Town Lake hike-bike trail. She has done marathons and hopes to some day do an iron man triathlon. “I didn’t get married by thirty so I decided to do something as equally self destructive,” she tells the audience in her act.  Even an avid runner like Sapp can use the old women comic material - weight. After she started running “A friend told me ‘you’ve lost like five thousand pounds. What do you say to that? You’re a big bitch but I was keeping that to myself,” Sapp told the audience.

Sapp came to Austin three years ago from Columbus Ohio to work for KASE and KVET radio where she sells advertising. “Advertising sucks and I sell it for a living,” she told the crowd. Shortly after moving to Austin, She took a continuing education class called “Comedy Gym.” After her almost daily five-mile run, she recalled her first day on stage. “It was almost like doing a play because I rehearsed my script and I had timed my pauses. I rehearsed so much I didn’t listen to my audience. I’m getting better,” she said. With all the concentration, Sapp isn’t sure how much laughter was at the first show.

“The trick is not trying to tell joke but  telling people things people already think are funny,” she said. She watches the styling of other comics “but make them my own,” she said. Some of her favorites are Ellen Degeneres’ ability to talk to the audience and do a whole hour of clean material and George Carlin and his use of facial expressions.

Sometimes material may be funny one day. And the next day for some reason it doesn’t work. “I’m not confident enough to say to the audience ‘that really sucked,” she said. The other comedians of Chick Schtick provide each other “a nucleus of support.” She said. “Any woman who wears a thong is a whore. And a liar,” she told the audience. Fellow performer Nancy Thomas suggested she change  it around. Next time she said “any woman who wears a thong is a liar. And a whore.” The laughs were greater.    

Kat Williams

“I’m not the official emcee but usually I am which is really a lot of fun,” Kat Williams said. “All the girls are so great in Austin. It’s so great to go up in between them. It’s a real kick,” she added. After talking about, among other things, growing up in Farwell, Texas(near Lubbock “it really has one stoplight,” she said) she sets the pace for the comics who follow.

Williams has always wanted to be a comic. She moved to Dallas then to Austin because of the comedy scene and says local comedians support each other. “We really have the most supportive group of all of comedians. There is not one female comic in town that isn’t nice. I couldn’t say that about Dallas,” she said.

Williams watches other comics, both local and national. “I try not to imitate their comedy or their style but how they relate to the audience.”

Getting on stage can be a little scary and she sometimes has butterflies before she goes on, “but once my feet hit the stage, it’s all over,” Williams said. To be effective her strategy is to “ try not too hard to be funny and state the truth,” she said. A lot of people think it’s(the show) going to be man bashing and feminine hygiene products but its not. We might have a little of it but all the women are original.”

Nancy Reed

In 1974, Nancy Reed moved to Austin. She soon had a reputation as “a smartass” she said, among her friends. They encouraged her to go on stage. “I was acting. Like I was just present, I was afraid if I looked at the audience in the eyes I would lose my train of thought,  so I just looked at their eyebrows,” Reed said. She learned to “do what cracks you up instead of pandering to the audience.”

Despite the laughs she was too nervous to let her friends into the audience. It was some six months after doing open mike nights she told her friends. Today she often headlines the shows. After doing comedy since the eighties, some material she has used for ten years, but life changes has added more fodder. “I am 47. Once your age exceeds your bra size it’s all downhill from there,” she said.

Reed has oneof those sarcastic looks on her face at all times which makes her a natural. Unlike the others at Chick Schtick, she has a bit of an angry comic streak, and will bring to her shows two issues about which she is passionate, namely the erosion of liberties through the Patriot Act and the wonders of herbal medicine. She said when she is on stage she feels obligated to mention “by the way there are cures for cancer and we have no rights,” she said. But she avoids getting to preachy because people come to the shows to enjoy themselves.  Reed is producing a film she calls a comedy-documentary on alternative medicine titled “Well Well Well.”

“Austin has a great comedy scene.. Austin has always been extra cool, the population more interesting, a wide variety and less boring lives,” Reed said and the performers are helpful and not as “back biting.” she said.  “If the comedians think your funny they will help you and critique you.”   

Corky Pumillia

“Comedy is about people relating to you,” Corky Pumillia said. “I was on stage. No one is laughing and the guy in the front started closing his eyes. Oh, come on, ya’ll can work with me,” she said. The audience started to come around. As she puts it, “Then I started talking to the people and being real.”

The Houston native, who has lived in Austin for thirty years, started out as a school teacher. At thirty seven she made her debut at the comedy club.  She wanted to improve herself and self confidence is one area where she felt she needed work. “It takes a lot of guts to get up on the stage weather you suck or not,” she said. She described the beginning of a comic’s career in therapeutic terms “It’s a form of therapy. You are having an intimate relationship with the audience on the stage,” Now at forty nine (“I feel sixteen”, she added) she is a veteran and she also teaches comedy, but she has to change her comedy club act for some of her students.  

Pumillia founded “Performing Arts Preschool” out of her Central Austin home. After years of teaching in the public schools, Pumillia opened her own, along with her landscaping business. In her living room, a hardwood floor, two floodlights and a wooden stool is there to make the rehearsals realistic. If comedy were aviation, her living room would be a flight simulator -- as realistic as possible but not so realistic a mistake would equal disaster.  At a nearby theater she runs a comedy camp for kids up to age sixteen. In April she helped put on the show “the Funniest Kid in Austin,”   the youngest contestant was four years old. Yes, four years old. And he already has an agent, she said.