INTERVIEW: Carole Montgomery on the art of making people laugh
Photo: The Funny Women of a Certain Age tour stops at the State Theatre in Easton, Pennsylvania. Photo courtesy of the State Theatre / Provided by official site.
Carole Montgomery has had a celebrated career in stand-up comedy, playing stages across the United States for several years. Nowadays, she leads the enterprise known as Funny Women of a Certain Age, which started as three TV specials featuring a group of female comics and has now become a successful touring show across the country. Montgomery brings her comedy lineup to the State Theatre in Easton, Pennsylvania, on Friday, April 25. Joining her for the evening of laughs are Tammy Pescatelli, winner of Comedy Central’s Stand-Up Showdown; Missy Hall, whose latest recording is called Scoot Up; and Liz Glazer, a first-place winner at the Boston Comedy Festival.
“Basically what I always say to people is there are four comics, including myself,” Montgomery said in a recent phone interview. “You’ll find something that you like. You should love the whole show, but if for some reason you don’t like one of us, you’re going to like the rest of us. I cast the show like that. I try to give something for everybody.”
Montgomery, an alum of two comedy productions in Las Vegas, said for this ongoing tour she looked for fellow women who had been traveling the stand-up circuit for several years, comedians who knew what it was like to fine-tune their craft in front of that iconic brick wall. She believes that experience leads to better comedy, and she wanted the best of the best.
“The [original] TV shows all feature female comics over the age of 50, but what happened was I realized that if I open it up to female comics over the age of 40, I got hundreds more quality women,” Montgomery said. “So the first thing is you have to be an older woman. It’s funny in my business that someone will come up to me who is like in her 30s, and I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, you’re too young.’ It’s very funny to have to do that, but you have to of course be an older woman. And you have to be somebody who has been doing this for a while. … Stand-up has become an option in life when you get older, and I’m like, ‘Come back to me when you’ve been doing it for 10 years.’ You have to be a professional to be on this show. I have to know that if I for some reason can’t be at the show that the show is going to succeed exactly as if I was there. I am so secure with the talent of these women that I don’t have to worry if I can’t make it to a show.”
Montgomery said she came up with the idea for this comedy tour when she was 59 years old. Now, almost 10 years later, she realizes that the audiences are diverse and cut across many age groups. She loves that fact about Funny Women of a Certain Age.
“It’s not an exclusive show,” she said. “Even though the show is called Funny Women of a Certain Age, we want everybody there. We want women there. We want them to bring their husbands, their boyfriends, their children, their grandchildren. In fact, of the three specials, two were shot in Brooklyn, and then the other one was shot in Los Angeles. I would say a third of the audience were people in their 20s and 30s. … When you watch somebody like a Derek Jeter. When you see him play, you go, ‘Wow, that’s a pro.’ That’s what you’re going to see when you come to Funny Women of a Certain Age. They know what they’re doing, so people want to see that. It really doesn’t matter what age they are.”
Montgomery not only elicits laughs from her stand-up routine, she also gives back to the industry by teaching up-and-coming comics. She tries to help these newcomers overcome that undeniable feeling of fear that many comics have at the start of their careers.
“I know how to make people laugh,” she said. “It’s my job, but when you’re first starting out, you’re so terrified. ‘Oh my God, I have to make them laugh. I have to make them laugh.’ You become rigid. When I get on stage, I’m so comfortable in my skin that it’s like, ‘Come along for the journey people.’ It’s basically sitting around talking in your living room, except that I have a microphone. That’s really the big difference. My confidence level is very high as opposed to when you’re starting out. You’re so worried about the laugh as opposed to the experience.”
This part of Montgomery’s career — the teaching of new comics — presents an interesting question: Can comedy be taught, or are some people simply funny in their own right? Montgomery comes down somewhere in the middle.
“Some comedians are like, ‘Nope, you have to be born funny.’ I think it’s a mixture of everything,” she said. “I do think that you have to have some kind of sense of humor. … I’ve actually met people that don’t have senses of humor. When you realize someone doesn’t have it, you’re like, ‘Wow. Oh, well, that’s interesting.’ So I do think it’s a mixture. I won’t lie to you. I’ve had students, and they take the class. And there are certain things you can teach — and I’m more of a performance teacher anyway as opposed to somebody who writes — so I really help with people’s performances. And then there are just some people that after six weeks of doing stand-up, you’re just like, ‘You didn’t listen to anything I said, and you still suck.'”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Funny Women of a Certain Age, featuring Carole Montgomery, Tammy Pescatelli, Missy Hall and Liz Glazer, will play Friday, April 25, at the State Theatre in Easton, Pennsylvania. Click here for more information and tickets.
