Comic Whose Mom Just Died From COVID-19 ‘Returns’ To The Bay For Zoom Comedy Show
‘Conan’ writer Laurie Kilmartin may be best known for livetweeting her mother’s dying of coronavirus in June, but this Walnut Creek native is “returning” to the Bay Area for the Thursday night, August 20 Zoom revival of Marga Gomez’ “Who’s Your Mami Comedy” show at the Brava Theater. The show also features Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, Suni Reyes, Dominique Gelin, and Jesús U. BettaWork, but we spoke to the headliner about her virtual return to the pandemic-era Bay Area comedy scene.
“My mom died of COVID on June 18, and if you don’t come see my show on August 20, my mom will have died in vain,” Kilmartin tells BrokeAssStuart.com.
“Who’s Your Mami Comedy” will be an online-only Zoom show, and not Kilmartin’s first one, either. “The audio is awful. I can’t tell if I’m actually bombing, or if it’s just the audio,” she says.
I just left a one-star Yelp review of the skilled nursing facility where Mom caught COVID-19.
— Laurie Kilmartin (@anylaurie16) June 15, 2020
I was just notifed that since my mom was a Trump supporter who died from COVID, her death has been ruled a suicide.
— Laurie Kilmartin (@anylaurie16) June 28, 2020
But she’s done comedy in San Francisco since the 80s. “I started doing standup in San Francisco in ‘87 with Marga at the Holy City Zoo,” Kilmartin tells us. (Robin Williams used to be a bartender there!)
On the other hand, ‘Who’s Your Mami Comedy’ is a more modern monthly that aims to reinvent the traditionally sexist and male-dominated standup comedy scene with women, nonbinary, and gay, and trans comics.
Marga Gomez tells us that “I came up with that title as a play on ‘Who’s your daddy,’ and I just started falling in love with ‘Mami’ as an endearment that Latinas use to other Latinas. Who’s Your Mami Comedy represents an acknowledgement of women in comedy and also of the rejection of toxic masculinity in comedy.
“Women were always like the ‘token gay,’ the ‘token person of color,’ the ‘token woman’ on a lineup of 10 cis male comics. But this time, we’re the majority of the show. We’re dominating the stage, and not in the minority.”
Thursday’s show will happen at the same time that Joe Biden gives his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. “I just want Biden to win the election, and then I want him to die,” Gomez tells BrokeAssStuart.com. “And I want Kamala to be president, and then I want to protest her. That’s all that I want.”
Live shows at Brava came to a halt in March, but Who’s Your Mami Comedy is now re-launching virtually with crazy new online innovations. “You can win a prize,” Gomez says. “We would like people to feel they can dress up. You can put the sparkly dress on. You can angle your webcam so people can see your heels, And we’ll give out prizes to the Best Dressed, and to the Most Creatively Attired. That can be anything legal.”
Brava has still been doing other virtual shows during the lockdown, like the upcoming Indómitas: Live Podcast with guest Eugenia Arbol (August 28).
“Brava happens to be run by mostly women, and everyone that runs it is on point for furthering the work of women artists, people of color, LGBT, nonbinary people, and the community,” according to Gomez. “They have done so much work against displacement in the Mission.
“If we can help Brava just keep going, we’ll be able to get back on its stages. We all want to get back on the stage.”
“Who’s Your Mami Comedy” is Thursday August 20, 2020 (and every third Thursday thereafter), at 7pm. TICKETS ARE $10 HERE.
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