If a stand-up comedian’s fan base is a reflection of the act, then Kathleen Madigan’s base are a bunch of “Good Time Charlies, people who have resigned themselves to life.”
Madigan says her fans are the ones who say, “Yeah we could go protest, or we could just go to the bar and turn on the Cardinals game. We could forget about it, it’s an option.”
She said she and Lewis Black always joke about that, because his fans are polar opposites. He tends to get people who are angry, frustrated, borderline alcoholics.
“If you go meet the people coming to my show afterwards, they are telling drinking stories,” Madigan said. “Lewis’s are saying, ‘Here’s anything the government is doing that you didn’t talk about.’ Ron White can have the CEO of a major company and a guy who seriously shows up without shoes on.”
(Sidenote: Black and White are Madigan’s best buddies in comedy; she references them often.)
Madigan has a theory for the disparity between her fans and Black’s fans. She tells Black that he gets angry because he still thinks there’s hope. He’s a product of the hippie generation when they were able to change things. “You remember when things worked,” she said.
“My first political moment was Nixon crying and quitting, and I’m left thinking, ‘Why is that dog getting on a helicopter and everyone’s crying?’ My first memory is of things dissolving.”
Madigan looks forward to sharing her good-time act in New Hampshire this weekend with a show at the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom. She’s been on tour most of the year and taped her fourth one-hour special while in Milwaukee in March. She said they are still working on distribution but the plan is to have the special out soon.
“You’ll see it somewhere this fall, even if I have to put it on Craigslist,” she said.
Madigan has seen great success on the road in her 27-year comedy career, one that she says happened by sheer accident. A visit to a bar with an open mic night and friend game for a little fun was all it took. While she says she had no thought of becoming a comic until that point in her life, Madigan says she did grow up in a funny family. But she was not even aware of that until her sister dated a guy who wasn’t funny at all, she said.
“He would tell this story and halfway through, I’d ask, ‘Do you even like this story?’ And he said no and shut up. That’s called German,” she said.
Madigan was a bartender at the time the comedy bug bit her. Those types of jobs, also flight attendants, nurses, attract a certain kind of funny person, she said.
“There are certain jobs that attract a kind of person with a sense of humor, people who love being around people but also you hate people,” she said.
If you check out Madigan’s Twitter feed, you will see a lot of political humor based on the 2016 election, though she’s quick to say it’s mostly because it’s stuff everyone is talking about right now. She likes to stay topical, like if you go back to when the Olympics were going on, she had quite a bit of stuff about that.
“For me it’s sort of the conversation at the bar,” she said.
And on whether she finds Trump to be the comedy gold mine many other comics do, she said he’s too easy and jokes on him can easily become hacky. She does do a little on Trump, Clinton and Bernie is at the moment is very interested in the Libertarian movement. She can’t see how Gary Johnson can be successful when his whole base just smokes pot and hikes. If he’s in the White House, “it’ll be like, ‘I don’t know where Gary is, he was here a while ago.’ ”