We Need a Laugh

As these women in comedy will tell you, cracking jokes can be the best way — sometimes the only way — to handle the pain that life throws at us.

Words by Jewel Wicker | Illustrations by Abigail Giuseppe

Finding out you don’t have any eggs left at 35, after years of popping Plan B. Funeral makeup rendering your deceased loved one unrecognizable. Old white men telling women what they can – and can’t – do with their bodies.

What’s so funny about any of that?

Plenty, it turns out.

Just ask the funniest women in the business of making us laugh. 

In spite of the sexism that continues to persist in our society – and not just within local comedy scenes – a diverse group of Southern women have found success on the national stage as comedians. Whether they’re touring, hosting stand-up specials, creating videos for social media, or telling it like it is on podcasts, the throughline of their work is a candor and dialect that makes even the painful, the political and the personal rip-rorious.

Heather McMahan’s father died of cancer a week after he received a diagnosis.

“I know it’s shocking; I’ve had periods that have lasted longer than that,” McMahan quips in her hilarious 2023 Netflix stand-up special, “Son I Never Had.” She goes on to tell the story of how her sister ended up having sex with the hot anesthesiologist on their dad’s care team and then veers into a discussion of her journey with IVF. 

When I speak with the Atlanta native, I’m eager to ask her about an article reporting she’d cut a joke from the special about scattering her father’s ashes outside of his favorite Waffle House. I desperately needed to know if that was true and, if so, at which Atlanta Waffle House this ritual occurred. You can tell a lot about someone by the Waffle House they frequent. I wondered what I could learn about her dad from the one where his remains were placed.

But, McMahan says, no ashes were actually strewn. “There is a plaque at the Waffle House that he used to go to, where he used to sit. And on his gravestone where we spread his ashes, it says, ‘Scattered, covered, and smothered,’” she says. Likening a loved one’s burial to the preparation of flat-top hash browns at Waffle House? 10/10. No notes. 

Heather McMahan

McMahan says she first caught the comedy bug when she was a junior tasked with roasting the graduating class at her Christian high school. She’s done a lot of stand-up since then and has hosted the Dear Media podcast “Absolutely Not” for five years, never shying away from using her own life as a source of laughter. All comedy is observational, she tells me, adding that while other comedians have talked about IVF, she could only speak to her perspective with embryo freezing in her mid-30s. She found that the subject resonated. “People were like, ‘Oh my God, thank you for saying it. Thank you for talking about it openly.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, we’re all trying to survive.’” That response prompted her to ask, “How are we not all discussing this together?”

Stand-up based on some of life’s darkest moments is what Atlanta native Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams has been doing for two decades. When we speak about her comedic style via Zoom, the creator of BET+’s “The Ms. Pat Show” tells me about a joke she struggled for a year to nail in front of audiences. 

“I [would say], ‘Oh, my kid’s father shot me in the back of the head.’ Immediately, the audience would be like, ‘Oh, my God.’ And I’d be like, ‘Why the fuck are y’all feeling sorry for me?’” she recalls. “So one day I’m onstage. And I’m just talking and I said, ‘Yeah, my baby daddy shot me in the back of the head. But it was not his fault, y’all. It was my fault because I ducked slow.’” 

“People finally started to laugh,” she notes. 

Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams

To be clear, no one was laughing at Ms. Pat for being the victim of domestic violence. Instead, the comedian had found a way to poke fun at a culture that absurdly blames women for their own misfortune. The joke finally worked because the experience of being blamed for the actions of an unreasonably angry man was universal, even if the specific act of being shot by a partner certainly was not. 

“I am an inner city Black girl. But guess what? We all have the same problems in this world. I’ve had white women whisper in my ear, ‘I had my baby at 15, [too].’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ In my first memoir I wrote I thought I was invisible. Because I felt nobody else had those experiences. Come to find out they did,” Ms. Pat says. “It’s really not ladylike to just tell all your business. But why not? Why can’t I tell you what it feels like to go through menopause, how much my kids get on my damn nerves, or what it’s like being married for over 30 years, or what it’s like being molested, or what it’s like being abused? [I] take all of this stuff and wrap it like a burrito, and you laugh about it.”  

Lace Larrabee says she’s noticed women in comedy are still policed when it comes to the topics audiences want to hear them discuss, a censorship she resists. “If it’s funny, it’s funny. Which is how I’ve always seen comedy, which has always made me so furious when male comics would be like, ‘Well, women comics just aren’t funny because all they talk about is relationships or sex,’” she says. “What do all of us do and deal with on a daily basis? What is the most human activity we can do? Sex and being in relationships with people. That is the most relatable, funniest stuff.” 

The Atlanta-based comedian says she remembers a time when the lineup for most stand-up comedy shows was predominantly male. Since 2017, Larrabee has run Laugh Lab, hosting more than 40 classes centering women in the business. She says she’s seen a difference in the local scene, although other markets still tend to be predominantly male. “There’s so many more women on all the festival boards now. There are so many more female bookers. There are so many more accidental all-women shows that don’t have to be advertised in some kind of kitschy way. Sometimes you show up and there’s eight women and two dudes on a lineup and you’re like, ‘Oh, it wasn’t even meant to be that way,’” she says.  

Larrabee rarely discusses politics in her sets but says she’s received the most hate mail over brief references to being a Democrat in the 2022 stand-up special “White Trash Cinderella” and a feminist on “America’s Got Talent.” 

“It’s one line out of hundreds and hundreds of lines. And that’s all they focus on,” Larrabee tells me. “They get mad, because here I am as a Southern white woman, I should be exactly what they think I should be.”

McMahan, fresh off shooting a new comedy special in Atlanta when we speak, says she doesn’t lean into discussing politics because, frankly, it doesn’t bring her joy. “My whole job as a stand-up is to take you out of the mundane bullshit that you’re dealing with and then to make you giggle for an hour. So why do we have to talk about Trump?” she says. “It’s exhausting.”

When I first saw Dulcé Sloan’s stand-up set about how she was “forced to move to New York because of success,” I knew I’d found my type of comedian. 

For one, I consider myself to be a natural born hater. I relish the visceral release that comes from openly disliking something that everyone is supposed to love — a city we are all supposed to adore. Just look at the T-shirts!

“It’s a Yankee trash heap. I hate it,” Sloan says of New York in her set. “This is my purpose in life. This is my ministry, to tell you it’s horrible.” 

Sloan spent her childhood in Atlanta and Miami, so we share another commonality: We’re both Southern Black women who hate being cold. “Just to know something about me, just emotionally, spiritually, genetically, historically … I’m never supposed to be cold,” she says. I nod incessantly as she describes experiencing a “bomb cyclone,” a hazardous storm that apparently consists of freezing temps, heavy snow, and high winds.

When I graduated from college, I spent about a year working as a reporter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I’d never even heard of a snow brush before moving there. By the time I returned  to Atlanta, I was no more prepared for cold weather than I’d been when I first arrived in central Pennsylvania. On the weekend of my departure, a record 30 inches of snow fell onto the parking spots occupied by my car and a POD holding all my furniture. I needed to clear the spaces before the movers arrived, but I didn’t own a shovel so I figured I’d just use a dust pan. A very kind older lady watched me from her window for a few moments before coming to finish the job herself. “Honey, you look ridiculous,” she said. I knew she was right. I mumbled to myself the same words Sloan uttered during her winters in New York: “I’m not supposed to be here.”

Dulcé Sloan

Sloan has worked as a correspondent for “The Daily Show” for several years, anchoring fresh-from-the-day’s headlines such as Trump’s criminal trial in New York (the show refers to the former president as “America’s Most Tremendously Wanted”) and sketches about Karens. Still, she’s clear there’s a difference between her work on the Comedy Central talk show versus her stand-up. When it comes to her solo comedy sets, she says she feels no pressure to include social or political commentary. “I’ve seen people go like, ‘Oh, I thought you were going to do more political stuff [in your stand-up],’” she says. “That’s ‘The Daily Show.’ I’m here to warn you about the dangers of broke men, that’s what I’m doing. I’m here to tell you about me going on vacation, or me trying to figure out why women are feeling like they should pay for things.”

“Southerners love to spin a yarn, tell a tale,” Sloan tells me when I ask her why women from the South seem to be naturally hilarious. Jokes, she says, are all about taking a situation and dissecting it. 

It’s absolutely that knack for storytelling that makes me gasp for air when Tennessean Leanne Morgan reminisces about the days when she had a functioning thyroid or her insistence that everyone she knows is now on a CPAP machine. It’s why I double over with laughter watching Atlanta-based comedian Mel Mitchell describe how funeral home makeup transformed her deceased dad from looking like Gerald Levert to the soul singer’s darker father, Eddie.

But I don’t just laugh at these women for the stories they tell. It’s the way they tell them that’s incredibly entertaining. The way Morgan draws the word “went” out over three syllables or the way Mitchell rolls her eyes proclaiming “they don’t do good by any body.” Their Southern vernacular and hyperbolic phrases are a major part of what draws me in, no matter what they’re talking about. It definitely doesn’t need to be political.

“Somebody [previously] asked me, ‘In the age of Trump, what do you think your responsibility is as a comic?’ I was like, ‘None. What are you talking about?’ There is no onus upon me to make you feel better about who the president is,” Sloan says.

“If you don’t like who the president is, go talk to your parents, talk to your family, and go vote. That has nothing to do with me. If you are unhappy about the times that you are in, that is not my responsibility. My responsibility is to make you laugh when you come to see me, that is my only responsibility,” Sloan continues. “I have no extra responsibility as a comedian. No comedian has any extra responsibility.”

Writer and comedian Blaire Erskine recently returned south with a single mission: Find out if Donald Trump supporters at a rally in South Carolina could pass the U.S. Citizenship Test, which the former president notably made more difficult during his tenure. 

Equipped with a camera crew, a microphone, and a clipboard, Erskine asked a series of questions to enthusiastic groups of rally attendees. 

How many amendments are in the Constitution?
“I’m worried about No. 1 and No. 2,” a woman chuckled. 
What is the “supreme law of the land”?
“Guns, liberty, and justice,” a man responded.
What are the first three words in the Constitution?

“We the people,” the first man’s friend answered — correctly. Then it’s revealed he overheard someone else say it first.  

“You cheated,” Erskine, who is mostly off camera, says. “You cheated like Joe Biden.” Despite the fact that she just made them look both hypocritical and foolish, the men erupt in cheers.  

For the record, I am very much a U.S. citizen and would’ve proudly proclaimed myself as a history buff before taking a sample citizenship test while reporting this story and failing miserably. I do, however, know that “guns, liberty, and justice” is not the supreme law of the land.

The segment is intended to both baffle and amuse, not just because the participants got the answers horribly wrong, but mostly because it’s clear they don’t particularly care about any of this information aside from using it to control the rights of others. 

As a writer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live” — for which the segment was created — Erskine has repeatedly gone viral thanks to her ability to point out the absurdity of MAGA Republicans who seem routinely to expect others to display a level of patriotism that even they can’t realistically meet. It’s a task she’s likely to continue to take on this election year. 

Pointing out such hypocrisy is a role Erskine is uniquely positioned to navigate, primarily because the L.A. resident still possesses the thick drawl of her native Ellaville, Georgia, as well as a deep understanding of the people she’s poking fun at. Even if her political views differ from theirs, she presents a cultural sameness that signals to the folks she’s interviewing that they can let their guard down and trust her. 

Blaire Erskine

Erskine landed her job with Kimmel after achieving notoriety during Covid for creating fictionalized versions of  Republican Southern women standing by their men — whether husbands, fathers, or bosses. Erskine’s video posts featured women defending men who used their governorship to weaken a mask mandate, caused a scene in Costco after being asked to wear a mask, or went on vacation as their constituents dealt with power outages and a devastating winter storm. Erskine, who grew up on a sod farm in a town with less than 2,000 people and only one stoplight, says these skits are caricatures of the Southern women she was raised around. These women, she says, can be absurd but they also don’t mind being the butt of a joke.

Many of the Republican women Erskine knows have told her they find her content to be funny. The comic says she believes this is because she’s a native Southerner making fun of other Southerners. “It’s very much if you have an idiot family member and you’re like, ‘I can make fun of him, but you can’t,’” she tells me. 

The comedy writer, who rose to prominence during a global pandemic and a time of forced social isolation, describes her brand of political comedy as her way of saying, “It’s awful. But we can find some things to laugh at. If you feel like the world is ending and somebody makes a joke, and makes you laugh, it feels better.” 

“I remember my best friend’s mom died. We were in the emergency room crying and somebody said something and we all laughed. And it felt so fucking good. It was such a release,” Erskine says. “It’s kind of like that. When things are really bad, people are just looking to laugh so they know that they’re still alive and OK.”

By transforming a stereotype into a platform for comedy, Erskine builds on a rich legacy. Back when it was seen as improper for women to comment on matters that didn’t involve their roles as homemakers, Southern women in comedy were doing both. Comedic pioneer Moms Mabley regularly used her contrived character as a means to discuss politics, race, and gender relations in a way that otherwise would have been shunned. Often dressed in mismatched outfits — and eventually performing without her dentures — she was the first female comedian to perform solo at the Apollo Theater and eventually appeared on popular TV programs such as “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” 

In a 1961 recording, Mabley joked about attempting to vote in Georgia at the urging of the NAACP. “I had a dream last night. I asked for my equal rights. Somebody said ‘Mom, you’re next.’ And there I stood with a rope around my neck,” she said to laughter from the audience. “If I can just break free, they’re seeing the last of me in Georgia.” Toward the end of the bit, she begins to sing of her misfortunes to the tune of “Georgia on My Mind” before declaring of the state: “Ray Charles can have it! You hear me?” 

In a similar tactic, Minnie Pearl used a caricature stage persona as a foil for discussing gender relations and other issues. There was a stark difference between the two, though. Mabley used her platform to highlight the need for racial equality, while Pearl, who notably didn’t speak about politics in her sets, famously campaigned for George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama and ardent segregationist. Not all comedians are on the right side of history.

If you ask me how I’m managing to do anything “in these uncertain times,” there’s a good chance I respond with a deep, guttural sigh and eye roll. The question implies there were ever more certain times, particularly for me as a Southern Black woman. My rights — either as a Black person or a woman, or both — have historically always been in jeopardy to some degree. As Taylor Swift recently sang about the allure and danger of her nostalgia for the 1830s — a time filled with the racism and sexism she acknowledged, but also cholera and no widespread electricity — I saw a joke on social media that the furthest Black people ever feel comfortable going back to is the 1990s. So, yes, these times are quite uncertain. But I am managing them, just as I have the uncertain times that have come before.

My friends have often commented that they’re surprised by my insistence on cracking jokes when they know I’m having a hard time. During the pandemic and a sudden breakup, it was not uncommon for me to pour my heart out and then abruptly change the subject by declaring, through a cracking voice, that it was time to watch “The Dundies,” the episode of “The Office” where a paper company gives out nonsensical employee awards inside a Scranton, Pennsylvania, Chili’s. If I focus on a breakdown, I fear I might descend further into darkness. Making a joke, even as I’m fighting back tears and snot, is grounding for me in the same way that focusing on the five senses or placing one’s bare feet in grass might be for someone else. In the past five years, I have laughed in hospitals, funeral homes, and voting precincts. It’s not that I am unable to understand the seriousness of any given moment. Rather, it’s the opposite. For me, laughing provides a reminder that all emotions — even the heavy ones like sorrow, grief, heartbreak, or loneliness — are fleeting. 

Today, I recognize my sense of humor as a generational gift bestowed by my maternal family. From the Georgia natives, I inherited my Southern drawl, grit, and an ability to find humor in even the most unfortunate circumstance. My mother’s lineage — tight-knit and deeply loving — is, in many ways, marked by generations’ worth of grief. For most of my life, the elders in my family plugged the holes left by untimely deaths, poverty, and other heartaches with laughter. There’s an artful precision to the way in which the women in my family can zoom in on the dark moments etched into their subconscious, adjust their focal point, and identify a smaller moment that was either comically specific or hilariously universal.

Leslie Jones’ views on balancing the personal and the political have shifted throughout her career. Jones, who spent most of her childhood in Memphis, will be the first to admit she didn’t know much about politics when she first got into comedy. That changed more than 10 years ago, when she began working for “Saturday Night Live.” On the show, she was tasked with creating sketches to provide accessible and humorous cultural commentary for viewers. While the show used comedy to shape how Americans viewed politicians, it was doing the same for Jones behind the scenes.

“I feel like I translate sometimes. I make it where you can understand what’s going on. When I was at ‘SNL,’ Kenan [Thompson] would do that for me a lot. Some of the sketches that were written would do that a lot for me,” Jones says. “Like, ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on.’ You make it funny and you make it relatable. People go, ‘Oh, now I see what’s up.’”  

By the end of her tenure on the show, which coincided with Trump’s presidency, Jones says she’d started to deeply understand her role as a comic in shaping public perception about world events. 

“I started noticing who they would cast as certain candidates. You can’t soften up Trump. You can’t soften up Brett Kavanaugh,” she says. “I would tell them, you have to understand how the public really looks at shit.” When Matt Damon is cast as Brett Kavanaugh, “that’s not making Brett Kavanaugh look bad.”

If Erskine’s comedy gently asks audiences to notice the absurdity of their views, Jones’ work has taken a much harder activist slant.

Leslie Jones

When we speak in early April, Jones is fresh off a win at the NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Performance in a Short Form Series, thanks to a segment she appeared in for “The Daily Show.” In the “After the Cut” segment, Jones speaks about the role Planned Parenthood played in her life as a child who grew up in a household where sex was rarely discussed. “You would not know how much they saved my life. So much that I have them in my trust,” she says. “We’ve already got our rights taken away. We can’t get our healthcare taken away also.” The stand-up comedian isn’t in a joking mood in the segment, even when she compares the current political landscape for women to “The Handmaid’s Tale.” 

“Let’s not sit here and watch some obvious shit happen. Let’s fucking fight,” Jones exclaims, riling up the audience. 

Just a week before our chat, she appeared as a guest host on “The Daily Show,” where she used her “In My Opinion” segment to beg viewers not to vote for Trump in the forthcoming presidential election. “This is like asking Jeffrey Epstein to watch your kids. Or a pedophile priest to watch your kids. Or that sick fuck who used to work at Nickelodeon to watch your kids,” she exclaims.  

I ask Jones why she feels compelled to use her comedic platform to effect change in this way. It feels both incredibly noble and like a particularly unfair burden for a Black woman, considering we’re often tasked with serving as the country’s moral compass, I note. Does she ever wish she could just make people laugh about silly, inconsequential topics?

“It’s a fine line, because I like being the comic that just cares about making people laugh,” Jones responds. “Getting older in my age and becoming a more conscious person, it is really hard to ignore shit. It’s like seeing a dirty spot and trying to continue to walk by that dirt spot every day. What kind of person are you to ignore that?”

There’s no expectation all comics take up the position of pointing out the political dirt spots they encounter. The beauty about today’s Southern comics is that the scene is diverse enough that there’s content for people who want to use humor to analyze the world around them, as well as the people who want to use comedy as a means of tuning it out. 

From decades of laughing with my family during hard times, I’ve learned laughter can be a powerful salve, but you can’t rely on humor alone. To use Jones’ metaphor, even if you’re using humor to identify that there’s a dirty spot, you still have to do the actual work of stopping to clean it up. 

That’s our own individual work, not the work of comedians.   ◊

Jewel Wicker writes about entertainment and culture from her native Atlanta for publications such as Billboard, Teen Vogue, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2021, she won Ambie and Webby awards for her work as a co-host and writer on the Crooked Media/Tenderfoot TV podcast “Gaining Ground: The New Georgia.”

Abigail Giuseppe is an illustrator, portrait painter, and pattern designer based in Richmond, Virginia, who loves bright warm colors and the intersection of history with popular culture. When Abigail isn’t drawing and painting, she can be found in the back corners of antique malls looking for odd plates to add to her collection or ordering her third espresso shot of the day.