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Kate Clinton’s career and life
A savvy, witty observer of American Life... - Boston Herald
As we read in the article “Fumerist” Kate Clinton Continues to Make Us Laugh by Malinda Lo (July 2004), Kate Clinton was “born in 1947 to an Irish-Catholic family in upstate New York … grew up as the middle child in a family of five children, a situation that she credits with starting her off as a comedian. ‘I had two older brothers, a younger brother and a younger sister, and [humor] was a way to make myself heard; sort of a way to diffuse the towel snapping that could happen after dinner,’ she told In Word in 1998. ‘My goal was usually to get someone in my family to fall off a chair or something’.”
Further in the same article it stated, “Educated at a small Jesuit college in upstate New York and at Colgate University, Clinton was a high school English teacher for eight years before a friend—who had taken note of Clinton’s interest in doing stand-up—signed her up to perform at a Syracuse comedy club in 1981”
In several interviews Clinton talked about starting her career as a comedian. She has a master’s degree in English and used to be a teacher. In her interview The Clinton years - political comedian Kate Clinton by Erik Meers (Feb. 2001) she told about switching her careers from teaching to performing, “I came out. I was a late bloomer, so I decided to tell everyone with a microphone. I started to talk about doing stand-up comedy, and I did it one too many times in front one of my friends. One of them booked me in a club and said, ‘You’re on in a month’.”
In A Conversation with: KATE CLINTON by Off The Shelf Production (1998) the comedian also talked about her decision to stop teaching and to do a stand-up comedy. “I am amazed that I can do what I really love and get paid for it, and that what I love to do is make people laugh. It’s so much better than, like, being an undertaker. I love the freedom that I have. There have been moments when I could have taken a path that would have gotten me into writing on a sitcom or doing that kind of thing. I’ve gone there, and the money certainly has been steady. [But] I love the time that I have to create my own thing. That freedom is incredible. I really think that in another life I was born in some hideous wrong century where women had absolutely no freedom.”
In her AfterEllen Interview with Kate Clinton she mentioned how her teaching degree has influenced her comedy acts. “I’m totally overprepared. Everything is on a page and…really I’m still doing lesson plans. But you know for me that’s what I’m comfortable with. I kind of know, have a kind of map of where I’m going and from that I can kind of improvise. But I think that is definitely something from my teacher years. I don’t like to waste people’s time. I don’t like that kind of ‘Where are you from?’ ‘Pittsburgh.’ ‘Oh, great!’ That’s not my idea of entertaining. I think I definitely want people to laugh because I don’t think there’s a better feeling—well, there’s another one but—I think it’s just so fabulous to laugh. I don’t mind if people think, either. I think the brain is a very sexy organ.”
As Clinton said during one of her performances, “Being a teacher is the same as being a comic, you work the room. You learn to deal with hecklers. You plan a show. And you try things to get laughs.”
Clinton’s former career as a teacher also brought many praises for her comedy performances, including one in the article Out of the closet, into the fray: Comic Kate Clinton begs you to get her started by Amy Barratt (1998). “As a former English teacher, Clinton is one of the most literate comics out there. She believes this is a great time to be a comedian because ‘people just want to use their brains. I mean they love it when they’re really working with me, trying to figure out what in god’s name made me go there. I think things like e-mail and sitcoms have made comedy banal. People are well able and happy to use their brains again. People are well able to go beyond appearances’.”
As she repeatedly expressed in her interviews and her comedy acts, Clinton identifies herself as a lesbian comedian. In her Interview with Kate Clinton on AfterEllenshe said, “You know I don’t mind it at all. It certainly is what I talk about—part of what I talk about. I mean, I’m happy to say that I’m a lesbian in the world, and this is how I look at things. I know there are people who don’t want to be called women comedians, if it’s funny it’s funny, all of that, but I think it gives a path to the fact that we live in extremely patriarchal times and that what’s funny is what’s funny to men … I remember one guy said to me, ‘feminist humorist, isn’t that an oxymoron?’ And I was like, well you’re half right.”
Clinton further said in the same interview, “When I was coming up—I sound like the oldest living lesbian now—it was really very often about women’s music, and there was a message and it was about community, and it seems more diffuse now and just reaching more and more and larger audiences.”
In her article Jubilee for me (February 2006) in the Advocate magazine where Kate Clinton writes monthly columns, she gave an example of some changes in the society regarding gay issues. “In the early ‘80s I did a set at a comedy club in Los Angeles. Afterward, in his office paneled in dark wood, the manager told me, ‘You can’t do that gay stuff.’ In the late ‘90s I did another set at that club, and a different manager whined, “I thought you were going to do more gay stuff’.”
Those changes also affected the material that Clinton has to work with while writing for her acts. As she said in her AfterEllen Interview with Kate Clinton, “…when I look at my history I think I’ve changed as the gay movement has changed. I mean, I came out…sort of at the end of the flowering of the women’s music scene, you know, the end of lesbian-separatism. And really I feel very blessed that’s where I was able to work on material and get my confidence, you know, working in Unitarian basements and coffeehouses. And I think that [it was]…probably about 1985, really, during Reagan when we were at the height of the AIDS crisis that gay men and women really started working together. And I did; I started to do more mixed gay audiences … My material really became more generally mainstream politically, as did the gay movement.”
As we see, Kate Clinton is not talking only about ‘gay stuff’ during her comedy acts. As she was quoted on classicdykes.com, “Performing is a little like jazz. You have the basic themes and then you improvise off them and return to them from time to time.”
And she talks about everything. As we learn from another quote, Clinton said, “My style has been pretty much like a newspaper. It’s got politics in it, it’s got media, sports, family relations, you know, all the sections you would expect, and wonderful religion things.”
Comedy act is as much about performing as it is about writing. In one interview on her Official Website Kate Clinton was asked about her preferences and she replied, “When I’m at my desk struggling with a sentence– having shut down the phones, turned off the email and strapped on the time released seat belt – I think I’d much rather be performing. When I’m on a plane in row 37A, jammed next to a fat guy who thinks the arm rest is his alone, circling Newark for two hours, I think I could be home writing. I always love performing – the getting to the show is less fun than ever.”
In another interview, A Conversation with: KATE CLINTON, she was also talking about the connection between her writing, humor and performing on stage. She said, “Well, I’d always wanted to be a writer. That was what a girl could do if she didn’t do nursing or teaching English. That was before word processors, and I was a horrible typist, so there would always be these giant wite-out holes in the paper. It was a mess. So I basically I went around and said it. I took a writing class, and that’s how I started to perform more and more. I mean, I would write short stories and generally be the last person to read in a group of fairly lugubrious people and I’d make everybody laugh. Then I felt I should try this more directly, and that’s when I started talking about it and then finally perform. But to come now to writing is sort of full circle.”
In the same interview, Clinton also mentioned about importance of connecting to her audience when she said, “Well I think that people are hideously spoken down to … It’s everywhere, it’s on television, you can’t look at an e-mail listing without somebody sending you a joke that’s so hideously racist, sexist, or something … I think that people love to be challenged. They love to be a part of a creative moment in live performance, they love to follow. I mean they love to go right with me and they love to be part of it. They love to know, to think they know, where I’m going and I don’t go there. I think people are really very happy to be challenged mentally. And I love it when someone, in reaction to my book, says ‘I really liked it. It gave me things to think about’. That’s wonderful because I think that people long for that excitement and that one of the most sexy parts of the body is the brain.”
Kate Clinton continues to make numerous appearances on television, perform on off-Broadway productions, write books and serve in the GLBT community. She now lives in New York (according to wikipedia.com article) with her longtime partner, Urvashi Vaid, an Indian-American attorney and gay-lesbian activist.
As we read in the article “Fumerist” Kate Clinton Continues to Make Us Laugh, “Talking to The Advocate in 2001 about their relationship, Clinton said, “[My relationship with Urvashi is] the best thing that ever happened to me. I met Urvashi in ‘88. We really helped each other. She’s very serious, and now she laughs more. I was very funny, but now I have more content.”
And we would like to leave you with another quote from Kate Clinton that in short characterizes the comedian’s view of her and our lives, “A friend told me that each morning when we get up we have to decide whether we are going to save or savor the world. I don’t think that is the decision. It’s not an either-or, save or savor. We have to do both, save and savor the world.”
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