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Recoil Magazine 10/2005
Best known for her spot on the second and third seasons of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, Kathleen Madigan has become a recognizable face on late-night television. Fox Sports’ Sports Lists and VH1’s I Love the 90s are just a few of the shows she’s appeared on. Madigan said she gets so many opportunities to sound off because the producers know that comedians can talk about anything, “compared to actors, who are just not funny.” Madigan grew up in St. Louis with six brothers and sisters and two working-class parents. After excelling in high school basketball she moved on to Southern Illinois University to study journalism. The big “after graduation” job lasted all of a year and a half before she returned to bars and restaurants to support her growing need to be on stage. Fifteen years later, she spends a lot of time making fun of news coverage. “I still believe that sometimes there’s just no fucking news,” she said. “How about that? Like CNN with twenty-four hours a day? There’s not twenty-four hours worth of news!” The petite redhead infuses a topical set with a lot of attitude. She’s lasted 15 years in the comedy business because she doesn’t have a gimmick, just a consistent 60 minutes of honest, funny material for each new audience. In addition to her show at the Kalamazoo State Theatre on Oct. 14, look for Madigan on Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown in November. While she’s a good poker player, she said she’s no fan of poker television. “I mean, I’ve been playing poker with my brothers and in clubs for twenty years, but I never thought it would be something you’d want to watch, unless you’re playing.” Madigan said that on the plus side they served lots of alcohol on the show and she had the chance to win a lot of money for her charity. Madigan spoke with Recoil via phone recently.
Recoil: Other than yourself, who would say provides you with the most inspiration for jokes?
Kathleen Madigan: Probably my family. My dad is nonstop. Things he says, things he does. Those all seem to make it into my act. He really is like a character. Like that sounds so cliché, but if my dad died tomorrow and someone asked me, “What would your dad think of this situation?” I could tell you exactly. There’s no wavering, you totally understand him.
R: When you were on Last Comic Standing the election seemed to provide you with some great material because of all the absurdity surrounding it on both sides.
KM: Yeah, I do like the politics, because I watch it and read about it, blah, blah blah. It’s so hard to do politics because it’s so easy to piss people off. I’m also to the point where I’m like I really don’t care if it pisses people off because for every person you piss off another person will say, “Well, I liked it.”
R: I’ve read that you sometimes get invited out to do somewhat serious corporate gigs. How does it feel to be a comedian facing an audience like that?
KM: It’s okay. I don’t want to get too political if it’s a corporate gig, and if they ask me not to, I will totally respect that. I did one for some oil thing in Texas so I really didn’t want to go in talking trash about Georgie. [Laughs] But I also talk about everybody; I don’t just talk about Republicans. I get more pissed off about incompetence than I do about Democrat or Republican specifically. Their incompetence is just amazing.
R: Over the years that you’ve been a comedian, what would you say was the best time to make political jokes?
KM: I say now. A lot of people would say Clinton, but the sex jokes just got so old and boring. How many Monica Lewinsky jokes can we do? How many times can that be in The Tonight Show monologue? I was like, “Please God, at some point somebody needed to say no more.”
R: Now there’s seems to be almost a daily occurrence of jokes, as far as incompetence.
KM: Yeah, Bush will say something once a week that is just absolutely mind boggling. People say you shouldn’t make fun of him for being stupid - it’s too easy - and I thought, go think about that sentence. Does that concern you? Yeah, it’s easy to make fun of Clinton for being a big whore, Okay, well that’s not a good thing either, but it concerns me more if you say it’s too easy to make fun of our President for being stupid. [Laughs] And just when you think, “Okay, I won’t say anything,” he does it. I don’t go looking for this stuff. Like when he went to England a few weeks ago, twice in one paragraph, shortly after the bombings went off in London, twice he referred to President Blair. My friend is like, “He said it twice?” And I said, “Well, I think you have to. After you say it once, you better say it twice to act like you meant it.” It’s just like, Okay, I’m not going to go looking for it, but when it’s right in your face, like the day before yesterday, Barbara Bush, I don’t know if you saw it, about what she said about the people in the Houston Astrodome. She said, “They’re underprivileged, so this will work out really well for them.” I’m like, “Are you on crack, lady?” I didn’t want to be in the Astrodome when there was a game and I had beer.
R: Is there part of you that wishes Last Comic Standing was more of a purely talent-based reality show like American Idol, where you each just perform and then fans vote on who wins, or do you like that you had the opportunity to live in a house with a bunch of other comedians?
KM: Here’s what I thought was sad about the producers. I thought they were really lame for our show because in real life, let’s say we’re awake twelve or fifteen hours of the day, we had fun and had intelligent funny conversations for eight of those hours and for maybe one hour people would bitch or fight because they made the conditions really shitty, trying to get you agitated. I just thought it was a waste. People always ask, “Are comedians funny offstage?” Well, a lot of times in conversation and things, we’re very funny. But they don’t want to show that. They want to show the drama.
R: Does having a reality show experience of your own make it easier or harder to make jokes about how ridiculous reality shows are?
KM: I can still do that. What’s really stupid now is that when I see a reality show, all I can do is look at the living conditions and compare it to how crappy ours was. There’s one called Are You The Girl? where there are people auditioning to be in TLC. Oh my God, the house in that thing is fantastic. They have a beautiful pool. It’s a real house. Ours was a real house but not really. Really the house was rented out as like a set. It’s in porno movies. It was totally gross. It was filthy. Physically from the outside it looked awesome, but on the inside it was so gross.
R: A regular feature we have in our magazine is a column offering tips for playing poker. After being on Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown, (airing for the first time Oct. 27) did you pick up any poker playing tips or strategies?
KM: Any tips? No. But I did pretty good. I can’t tell you because they told us I can’t say, but I wasn’t the first one out. That was my biggest fear. I play video poker like an addict. But Texas Hold Em is a little slow for me. The whole pace of it, I’m like, “Come on, chop chop, let’s go.” That’s why I play video poker. No one else is involved.
R: So is there any advantage at the poker table by being a comedian?
KM: Hmm, I don’t know either way. Obviously it’s not good enough because I didn’t win.
