The Queer Queens of Qomedy return to Chicago this year as part of the Just For Laughs festival June 14-16 at Zanies. Produced by Poppy Champlin, the show comprises a diverse group of talented lesbian comics, including Vickie Shaw, Sandra Valls, Sapna Kumar and others.
This is the second time the act has come to Chicago, where Champlin spent eight years honing her craft at clubs and working at Second City. This time, the show comes on the heels of her appearance on a new Showtime comedy special called "Pride: The Gay and Lesbian Comedy Slam."
Champlin spoke with Windy City Times on her birthday to talk about the special, Queer Queens and the challenges of being a lesbian comic.
Windy City Times: First of all, happy Birthday! Everyone feels differently about birthdays after 21. Do you just brush it off, embrace it or hide from your mortality?
Poppy Champlin: I accept it. I mean, I think I saw over a 100 well-wishers on the Facebook page, so I think that alone is an accomplishment. It's like, "Wow, 100 people are wishing me a happy birthday as I sit here at my computer working." You know it's a nice day out, my dog's just lying here [ and ] it feels very alone but there's 100 people out there saying happy birthday.
WCT: Let's talk about the Queer Queens of Qomedy. Did you stop here last year with this show?
PC: Last year I shot it at the Lakeshore Theater with hopes of selling it to LOGO or Showtime and also shot a game show after the show called "The Gayly Wed Game" for LOGO or Showtime and LOGO came back—if you can believe this—with, "it's too gay." I was like, "You're LOGO; you're supposed to be gay." I guess I gotta go more mainstream or something.
WCT: So it sounds like the Queer Queens of Qomedy must be working really well for you if you're on the road with it again.
PC: Yeah, you know, it's creating work for myself and creating work for others as well and traveling and staying visible. I want the Queer Queens to pick up some bigger momentum and I think with my Showtime special coming out right now that this will sort of give it a little more kick.
WCT: Tell us a bit about the Showtime special. What can we look forward to from you on the show?
PC: Just that my hair and make up is fabulous, which is really important to me. I just can't get it as good as my hair and make-up guy, and he's done Angelina Jolie and some major people, and he gets magazine covers and everything. He's my friend; he does it for me because he wants me to look good and, boy, I just love how pretty I look. So this whole transformation is great and the house was packed.
Sandra [ Valls ] and I packed the house; it was at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood. She and I probably got 150 people just of our friends. Even my car sales guy showed up, so the house was really good, so I feel like my set was really hot. When the crowd is great you can find that zone faster, and we probably only had 10 minutes each so it's important to get into the zone as fast as possible, and with a crowd like that it was awesome.
WCT: Hopefully they shot you from the waist up most of the time, anyway.
PC: I hope so.
WCT: I know you spent a good amount of time in Chicago and working with Second City. What do you like most about being able to come back here?
PC: You know what's cool about this one is in my relationship with Bert [ Haas ] at Zanies. For some reason his club was the hardest club for me to continually progress at, because I started my comedy career basically in Chicago in 1988. And to climb that ladder because you start as an opener and then you want to move to the feature spot where you get more time and more money, and then you want to become the headliner where you get the most money and you do the most time.
At Zanies, he always held me back. He would not let me headline for the longest time. It was a real challenge for me as a comedian to headline at his clubs and when he finally, finally did, I'd been there for eight years. It's nice for me to come back, not only as a headliner but as the producer of my own show, and have that coincide with my Showtime special... And I'm going to P-town this year and my logo is "How do you like me now?" so I think that's kinda what I feel like when I come back to Chicago this time and to Zanies. It's kind of fun—at the time it wasn't fun that he held me back for so long—it's also good to have that carrot because when there are no more carrots to go after it's kind of boring. I'm not headlining this one, really, I'm letting Vickie Shaw headline it; people really love Vicki in the LGBT community—she's been around a really long time. As the producer I just host and I bring up each of the others and let them be the stars of the show but I do my time, don't get me wrong, I just do it in the beginning and in between.
WCT: Have you enjoyed that dynamic more working with other queer women comics, anything that makes that more special?
PC: It makes it special in that it's my show. It doesn't necessarily make it more fun, however. Because it's my show there's a lot more pressure on me to produce it, possibly. Whatever money we get at the door is the money I'm giving the gals. There's no guarantee on this one. There's a lot of other factors that I have to be involved with which I'd rather not. I'd rather be the comedian being hired but, again, it's a challenge and I do like challenges so I continue to do it—and I really have to admit I'm getting better at it. After five years I'm starting to get better at being a producer.
WCT: Is there a balance that you work with with being a lesbian comic and being a comic for lesbians? How do you balance that to keep your act open and to be able to cater to the audience that appreciates you the most?
PC: That's a hard thing to do. It's definitely a balancing act that I'm working on. I did that a month ago in Ventura and it was basically all straight people: just a few tables of gay people. I found that the first night I was afraid of it. I didn't know if I could do it because I hadn't done it in awhile. And the room was almost evenly half-and-half [ gay and straight ] and I wanted to cater to everybody and it was really difficult, but it was only difficult because I thought it was difficult. So I caused my own angst about it and the next night I rewrote the set to have it be tighter with the jokes instead of more ad-libbing. The straight people totally loved it, but I didn't really come out with the in-their-face gay stuff. It was really fine and, by the end, a straight woman wanted me to sign her breast and a straight guy wanted me to sign his beer bottle. I know the straight world is so much more okay with the gay scene now, basically; if it's not okay then it's not that many and the ones who aren't [ okay with it ] are outnumbered by the entire audience.
WCT: Was the lesbian routine something you always wanted to eventually be your niche when you began doing stand-up?
PC: It never was. There was no way I was coming out in the beginning. That was back in 1980 and it wasn't a good idea. I had to learn how to deal with hecklers from the moment I stepped on stage and I was young and wasn't even good; now, I can handle hecklers pretty well. Back then, if you said you were gay, forget it; they wouldn't listen to you, let alone heckle you. That wasn't the way I went and I learned how to craft jokes. It wasn't about being gay, it was about being funny and the jokes were funny. When I came out [ to Los Angeles ] I just couldn't do it anymore without being openly gay. I couldn't say, "My boyfriend this."
I do go towards the more sexual humor and I do have some blue humor and when people laugh at the blue humor and it's funny and not just sick and gross and stupid, man, they laugh really hard. That's the goal for me: to make people laugh really hard—beyond their comfort zone of laughing, like, all of a sudden, they're just laughing like they're crazy. God, I've never said that before; I like that. I had to be honest and true to myself. I think people know when you're telling the truth or lying, so it has to be true.
WCT: What other things do you have in the pipeline?
PC: I still want to continue to pitch those TV shows, it's like a focus thing. I would still love someone to pick up the Queer Queens as a series, which would be great, but I'm certainly not focusing on that right now. I say that I want to write a book— just a joke book, your regular coffee table in the bathroom kind of book because I have so many and they're just in folders everywhere. That would be something I'd like to do and I think that's as far as I'm looking right now. Continue with the Queer Queens and build that up. That's kind of the goal is to build the Queer Queens so that every year the same place wants us back and the same people and more continue to come out so that it gets easier for me to produce it and it starts working like clockwork.
The Queer Queens of Qomedy will perform at Zanies, 1548 N. Wells, June 14-16. For more info, see www.chicago.zanies.com .
