Best Bets: Comedian Kathleen Madigan on road to Freeman Arts Pavilion

By Craig Horleman
Posted 7/9/21

Talking to comedian Kathleen Madigan is like talking to a friend at the corner bar. She’s a straight shooter, down to earth, a little profane but most of all, very funny.

She brings her …

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Best Bets: Comedian Kathleen Madigan on road to Freeman Arts Pavilion

Posted

Talking to comedian Kathleen Madigan is like talking to a friend at the corner bar. She’s a straight shooter, down to earth, a little profane but most of all, very funny.

She brings her comedic takes on her large Irish-Catholic family, growing up in the Midwest, everyday life and anything else that pops into her head to the Freeman Arts Pavilion July 24.

Ms. Madigan, whose been at this professional comedy thing for 32 years, has had over 40 appearances on late-night talk shows and multiple comedy specials airing on Netflix, Comedy Central and HBO.

She also joined Jerry Seinfeld on his Netflix show “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” and made the most of the pandemic last year by launching a podcast, appropriately called “Madigan’s Pubcast,” on all streaming outlets.

She heads back on the road on her new “Do You Have Any Ranch?” tour July 17 in Reno, Nevada, and Delaware is her second stop the following week.

Before the national shutdown, Ms. Madigan said she had never been home for a whole year in her life since she was 23. So is she excited to get back out there to tell jokes?

Ehhh, maybe.

“Well I’ve finished everything on Netflix. There’s nothing left. So I guess it’s time to go back to work,” she joked during a wide-ranging phone call from her home in Nashville Wednesday morning.

“The younger comedians were all like, ‘Well, let’s do Zoom shows’. I’m like, ‘How about we not?’ We don’t do that. Why don’t you just accept what the Lord has done here and sit your (butt) down. There were a lot of comedians who did that to make money one way or another. Thankfully, I saved up enough money where I didn’t have to do that.”

During one of her many comedic asides, she wondered why her friends could make do without money coming in regularly during the pandemic but big companies couldn’t.

“Three weeks into the pandemic, on the news they said Delta and American and all the airlines were broke. ‘We need money from the government.’ I’m like, I have drunk comedian friends that have saved more than you. How is that possible?” she wondered aloud.

“I mean they only can make it maybe six months. But a couple of my Denver comics are never sober. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. And they were like, ‘Yeah, I got enough to get me through to like the fall.’ Like really? Delta doesn’t?”

She said her life didn’t change too much over the past year beside not working on stage. She is mostly based in her hometown of St. Louis, the Ozarks and Nashville, having left Los Angeles some time ago.

“I went golfing with my dad. I went fishing. I do outside (stuff) that doesn’t really involve a whole lot of people anyway. So fishing wasn’t closed. Golfing wasn’t closed. It was just kind of a vague vacation,” she said.

“And you don’t want to say you had a good time because it was so tragic for so many people. But it was kind of cool to be able to go ‘Oh, right. I worked hard for this house. I should probably know what’s in that closet. I wonder what’s in the attic? I don’t know if I’ve ever been there.’”

Before the pandemic, she was doing 250 to 300 dates a year in mostly theaters and casinos. She’s also done overseas USO tours throughout her career. But she says she’s not one of those comedians who longs for the stage.

“If you gave me five million dollars, you’d never see me again,” she said.

“I’m really excited when I look at the road schedule. It’s just that show thing that gets in the way of my fun. But then there’s people like my friend (and fellow comedian) Lewis Black who says ‘Don’t you miss performing?’ I’m like, ‘I miss the road and I miss people.’ But every time I’m having a good time at five o’clock. I’m like, ‘(Bleep) I have a show in two hours.”

Don’t get her wrong though. She has been performing at a nearby comedy club and practicing jokes for her new tour. So she isn’t going back to this without some prep.

“I do have a very fun job. I am excited. I have new jokes in my head that should go somewhere I suppose to get them out of my head at least. So yeah, I’m excited. I actually I don’t know about the traveling. It seems to be a bit of a cluster(bleep) right now with canceling flights so I’m just going to leave two days early,” she said.

Her new tour takes her all over the country until at least December. Over the summer, the gigs are spaced a week or two apart but then they get closer together toward the fall.

Her Pubcast has helped keep her in touch with her legions of fans during the downtime.

“It’s the (stuff) that I would talk about if I could be at my bar. It’s not necessarily funny. Some of it is but some of it’s just weird and not the stuff you hear on the news per se. Some of it is. I’ll do Britney Spears for a minute. But most of it’s not,” said Ms. Madigan, who isn’t sure if she will continue the podcast once her road schedule picks up.

One facet of her life that has remained a hallmark of her act are her travails with her aging parents. Her whole family provides endless laughs for her and her fans.

“At one point during COVID. I said to my Mom, ‘Where are you?’ And she’s like, ‘I’m at Target’ and I go, ‘The whole country is staying home so we don’t kill Grandma. You’re supposed to be home?’ I go, ‘I’m staying home so you don’t die and you’re at (bleep)ing Target?’ She said ‘Well, your father was really busy.’ No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. When your parents are older, they become defiant. I had to put LoJack on their car,” she joked.’

So do her parents ever ask her not to mention them in her act?

“The only thing they have ever said is ‘Could you just lie about our age by about three years?’ Oh my God, do you still care about that? ‘Well, you know, not everybody needs to know our age.’ I said ‘No problem. If that’s your only editing note, no problem. How old do you want to be? You tell me how old you want to be? 78? OK, we’ll stick with that then,’” she said.

Tickets for Ms. Madigan’s 7 p.m. show at Freeman Arts Pavilion in Selbyville are available here.

Adding spark to fireworks

Folks who attended Dover’s Fourth of July festivities last weekend were treated to entertainment from both DJ Chad Messina of Spinjocs Entertainment and vocalist Grace Field, who performed tunes and sang the national anthem prior to the fireworks.

But until Wednesday of last week, Mr. Messina was to be the lone provider of entertainment for the crowd, providing his services at no charge.

That’s when Broadway vocalist Ms. Field called fan Dave Skocik to ask about Dover’s celebration. Ms. Field worked with him on a benefit last October at Middletown’s Everett Theatre for the Veterans Watchmaker School in Odessa. Both he and his wife are fans of the performer and keep in touch.

Ms. Field, based in New York, has performed on NBC’s “Today” Show with Hugh Jackman and is a proud member of Tony award-winning Broadway Inspirational Voices and has performed across the globe, including Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre in “Disney on Broadway” as part of the Celebration of Disney’s 25-year run. She is currently on her solo tour “Best of Broadway.” In 2022, she will be performing at Carnegie Hall playing the role of Aloysia Weber, Mozart’s muse in “Mozart² - The New Musical.”

“It was an out-of-the-blue contact and she indicated she would check with her scheduler and if free would be willing to come down from New York and perform,” said Mr. Skocik.

Ms. Field and Mr. Messina were connected and worked together to provide entertainment for the crowd on Sunday night.

Amillion on the air

Dover’s own Amillion Mayfield aka Amillion The Poet recently signed a partnership deal with iHeart and WDRB Media to have his own radio program entitled “1NA Radio Show”.

The show airs every Sunday at 10 a.m. on iHeart Radio. It can be heard on the iHeart app and here.

Listeners will hear Amillion’s music and he hopes it will be a platform for independent and international artists as well as advertising for local businesses and sponsors.

To contact the radio show, email 1NARadioShow@gmail.com.

Now showing

New in theaters this weekend is the Marvel film “Black Widow.”

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