Beth Stelling

Beth Stelling speaks slowly, almost like she is already tired of the conversation but feels obligated to finish her thought. She does not pace the stage or wave the microphone. Instead, she stands still and lets silence hang in the room, wearing a faint, knowing smirk while the crowd catches up to what she just said. When she hits a punchline, she drops her volume rather than raising it. You have to lean in to hear the strangest, darkest details of the story.

She is a theater act whose specials reliably land on end-of-year lists. Within the industry, she holds quiet respect as a heavy-hitting punch-up writer for film and television, operating as the comic other writers call when a script needs actual jokes.

She builds material out of her childhood without leaning on regional stereotypes. She talks about her family with an affection that never softens the joke, weaving in details about her mother’s habits or her father feeding Hershey’s Kisses to a backyard raccoon army. She will describe a terrible relationship or an invasive medical procedure with the flat, unbothered tone of someone reading a grocery list. She doesn’t ask for sympathy. She just lays out the mechanics of a bad situation and waits for the crowd to realize how strange it is.

Raised in Dayton, Ohio, she came up through the Chicago comedy scene before moving to Los Angeles. Her time in Chicago still shows in the tight construction of her bits, even if her slow delivery makes them sound like off-the-cuff stories.