Lea DeLaria

Lea DeLaria does not just stand behind a microphone; she physically overtakes a room. She is loud, brash, and constantly in motion, pacing the stage and sometimes ending up literally in the laps of women in the front row. She talks in an aggressive, brassy shout, using her entire body to sell a punchline. She is also a trained jazz vocalist, and she often treats her comedy sets like a cabaret act, dropping into a swing rhythm or scatting in the middle of a bit. She treats the stage like her own living room, and she is a very loud host.

She is a foundational figure in queer comedy. While most audiences recognize her from her acting on Orange Is the New Black, she was working rooms as an out comic decades earlier. She was the first openly gay comic to perform on late-night television, walking out on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1993 and immediately announcing that it was the nineties, it was hip to be queer, and she was a big dyke. The ubiquitous joke about a lesbian bringing a U-Haul on a second date is actually hers, written in the late eighties.

Her material is heavy on sex and anchored in her identity as an Italian-Catholic butch. She does not ask for the audience’s approval. Sometimes the sheer volume of her delivery, from the mugging to the shouting to the manic pacing, can bury the actual writing of a joke. But that volume is the draw. You do not watch her for quiet setups. You watch her to see someone who refuses to dial it down.

She started in San Francisco’s Mission District, blending standup with the musical theater chops that took her to Broadway.