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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy

Lisa Gopman

She treats heavy medical trauma like minor neighborhood gossip.

1 special · 2003

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Lisa Gopman approaches a microphone like she just ran into you at the grocery store and has to tell you what happened before she forgets. She does not do slow build-ups. Her sets operate on a breathless, conspiratorial wavelength. When she drops into crowd work, it never feels adversarial. Instead, she interrogates an audience member with the bright, invasive curiosity of a nosy aunt, nodding along to their answers before using the exchange as a springboard into her own chaotic anecdotes.

Specials

On stage

Much of her stage time over the last decade has been rooted in the 49-seat Hollywood theater she co-founded, Oh My Ribs. In that intimate space, she developed her solo show Lisa Gopman and the Deep Cervix of Doom. The hour pulls directly from her survival of cervical cancer, but she completely strips the subject of its usual solemnity. She recounts sitting in doctor’s offices and undergoing invasive procedures with a cheerful detachment, treating life-altering medical news as an annoying administrative hurdle. She cuts the tension by refusing to let the room feel sorry for her, mining the sheer indignity of being a patient for punchlines.

She arrived in California by way of Ohio to study theater at USC, a background that shows up in her comfort with the physical space of a stage. Beyond her early television spots on Comedy Central, she also teaches standup and crowd work, showing younger comics how to talk to a room without fighting it.

At a glance

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