Maggie Faris

A fixture of the Minnesota comedy scene since the late nineties, Faris is a beloved regional comic who spent years quietly succeeding in Midwestern clubs and throwing heavily themed local shows. A string of major comedy festival wins eventually introduced her to a wider national audience.

She builds her act on the contrast between her loud, folksy friendliness and the sly one-liners she slips into her stories. She writes bits about ordinary situations like fighting bees, driving a snowplow, or the daily logistics of being a middle-aged lesbian in the Midwest. Because she looks and sounds completely non-threatening, she gets away with strange, sharp left turns. She will set up a premise that sounds like a mild local anecdote, only to hit a bizarre, exact punchline that catches the crowd off guard.

She lives in Minneapolis and approaches her offstage life with the same commitment to being aggressively silly, occasionally supplementing her standup by running a tricycle-based ice cream business.