Maggie Faris

Maggie Faris takes the stage with the loud, relentless cheerfulness of a camp counselor. She works happily, pacing the stage with a permanent grin. Rather than adopting the detached posture common in much of modern standup, she leans into pure enthusiasm. When a bit reaches its end, she often drops her voice into an exaggerated, conspiratorial stage whisper, treating the entire room like a single friend sitting across a barstool.

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.