Margaret Smith

Margaret Smith does not look happy to be on stage. She stands almost entirely still, facing the crowd with an expression of pure exhaustion. Her voice is a slow, flat monotone. She never rushes to the punchline, stretching out the silence until the audience realizes they have to adapt to her pace. She doesn’t raise her volume when a bit works, and she doesn’t speed up when the room gets quiet. She just waits, letting the quiet do half the work.

She performed constantly on late-night television in the eighties and nineties, doing frequent spots on Letterman and Conan. She eventually stepped back from heavy touring to write and produce, winning Emmys for her work on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Her old sets remain a reference point for comics learning how to hold a room without shouting.

Her material treats mundane inconveniences and family dysfunction with the exact same weight. She complains about the indignity of buying underwear or dodging collection agencies in the same flat, irritated tone she uses to describe her childhood. There is no emotional modulation. Whether she talks about therapy or the weather, she sounds equally put out. The joke relies heavily on the premise that she can barely summon the energy to speak.

She started in Chicago’s improv scene before moving into standup. That early training shows up not in loud characters, but in her total commitment to her onstage posture: a woman who is simply too tired to accommodate anyone.