Reno
A fast-talking downtown ranter who never stops for a breath.
1 special · 1993
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Reno paces the stage like she is late for a train. She does not do setups and punchlines. Instead, she winds herself up into a long rant, letting a thought about Wall Street bleed into an aside about gentrification without taking a breath. When she gets worked up, her arms fly out, and she shouts at the ceiling. The rhythm feels like a frantic, one-sided conversation with a stranger on a subway platform who turns out to be right.
Specials
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Out There with Lea DeLaria, Bob Smith & 4 more
Network television's first all-queer stand-up comedy showcase.
Comedy Central · 60 min
On stage
She built her act in the downtown New York spaces of the late eighties, playing rooms like P.S. 122. She came up alongside the solo performers who blurred the line between art and comedy. Her angry, left-wing monologues feel like the blueprint for the anxious oversharing in black-box theaters. She skips the standard comedy clubs. Her crowd shows up expecting a theatrical story rather than a tight set.
The material is aimed squarely at politicians, corporate greed, and the indignities of city living. She is funniest when she lets the irritation take over, turning a complaint about the slang people use for female anatomy into a sprint of pure annoyance. The trade-off for all that momentum is structure. She will chase a tangent until the room goes quiet, only to wrestle the premise back to its starting point.
She grew up an adopted kid in a middle-class family on Long Island. That background surfaces in her work as the reason she feels like an outsider looking in.