Sheila Kay

She came up through the Detroit club circuit and gained national exposure during the comedy boom of the early nineties. When clubs often preferred female comics to be polite, she built an act around being bawdy. She is a working road dog, the kind of comic who can walk into a stubborn room and force a crowd to pay attention by refusing to back down.

Her material is physical and unromantic. She treats her own body as a failing piece of equipment, describing weight fluctuations and medical appointments like a mechanic inspecting a bad transmission. Her jokes about her ex-husbands aren’t wounded. They are exasperated. She gets laughs by stripping away any trace of vanity. The limitation of the approach is that she rarely drops her volume. She doesn’t do quiet tension or slow builds. She just tells you exactly what went wrong and waits for you to catch up.

She grew up in Detroit, working in a veterinary clinic and a law office before trying a local open mic. You can hear the years of regular employment in her act. She complains about her life with the tone of someone who has spent a lot of time on hold.