This is a story about a seventy-nine-year-old woman who started performing stand-up comedy in a small club in Milwaukee eighteen months ago, why she started, why she is very good at it, and what her niece — who has been a professional comedy writer in Los Angeles for the past fifteen years — has been trying to figure out about the situation.
The seventy-nine-year-old — I will call her Corinne, because her niece chose that name, and because when I asked why, her niece said, “It sounded like the name of a woman who would surprise you, which she has, in every meaningful way, done” — was married to her husband Frank for fifty-four years. Frank was, by every account, a good man. He was, by his own account and his wife’s, “the funny one in the marriage.” He passed away in October of 2023 after a short illness.
Corinne started performing stand-up comedy in April of 2024.
She had, at the time, never told a joke in front of an audience in her life.
At the time of this writing, she has a regular Wednesday-night spot at a small comedy club on the east side of Milwaukee. Her set is nine minutes long. She has never gone over. She has, on three separate occasions in the past year, been described by the club’s owner as “the best set of the night.”
The flyer
The story turns, in Corinne’s account, on a specific piece of paper.
Corinne, in the winter of 2024 — approximately four months after Frank’s funeral — was, in her own phrasing, “trying to leave the house.” She had been leaving the house for grocery shopping. She had been leaving the house for doctor’s appointments. She had been leaving the house to visit her sister across town. She had not, since Frank’s funeral, left the house for anything that was not, in the strictest sense, necessary.
On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-March, she went to a small independent coffee shop on the east side of Milwaukee. She sat down with a book. She did not read the book. She stared at the front window for approximately forty minutes.
On the front window of the coffee shop was a flyer.
The flyer, which Corinne has told me she memorized without meaning to, said: “OPEN MIC COMEDY — EVERY WEDNESDAY — 7 P.M. — ALL EXPERIENCE LEVELS WELCOME — 5 MINUTES PER PERFORMER — SIGN UP AT THE DOOR.”
Corinne read the flyer approximately fifteen times.
She has told me she does not remember why she read it fifteen times. She has told me she does not remember whether the reading was, in any coherent sense, a decision. She has told me the reading was, “in the specific way of the months after Frank died, less like reading and more like sitting with the words.”
She left the coffee shop. She drove home.
The next Wednesday, she drove back to the neighborhood. She parked one block from the small comedy club, which she had passed hundreds of times over the decades and had never once entered. She sat in her car for approximately twelve minutes. She then got out of the car and walked to the club.
She signed up.
She has told me she cannot fully explain, in the eighteen months since, why she did this.
The first set
Corinne performed her first five-minute set on April 3, 2024.
She has told me she does not remember most of it.
She has told me she remembers three specific things.
The first is that when the host introduced her — “next up, a first-timer, please welcome Corinne” — the audience, which she estimates was approximately fifteen people, applauded politely. Some of them, she has told me, “clearly assumed I had wandered in and was going to be embarrassing.”
The second is that the first joke she told — which she had, in the days leading up to Wednesday, written on the back of a receipt from Woodman’s Market — did not go over the way she had anticipated. She has not told me what the joke was. She has told me that it was received by the audience in a specific way that she has, in the eighteen months since, thought about a great deal.
The specific way, in her account, was: “with a moment of quiet, followed by laughter that was not, in the way of laughter I had heard before that night, purely amused. It was laughter that included, in it, a small amount of surprise. It included, in it, a small amount of relief.”
The third thing she remembers is that when the five minutes were up, she did not, as she had planned, thank the audience and walk off the stage. She instead paused, looked at the audience, and said — this is verbatim from her account — “I don’t want to leave yet. Would that be okay.”
The host, according to Corinne, laughed. The audience laughed. Corinne, apparently, took another ninety seconds.
She has told me she does not remember what she said in that ninety seconds. She has told me she does remember that when she finally walked off the stage, three people in the audience were, in some observable way, crying.
Why she has kept doing it
I have asked Corinne, in the course of three phone conversations, why she has continued to perform every Wednesday night for the past eighteen months.
She has given me several answers.
She has told me the first answer, which she gave the first time I asked her: “I like it.”
She has told me the second answer, which she gave the second time: “I had not realized, until I started doing this, how much of my adult life I had spent being quiet.”
She has told me the third answer, which she gave the third time, and which she has told me she has arrived at only recently: “I have spent fifty-four years listening to Frank tell jokes. I have spent fifty-four years being a very good audience for a man who was, in my honest opinion, a genuinely gifted comedic performer. I did not realize, in the fifty-four years, how much I was learning. I did not realize, until the first time I stood on that small stage, how much of what Frank was doing I had, in some quiet way, absorbed.”
She has told me: “I am not doing Frank’s material. I am not, in any way, performing him. I am, however, using the specific comedic architecture I learned by living with him. I know when to pause. I know when to lean in. I know when to abandon a line and let the audience finish it. I did not know I knew these things. It turns out I did.”
She has told me: “It has been, in some way I cannot fully describe, a way of using something Frank gave me. He did not, technically, give it to me. I received it by accident, from being in the same room as him for a very long time. But it has, since he died, been the thing I have that he would recognize as his.”
She has told me: “The material is mine. The training was his.”
She has told me: “I am seventy-nine years old and I have just started using what I have.”
The material
I have, with Corinne’s permission, seen recordings of three of her recent sets.
I want to be careful about how I describe her material, because Corinne has asked me to be. She has told me she does not want to be described in a way that will send strangers to her Wednesday-night club. She has told me she does not want the club, which is small, to be affected by the article. She has told me the material is, in her own phrasing, “not the point of the story. The story is that I am doing it. Not what I am saying.”
I will honor that.
I will say only, in the most general terms, that her material is not, as one might expect, about being seventy-nine. It is not, primarily, about widowhood. It is not, in the standard mode of comedy about aging, about complaining about hip pain or making jokes about her doctor.
Her material is about ordinary things. Grocery stores. Small dogs. Her sister. Rain. The specific texture of a Wednesday afternoon in Milwaukee. She talks, in the sets I have seen, about the specific way a checkout clerk at Woodman’s once said good afternoon to her, and about the specific set of thoughts she had for the next three hours as a result. She talks about a small argument she had with her sister over the correct name for a specific kitchen implement. She talks about her deep and specific dislike of a certain kind of small blue flower that grows in her neighbor’s yard.
She does not talk, on stage, about Frank.
She does not talk, on stage, about being widowed.
She does not talk, on stage, about being seventy-nine.
She has told me, when I asked her about this: “I do not, on stage, need to be old. I do not, on stage, need to be sad. I can, on stage, just be a person noticing things. That is what stand-up comedy is. It is a person noticing things carefully enough that the rest of the room realizes they had noticed it too. I did not know, until I started doing this, that I had spent fifty-four years noticing things. I am, apparently, very well-trained.”
The niece
The niece — I will call her Delfina, because she chose the name, and because when I asked why, she said, “It sounded like the name of a professional comedy writer who was in the middle of a very complicated feeling about her aunt, which is, technically, what I am” — is thirty-nine. She lives in Los Angeles. She has been, for the past fifteen years, a professional comedy writer.
She has, in that fifteen years, written for four different late-night shows, two comedy specials that ended up on major streaming platforms, and one animated series that had a small but devoted following. She is, in her own phrasing, “reasonably successful for someone in this industry, which is a low bar.”
She learned about Corinne’s stand-up career approximately six months after it began.
She has, in the year since, been trying to figure out how to feel about it.
The first email
Corinne emailed Delfina in October of 2024, approximately one year after Frank died and six months after her first set. The email was, according to Delfina, “extremely short.” It said, in its entirety:
“Delfina — I have been performing stand-up comedy on Wednesday nights at a small club in Milwaukee. I did not want to tell you before I was sure I was going to keep doing it. I have been doing it for six months. I am going to keep doing it. I would like you to know. Love, Aunt Corinne.”
Delfina, when she received the email, was in a writers’ room in Burbank.
She has told me she read the email approximately eight times.
She has told me she then walked out of the writers’ room, went to the parking lot of the production company, sat in her car, and — in her own phrasing — “had a small breakdown that I did not, at the time, entirely understand.”
She has told me she then called her aunt.
The phone call
I want to be careful about the phone call, because Delfina has asked me to be. She has told me she is not, in retrospect, particularly proud of it.
The phone call, in Delfina’s account, was approximately forty minutes long. Delfina spent most of it asking her aunt questions. Where was the club. How long had she been doing this. Had she ever done improv. Was she taking a class. Was anyone helping her write the material.
Corinne answered all of the questions.
At the end of the phone call, Delfina asked her aunt if she could see the material. Corinne said no. Delfina asked if she could come to Milwaukee for a Wednesday night. Corinne said no. Delfina asked why.
Corinne said, in Delfina’s account: “Because this is not for you.”
Delfina has told me she did not understand, in the moment, what her aunt meant.
She has told me she has, in the fifteen months since, spent a great deal of time thinking about it.
What Delfina has come to understand
I asked Delfina, in our final conversation, what she now believes her aunt meant.
She said: “I have thought about this for over a year. I think my aunt meant that if I came and watched her perform, I would be watching her as a professional comedy writer. I would be evaluating. I would be, in some small way, judging. I would be, in the specific way of my profession, unable to just be an audience member. I would be the niece who works in comedy, watching her elderly aunt do amateur stand-up. That is not the frame she wants. That is not the frame she deserves.”
She said: “I think my aunt understood, in a way I did not understand until much later, that what she was doing was not about me. It was not about my career. It was not about the industry I have spent fifteen years in. It was about her, and a stage, and a small audience in Milwaukee, and the specific thing she had discovered she could do.”
She said: “I think she was protecting the thing from me.”
She said: “I think she was right to.”
She said: “I have not, in the fifteen months since, asked to come see her perform. She has not, in the fifteen months since, brought it up.”
She said: “I know the club exists. I know the day of the week. I could go. I have decided, for now, not to.”
She said: “I am, honestly, waiting to be invited.”
The niece and her writers’ room
Delfina told me, in our last conversation, that in the past six months something has happened in her professional life that she wants me to include in this article.
She has told me that she has, in the past six months, changed the way she writes.
She has told me she does not know if the change is because of her aunt. She has told me she suspects it is. She has told me that in the past she wrote, in her own phrasing, “clever comedy about people who noticed clever things.” She has told me that in the past six months she has begun writing something she describes as “smaller.” She has told me she has been writing about people noticing very small things, in a very specific way, without punchlines that resolve. She has told me that the writers’ room has, in the past six months, told her that her recent work has been the best work of her career.
She has told me she does not know if she can attribute this to her aunt.
She has told me she suspects she can.
She has told me she has not told her aunt.
She has told me: “That, at least, is a boundary I have decided to keep. She is doing what she is doing. I am doing what I am doing. We are, in some small way, in different rooms.”
She has told me: “She would probably be pleased to know she has influenced me. I would rather that she doesn’t. I would rather she does not know that her Wednesday nights in Milwaukee have, in some quiet way, made me a better writer in Los Angeles. That would, I think, change what her Wednesday nights are. And I do not want to be the person who did that.”
What Corinne has said about the future
I asked Corinne, in our final conversation, whether she planned to keep doing stand-up.
She said yes.
I asked her whether she thought she might, at some point, want to perform in front of a larger audience.
She said no.
I asked her whether she thought she might, at some point, want to make a recording, or write a book, or in some way document what she has been doing.
She said no.
She said: “I am not doing this to make anything. I am not doing this to leave anything. I am doing this because it is Wednesday. I am doing this because there is a small stage in a small club in Milwaukee that has, for eighteen months, been the specific place I go to be seen once a week for nine minutes. I am doing this because Frank spent fifty-four years teaching me, without knowing he was teaching me, how to notice things. And I have decided, in the years I have left, to notice them out loud.”
She paused.
She said: “That is all I am doing. I do not need it to be more than that.”
She said: “It is, honestly, plenty.”
What this is
I have, in the weeks since I first heard this story, thought about the specific and unfair way that our culture assumes people over a certain age have stopped becoming. We assume that whoever a person is at seventy-nine is who they were at fifty, and forty, and thirty. We assume the arc is complete. We assume, when a person over seventy loses their partner, that what follows is grief and, eventually, acceptance, and then, eventually, an ending.
Corinne’s story suggests something else.
Corinne’s story suggests that a person can be seventy-nine, and widowed, and — after fifty-four years of being what she has, without self-pity, described as “a very good audience” — pick up an entirely new thing. She can be new at seventy-nine. She can be discovering things at seventy-nine. She can be, in the specific way of the young, making something she had not, until this moment, been. (For a related earlier piece on the small and specific ways adults discover, late in life, the versions of themselves that had been quietly waiting, see the Wattalife story about the 67-year-old man who began dressing as his own 1987 self after his wife’s death.)
I do not know exactly what to make of Corinne’s story. I know only that when I asked her, at the end of our final conversation, whether she was happy, she paused for a long time.
She said: “I am not what I would have called happy at fifty. I am not what I would have called happy at sixty. I am, however, at seventy-nine, doing something. I am doing something specific. I am doing it once a week. I am doing it in front of people. I am doing it well. I am not, so far as I can tell, ever going to stop. I do not know if that is happiness. But it is, I have come to understand, close enough.”
—
Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, considered whether there is a specific version of herself she has, without meaning to, been in training for over the past several decades. She does not know. She has, however, begun paying attention to which flyers she reads more than once. So far there have been three. She has not, so far, acted on any of them. She is, however, remembering where they are.