What It Takes to Be Risky: Profile of a Young, Female Comic

“I think I was depressed before I was even born.” Danya Trommer paces back and forth on stage. Clad in knee-high socks and checkered Vans sneakers, she makes small kicks every time she delivers a punch line. “Hear me out. I was a C-section, as all fun babies are. I ended up getting caught in my mother’s pelvis because I was a big woman. As they were pulling me out, I had the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, so I was trying to end shit before it even began.” The audience roars and Danya chuckles a little with them. She adjusts her glasses and continues her routine. “I like to imagine that I was in the womb just wrapping it around myself,” Danya jokes as she mimes wrapping a noose around her neck. ‘There ain’t gonna be a baby to take out of here!” Danya smiles, snaps her fingers and points at the crowd while the audience simultaneously laughs and gasps.

Alone on stage, Danya takes control of her audience. Their laughter is her drug and she is fueled to keep moving forward. Danya hadn’t performed this set for anyone before getting on stage; this is her rough draft, and it is risky. Unlike other forms of performance, stand-up rarely has rehearsals. Danya is one of many college students stepping into the comedy scene: it’s what the hip kids are doing. Stand-up comedy has become a popular art form, and everyone wants to become the next Tiffany Haddish or John Mulaney. Comedians no longer deliver classic, hammy one-liners about their wives or airplane food; stand-up has become storytelling. Danya's journey shows us what drives comedians in today's competitive environment. Even more, Danya shows us how women, already inevitably stereotyped and judged, must be strong to survive on the stage. She demonstrates to us what it takes not to only be a comedian but a young, female comedian.

Comedy often comes from a place of pain, and for many comedians, that pain is rooted in a troubled childhood. Comedian Judd Apatow explains that stand-up was his revenge on middle school bullies in his book, Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy: “I always felt as a kid that I was underappreciated, invisible or weird, but I've always secretly thought people would one day appreciate what is different about me.” For Danya, comedy was a way to take the extremely confusing and dark things in her life and spin them. “I was really moody and depressed because my parents just got divorced and my mom was suddenly gay and I was like ‘that’s kind of funny, though,’” she says.

“It definitely goes back to self-esteem,” acknowledges Danya. Even as a child, she sought praise and validation from others, including strangers. Toddler Danya was famous for talking to everyone she met. “She’d sit in the shopping cart and talk to everyone in line at the supermarket,” reminisces Danya’s mom, Irene Trommer. “When we walked into Trader Joe's, the employees loved seeing her and would take her around the market and let her choose any foods she wanted to try. They'd take her into the break room and they would listen to her stories while they were all eating her food selections. I’m serious! They'd even cook up mac and cheese if that's what she chose!” It's a classic stereotype: the extroverted performer brightening everyone's day in their search for attention.

There are different attention-craving types of kids, however. There are the kids that seek attention for the dramatic thrill, and there are the kids that want attention in order to validate themselves through a connection with others. Most stand-up comedians are the latter. Stand-up comedians are famous for being lonely. “55% of comediennes were the youngest child in the family,” wrote Dr. Gil Greengross in the November 2013 Psychology Today article, “Why Do Comedians Become Comedians?”: “Comedians’ childhood experiences were marked by isolation, suffering, and deprivation feelings.” Comedians tend to “channel feelings of anger and anxiety into their comedy act and seek the love of the audiences.” Comedian Richard Lewis puts it this way in July 2017 CNN article by Jen Christensen, “The sad clown: The deep emotions behind stand-up comedy.”: "I despised myself from pretty much close to getting out of the womb. I was always wrong. Let's start with that. When you are always wrong, you seek an audience to disprove that theory."

Danya, like the majority of comedians, was the baby of her family and she agrees with this assessment. “I love validation,” she says, explaining her drive to perform. “Usually the baby is like spoiled or the most loved one,” she uncomfortably laughs, “but the thing is I come from a super dysfunctional family so the attention was always on someone else.” She had to act as a Band-Aid, constantly trying to keep everyone protected and together. Danya said that she is a “fixer” in relationships and friend Zoe Salvucci agrees, noting that she is always “making sure everyone is okay. If you’re in a bad mood, she is guaranteed to bring it up.” Stand-up was like therapy for Danya, serving as both an outlet to relieve stress and a way to affirm her value as an individual. “Being funny serves as a defense mechanism against panic and anxiety,” wrote Dr. Gil Greengross in the November 2013 Psychology Today article, “Why Do Comedians Become Comedians?”. Comedians are frequently driven by an effort to “seek control, get approval from friends and family, and prove that they are good and worthy.” The best stories to share on stage are “the saddest, worst moments of your life—that’s the stuff people connect to and appreciate,” said Amy Schumer in an interview with Judd Apatow in his book, Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy. Stand-up comedians tell relatable stories on stage in order to proclaim, “Look! I’m like you! Let’s be friends!”

Fellow stand-up comedian and friend of Danya’s, Karli Marulli, agrees that stand-up is a form of therapy. “I think stand-up has helped my mental health,” explains Karli. “[It] encourages me to be honest.” When on stage, stand-up comedians can be completely themselves, sharing intimate stories that lay themselves bare. This is a relatively new aspect of the craft of comedy. Before the advent of social media, comedians could use the same 10 minutes of one-liners throughout their career. Today, comedians endeavor to be fresh and authentic. As a result, stand-up comedy has changed from jokes to into a form more like storytelling. Classic one-liners like Rodney Dangerfield’s, “I get no respect!” are out, and stories, like Amy Schumer’s detailed confessions about her sex life, are in. Karli admits that she started off not telling many personal stories, “Most of my stand-up was observations and fully contrived jokes.” Danya started stand-up the same way, making jokes about others and avoiding personal references. She hopes that her comedy is undergoing a change right now, “I’ve started writing jokes that are more personal about my life,” says Danya, “which is therapeutic to talk about.”

However, the practice of being 100% authentic on stage isn’t easy for female comics. Female comedians must tread cautiously around traditionally female topics, for fear of losing their male audience. As comic Lily Tomlin Jen Christensen quotes Lily Tomlin in her March 2013 Vulture article, “Lily Tomlin on Admission, Tiny Fey, and Girls”: “I grew up in a time when women didn’t really do comedy. You had to be homely, overweight, an old maid, all that. You had to play a stereotype, because very attractive women were not supposed to be funny – because it’s powerful; it’s a threat.” Female comedians continue to battle the idea that women aren’t funny, and it shows in the statistics. “683 people are big enough to warrant inclusion on Wiki’s list of ‘American Stand-up Comedians;’ just 92 are women. That equates to a not-so-funny 13%,” wrote Ravishly in the October 2014 Huffington Post article, “Why the Gender Gap in Comedy Isn’t That Funny.” Considering that fact, female comedians’ hesitation to be fully themselves on stage is understandable; they fear losing their audience, their standing and even worse, their validation: a comedian’s medicine.

Danya understands that fear, and explains that she stays away from talking simply about being a woman, that, she tries “to keep [her] comedy as neutral as possible.” Karli is the same way: “I rarely talk plainly about being a woman.” Danya is terrified of being defined as the “female comedian archetype.” She worries that when she talks about sex all she becomes is the clichéd female comic that is like “heh, heh, heh, here’s my vagina, I have a vagina.’” She feels trapped; she wants to portray what it means to be a woman but she doesn’t want to risk her reputation. “I hate that this archetype exists, but I always feel like I don’t know the right balance of too much and not enough. So I think my perspective isn’t unique as a female…I want to write more gendered comedy, I really do, but I’m always afraid of falling into that category.” She feels that Amy Schumer has fallen into this category. “Honestly, I’m so misogynistic and I kind of hate Amy Schumer’s humor,” laughs Danya. Amy Schumer knows she has been labeled as the stereotypical female comedian obsessed with sex. In an interview with Judd Apatow in his book, Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy, Amy Schumer comments about one-night stand jokes, “You can get up there and do that, and you’re not the Sex Guy. But if I do it, I am. So I just embraced it.”

Danya feels pressure to move up the comedy college rankings before she can take the risk of embracing her female sexuality on stage. She even consciously gears her routines towards a male audience. Moreover, she explains that “usually the girls in comedy, I’ve found, like masculine things so I feel like if I skewed it more towards the men then both will like it…it’s just unfair, ugh God.” Danya grabs a marshmallow Peep and bites its head off. She seems anxious and conflicted. “I literally just realized that even in my porn bits I talk about females and even when I talk about sex I talk about being attracted to women and that’s the gender I choose to talk about. Wow. That’s kind of crazy.”

Let’s say a female comedian takes the risk: she’s honest and fearlessly female and the audience loves it. Even then, she still risks discrimination and harassment directed at her afterwards. “My go-to story is when I won a local competition in Boston, and had to face a green room full of the men who lost. They didn’t congratulate me, and grumbled about how I won because I’m a young woman,” describes Karli. Danya has experienced the same bullying. When she was 16, a 28-year-old male stand-up comedian in Philadelphia would continuously “try to bring [her] down” because of her age and sex. “He would be like ‘you’re too young for this, you don’t want to get into this, like blah, blah, blah; you’re not fit for this.’ That type of thing. It was kind of fucked up.” It got to a point where he would direct message her on Twitter and bother her constantly.

Danya eats another marshmallow Peep as she tells this story in a nonchalant way. It’s just part of being a young female comedian. Danya’s goal is to perform stand-up for a living, even though she admits it is “very, very tough” and that she “won’t be living comfortably ever.” But despite the discrimination and competition, there is something about the art form of comedy that makes Danya keep coming back. “I don’t think Danya sees herself as different for being a female comedian,” says her friend Zoe. “If she does, she certainly doesn’t let it slow her down.”

The fact that Danya strives to pursue comedy, even with its risks and frustrations as a woman, is a testament to her pioneering spirit. When I tell her she is groundbreaking, she disagrees. She stops eating her Peep and looks at me, “I’m really not, I feel like I’m giving you a bad interview because, okay, all right, um, cause it’s all negative, I feel like I’m not the feminist comic you want to write a profile on…I feel like I’m doing so many things wrong.” She then laughs and bites back into the Peep. In the midst of facing her insecurity, she turns it into something funny, and maybe that’s exactly what she needs. Danya’s self-doubt, need for validation and pressure of being a woman and family Band-Aid compel her to be hilarious and her family, friends and audience thank her for it.

Danya places the stage, flaring her hands and pushing back her jet black hair. “So in high school I went to my first party and I was in charge of making the playlist for the party and, you know, just my luck I accidentally put the entire soundtrack to the 2011 Muppets Movie and so the song came on and I didn’t turn it off I really ‘kermit-ed to’ the idea.” The audience simultaneously goes “ohhh!” and laughs. “It happened though. It was really embarrassing. I was very drunk and I started crying.” The audience cracks up and Danya has scored a point. She is playing the successful female stand-up comedian game perfectly: embarrassing herself and being tragically relatable.