Mandy Kay - There's Always Ice Cream

I con­fess that I’ve only watched Mandy Kay on stage for a sum total of five min­utes, but it was a very impor­tant five min­utes. The first of 15 pre­lim­i­nary rounds in the high­ly antic­i­pat­ed Cap City Com­e­dy Club’s Fun­ni­est Per­son in Austin (FPIA) contest. 

Kay had a casu­al nature on stage and jokes that the entire audi­ence roared at. 2022 FPIA is run a bit dif­fer­ent­ly than past years — three comics per pre­lim­i­nary round advance based on audi­ence vote. Kay emerged as one of the three that night and in my excite­ment I want­ed to get to know more about her. With­in a 24 hour peri­od, like any good com­e­dy super­fan, I launched a friend request, intro­duc­tion, and sched­ul­ing of a guest spot on the pod­cast. All of which Kay did with an affa­ble air, espe­cial­ly for being hound­ed by a stranger online (that’s me) since Kay is a recent trans­plant from the Den­ver area com­e­dy scene.

Kay’s entry into com­e­dy did not begin eas­i­ly. One might say it began quite mess­i­ly, as stage fright kept a crip­pling hold of her (but not nec­es­sar­i­ly the con­tents of her stom­ach) until she found ways to man­age it. Improv was her first love and she adored the fact that it felt so trib­al and con­nect­ed. The draw for her was that it was fun and easy and this feel­ing she cap­tured became the foun­da­tion of her approach to com­e­dy to this day. She also got an incred­i­bly valu­able les­son from an improv instruc­tor that guides her to this day when it comes to her standup com­e­dy: ​“Be real, don’t go for the laugh, fig­ure out where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing before you have fun.” While it’s not intu­itive to not go for a laugh as a standup com­ic, being aware of who you are cer­tain­ly is.

What brought her from the warm com­fort of improv to the some­times bru­tal splash of water in the face that is standup? A most uncon­ven­tion­al answer from my guest is sum­ma­rized in two words: RV and mar­riage. Kay and her first (now ex-) hus­band mar­ried and set out on a cross-coun­try trip in an RV. Not for the faint of heart, but she loved the fru­gal lifestyle and learn­ing about dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try. It was­n’t easy to drop into improv groups, but Kay found that drop­ping into an open mic was easy, so she tried her hand at standup, a solo act. This accel­er­at­ed not only how hard she fought to con­tain her stage fright, but taught her that cre­at­ing jokes about her real life expe­ri­ences felt almost as com­fort­able and fun as the feel­ing she had being in an improv troupe. With less ​“yes, and-ing”, we presume.

To expe­ri­ence any mea­sure of hap­pi­ness in this fick­le com­e­dy world, you have to adopt cer­tain philoso­phies to get you by. For Kay, there are a hand­ful of such philoso­phies that have served her well. There’s the pro­found ​“What’s sup­posed to be for me is gonna hap­pen for me and is meant for me. And ​“If I do the work, and I love the work, the oth­er stuff will come.” And then there’s the more suc­cinct ​“If you’re mis­er­able, do new shit.” For an admit­ted life-long learn­er, she real­ly takes that last one to heart. She then offers a alter­na­tive ver­sion reframed as ​“There’s always ice cream.” This is about the point in the inter­view where I told Kay she was now my best friend. 

This rat­tling off of life mantras with a sil­ly off­hand remark (which still man­ages to be pro­found) is what made her so charm­ing when I saw her first per­form and it’s what makes her approach­able to the audi­ence. But the audi­ence needs to be polite too. Heck­ling can be an annoy­ing fact of a standup per­former’s real­i­ty, and Kay deals with it direct­ly, but sly­ly, falling on the retort, ​“that was­n’t very nice, that hurt my feel­ings, I’m not going to talk to you any­more.” Like a rogue school teacher lec­tur­ing us to behave in one moment, fol­lowed by shar­ing a quite sil­ly sen­ti­ment the next.

I test­ed the waters with Kay and offered that in that very strong 5 min­utes I watched dur­ing the FPIA pre­lims, she remind­ed me of two of my favorite comics (and past Com­e­dy Wham guests), Leanne Mor­gan and Dave Hill. Kay did not race out of the pod­cast stu­dio, and admit­ted she had heard both of those before. Hav­ing per­formed com­e­dy just shy of 7 years, and with those well-honed philoso­phies men­tioned above, being com­pared to oth­er comics (“as long as they’re good comics”, she offered) does­n’t phase her. She’s still going to per­form the type of com­e­dy that she likes and that she finds natural. 

Hav­ing spent 6 years in the Den­ver area per­form­ing, Kay moved to Austin in Decem­ber 2021 and found the scene almost over­whelm­ing, but soon found her foot­ing and along with her also-com­ic boyfriend, found out about open mics and quick­ly got booked on shows. She recent­ly land­ed week­ly co-host­ing duties at the Bak­er Street Com­e­dy Show with Zac Sil­ver­man. Hope­ful­ly, with a lit­tle more time in Austin and the pat on the back of being an FPIA Semi­fi­nal­ist (as of this writ­ing, the pre­lim rounds are only halfway done), she’ll be seen on even more show­cas­es and con­tin­ue per­form­ing on fes­ti­vals. I’m excit­ed to see her keep mak­ing a splash in the scene, and maybe she’ll make a lit­tle time for me so we can meet up to get some ice cream.

Fol­low Mandy

• Web­site — mandykay​com​e​dy​.com
• Twit­ter — @MandyKayComedy
• Insta­gram — @mandykaycomedy
• Youtube — Youtube​.com/​M​a​n​d​y​K​a​y​C​omedy

Mandy can be seen and heard:

• FPIA Semi­fi­nals — Sep­tem­ber 14, 2022
• Plano Com­e­dy Fes­ti­val — Octo­ber 13 – 16, 2022
• Co-host of the Bak­er Street Com­e­dy Show — Tues­days 8pm at Bak­er Street Pub