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Caroline Rhea: Funny Girl |
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Written by Dan England
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Friday, 21 September 2007 |
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 Some comedians have a stage character when they perform, like Larry the Cable Guy. Others make observations on their half-baked lives, like Jerry Seinfeld. And some like to make you squirm by picking the scabs off every sensitive topic in today’s world, probably layered with several swear words, like Carlos Mencia.
All of it, of course, is designed to make you laugh. But all Caroline Rhea has to do is tell the truth.
Her quirky personality is funny. She’s disorganized, co-dependent and probably ADD, she admits in a phone interview. Her life is funny, even if it’s a life most would find interesting, with movie credits such as “The Perfect Man,” “Man on the Moon” and “Christmas With the Kranks” and TV spots like her own “The Caroline Rhea Show” and her first, as Aunt Hilda on WB’s “Sabrina, The Teenage Witch.” Her parents are funny. A story about her mother swimming helped her break out of nightclubs as one of the more well-known stand-up comics, and she credits her family for inspiring her to be a comedian.
She’ll showcase those storytelling skills on Sept. 29 at the Union Colony Civic Center in Greeley.
Rhea on stage could be Rhea sitting next to you over lunch, or maybe someone who’s had one too many Red Bull and vodkas and starts talking too much. Her love for telling funny stories, married to her desperate need to connect to anyone she talks to (co-dependency, so much so that she says she always buys the product after eating a grocery store sample), meant Rhea wanted to be a comedian since she was 9 watching Johnny Carson and Carol Burnett.
“Every report card said things like, ‘Must Stop Entertaining Other Students,’ or ‘Classroom Is Not A Stage,’” Rhea said and laughed.
Rhea grew up with a father who was a doctor but always wanted to an actor, someone who answered the door in full scuba gear when a guy came to take Rhea on a date. Her mother was witty and thought it was funny when people fell down and got hurt, as long as they weren’t hurt seriously. Too seriously, anyway.
She’s at the UCCC primarily because she didn’t want to be apart from her family for long stretches at a time, but she did want a comedy tour, so she opted for small venues on scattered dates.
 Even today, her parents give her a lot of material.
“I asked my mother to slow down for a minute when I was on the phone with her the other day,” Rhea said, “and she said, ‘Why, are you writing down what I say again?’”
Rhea doesn’t feel a social responsibility to be on stage, and yet she wishes more women were stand-up comics, since that’s where most of her style came from. It’s tough for a woman to have strong opinions or even have crappy days, she said. She hates Oprah and how everyone on that show seems to grow and talk about sunshine days. She moved to New York to start her career in 1989 and was one of the few female comics on stage. There are more now but not enough for Rhea.
“I like to air my opinions as a woman,” she said. “I represent a certain voice. I hate that there’s not more women doing it. And I don’t like it when female comedians adopt a style that’s super-mean. I feel like that’s a male perspective.”
Maybe it’s that woman’s touch that lets Rhea get away with saying what she does on stage. She said she can be edgy, though she prefers to leave the curse words out of her act, mostly from her co-dependence.
“Usually what happens is I’ll throw out some random curse word and then look down at the audience and see a 12-year-old,” she said and laughed, “and I’ll think, ‘Why did I just do that?’ I’m just always so concerned about the audience. I desperately want you to have a good time.”
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GO TO THE SHOW
Caroline Rhea will appear at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, Sept. 29 at the Union Colony Civic Center.
Tickets are $18-$28, with center circle tickets at $45. Call 356.5000 or go
online: ucstars.com. | Only registered users can write comments.
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