Featured Female Start-up: A Standup Girl - Gaby Dunn and the Pursuit of Comedy

It is 12:30 in the afternoon on a Wednesday and I am crying. Tiny drops of saltwater keep falling from my eyes no matter how much I wipe them away. I am gasping for air because I cannot breathe. But it’s not that weird, especially since Gaby has always made me laugh this way.

When I first met Gaby Dunn five years ago, she was excessively quoting Anchorman and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She had a dry, sarcastic sense of humor and talked like a standup comedian. Not much has changed. Except now she actually is a standup comedian.

Gaby, a senior Multimedia Journalism major at Emerson College in Boston, MA did her first standup show in May 2009 as part of a requirement for a school class, Writing for Standup Comedy, taught by part-time faculty member and comedian Michael Bent. Bent had students develop and perfect four to five minutes of material throughout the entire semester. Outside of class, students had the opportunity to have their performances critiqued by Eddie Brill, the comedy booker for David Letterman. The final project was to perform in Boston’s best comedy venue, The Comedy Studio. “I finished, and I was just like, ‘I love this. I love this,’” Gaby says.

I won’t lie—watching a friend do standup scares me. I’m always hoping their jokes won’t bomb, that there won’t be the awful silence of joke failure that can come with a new standup career. But that never happens when I watch Gaby. Watching a recent show of hers at Yale (on Vimeo), she approaches the light wooden stage, standing close to the audience, and begins her set. She is wearing a black and red plaid shirt, which is her first joke of the evening:

“When I told my mom that I was going to do standup comedy, she was like ‘Oh, wow, that’s great, that’s great,’ and then right before I was coming here, I opened up mail from her, and it was this shirt. Which had a note attached to it that said, ‘Dear Gaby: Saw this shirt, reminded me of your new life path…” She pauses. A wave of healthy laughter rises from the audience.

“‘Wear it at your next show.’ So I’m wearing it, and she’s being supportive. I’m glad she’s being supportive. I think, though, that she heard ‘lesbian’ and not ‘comedian’.” She is greeted with another wave of laughter. She offers a small smile and raises her eyebrows as if to say, ‘That’s mom for ya,’ but I can’t help but think that the smile is really because she’s happy with the way her joke was received.

“It’s an out-of-body experience,” she says to me later. “If something doesn’t go well, my hands shake. If it’s going well, it feels great. You’ve got to act like it’s a conversation even though you’re performing for [the audience].” The lights shine in her eyes and she can’t see the audience but Gaby, who jokes that she looks like Velma from Scooby-Doo, takes it all in stride.

Gaby has been interested in comedy for a long time. “When people ask me how I got into it, I always just say ‘no friends,’” she laughs. While her middle school peers paraded themselves around the local mall on Friday nights, Gaby stayed in, taking in the jokes of comics on Comedy Central Presents and Friday Night Standup.

Gaby actually started performing via sketch comedy, though, during her freshman year at Emerson. A former boyfriend wanted to audition for one of Emerson’s sketch comedy troupes, Chocolate Cake City, but got sick the day before he could. He urged Gaby, who had wanted to audition but was too scared, to take his audition slot. “I knew I wanted to be a writer,” she says, “but I wasn’t really an actor.” Nevertheless, she set out to audition the next day.

That night, Gaby paced up and down the halls of her dorm, sharing the material she had written with anyone who walked by. “Do you think this is funny? What about this? Or this?” But sleep beckoned and there was nothing else she could do. At the audition, reading almost directly from her page of material with hands shaking, Gaby delivered her audition piece. Though the experience hadn’t killed her, she was certain she wouldn’t get into the troupe.

But she did. “People always laughed when I told jokes and stuff, but I never had any real validation that I was funny before then.” Gaby began working right away with Chocolate Cake City (CCC), whose members write and perform their own sketch comedy. “I had to crank stuff out. It was trial by fire. I had never done anything like that,” she says. It turns out that CCC was a good choice—founded in 2002 by Emerson alum and comedian Rob Asaro, the troupe is known state- and nationwide for its clever, intelligent approach to comedy.

Emerson itself, Gaby says, is actually a great “comedy school.” Modern comic greats like Jay Leno, Denis Leary, and David Cross all attended Emerson, and it’s one of the few universities in the country where one can actually study the art. Emerson also gives out a comedy scholarship annually, funded by alum comics, and is home to the American Comedy Archives, dedicated to preserving comedic material.

In a college with a comedy background like this, Gaby definitely found her niche. She’s even picked up a Comedy Writing minor in the process, having taken classes like Sketch Comedy Writing, the aforementioned Standup Writing, and Sitcom Writing.