Leiby Looks At Life With A Sense Of Humor

While most people are cracking jokes to lighten a serious mood, for Severna Park native Alison Leiby, being funny is all a part of a day’s work. Now living in New York, Leiby has made a career by using her sharp wit and eloquent use of words to keep audiences laughing. By day, she serves as a copywriter at Comedy Central, and by night, she performs standup comedy at venues throughout the city.

“With standup, from the beginning, the enjoyable part has been finding the funny thing in everyday experiences,” Leiby said. “But also, it’s sharing my perspective with an audience, and having them get it and laugh.”

The laughter is what makes it all worthwhile for the SPHS class of 2002 alumna, who shared that although it might seem like fun and games to have a job that’s all about telling jokes, it’s actually a lot of work. “When you [get the audience to laugh], it’s super rewarding; it’s what makes it fun to do,” she said. “If it weren’t for that, there’s nothing fun about doing standup — it’s exhausting.”

Leiby headed to New York after she graduated from Cornell University with a degree in English in 2006. She began interning at satirical news company The Onion, and afterward “bounced around a bit” before she started doing standup and writing on her own.

It started with open mic nights and making friends with people in the comedy scene, and after several years, Leiby had built a network and a following. “It’s no different from working in a really, really big office,” she said of the New York comedy scene, estimating that about 90 percent of the comics know one another and will frequently book shows with friends. “You’re not operating independently,” she added.

But Leiby said the moment she knew that she had made it came when she pitched a concept to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in East Village and found herself the host of the monthly live comedy show “It’s A Long Story,” which features comedians telling long, hilarious true stories. “I wanted a place where the standups I knew could open up and tell a long true story they don’t normally do,” she explained. Although there is some overlap between standup and comic storytelling, Leiby distinguished that the former is a series of jokes and is usually crammed into a short set, sometimes only a few minutes, whereas the latter tends to be longer and cohesive.

Leiby’s sense and style of humor is always evolving, but her jokes are consistently self-deprecating and, as she put it, pretty strongly feminist. “The things I tend to talk about onstage, especially in the past two years, are pointing out what I think is ridiculous or even unfair, but it’s always in a funny way of looking at it,” she explained.

Her literary endeavors reflect her same comedic talents, and her work has been published in McSweeney’s, Cosmopolitan, VICE and, most recently, The New York Times, in which her article, “A Few Questions About The Specials,” takes the voice of a picky restaurant guest who is trying to find out whether the menu fits with the latest diet fads. “I alternate between Paleo, juice cleanses and eating like the world is going to end tomorrow,” the article reads. “But tonight I’m sticking to Paleo, so no carbs!”

Leiby draws ideas for her jokes from everyday life as a single 32-year-old woman living in a big city. “Almost all of it is something I’ve experienced,” she said. “Other women my age will usually understand the reference.”

Although Leiby always planned to move to New York to pursue her interests, and was itching to get out of Severna Park by the time she was done high school — “or maybe four years before,” she quipped — she sees elements of her comedy that are enhanced by growing up in the area. “Everything you live through influences the way you view the world,” she said. “Part of my worldview is totally part of growing up in that town.”

As she moves forward in her career, Leiby hopes to be more involved with television, her favorite medium, which she first experienced when she was a writer for “We Have Issues,” a pop-culture comedy talk show that aired on E! Entertainment network. “With comedy, it’s always coming up with new ideas and seeing where they fit, and hoping that they’re snowballing and you’re getting a bigger and bigger audience,” she said, indicating that she would like to have increased creative control in projects as her career moves forward but it’s never easy to know what platform will evolve next. “It’s hard to predict, so for me, I’m just going to keep making comedy in whatever space best fits what I’m doing.”

Fans can follow @AlisonLeiby on Twitter, where she shares her published writing, promotes her upcoming show dates and makes jokes about everyday life, so her followers in Severna Park will be able to get the latest updates on her success.

“Any creative pursuit takes years and year of working at it,” the comic observed. “You have to settle in and be ready for it. Working 9 to 5, then doing comedy at 6 and getting home at 2 can be exhausting, and you have to do it because you love it. Ultimately, it becomes the thing that is your career if you love it enough to throw your entire self into it.”