Queer Stand-Up Comedy Lineages in NYC
Lili Pujol performs at Don’t Tell Mama in NYC. Photo by Diego Salazar.
In tandem with resistance movements of the Black Panthers, the Chicana Brown Berets, and the Young Lords, people of color mobilized through activism, protests, and boycotts throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Such deliberate modes of political organizing also took shape through theater and poetry. In New York City, particularly in the Latinx queer stand-up comedy scene, pioneras like Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana contributed a performance that, at the time, was a rethinking of free expression within stand-up comedy and performance art. Both artists helped birth the modern aesthetics that a new generation of comedians are making their own.
“Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana contributed a performance that, at the time, was a rethinking of free expression within stand-up comedy and performance art.”
Decades before, spaces such as the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in New York City and the Nuyorican Poets Café united sensational scripted work and improvisational performance fervently, allowing young folks of color to reconnect or engage with their creative autonomy. Performance studies scholar Karen Jaime writes in their book The Queer Nuyorican, “The Nuyorican Poets Cafe has emphasized poetry and various performance styles that reflect a coming together of people…to challenge racism, affirm their identities, and meditate on their personal and collective realities.”
While the Nuyorican existed as a blueprint for communal performance rituals steeped primarily in poetry, Tropicana and Gomez oscillated between theatre and performance art to expand the limits of live comedy. Predating gentrification on the Lower East Side, Gomez and Tropicana (both lesbians with a Caribbean background) frequently performed at venues such as Dixon Place and Performance Space New York (formerly known as PS 122), where they’d stage everything from autobiographical solo performances, sketch comedy characters, and even a subversive piece titled Single Wet Female, satirizing the 1992 film Single White Female.
Marga Gomez. Photo by Cynthia Smalley.
Gomez’s work exists and emanates through the lens of a thespian-clown hybrid with a cunning imagination. Pushing past representational binaries, her stand-up comedy routines refuse to solely repeat the spitfire Latina tropes, while at the same time expanding the layers of lesbian experiences onstage with subversion and wit.
Similarly challenging more traditional modes of theatre and performance art and live comedy was Tropicana—also known as Alina Troyano. Through her theatrical scripts—Chicas 2000, Memorias de la Revolución (cowritten with Uzi Parnes), and The Conquest of Mexico As Seen Through the Eyes of Hernan Cortes’ Horse—Tropicana skillfully pens aesthetically defiant or genre-phobic work that tinkers with Latina stereotypes and offers a landscape to do away with them entirely. An Obie Award winner and contemporary of Gomez, Tropicana’s unparalleled braggadocio on stage and the page satiates the need for pushing the needle forward with interdisciplinary work. Not necessarily couched comfortably in the label as a stand-up comedian, Tropicana’s comedic performances as Pingalito Betancourt in Memorias de la Revolución is a display of drag and satirical commentary that distills Cuban identity into a more porous state, departing from hypermasculine political symbols and icons across history.
Carmelita Tropicana. Photo by Carlos David.
As a few of the north stars for Latine performance, Gomez and Tropicana tightened, loosened, and redefined their live acts to build room for performance worlds anew. Their work, and particularly that of Gomez and Tropicana, has helped shape the current comedy scene. About 10 years ago, Lili Pujol¹—a lesbian, Cuban, Miami-born and -raised comedian—was a theater student at Florida State University. Assigned to read Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentications: Queers of Color And The Performance of Politics, Pujol perked up reading the author’s robust case studies about performance, theatre, and the realms in between. Coming from an anti-tradition, chronically Catholic context, they identified with the artists featured in the book because of their rule-breaking nature and ability to exist in a larger umbrella of performance that doesn’t fit neatly within theatre or pop culture.
A few years later Pujol moved to NYC despite a rejection from the Tisch School of the Arts. Instead, they enrolled in classes to study improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Pujol would then go on to perform improv in Spanish on a team called Gato Culo before cofounding Glory W(hole). We had a buzzing need to create a space where queer comedians of color could get their feet wet for the first time, without a sea of Anglo gays as hosts or the dominant population at open mics or shows.
Glory W(hole) deliberately brings together brand new and experienced queer of color stand-up comics on the same bill. Tongue-in-cheek in nature and rhetorically relevant, Glory W(hole) consists of a partially curated lineup by Pujol and me, while the remainder of the lineup is vacant—meant for nascent, budding queer people of color to sign up, first come, first served.
“The state of stand-up—particularly amidst Manhattan and Brooklyn—has evolved and remained the same in a ghastly way.”
And within and outside of Glory W(hole) there are exciting contributions to the scene. The state of stand-up—particularly amidst Manhattan and Brooklyn—has evolved and remained the same in a ghastly way. Bound by an influx of Anglo-led open mics and shows, the straight and gay white male dominates open mics and other productions, greatly impacting who occupies stages in New York City. This lopsided scale to operate from, with queer people of color on the margins in host and producorial positions, was part of the inspiration to birth a show like Glory W(hole).
As much as this homogenized glimpse of comedy in improvisation and sketch comedy proves to be demographically bleak, there is a luminous generation of queer of color comics who began to catch national attention from the 2010s to the present. Ana Fabrega of HBO’s Los Espookys, the scripted Spanish-language comedy series she cocreated with Julio Torres. Joel Kim Booster, Jaboukie Young-White, River L. Ramirez, Patti Harrison, and Sydnee Washington make up some of the field of skilled, vivacious folks who have cascaded across alt and popular spaces onstage and on screen.
Although the pleasure and delightful riot of glee organizing and cohosting Glory W(hole) fuses these new forces––the freaks of nature in stand-up comedy––I contend that gentrification and blistering costs to keep spaces like Dixon Place open are some of the pertinent hurdles in our midst, as queer communities of color continue to live on and offstage, as lively as possible.
¹ For context and transparency, Lili Pujol is a collaborator and friend of mine with whom I co-originated the recurring stand-up show Glory W(hole) on the Lower East Side at Dixon Place.
