Comic crusader

>> Kelli Dunham is changing the
world one yuk at a time

PREACHER OF PUNCHLINES: Dunham

by AMY BARRATT

“I don’t have to come out to anybody.”

Comedian Kelli Dunham isn’t defending her right to stay in the closet, just stating fact: it should be perfectly obvious this buzzcut-sportin’, flannel-shirt-clad skateboarder is a lesbian. Unless of course you take her for a 12-year-old boy. This particular gaffe has occurred often enough that Dunham titled her first CD I Am Not a 12-Year-Old Boy.

“I had an advantage starting out as a comedian, being in a niche,” says the stand-up/storyteller who is bringing her show Almost Pretty to the upcoming LGBT Harvest Festival. “I never played comedy clubs, so I never had to worry that much about punchline, punchline, punchline.”

It’s not that Dunham’s stuff isn’t hilarious, especially to a queer audience, it’s just that she’s not as determined to “kill” as a club comic is. She attributes her gentler vibe to playing an alternative circuit that includes “Pride celebrations, coffee houses, livestock auctions…”

Before getting into comedy six years ago, Dunham kept herself busy saving the world. She worked at a school for kids with disabilities in Haiti, then began volunteering at a nearby Home for the Dying run by the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa’s religious order. Four years in, she requested to join the order and was sent for “aspirancy” training in, of all places, the Bronx. That experience, which ended in her being rejected as a nun for, among other things, “having too much self-esteem” became the raw material for her previous one-woman show, Bad Habits.

Dunham then became a registered nurse and until recently had a day job that involved doing home visits with teenage moms. “I miss it,” she says, “but in the last year, I was working full-time, I was on the road 32 weekends doing comedy.”

“My problem with performing art was, how much does it really change the world?” she explains. “But about the time I was wrestling with the decision to become a full-time comic, my partner [plus-size burlesque queen Heather McAllister, founder of the Big Burlesque and the Fat-Bottom Revue] became really ill with ovarian cancer. Towards the end, the only thing that brought her comfort was sitting and watching stand-up comics on TV. That made me realize that comedy might not fix all the world’s problems, but it could make the world a better place to hang out while we’re changing it.”

“If you know that I used to be a nun, it tells you a lot about the choices I make now. In many ways, I’m living the life now that I wanted then. Only with less praying.

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It’s another busy week in local theatre. Playwright Alex Haber’s Housekeeping & Homewrecking, presented in a shortened form at Fringe ’07, gets the full-length treatment at Théâtre Ste-Catherine starting tonight, Nov. 29. Alain Goulem directs a star-studded cast.

Also this evening, Infinitheatre’s Pipeline series of readings gets underway with The Source, by Guy Sprung. Readings continue over the next four nights at 7 p.m. at the Bain St-Michel (5300 St-Dominique). Pay what you can.

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The Harvest Festival gets underway Dec. 4 with a preview of A Queer Carol, Joe Godfrey’s retelling of the Dickens classic that promises to “make the Yuletide really gay.”

Go to villagescene.com for more info on all productions.

Almost Pretty at the MainLine Theatre
(3997 st-laurent) Dec. 11, 7 p.m.,
and Dec. 14, 10:30 p.m.