Just For Laughs: Kate Clinton

Before there was Ellen, before there was Lea Delaria, Kate Clinton was out there, cracking up thousands of half-naked dykes on the Womyn's
Festival circuit.

Clinton may have moved a little closer to the mainstream lately--writing for and appearing on the Rosie O'Donnell Show, publishing a new book with Ballantine--but that hasn't meant dulling down her razor-sharp left-wing wit. It helps that the moral majority types keep lobbing her slowballs.

"You can't write it any better than this," Clinton said in a phone call from New York last week. "Pat Robertson has said that because of Gay Day and Disney, there would be terrible storms and hurricanes. My feeling is not to take it too personally, but to hire out in Florida for the fires. Rain starts--boom--the fires are out! We'd be heroes."

In her new book Don't Get Me Started, Clinton has a fresh take on President Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military. "Think of the money that could have been saved in the Persian Gulf War," Clinton writes. "One big multi-pocketed lesbian proclaiming, 'I'm a lesbian!' from the top of a sand dune, and whole platoons of Iraqis would have bit the dust. Not a shot fired. No property destroyed. The Neutron Lesbian strikes again."

After spending Gay Pride month ("formerly known as June") doing concerts and a monster book tour, and before heading to Provincetown to try out new material, Clinton will be in Montreal next week hosting Queer Comics. She'll also be giving a reading at Chapters. As a former English teacher, Clinton is one of the most literate comics out there. She believes this is a great time to be a comedian because "people just want to use their brains. I mean they love it when they're really working with me, trying to figure out what in god's name made me go there. I think things like e-mail and sitcoms have made comedy banal. People are well able and happy to use their brains again. People are well able to go beyond appearances.

"Like, 'Bob Dole is old.' That is not a joke. Or as a young friend of mine said, she had to break up with her girlfriend because her girlfriend thought, 'Shut up, bitch' was humour."

Sometimes, Clinton says, being an out comic means you forget that you have to keep coming out. For instance, when she appeared on the Rosie O'Donnell show in May, the "L" word never came up. Clinton swears this was not a case of censorship by the widely-understood-to-be-closeted O'Donnell. She says she didn't even realize she hadn't outed herself until friends started calling. Clinton was a staff writer for the first seven months of the show's life, and says that she left only because she needed more time to work on the book, and that she and O'Donnell are still on good terms.

"Rosie's always been very supportive of me," Clinton says, "and as nervous as she might have been about that, nonetheless, I was on the show."

Rosie might have been more nervous about Clinton's talk-show track record than her lesbianism. In her book, Clinton notes that she puzzled the Arsenio crowd with her political humour shortly before that show went off the air, and "The Joan Rivers Show? Gone. Women Aloud With Mo Gaffney? Gone. I volunteered to do the Rush Limbaugh Show just to see if I could get him off the air."

Kate Clinton tells it like it is as host of Queer Comics at Club Soda Sunday, July 19 at 7 and 9:30pm, $19.50 + tax. she reads at Chapters, Tuesday, July 21 at 8:30pm