Finding the Funny: Interviewing Tammy Pescatelli (Part 2 of 4)

Pescatelli’s not only a headliner in the United States, with a hit standup special, “Finding The Funny,” on Netflix. Her comedy career has taken her around the world.

You can read part 1 of 4 of this series right here.

---

“I did 12 cities in Israel, I’ve been on tours in Australia, I’ve done shows in Germany, Kuwait, Iraq, Dubai, London and Scotland.” According to Pescatelli, audiences are all different. One of her favorite places to perform is Boston, which is where she taped her Netflix special at the Wilbert Theater. She also loves the audiences in DC and other places. “I love the audience in—I was so shocked—Huntsville, Alabama!—they were so smart.” She feels lucky because by now the audiences come and they know the entity they’re getting, so no matter where she performs it could be the best. “Maybe tonight here in Boca Raton—you never know,” she said.

When she played this venue previously, she was part of a threesome which included Wendy Liebman and Michelle Balance. “The Improvs in West Palm Beach, Ft Lauderdale and Miami—I cut my teeth on all of them because they used to be owned by the same guy, so I played those three clubs since the nineties.”

Pescatelli doesn’t actively search for material. “Whatever happens in my life is how I get my ideas. I write with a muse. Something has to happen that I think is funny. I just let life happen and then I go ‘Okay, I need to talk about that.’ I jot it down, depending on what’s available— there’s tons of pieces of paper, napkins, and then my voicemail notes. . . and then sometimes I’ll go back and like ‘what does this mean?. . .cabbage?’ and then it just becomes a joke—hopefully, or it doesn’t, and then sometimes it becomes a bit, and then sometimes it becomes a bit with a call back.”

Even though Improv seems spontaneous, Pescatelli says every professional comic is scripted. “You have to allow for interaction—things do happen; there’s something you want to talk about that you weren’t planning, sometimes you can get thrown off, it just depends on where someone would interrupt or what happens—like I just taped my new special March 16th and there was an Amber Alert. People’s phones were [turned] off and the Amber Alert overrode it twice! I’ve had people die at the show and be able to say something funny or cover. There’s nothing funny about an Amber Alert, so I just had to pause and then say ‘we’re gonna have to cut this out of the special’ and go with it. That broke the rhythm.”

As a working woman, wife and a mother of a 10 year old boy, like most women, balancing her life has been her biggest challenge. “When I got pregnant, I did not know how I was gonna balance it, and still there are things, like, y’know, I’m missing, this week for example, was my son’s last basketball game—that kind of stuff happens . . . but y’know, this is what I do for a living. I make a good living. This is how I take care of the family. I go home for like four days and then I go back on the road.”

While living in LA, Pescatelli, who was born and raised in Cleveland, met her husband who was from Brooklyn. “We tried to live in Brooklyn and we lived in an attached house next to his mother, and she makes the mother on ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ look like a nice lady.” Since living too close for comfort didn’t work out they had a “go away house” in Pennsylvania and they produced their TV show while there. “It ended up, my husband fell in love with the little town and that was just it, it was just great, I moved my parents there and my son lives a normal life.”

More to come . . .