Find Something New and Bring It! Interviewing Tammy Pescatelli

This is the last part of a 4 article series. You can read part 1, 2, and 3 here in Women In Comedy.

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Becoming a success in comedy requires a combination of everything; a magical gift, practice and training. “Ten thousand hours for sure,” says Pescatelli. “You can’t bomb too long, because at a certain point, people have to like you enough to give you their money. They show up wanting to buy tickets and if they come one time and they pay you money—and you don’t deliver, they don’t come back.”

I asked Pescatelli what she feels is most important, writing funny, or, stage performance. “The funny part about comedy is, it’s so subjective. There are people right now that are huge sensations—I don’t personally find them so funny but I see the merit in it—I see how they entertain people.” Pescatelli admits there are people who can entertain without having good writing, but if you’re a good writer and you don’t have stage presence, you’re not getting in front of people. “Even Stephen Wright who’s one of my favorites, his stage presence became that awkwardness. You can only name like one or two people like that. I love him.”

Pescatelli has always had goals—two month, four month, six month plans, but then, like everyone else, life takes it’s twist and turns. “I found myself at this really odd place in my life. I had this agent for 15 years and a manager and I had all these opportunities and then someone lifted some material and I basically got blackballed for saying, ‘Hey! Those are our jokes.’ It wasn’t just myself, three other women said something too . . . I was the last one to say something and I’m the one who took the biggest brunt.”

That incident happened two years ago, and after losing her agent and her manager, it’s taken time to come back. “If you watch Gary Shandling’s documentary, it talks about how he spoke up against something that was wrong and it broke, it was really tough and it broke me, because I thought this was a camaraderie, but it’s not. So I just keep working and plodding ahead and hopefully I’m still viable and my goal is to get this ‘Way After School Special’ special sold.”

With all the choices on Netflix, Pescatelli doesn’t necessarily want to go that route again, even though she admits they’re nice to work with. “I wouldn’t turn it down, but I want to try other venues first because there’s so many people on Netflix and I don’t want to get lost and it’s all about the algorithm if it suggests yours. I have to check every now and then to make sure my special [Finding The Funny] is still out there.”

One of the keys with women right now, is that they’re getting a chance to be heard. “When I first started it was an anomaly to have a woman on a show and I inevitably would hear, ‘Show me your tits!’ or other women would be mean to me in the audience because they had gotten dressed all day and gotten ready and they didn’t want their husband or their boyfriend looking [at me], it was a real catty thing and now that‘s not the generation that we’re growing up in and people have a chance to be heard.” She feels the door is now open a little bit more for women. “I’m not saying it’s completely open—so bring it! y’know what I mean? You have to bring it. There’s so many things that have already been covered, come with something new, come with your own perspective. And there’s some great women that are coming up, some young female comics, Emma Willmann is one of my favorites and she’s got some really funny stuff, and of course you’ve seen what’s happened with my lovely friend Tiffany Haddish—It’s great! Beth Stelling—I’ve heard great things about her.”

When it comes to location, Pescatelli said when you’re starting out it makes a huge difference where you live. “You have to be able to constantly go to clubs and get the word out. But no matter what, if you’re a real working comic, you gotta get on a plane to get somewhere.” Pescatelli is at a place where she’s making a great living so she doesn’t have to travel as much as she once did. Sometimes she may travel 15 days out of the month and other times only five days. She’s committed to doing whatever it takes to make sure her family is taken care of. Sometimes she performs in theaters, sometimes at clubs, or corporate events; she’s even performed on military bases overseas. “I’ve set goals down and just let it come instead of putting off, and I know the only thing I can control is the stage.”

In her act she often jokes about her dumb husband and her dumb cousin and I asked whether her family has taken offense to any of it. “My husband is so confident—he loves that I talk about him—and no one can tell who dumb cousin is—those characters are an amalgamation. Dumb cousin isn’t just one person. My mother-in-law loved it that I talked about her. My son is the only person who’s off limits for me, unless he does something completely ridiculous.”

Pescatelli’s joking about her family is a tradeoff that has afforded them all some real perks. “I’m planning to take seven people in my family to Italy for three weeks in July, so they’re gonna have to let me talk about them. They don’t mind it when it’s on the Tonight Show. They get a little cachet out of it, so don’t kid yourself.”