A Quote by Martha Kelly
Most of my standup is about stuff that makes me uncomfortable. There are also things I don't joke about. I don't do jokes about the people who helped me get sober.
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The bad thing about being a famous comedian is that every now and then someone approaches me to tell an old joke. Don't tell me jokes - I have that. People also say the weirdest things, sometimes sarcastic things, and even evil things. They like to provoke to get a reaction.
I don't like my wrestling or entertainment in general to be too clean or predictable for me as a fan. When I say clean, I'm not talking about dirty jokes, middle fingers and stuff like that. I'm actually not even a big fan of that. A lot of people talk about the attitude era being so great but a lot of it was terrible crap, sex jokes and over-the-top terrible bad comedy. It was Jerry Springer-like. They made a joke about a woman's breasts. Hilarious, but where's the wrestling? I look back on a lot of stuff now, and I'm like where's the wrestling? It's just a lot of crappy jokes.
What makes me uncomfortable about [Barack] Obama is what makes me uncomfortable about any young politician who has not yet been bloodied inside the Beltway.
When someone comes up to me and says, 'Mary, you helped save my marriage', or, 'Mary, you helped me get out of this abusive relationship', I'm in it, really in their lives. And I'm so passionate about my feelings, but also about showing people the way through theirs.
I started to get so many letters from unlikely people; a single mum going, "I watch your show, I'm not into survival, but I hold down four jobs and I get it when you say it's about persistence and putting a positive attitude into things during difficult times." That for me was a great liberator to realize that the show isn't about me running around, jumping off stuff and flexing muscles, it's about inspiring people. That makes me really happy.
What makes me laugh is hearing the stuff about my son or the stuff about my mom. I was a big fan of Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy; they talked a lot about their moms and their kids. Those are the things that inspired me to do stand-up.
If I make a joke about black people or Asian people or whatever, and then an Asian comes up to me afterwards and says, "That joke offended me," I'm still more or less not going to listen, but at least it makes sense, like I said something that was about them.
The real issues I don't think most people touch. The Clinton jokes are all about Monica Lewinsky and all that stuff and not about the important things, like the fact that he wouldn't ban landmines.
The funny thing about 'Take Shelter' is that a lot of people talk about how it was allegory for the economy and things that were to happen. And that was so on the nose in the movie for me. I was like, 'That's obvious.' It's the other stuff about marriage and commitment and those other things that I spent the most time thinking about.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.
Since my act is a goofy reflection of what's going on in my life, I started doing pot jokes, and I noticed that audiences invariably love pot jokes. Even people who don't smoke pot think it's a funny subject. So when I started getting laughs, I started doing more material about it. When people come to see my shows, there are a lot of stoners in the audience, but there are also a lot of people who just like me. So I try to give a healthy mix, where people aren't going "There are too many jokes about pot!" or "There's not enough jokes about pot!"
When I'm writing columns, it's - all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.
People are in denial all the time, hiding things. If I tell you a racist or dirty joke and you laugh, you're telling me something about yourself, which you don't want to reveal. Accessing that hidden side is what good acting is all about. And there are only a handful of people in the entire United States who interest me as actors, who surprise me. Even people who write about it, don't know anything about good performance. At least when you work at General Motors, you know something about cars.
I think that to me, films are personal affairs. It doesn't mean that I am against other people doing things differently, but I'm talking about what I can do. So I don't feel comfortable going to a new city or a certain class of which I don't have sufficient knowledge, doing research on that, and then writing a story about it I don't think I have the ability of presenting other people on screen in that way. It makes me uncomfortable. This doesn't mean that I only want to talk about myself. I want to talk about what I know.
So for me, fashion was about standing out as an individual - and it helped me get the attention that most people try to get with publicity stunts or by doing other crazy things. But I just let the attention come to me naturally, and I think some of that has to do with my fashion.
In general, I think there are some things that require time before you can talk about them. Some stuff that happened over the summer, for instance - the Philando Castile shooting, Alton Sterling, the police officers in Dallas - there was no room for jokes. But there are, of course, the policies that have given us those events. Now, there's a lot of room for jokes there. When you're looking at something difficult to talk about, there's always a sideways way in that feels a little less personal to people. That's where the joke lives.
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