On stage and screen, Stacy Kendro finds the funny
Though she didn’t start performing until her thirties, Stacy Kendro’s journey to the standup spotlight started much earlier.
Before starting college, she waitressed at a restaurant in Framingham, Mass., when it became a suburban outpost of Nick’s Comedy Stop. For someone who would eventually major in art and minor in theater, whose dad loved comedy and had a record collection that included Rodney Dangerfield and Spike Jones, it was timely.
Since then, “it’s kind of been my whole adult life,” she said by phone recently. Urged by coworkers, she did characters for the Nick’s crowd a few years in. “It was awkward, but I got laughs,” she said, “There were like 15 waitresses, and none of them did standup, but I did. So it was already in me, I think.”
Later, she sporadically duoed with her now ex-husband, an experienced comic. When the two weren’t working, she crafted a solo set and tried out her nascent act at one of her friend’s shows.
“I didn’t tell my husband at the time,” she recalled. “I wanted to not have anybody looking at what I was writing, just go do it, fail a bunch of times and see how it went.”
When Kendro got serious, she headed to L.A., doing shows at the Comedy Store’s female-centric Belly Room, along with the Ice House, which had an annex for young comics. All the while, she’d hit every open mic she could find. Then she headed home. “I kind of cut my teeth in Boston,” she said.
Later, she performed on cruise ships. “That was interesting…. I met singers, but mostly it was piano players and magicians that I became really good friends with. Then I went to New York in 2000…. I came back at the tail end of the pandemic.”
Kendro’s comedy is street-smart and world-weary, with sharp wordplay leavened in. She’s written a series of film shorts called Albanian Assassin set in Las Vegas. She’s won accolades, including placing second in a national Ladies of Laughter competition in 2019. Kendro’s writing is also getting noticed. She wrote a couple of pilots, one of which was picked up by Women in Film Video New England for a table read and more. “We’re also going to block, which is great, because you can see everybody act it out, but also network with filmmakers.”
Since returning home, Kendro has become a regular on Rob Steen’s Headliners circuit, which includes a show in Gilford on July 12 with Jody Sloane and Amy Tee at Beans & Greens’ Notch Biergarten called Ladies of Boston Comedy. She’s not crazy about the name, even while understanding the marketing of showcases like Mothers of Comedy and others.
“It’s like we’re a novelty,” she said. “You know, there’s never an all-male show, there’s just a show…. Interestingly, bookers are still in the boys’ club in their heads. They kind of base a lot of who they book on what their tastes are, not realizing that half the audience is women. In that sense, it’s harder to be a woman.”
Kendro once opened for Joan Rivers at a New Hampshire women’s expo and recalls watching her perform as revelatory.
Her set mixed humor and reflection. “She managed to talk about her personal life and some triumphs. She even said to the audience, ‘You think just because I’m famous that my life is easy? I got fired off the Tonight show. My husband committed suicide. I’ve been through some trials.’ But she made it funny, she was very skillful in that.”
Later, the two talked about Rivers’ early years in a comedy world even more dominated by male comics than today’s. “I asked her what it was like,” Kendro said, and the answer exemplified the legend’s no-BS worldview. “She said, ‘Oh, it was easy, because I was friends with Richard Pryor, and Carlin, and we drove around the Village, and I did stuff with them.”
Ladies of Boston Comedy w/ Jody Sloane, Stacy Kendro, Amy Tee
When: Saturday, July 12, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Notch Biergarten by Beans & Greens, 245 Intervale Road, Gilford
Tickets: $27.50 at beansandgreensfarm.com
Featured photo: Stacy Kendro. Courtesy photo.
