Out comedian Suzanne Westenhoefer plans to keep us warm with laughter when she performs this weekend at New Hope Winery.
One of America’s most recognized openly gay standup comedians, Westenhoefer is no stranger to New Hope — and said she likens the town to another LGBT favorite when she describes it to friends.
“The only way it’s easy is if they have been to Provincetown,” she said. “Then you can say it’s like Provincetown with more antique stores. They need a few more cabarets and it could be Provincetown.”
Westenhoefer is focusing on live performances after co-starring for two seasons on the romantic comedy series “We Have To Stop Now” with Cathy DeBuono and Jill Bennett. The comedian said the series probably won’t film anymore episodes.
“Sad to say, I think it’s not going to happen for a third year. We are very upset because people were into it, but the lead couple broke up and they were kind of the executive producers. In that Hollywood fashion, when they fell out of love with each other, the project kind of dies with them.”
The demise of “We Have To Stop Now” comes at an inopportune time, as independently produced series like “Orange is the New Black” are riding a wave of interest thanks to outlets like Netflix.
“Any time you get smaller-subset shows that break out, it absolutely brings attention to all the other things that are going on,” Westenhoefer said. “The thing about web series is they are hard. You have to go online, sign up and pay. With Netflix, that’s making it easier for people for sure. They are getting an idea that they can get good programming that way. That’s only going to help any web series. It’s not like watching TV the way we used to.”
Westenhoefer said most of the projects she gets approached to do these days involve web series or podcasts.
“Sometimes it’s constant and weird and other times there’s nothing and I feel like nobody loves me because I’m a sad comic like that. But I would say more these days, it’s definitely web-based and podcasting because that’s where the success and money is. Television is so … I mean, ‘Orange is the New Black’ didn’t happen on television. They’re still doing a lot of the same old things on television and they are still doing programming that’s pretty much either for the really old or the really young.” She added that the LGBT cable networks could lead the charge in creating new LGBT programming, but they haven’t yet.
“Netflix and any kind of web series or podcast are willing to go there,” said Westenhoefer. “I’ve been weirdly disappointed. Logo is not creating anything and we thought they would. I’m not sure if it’s not successful. They’ll do ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ and that’s it. They stopped doing ‘The Big Gay Sketch Show’ and now Kate McKinnon is on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I don’t know why, but they are not much for creating new programming. They only want to buy things that have already been done. Most of us don’t have a sitcom that was syndicated on NBC that we can sell to Logo.
“I’ve never understood why they are not creating gay programming or a gay talk show. Fortune Feimster and Ross Mathews from ‘The Tonight Show’ and Butch McManus, who is on ‘The Queen Latifah Show,’ they are friends of mine and we’ve all tried to work with Logo and really haven’t had much success. If you do a special and someone else tapes it, they buy it and they show it. Now a lot of these people who they could have had a chance to work with are going to get way too big for Logo. It seems like a waste and a missed opportunity. But I don’t run Logo. They won’t let me.”
With the increasing number of openly gay comedians finding mainstream success since she started in the industry, Westenhoefer was humbled to discover some of them listed her as an inspiration.
“That’s really embarrassing for me,” she said. “But I did do a show in Long Beach and Fortune opened the show for me. She made this very long, impassioned speech about how I was the reason she knew she could do standup. It was very humbling and sweet and it blew me away. I hope that any comic who started after me thinks I helped them. That’s kind of the idea.”
Westenhoefer said she had a few comedic trailblazers of her own as influences.
“I listened to a lot of comedy albums when I was a kid so it was like George Carlin and Robert Klein and Lily Tomlin,” she said. “But Lily, she’s more than a standup. She blows us all away with the characters and the one-woman shows. When I started doing standup, I was doing straight clubs in Manhattan and I knew of Kate Clinton, but I didn’t know any other gay comics at the time. I knew that she definitely showed me it was possible. She wasn’t performing in the straight clubs yet. But I knew that I wouldn’t get shot, I guess. It seems funny to say that now, but that was 1990. It’s hard to believe that there was this time where it was absolutely not accepted. It was not that long ago that a club would book you and you were not allowed to talk about being gay. Most major comedy clubs will have a gay night, which is a little ghetto-izing. They have black nights, ladies nights, Latino nights, but that’s always going to be the way.”
Even with the visibility of LGBT comedians in these more-enlightened times, it seems there are more instances of mainstream comics getting into trouble with sometimes antigay material.
Westenhoefer said comics should be able to express themselves freely, but also should own up to it when they take things too far.
“In general, I don’t like to see comics back down from what they’ve done,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to see comics backing away from their opinions and their jokes. But if you get out there and you say something cruel … and cruel is different from mocking someone because that’s what we do. But if you said something cruel, you said it. Are you going to stand by it or jump in and say, ‘Maybe I went too far and I didn’t mean it that way’? I know for me personally, I mock people. I mock myself. I mock my family. I mock my partner. But I don’t want anyone feeling bad after what I did. What’s the point in that? But if you have an intention of a joke and it went too far, then people need to lighten up a bit and remember it’s comedy. That’s the point.”
Suzanne Westenhoefer performs Jan. 24-25 at New Hope Winery, 6123 Lower York Road, New Hope. For more information or tickets, call 215-794-2331 or visit www.suzannew.com.