Out comedians Kevin Meaney and Julia Scotti are teaming up for “Big Pants and Hot Flashes!” a stand-up performance followed by a Q&A session, Aug. 15 at Act II Playhouse in Ambler.
Both comedians are comedy veterans who came out later in their careers, Meaney as gay and Scotti as transgender. Both bring those experiences in humorous detail to the stage.
“It’s a real special show because it’s got content and meaning,” Meaney said. “I think it’s a timely show. I love Julia and I love her story. We both came into our own later in life. I think it really says something, this show, in a communal way.”
Scotti had stopped doing comedy around the time she came out as transgender and underwent sexual-reassignment surgery.
“I began the process in 1999 but I had my gender reassignment in 2002,” she said. “I am ‘13 years old’ this year. I left teaching in 2007 and I have been doing standup since 2011. If you can believe it, in between I was a stock broker.”
Scotti added that transitioning after doing standup for so many years as a man brought out a range of reactions from her peers in the business when she decided to get back into comedy.
“I quit standup in 2000 to become a teacher. But from what I hear, when word got out as to what I was doing, there were all kinds of stories that I had lost my mind or that I had gone into an insane asylum. And nobody bothered to ask me,” she said. “So, you could say there was a reaction although I wasn’t around to witness it. For the most part, it has been a very welcoming experience coming back. There have been a few cases where a few people needed to see me again, which I understood, or just didn’t want to work with me at all, which I don’t understand. Most of the people that I work with in the business were very, very welcoming and I really appreciated it because it was a fearful thing coming back.”
Meaney has never had a break from his comedy career, which began in 1980. Soon his distinctive voice and animated performance style found him appearing on TV shows like “The Tonight Show,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “The Jay Thomas Show.”
Meaney said he was inspired to come out after landing a role in a Broadway show.
“The main reason I got the courage to do it was because I was in ‘Hairspray’ on Broadway,” he said. “I found this new family, aside from my own family, where I could totally be myself. Everybody in the cast and crew was gay. It was the gayest show ever, and I mean that in a great way. Mostly everybody was gay. I kept saying to myself, This is who I am and I’m hiding. I confided in one of the actors and we just became great friends. After two years of being in the show, I just decided it was time. The minute I told the first person, I was set free. It was a really big part of my life. So the question is, does Broadway make you gay? Yes, it does.”
After he came out, Meaney said, he discovered that his sexuality wasn’t the closely guarded secret he thought it was among his audience.
“They were the first ones to tell me that ‘we knew anyway,’” he said. “Even my old comedy friends said, ‘We should have told you a long time ago.’ Everybody seemed to know I was gay except me. Once you start talking about it on stage to people who don’t know you, it’s a lot of ‘who cares?’ because the younger generation really doesn’t care if you are gay or straight. It’s not a big thing to them so you have to make that funny and it has to become a story. That was my challenge.”
It was a somewhat different situation for Scotti, who said she had to start from scratch with her comedy career.
“I had to write a completely new act,” she said. “I was just getting my feet wet again. My persona up there is similar to what it was before but the material is brand new and I’m constantly writing new stuff. The bottom line is whether or not I was funny. I think that was the big question. Is she funny? Is the audience going to like her? I didn’t concern myself with if they would embrace my identity because I felt that, if I could go out there and kill it every single time, everything else would fall into place. I never really exploited the fact that I was transgender. I emphasize the fact that I’m supposed to be labeled a transgender comedian but I’m really a comedian who happens to be transgender. I’m not speaking for Kevin but Kevin is a comedian first and he’s gay second. It’s not our entire identity.”
Scotti added the emergence of more transgender figures into mainstream culture is helping to make audiences more open to transgender performers.
“There’s a sizable number of trans comics around the country,” she said. “I’m not on an island here. If you go to New York, there’s a community of them. Because of Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox, people are becoming aware that we exist. I think once they get to know us, they become a lot more accepting. I don’t really even talk about it until I’m 15 or 20 minutes into my act, if I do at all. I don’t always talk about it. I do that because in order to work mainstream clubs, I have to be a mainstream act. I cannot just focus on that subject because it loses its luster after a few minutes. My act is for everybody: straight, gay, cis, trans, anybody. They’ll get something out of my act.”
Meaney said he found lots of new material in his coming-out story.
“Comedy is like truth,” he said. “There is so much comedy in truth. Once I started talking about coming out to my wife and my family, I found humor in that. Where is my relationship now with my ex-wife and my daughter? It was a fun thing to play with on stage and having the audience accept it was a challenge and it took me a while to kind of figure out that road. It was still my style and brand of standup, which each of us eventually gets to. I discovered that and I liked it.”
Kevin Meaney and Julia Scotti perform as part of “Big Pants and Hot Flashes!” 8 p.m. Aug. 15 at Act II Playhouse, 56 E. Butler Ave., Ambler. For more information or tickets, call 215-654-0200 or visit www.kevinmeaney.com or www.juliascotti.com.