Katie Brien’s one of the first comedians I saw when I first moved to Portland. She co-hosts the monthly stand-up showcase Down to Funny, which tonight features Bri Pruett, Steven Wilber, Sean Jordan, Jason Traeger, Laila Hamdan, and James Barela. DTF returned this fall after Brien took a hiatus comedy to get sober. Now, she co-produces with Hutch Harris, and their venue’s shifted from East Burn to the Analog Cafe. Here’s what she told me about being a sober comic but not the sober comic, the evolution of her show, and the ultimate jerk-dude litmus test.
You recently got sober. How are things going?
Things are really good… I started coming back out to comedy in the fall. I work for Potty Talk, the sketch comedy webseries, and we’re pre-production right now. And I had to put on a show at White Owl, it was a fundraiser, and I’d been out of comedy for like a year and three months at that point, because… I had to go away. All my stuff started when I was 14, and then there I was, 32 years old. I was like, okay… that is not working anymore… I was just done with all of that. So, anyway, we had our show at White Owl and it was so fun, the place was packed, and I was starting to get depressed and I couldn’t figure out why and then I was like, oh, because that’s missing. And so I stayed away as long as I needed to. It’s interesting to be back in it. But… it feels really good.
Drugs and drinking are so often just part of arts scenes. Was that difficult to deal with when you came back?
Yeah, I think it was just staying away until I just knew that I was gonna be okay, because I’m always gonna want to drink… Every time I have a feeling—like, oh, I wanna stuff that down… When I started coming back out more… a couple people were like, “Oh, be careful, you’re gonna be in a bar.” And I was like, you know, being around someone’s $2 PBR tallboy is not what’s gonna make me want to drink. What’s gonna make me want to drink is not doing what I love, and feeling sorry for myself, or thinking that I can’t do it… Like I said, it’ll always be there, that’s what I had to realize, it’s always going to be my immediate, like, “That’s what’s gonna fix everything!” But it doesn’t. It took me a long, long time and a lot of mistakes to realize that. I feel better though… I used to drink because I thought it would help my nerves. Turns out it made my nerves a lot worse. And as far as performing now, if someone interrupts or there’s a heckler, I actually can come up with a clever way to respond, not just… “You want a microphone, you want to come up here and try this?”
How did you end up joining up with Hutch Harris, your co-producer?
Well, I started the show again with a lot of anxiety, and I wanted a co-producer. I met him back in the fall when I started coming back out… One of the very first shows [for] DTF, I needed a door-person, and so put it out there to the comedy community—can someone be here in 20 minutes and watch the door? And here he comes… I wanted someone that was going to match my enthusiasm, because… as far as putting on a show, I don’t do mediocre. I don’t do half-assed… It’s important… to know production stuff and to be good at marketing and all that but then also the love for it and excitement for it is really huge for me too.
Do you feel like comedy has helped your recovery at all?
Well, when I first got sober, I did not laugh for a long time, I didn’t think anything was funny, and I didn’t write for a long time. And then one day, it just like clicked back on, and I don’t ever want to be—like, pretty much everyone knows I’m sober, but I don’t wanna be like “the sober comic.” The majority of my act—there’s a few jokes where I talk about being a drug addict or, you know, doing some recovery work. But that’s not my thing. I don’t want that to be my thing. Because I’m just like everyone else. I’m just a person. I’m struggling just with life. I want to follow my dreams and do what I love and I think it can be weird for people sometimes, but just the fact that some people know has made it possible for me to answer questions for people or be someone that they can talk to… I mean now, it’s harder and it’s easier because I can’t blame a bad set at an open mic on being drunk. I can’t blame anything on being drunk. I take responsibility for my actions and if something goes wrong, instead of giving up and being defeated I think, okay, well, what can I do to make this better?
Tell me about Potty Talk.
Yeah, I’m so happy to be on board with that, because my entire 20s I was living in LA and I was working in the industry in TV and film and all that stuff and I knew I wasn’t ready to come back into the comedy world yet. And I met Brenan Dwyer and Rani Lightle—they’re the producers of the show. I had been on some of their other comedy shows, their fundraisers, and she sent out an email last spring saying she was looking for an associate producer, so I emailed her and we met up and it just was a perfect match. We did a lot—it was kind of cool because since I wasn’t doing stand-up, I had a lot of responsibility for all the fundraising and everything we were doing for the show and we ended up getting a huge art grant… and so we are way overbudget so this season is gonna be the best production, we’re gonna hold auditions and cast everyone, everyone’s going to get paid, so it’s a lot different than it’s been the first two seasons. And yeah, we’re gonna start filming in July. We’re gonna film six days straight—six 12-ish-hour days—and knock it all out, but it’s just been a great opportunity… It’s been fun.
There’s a lot of humor [that] sometimes seems to come from this painful place.
Yes… Back to how being sober has changed my comedy, so many of the jokes that I was writing and performing before I got sober, I can’t even do anymore.
Really?
Yeah. Because… I’ll always be self-deprecating, people want to hear the negative stuff that we think about, how we make things silly… but so many of the jokes I wrote before, I look back at them and I think, I don’t hate myself that much anymore. And that is huge. Those are not okay anymore… That was really interesting to see. I performed on a couple things over that year. I did two shows for Potty Talk and then a few shows over at the Fourth Dimension sober club and I didn’t have anything new because I hadn’t written because like I said nothing was funny to me for a while. I’d get so mad if people were laughing at anything. I was like brand-new. Everything is brand-new.
I do think there are people who never really reach that point—getting help—whether they have problems with drinking or not.
One of the hardest things to do is to remember that everyone is suffering in their own way, and who am I to lash back out at someone when I know that it feels like? How do I turn it into something positive without destroying myself in another way? Which is so different about the comedy that I do now.
I always wonder about comedy and pain. Are they connected inextricably?
Have you heard that math equation? Time plus tragedy equals comedy. There’s that… [Comedy] really was my therapy for a long time and it still is therapy. I think a lot of what I had written about and made fun of was stuff that I didn’t really know how to ever deal with and there are so many comics that have so much material that has nothing to do with pain… I’ve written some stuff lately that in some places, people think it’s funny, and somewhere else they’re like, ooh, that’s sad. I’m trying to make it funny. I’m trying to make this really sad thing funny. Pain is our motivator for expressing ourselves.
When people find out that you’re sober, are they mostly understanding or do you get some people who are kind of assholes about it?
I’ve had a few people be weird about it… I met this guy and he asked me out and I went and met him at a bar and he had had a couple drinks before then—I don’t care, I’ll date someone that drinks, preferably not an alcoholic—and he asked if he could buy me a drink and I was like “No, I’m fine, I don’t drink,” and he’s like “Boo, sorry to interrupt your sober party.” And I was like, dude!… I can date someone that’s a social drinker, one or two, but he was instantly, like, ugh. And I was like, I know, you know, it really does suck for you that I’m not gonna get so wasted and go home with you tonight because I hate myself, I know, I’m really not worth it, okay bye! It is like an extra layer of protection though.
Totally. It’s like a litmus test.
‘Cause if I don’t care that people drink, they shouldn’t care that I don’t. Me not wanting to hang out with someone who drinks would be like someone not wanting to have dinner with me if I was going to eat meat. That’s shitty. Both of those situations—people are who they are. It’s not my job to always try to control everything… But it gets easier, like the first night that I really had fun was New Year’s Eve, there was a comedian, she was having a party and she invited me—well, she invited everyone, and I was like, ugh, New Year’s Eve. The year before I had spent it with all sober people and I didn’t want to do what they were all doing this year, I really wanted to hang out with comedians and stuff, and I was like, okay, well, I’ll have my car, I’ll stay for like a half-hour, I can leave any time, it’s totally cool. I ended up staying until 2 in the morning. I had so much fun. And I wasn’t drunk. Some people were, some people weren’t. It was like, it doesn’t matter anymore.