Laurie Kilmartin makes me laugh like a tiny, ticklish child who’s been mainlining Pixi Stix. Her jokes are delightfully uncensored and manage to be both vaguely offensive and very charming—a phrase she suggested be put on her tombstone when I used it in our interview—and cover all manner of subject matter, from having a kid at 40 after putting in years of “anti-kid” comedy to the financial lives of sex workers.

“The big difference with these jokes is I’m willing to hold the audience’s hand on some of them,” she says. “Smile, go slow so everyone can jump on board. Look at Chris Rock—he gets away with murder because he’s smiling when he says it. It’s strange—even though you’re a comedian, performing at a comedy club, people still need to be reassured that you’re joking. So I do a lot of that.”

If you look at any of her stand-up, you’ll find this is true. Her crowd-work is just as fun to watch as the jokes themselves. When audience members are uncomfortable with her jokes—as one woman at a recent show in the above video was, prompting Kilmartin to publicly offer her a hug (she accepted a Bud Light)—Kilmartin engages with them.

But there are limits. “I always think if a joke isn’t working, it’s because I haven’t finished it yet,” she says. “No matter what the topic, a good joke should make people laugh. Not all the people all the time, but most, most of the time.”

If you know anything about Laurie Kilmartin, you probably know she’s a staff writer for Conan, and you’ve probably heard about her tweets about her dad, written when he was in hospice. Those tweets, in a way, serve as the basis for her 45 Jokes About My Dead Dad tour:

“My dad had cancer for nine months, and I was talking about it onstage as soon as I found out,” she says. “The only reason I went on a tweeting rampage during his hospice is that I didn’t want to leave his side to perform, and I had to put the jokes I was coming up with somewhere.”

Laurie Kilmartin will perform some of those jokes tonight at Bossanova Ballroom, a pretty amazing lineup with Dan St Germain, Alex Falcone, and Amy Miller. If you like laughing uproariously, you should definitely go.