A Joyful Girl
Originally
published March 28, 2007
By Bill D'Agostino
News-Post Staff
– FrederickNewsPost.com
"I love starting
out happy," actress and stand-up comedian Joy Gohring said, describing the usual pattern
of her jokes, "and ending dark."
The first time that Gohring stepped on stage as a comic, in a club in her
hometown of
"I got more laughs from looking at my hand than any of the jokes I
wrote," she recalled.
Gohring, who performs Friday at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, is
now getting laughs for her outrageous antics on stage. In one bit, she
demonstrates the nutty behavior of today's young girls by revealing that she's
wearing a gigantic G-string bikini. Calling it typical of the girls she sees in
malls, Gohring pulls the oversized undergarment up to her top of her midriff
and prances around the stage.
"When I was 11," she says for comparison, "I was reading 'Are
you there God? It's Me, Margaret.'"
"I'm just making fun of people who have no sense of what they're doing, no
sense of themselves," she explained. "Those are my favorite people.
People who take themselves so seriously -- that's who I love to make fun
of."
All of Gohring's humor is grounded in real life, in her observations of real
people and of herself.
"I'm less of a fantasy person and more of a non-fiction person," she
said, speaking from
Her life began -- and no, this is not a set-up for a joke, although Gohring has
frequently mined it for its inherent comic potential -- as the child of a
former monk and former nun.
Growing up, her mom was an English teacher and her dad taught math. Lessons
from both disciplines are useful for comics, Gohring pointed out. In English
classes, she noted, you learn about language and metaphors. And there are
mathematical formulas useful for comedy, such as "the rule of three."
That's when a comic sets a pattern and then breaks it with the third, hopefully
funny, example.
"Christmastime with my family is fun, playful and kind of like
prison," Gohring offered.
The performer's biggest break was as a star of the sitcom "Good Girls
Don't..." She described it as "blue collar 'Sex and the City.'"
During one episode, Gohring's character, the excessively needy Jane, pretended
to be pregnant because she knew that a man she was interested in (guest star
Dane Cook) had a fetish for pregnant girls.
Despite coming from the makers of "Roseanne" and "That 70s
Show," the sitcom lasted only one season on the then-nascent Oxygen
Network.
"It's a heartbreaking story," Gohring said.
Earlier this month, the comic stepped behind the camera for the first time,
directing a short film, "You wish," a drama about a teenage girl who
has to take care of her bedridden mother.
"It's has a lot of my comedy rhythms in it," Gohring said. "It
starts out very delightful and sweet and then it becomes very dark."
What: Stand-up comic Joy Gohring
Where: Mount St. Mary College’s Purcell Hall,
When: Friday, March 30
Tickets: Free
Information: 301-447-5366