Though she first graced the stage in Boston in 1997, veteran comedian and “Chelsea Lately” regular Jen Kirkman developed much of her anecdotal style — where personal revelation meets tight jokes delivered in a raspy voice — right here in New York.
So when Kirkman returns to Brooklyn on Wednesday for a headlining show at the Bell House, it marks a homecoming of sorts for the LA resident.
Kirkman moved to the city in 1998 and immersed herself in a scene that helped her define her style. “It was exciting back then, because you had Luna Lounge on the Lower East Side every Monday night,” she says, recalling the popular “Eating It” stand-up comedy show that featured the likes of Marc Maron, Janeane Garofalo, David Cross and Patton Oswalt back in the late ’90s and early aughts.
“It was thrilling to me, because that was the kind of comedy that excited me. It was usually people telling true stories, and that’s my favorite kind of comedy.”
Kirkman’s stand-up is intensely personal. A significant chunk of her most recent CD, 2011’s “Hail to the Freaks,” involved her wedding (she’s since divorced), such as how at 35, the motivation for marriage could be boiled down to, “I wanna get on your health insurance.” She notes that for those familiar with her first CD, 2006’s “Self Help,” the man she married was the same man she joked about at the time.
From the very beginning, Kirkman considered her work to be derived from storytelling. “The hot thing then was to be a one-liner comic, like Demetri Martin or Mitch Hedberg, so that was how you got on TV as well,” says Kirkman. “I always struggled with that, because I didn’t have one-liners. I’ve always been more long-winded. I’d rather start a true premise with some jokes in it than make up a completely-out-of-nowhere one-liner.”
While developing her skill onstage, Kirkman also became something of an accidental pioneer for female comedy writers. Along with fellow comedian Becky Donohue, she started a website called Girl Comic in 2001 as a place for female comedians to publish written work. “We were trying to say that women who are feminist can be funny,” she says.
Kirkman eventually found that writing for the site helped elevate her own work. “It helped me subtly,” she says. “I wrote enough essays that when I moved to LA, I got involved in this really cool storytelling show at the Comedy Central work space, and I felt confident enough to do it because writing a funny essay wasn’t foreign to me.”
Since then, she published a best-selling book, last year’s “I Can Barely Take Care of Myself,” which comically dealt with her desire not to have children, and worked as a writer and panelist on the just-ended E! hit “Chelsea Lately,” a move that both pulled her into new creative directions and greatly increased her fan base. “It taught me a new skill, which was writing pop culture jokes, because that was something I still don’t do in my act,” she says.
“My act is very personal. I don’t mention what’s going on in pop culture. So it taught me how to not have snobbery about anything, and to [realize that] you can have your own point of view about Lindsay Lohan, and you don’t have to be totally interested.
“It’s just a paid job,” she adds. “It’s not like we’re sitting around going, ‘We love reading TMZ all day.’”