Meet…
Veronica McNamara, a stand-up comedian and Psychology major at Sinclair Community College.
Why she’s interesting… McNamara has been doing stand-up comedy for about one year and goes to open mic nights in Dayton and Columbus.
The bonding experience of making people laugh is one of the main reasons for doing stand-up according to McNamara.
McNamara said she has been doing stand-up comedy for a little over a year now and she has been watching stand-up for a long time. More recently, she has been listening to various comedians’ podcasts.
“I have always admired the ability of people who make other people laugh,” McNamara said. “To be able to relate really hard things about life, but in a funny and kind of light-hearted way, is such an amazing thing to do.”
McNamara said she was searching for an avenue to connect with a lot of people, because she was an awkward person growing up.
“I’ve had a lot of crazy experiences, a lot of funny awkward moments … my jokes usually relate to stories from my own life,” she said.
She said she started making voice recordings of herself telling stories, which was how she began practicing before getting up in front of an audience.
“Language is such a subtle thing,” McNamara said. “It’s really easy, especially when you’re telling stories, to start rambling.”
McNamara said she would review the recordings and make adjustments until she had a short, humorous account of her story, then she would start making videos of herself.
“So I would record myself like a crazy person,” McNamara said. “I would sit in my apartment performing for myself.”
Along with the recordings, she said she would secretly share bits of her act with unwitting friends to gage their reactions.
McNamara said you can do all these things to prepare, but being onstage is still frightening to her.
“When it comes down to the night before … [being onstage is] still the most terrifying thing you can imagine,” she said. “Because you’re going up there and asking all these people to not only think you’re funny, but to accept who you are as a person.”
McNamara said the hardest part of telling a joke is honing in on the parts of an experience that are relatable across gender, age and educational backgrounds.
“[The] thing that makes a good joke is making people feel like they could have [written] it themselves,” she said.
McNamara encourages anyone with an interest in being a comedian to just do it.
She said she has had two experiences where she really “killed it” and it felt awesome.
“Once you get that high from, ‘oh my God these people think I’m funny— yes! I have totally succeeded!’ It’s like — I’ve got to do it again,” McNamara said.
McNamara said the experience of stand-up is more cathartic than anything else.
“It’s kind of like … reading your diary out loud to people … it helps you learn who you are,” she said.
“I think comedy really does play on peoples’ expectations about what it means to be alive,” McNamara said. “You can go into tragic stories and laugh about them … it takes you away from [the fact that] you don’t have any power as a person. We always want to feel like we have some sort of control … but we don’t and that’s funny.”
McNamara will be performing new material she’s been working on for stand-up night on Dec. 8 at Wiley’s Comedy Club.