Eliza do… lots

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This article was published 24/08/2017 (3077 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Los Angeles comedian Eliza Skinner is mid-sentence when she stops short and says, “I’m so sorry, but I have to go — I’m at Conan and they need me for a sketch; I’ll call you right back.”

True to her word, she’s back on the phone 20 minutes later. The sketch, unfortunately, has been cut from that night’s Conan show, but that’s OK — Skinner has many more irons in the fire. 

The Richmond, Va.-born performer is head writer for the Drop the Mic, a new rap battle show that’s a spinoff of the popular regular feature on The Late Late Show with James Corden. She’s renowned for her own freestyle comedic raps and musical improv. She’s also an actress, a sketch writer, a popular guest on comedy podcasts and a standup comedian.

It’s her standup she’ll be strutting at the Oddblock Comedy Festival tonight, and Skinner, who has a quick-draw wit and enviable improv skills, says she welcomes the fest’s informal structure.

“It gives us a chance as comics to do the things that we’re interested in doing, rather than having to fit into some sort of mould for a club or a TV set or a themed festival,” she says. “A festival like this, you can do the sort of things that you, as an artist, like to do.”

Skinner’s standup pokes fun at her personal foibles and romantic life, but there’s also sharp sense of political acuity at play in her work. She’s penned some pointed sketches for Funny or Die that take issue with the federal minimum wage in the United States and the wage gap for women, and she says addressing issues such as these is imperative in comedy today.

“I think it would be reprehensible to have a platform where you can be heard and suggest new ideas to people and not have any of that be something about the state of the world today, especially as an American,” she says. “You have to.”

However, she’s at pains to point out that having a president who tends to be a walking punchline is no automatic boon to great political comedy.

“I have a pet peeve with any joke where the punchline is ‘Trump sucks.’ That’s hack, we know that already, we’ve all heard it and it makes me tired,” she says. “Something that has a more illuminating angle than that is important.”

Her job at Drop the Mic, meanwhile, allows her to plumb her lifelong interest in pop culture and put her degree in media studies to work. A recent matchup between David Schwimmer and James Corden found her working with the former Friends star, who was so enthusiastic about the sketch, he sent in pages of his own jokes. 

But even when the celebrity is onboard, there are some jabs that can hit too close to home, though Skinner says it’s difficult to predict what will strike someone the wrong way.

“They always reject stuff and it’s never the stuff that you think they would… sometimes they’ll be like, ‘Be meaner! You didn’t say anything about my face!’ but there will be this one little sore spot and they’ll be like, ‘Nope. I don’t like that.’

“The things that they pick don’t seem painful to me at all. ‘Why? This doesn’t hurt you.’ But it does,” she says. “So it’s also been a lesson in you don’t know what will hurt someone else or where their soft spots are. But I will say that David Schwimmer made us take out a joke about the monkey and the monkey being more popular than him. But I feel a little bad — I don’t know why that bothered him.”

There are five chances to see Eliza Skinner at Oddblock: On Friday, she’s part of Total Baloney with Mayce Galoni (Game Knight, 8:45 p.m.), and then she headlines the aptly named Eliza Skinner & Friends showcase (Park Theatre, 9:30 p.m.). On Saturday, she joins Chris Locke for Utopia to Me? at the Park Theatre (5 p.m.) and then appears at Barely Legal (Game Knight, 8:15 p.m.) and Punching Up (BMC Market, 8:45 p.m.).

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca  

Twitter: @dedaumier