On a Thursday morning in February, stand-up comedian Cathy Ladman was scrolling through the Notes app on her phone, stopping to read aloud her most nonsensical self-reminders — comically brief and vague, joke-adjacent, but with long-forgotten punchlines.
“I mean, here I just wrote a title: ‘Forgetting Things.’ That’s it. That’s all I wrote. Ridiculous!” she said. “I mean, it’s almost ironic: I forgot what I was forgetting.” She paused to laugh, then continued: “This happens a lot.”
Of course, for every hastily jotted-down, half-baked idea — “this one just says: ‘panicking when I thought my phone was dead,’” she added, still scrolling — there’s an equally fleshed out, carefully workshopped quip, dripping with the comedian’s trademark observational humor and candid storytelling. There’s a reason that Ladman, winner of an American Comedy Award for Best Female Comic, has been invited for 10 guest appearances on The Tonight Show, and the secret is probably somewhere in her Notes app, buried beneath a memo that reads, “Inventions: Jellyfish Prevagen.”
“I have no idea what I was talking about there,” she said.
Though her performances often serve as a self-probing vehicle, poking fun at her own personal neuroses, Ladman sees her particular brand of comedy as a celebration of the human experience, shedding light on the absurdities and ironies of life — the ups and downs of marriage, motherhood and being called an “old lady” for the first time.
“We’re all flawed,” Ladman said. “Anyone who projects him or herself as a perfect person is lying, and I think the more you can laugh at yourself, the better off you are in life. I don’t want to portray myself as being more adept at life than I am. I want to show how I fall on my face sometimes. Because, to me, that’s the essence of what good comedy is — to not take yourself so seriously.”
But, despite her often self-deprecating humor, Ladman didn’t stumble into comedy by accident. It was what she always knew she wanted to do. In kindergarten, she was making classmates laugh with spot-on impressions of her school principal. At age 8, she had listened to her parents’ comedy albums so many times she had them memorized. At night, she’d perform the skits from memory for her mother as she was being tucked into bed. “She didn’t quite know what to make of it,” Ladman recalled. Then, at age 13, she was voted class clown, “and I made a decision right then that I wanted to be a comedian.” It took another 12 years for her to get up on stage for the first time, in New York City’s famed comedy club, The Improv — and, after her first laugh, there was no going back.
“I always knew what made me funny was who I am,” explained Ladman, who, in addition to being a stand-up comedian, is also a successful actress and television writer. “I like to reveal myself and be vulnerable up there on stage. I want to show my frailties and my humanity, because that’s what connects us. But It’s hard to be yourself in comedy, because it’s such an artificial environment on stage with a microphone. I watch [clips from] my younger years, and I see how I was trying too hard. But as I became a more mature comic, I started to trust that the authentic me is enough. I’m constantly edging closer to who I am.”
On Saturday, March 16, Ladman brings her 40-plus years of comedy experience to downtown Asheville’s Wortham Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are $42 and are available at the box office, 18 Biltmore Ave., online at worthamarts.org or by calling 828-257-4530.
IF YOU GO
Who: Comedian Cathy Ladman
When: 8 p.m. March 16
Where: Diana Wortham Theatre at the Wortham Center, 18 Biltmore Ave., Asheville
Tickets: $42 at worthamarts.org/cathy-ladman
