It’s 8:08 a.m. when comedian and former Quad Cities resident Tammy Pescatelli calls for our arranged interview, and right off the bat, she apologizes, unnecessarily, for running eight minutes behind schedule.
“I’m calling you late because the principal from my son’s school called,” she says. “Whenever you hear that the principal is calling, you get nervous. First, you see that the school is calling, so you’re like, ‘Oh no ... is he sick?’ And then when it’s the principal, you’re like, ‘Oh, God ... what now?’ I mean, he’s never been in trouble, but you know ... . You become a kid when the principal calls your house.”
It turned out, however, that the principal was calling with good news: Pescatelli’s son Luca, who turns eight on February 26, had qualified for the gifted program. I tell her that’s great, and also congratulate Pescatelli on her 2013 comedy special Finding the Funny, the Netflix-streaming title I’ve viewed and enjoyed numerous times over.
“Then you know how excited I am to find out that my son’s in the gifted program,” she says upon hearing that I’ve seen her stand-up act. “’Cause you know the other side of his genes.”
If you’re familiar with Pescatelli through Finding the Funny, her recent guest spots on The View and The Howard Stern Show, or her frequent appearances on The Bob & Tom Show and SiriusXM’s Dirty, Sexy, Funny, you know this isn’t the first good-natured joke she’s told about husband Luca Palanca. During our interview, it also won’t be the last. (“He’s very street smart. He knows how to handle so much. But when it comes to, you know, knowing how many planets there are? Forget about it. Though that is a tricky question nowadays ... .”)
But for all of her razzing, it’s clear, both in conversation and in her comedy, that Pescatelli absolutely adores her husband, and her son, and the life they’ve made together in rural Pennsylvania. Watching Finding the Funny, it’s also abundantly clear – as it no doubt will be during the comedian’s March 5 engagement at Davenport’s Golden Leaf Banquet & Convention Center – that Pescatelli absolutely adores making people laugh.
You can hear Pescatelli’s happiness in her explosive, throaty cackle that accompanies reminiscences about dopey friends and dating traumas and, always, her material-rich Italian-American family. You hear it in her gags about the surprising confidence levels of toothless hookers and how many women actually want to receive iPhone photos of their boyfriends’ junk. (It’s a lower percentage than you’d think, guys.) And you hear it when Pescatelli not only entertains, but comes close to shocking, her patrons, as in a particularly descriptive routine about what sex with Larry King must really be like.
“I was booked on his new Hulu show,” says Pescatelli of the venerable talk-show host, “and then about an hour-and-a-half later, we got the call: ‘No, I think we’re gonna pass.’ And I was like, ‘See?! I knew it had to be a mistake!’ But that made it [the routine] even sweeter and funnier. And you know, how far is ‘too far’? My ‘too far’ is the place that some comics start.”
A Bet and a Dare and an Open Mic
Regarding her own start in comedy, Cleveland native Pescatelli says that being funny as a youth was something of a defense mechanism, as she grew up surrounded by two brothers and five male cousins.
“When you grow up with boys,” she says, “in the early years, it’s all about physical activity: Who can run the fastest, who can catch, who can shoot hoops. And I still throw the best spiral in my family; I’ve got the best arm. But the problem is that physically, when you become 10 or 11 years old, the boys are stronger than you. It just happens. But no matter how fast they could run, they could never outrun my mouth.
“So they might punch me,” Pescatelli continues, “but I would say something – something sarcastic. And then three days later, my brother would come up to me and go, ‘You know, you really hurt my feelings by what you said ... .’ And I was like, ‘Wait a second! I was just joking! You punched me in the face!’
“But I also just loved stand-up. I truly, truly, truly loved it. But it’s a different climate now – there are a lot of female comedians. When I was a kid, there weren’t very many at all, and the ones that were out there were married and talking about their kids. Which is who I’ve become now,” she says with a laugh, “but at 13, 14, 15 years old, that didn’t relate to me.”
Pescatelli didn’t, however, intend on forging her own path as a professional comedian, and instead earned a bachelor’s degree in fashion design from Kent State University. Yet after graduation, with Pescatelli’s parents having recently moved to the Quad Cities, she arrived in the area in 1990 planning to stay for the summer before beginning a fall internship in New York. She never got there.
“I was about 21,” Pescatelli recalls, “and I didn’t know anybody, and it’s hard to meet people. But I saw they had this Funny Bone [comedy club], which was way out on Kimberly in those days. So I thought, ‘I’ll go waitress there, I’ll see some fun shows, I’ll make a little bit of money, and then I’ll go to New York with my fashion degree.’
“And then the next thing you know,” she continues, “I’m at the Funny Bone all summer, and a female comedian comes in. And I have a big mouth, and I say to my family, ‘I’m just as funny as her.’ And that became a bet and a dare and an open mic ... . And that’s it. That was the end of everything.”
Or, more accurately, the beginning. Pescatelli’s nascent stand-up act proved such a hit that she not only began performing regularly at the Funny Bone, but was also booked as a headliner at the Circa ’21 Dinner Playhouse, and eventually hired to co-host a morning show on the former WPXR-FM “Power” 98.9. (She also began her list of Internet Movie Database credits – before there was an IMDb – with a role in 1991’s locally filmed cult classic Beauty Queen Butcher, which she remembers as “the world’s best shoot. I mean, literally. Just one of the best things ever.”)
Although her career in comedy began inadvertently, Pescatelli says it immediately felt like the right professional choice, and when I ask what made stand-up comedy so fulfilling, she pauses for a few seconds before offering a concise answer: “Therapy.”
She continues, “I didn’t have a lot of deep-seated issues. But I had a lot of crazy family stuff that goes on, and when I first started, I really wanted to talk about my Italian family; I didn’t want to just be ‘a female comedian.’ And I think just talking about it, and hearing other people laugh, whether they laughed because they related or because it made them feel uncomfortable ... . Either way, I got it out.
“It’s like the first time I went to therapy after I made a little money and finally got health insurance. I went to therapy, and the therapist let me leave the office and didn’t lock me up.” Laughing, she adds, “I thought it was validation. So I think it’s the same kind of thing. Comedy just validates your experiences, you know?”
Weird Synchronicity
After Pescatelli left the Quad Cities in 1995, she embarked on a professional touring career that found her booked in comedy clubs during 36 weeks of her first year away. “And I didn’t even have a manager,” she says.
“What happened was that little Funny Bone in Davenport, Iowa, connected me to so many other clubs. The Funny Bone had 22 sister clubs, and it was a sister chain of the Improv – and the biggest owner of all the Improvs was based in Cleveland, where I was from originally. So I stayed employed. It was amazing. Just a really weird synchronicity.”
Pescatelli toured for years before her acclaimed sets at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival captured the attention of the Hollywood Reporter, whose mentions of her captured the attention of booking agents for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which led to the comedian’s 2003 debut on the late-night series. That, in turn, led to her weekly appearances on the 2004 season of Last Comic Standing. And that, as she says, “changed things for me overnight.
“We were lucky,” Pescatelli says, “because that was a season that had 17 million viewers, and things changed right away. I mean, we flew out one day, and no one knew who we were, and we flew back the next day from a gig, and I was signing autographs at the airport. And even when people would say, ‘Oh, she’s the Italian comedian – all she ever talks about is being Italian,’ it wasn’t an insult to me. I thought, ‘Wow ... they didn’t even notice I was a woman!’”
Since that season of Last Comic Standing, “the Italian comedian” has stayed in both the public eye (with nearly 50 IMDb credits from 2005 to 2016) and, via her frequent visits to radio shows, the public ear. Yet Pescatelli says that she still gets a true kick out of touring, “even though it’s harder now – just the physicality of it.
“What I used to do was drive around everywhere,” she says. “You know, we didn’t have GPS. We had an atlas and a bag of clothes and a cell phone. But now I live in Pennsylvania, where we thought life would be easier for our son. And it is. But it’s a little harder for me, because I’m an hour and a half away from an airport, and so there’s a lot of traveling. But it’s a necessary evil. Like in that rock song ‘Same Old Lang Syne’: ‘The audiences were heavenly but the traveling was hell.’
“But I actually love the stage now more than I ever did,” Pescatelli continues, “and I think it probably shows in my act more. I honestly feel that – and I don’t say this in a braggadocious sense – my act is the best it’s ever been. Because I’m giving the most of me. I don’t care what the perception is; it’s just the true me up there. There’s something great about just being who you are.
“And I’m at a place, too, where I don’t want everybody to like me. Not everybody is my audience. I’m not saying that I am specifically going out to make people not like me. But I have a very specific demographic that are not really millennials, but that gave birth to millennials, you know what I mean?
“I mean, if millennials get my act, that’s because they’re cool kids, and had parents that were cool and taught them.” Pescatelli laughs. “But I don’t want to be for everyone, and I don’t want to have to cater to anyone. At this stage of my life – age of my life – it’s just ‘I am what I am.’ Like Popeye.”
Tammy Pescatelli performs at the Golden Leaf Banquet & Convention Center (2902 East Kimberly Road, Suite 1, Davenport) at 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 5, with additional sets by comedians Chris Schlichting, Gary Menke, and Jake Harris. For more information and tickets, call (563)359-7225 or visit EventBrite.com.
For more information on the show’s headliner, visit Pescatelli.com.
