All Women Who Like To Make People Laugh Should Check out GOLD Comedy! You may just find your people.
GOLD COMEDY is a comedy school, professional community, and content studio where women + non-binary folks grow their comedy careers and creative side hustles, build powerful networks, and make funny stuff.
I’m personally all about using humor to address serious matters. Humor gets people to pay attention. That I know. So naturally I was drawn to Lynn Harris, the CEO and founder of GOLD Comedy when I came across her profile on LinkedIn which read:
Founder | brand-builder | writer | producer | podcaster | multi-hyphenate using the power of comedy and humor to connect, humanize, and transform.
Lynn’s done stand-up comedy in Boston and New York and has had many comedy adjacent roles, including using comedy to make tough issues more accessible while working for a human rights organization. One past success includes her infamous internet co-creation called ‘Breakup Girl’.
GOLD Comedy offers classes, celebrity speaker series, digital shorts teams, mics, shows, and more to help build expertise, careers, and resumes for women and other “others” who are chasing showbiz dreams or all the other opportunities and outlets that comedy provides.
Lynn shared that GOLD Comedy even creates opportunities for women to ‘collaborate’ on comedy content, including forming teams to produce digital sketches. These teams retain ownership of their content, with GOLD Comedy even subsidizing some expenses.
Why GOLD? Dudes still dominate the comedy world and access to it. Twice as many ads feature men being funny versus women. Stand Up lineups are still up to 70% men. Amy Schumer is STILL the only woman ever to make the Forbes 100 list of top-earning comedians.
Even though women are more and more visible in comedy, men still control and define it. Women have more challenges in the comedy industry, including the perception of women comedians and the male-dominated landscape of late-night TV and stand-up comedy. And let’s face it, comedy is mostly a late-night activity, which can be challenging for women, especially those with families.
GOLD Comedy is here for the gals.
Rachel Dratch is an advisor, and their guests + mentors have included Margaret Cho, Paula Pell, Judy Gold, Rachel Bloom, Ashley Nicole Black, Patti Harrison, Paula Pell, Bridget Everett, and staffers from The Daily Show, SNL, A Black Lady Sketch Show, Broad City, Search Party, Inside Amy Schumer, and more.
You must check out a fabulous GOLD Comedy bit on You Tube called ‘Spanx for Nex’! It’s a riot.
Tune in to this fun podcast of our live conversation on The Debbie Nigro Show. If you’d rather read than listen the audio transcript is below.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
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And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show.
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Music
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Well guys, if you know me, you know I love funny, and that I always lead with humor to get your attention for important things. So, today is no different. So, I’m talking comedy today, funny women and a really interesting guest coming up right now for you on the Debbie Nigro show. Great to have you. So listen, there are a lot of funny women in the world, but you may have noticed that there’s more men who are funny who get the gigs, right? Whether it’s in a stand-up venue or on a late-night talk show, even though I want to give a shout-out to the newest female host, first time in forever, late night TV’s Taylor Tomlinson. Go, Taylor.
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Anyway, there’s never really been an opportunity for women to come together, help each other, really learn how to do it right, go to comedy school, be part of a professional community, be able to create content and grow your comedy career. Okay, so I’ve got a gal that’s going to help you get there. Lynn Harris, the founder, and CEO of Gold Comedy is with me this morning. Hey, how you doing, Lynn?
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Hello, how are you?
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Great to be here.
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I’m so happy you said yes to be on my show. Thank you.
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My pleasure, my pleasure.
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So I’ve done stand-up. I find it terrifying. I’m jealous that you’re standing up. I put a beautiful picture of you up doing comedy, but that’s not your main thing. But I know you’ve got a lot of talents, and you took all these talents, and now we’re helping all the other women out there. Talk a little bit about you. Come on.
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0:01:54
Who are you? Oh, I’d be happy to go on about myself at great length. I did stand-up for about 10 years in Boston and New York, primarily. And then I went on to do a lot of comedy adjacent things loosely around when I realized I could really just not say up past 10 p.m. And many people do it. It’s just not my area. If you guys want to do, you know, morning walk comedy, I’m your girl.
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Oh, my gosh.
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I am so with you.
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But I always stuck around, even though I kind of gave up being on a stage late at night I always stuck with doing, I worked even for a human rights organization that used comedy, animation, stuff like that to, as you said, get people’s attention and make tough issues accessible to really make things that seem difficult to grapple with more relevant, actionable, and urgent.
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We even made animations, like funny animations that showed at NASCAR races to invite men to challenge violence against women. I did a lot of that kind of thing for a long time, and then I just realized I wanted to send the ladder back down and make it really easy for women and other others to succeed in comedy and that’s why I founded Goals.
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Well, I think you’ve got not only a great platform but a bigger mission too. It’s changing the narrative, right, and letting women talk about things that they find funny that guys might not find funny. Is it true, and I think it is, that men and women have very different senses of humor?
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I think we’re never going to really know the answer to that question because there’s no way we can ever conduct a proper scientific experiment because we’re never going to live in a world that doesn’t have different ideas of how women and men should be. It’s just impossible to distill it down. What I do know is that comedy is still defined by men. Whether that’s a style of humor, I don’t know. But it’s, you know, men are still called comics, and women are called female comics, right? You never you never call men male comics, right? And men are still two times more likely to be the funny one in an ad. And other than you mentioned
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Taylor Tomlinson, other than her, all of the late night hosts now are straight cis men. And stand up lineups are still up to 70% men. SNL has two comedy short teams. They’re very funny. They’re 100% men. Only one woman ever has been on Forbes’ 100 top earning comics list. I’ll let you guess.
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Amy Schumer.
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Amy Schumer. Amy Schumer.
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And she’s crossover. Yeah, she’s crossover. My boyfriend loves her. But still, only one? Yeah, I was just talking about wanting to watch her new show on Hulu, which I didn’t know because I’m drawn to funny, you know, but what you’re doing, what you’re doing…
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As long as it’s defined by men, it’s not designed for women, and that’s the narrative that we’re trying to change. It doesn’t mean it’s bad comedy, it’s just not enough.
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Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about what you offer the girls, the funny girls out there. It’s a pipeline, yes, but also you have lots of ways for them to get to whatever they want in their career, and you help them forward. Explain that.
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Correct. So GOLD is, and thank you for just nailing it right out of the gate, GOLD is, as you said, is a comedy school and a professional network and a content studio. So we’ve got, you know, for women and others who want to succeed in comedy or also in the creative and funny side hustle, or even in the, to even access the other benefits
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that comedy provides. We know that comedy, I got lots of studies that talk about how comedy basically makes you more successful at work, makes you a better manager, makes your teams more productive, all those things, a zillion studies. So we do, our main customer are women who are like, I need, I want a leg up, I want a community,
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I want to build my skills, I want to take classes, I want to be on one of your sketch teams. As I said, SNL has two teams making comedy digital shorts. We have 13. They’re all women and non-binary folks. We create pathways for people who are traditionally excluded explicitly or not from the regular ways that people get into comedy to get there. We have stand-up classes, we have improv classes, we have classes on production, on how to be the one behind the camera, how to be the one making the sketches happen. In addition to all the specific skills, we’re your crew. We’re the people. The most important thing most successful comics will tell you, or people
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in anywhere in comedy, or even in any job, honestly, is that what mattered are the people that they came up with, the people who supported them, the people that they worked with who are a little bit better than them, that they aspired to, just your people. And so we also aim to be your people. So we’re kind of like the fancy Women’s Professional Network chief, but funny.
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Oh, I love it. I think I’m gonna join. I’m very funny. And I think it’s time. I think there’s time for, there’s room right now for a grandma stand up that you know I could I moved into that
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category you know Rachel Dratch is one of our advisors Rachel Dratch from SNL and a lot of our members are in their 20s and 30s let’s just say I am NOT Rachel and I are you know peers and it was so funny because she was doing a workshop with our team a lot of the members of our digital sketch teams and they kept asking her questions about social media promotion and strategy. And she’s like, I feel like the only way I can answer your question is with a grandma emoji. But we do have women, a lot of women who, again, mostly 20s and 30s, but for sure, we
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have women who either have kind of hoped to do this all their lives or have a pilot in their pocket that they want to write or pitch, that they’re just like, why not now? Now, now’s the time.
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So, it’s a vision. Yeah, do you have a pipeline for those people who, yeah, do you have a pipeline for people who want to write a pilot, say, and submit it somewhere or a comedy sketch? Is there way too much money for people who join Gold Comedy?
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Yeah, well, first of all, we actually hire people from our own community to do stuff. If someone comes in who’s a member who also teaches improv, boom, you’re our improv teacher. We hire, we pay people to write for our website. We really try to make those paths internal as much as we can, but we have two premium classes, especially that I would point out to you,
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and this is gonna sound super advertorial, but you ask me, one of them is how to pitch your show. It’s run by a producer who’s worked with Amy Schumer. She worked on Broad City, she worked on Search Party, and the problem she’s trying to solve is she had seen so many pitches come in that were for great shows, but not great pitches. Because it’s a certain thing, it’s a certain art.
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If you haven’t learned that particular thing for this particular genre, it’s good to learn. So she teaches, yeah, that’s one of our most popular classes. You don’t even have to have the pilot written. It’s pitching the show. And then you figure out, you can figure out the pilot later. Yeah, we also have a pilot writing class. They could be done in either order.
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Yeah, this is tangible, tangible, really great stuff. I do know you have a lot of advisors who people might know their names, famous comedians like Margaret Cho and Paula Pell and Judy Gold and Rachel Bloom and Ashley Nicole Black, Patty Harrison, Paula Pell, Bridget Everidge, and people from the Daily Show, SNL, Black Lady Sketch Show, Broad City Search Party, Inside Amy Schumer, are all supporting you, which is incredible. In one way or another.
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Yeah, it’s fantastic.
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Yeah, one of my favorite things that we do is every Wednesday, this is if you’re a paid member, every Wednesday we have a Q&A with people like that, or with people who you haven’t heard of, but once you hear of them, you might want their job. You know, they talk about how they got their film at Sundance, or they talk about how they work their way up from a PA to a producer. And so you really learn about all different aspects of careers that are directly comedy or comedy adjacent.
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Awesome, awesome. But you did make one point, and I’m going to just bring it up again. Late night, I mean, stand-up is usually late night. And I have a wonderful, fabulous comedian gal pal of mine who I admire and love, Luz Michelle. And she’s a mom and she’s got two kids in her early 40s and she’s out, you know, hustling doing these shows and she drives and by herself, it’s late at night. I’m like, that’s the only piece of it that I think for a lot of women who might have families or, you know, not be wanting to travel at night by themselves,
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that’s a little bit difficult in terms of the stand-up world. So you’re offering…
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It’s hard. Yeah, I mean, I can think of a few examples. I remember Laurie Kilmartin driving around New York with her toddler in her backseat, getting someone to just watch her kid in the car while she ran in to do a quick 10 and then run out, if I remember correctly. It was something like that. Ophira Eisenberg right now has a kid who’s eight or nine, and she works at night all the time, and that’s just their life. That’s just how it is.
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That’s their lifestyle. She’s around maybe during the day more, and she and her partner and her husband switch off that way. She makes it work. But it’s certainly hard. It’s certainly hard. I think being able to teach from Zoom is helpful to any parent, I think. All of our classes are on Zoom, so it’s great for students and teachers. The person who teaches our pitching class is a single mom, so she’s got to pull that off and I think not having to drive around like Laurie Kilmartin It was definitely helps But she’s not a stand-up. So that would be much harder. She was a stand-up. Obviously
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I just want to give you I want to give you a huge compliment I took some time this morning and I watched your gold comedy bit on Spanx for next Just I posted it on my Debbie Nygro show Facebook page. It is so darn funny. And you nailed it. I mean, you had a collaboration of people. So I imagine all the gals in your comedy world came together and came up with that. Yes.
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Well, the way that works is that’s one of our that’s one of our 13 teams that we we kind of put a call out. There’s all this talent out there. There are not just good writers and good actors who are women, but also people who know how to edit comedy, people who know how to do light and sound for sketches and digital sketches like that one. It’s frustrating even though we love them and they’re very funny, it’s frustrating to see only the two teams that SNL has be all dudes, right? We know how much talent is out there, so when we put out a call, that was the second year we’ve done this, we got enough talent and more to form 13 teams
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of groups who work together to create their own digital sketches. They own their content, we subsidize some of their expenses a modest amount, but it’s something. And we license back the right to show it. So it’s very user, sorry, creator friendly. And so that’s what that came up with.
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I was just going to say, because a lot of fear gets involved when people are like, oh, this is my bit, and they’re going to hope nobody steals my bit or my ideas. You know, comedy can be as good as one line, and you know, one line, a great line, has made a lot of money for some people, as opposed to a whole thing. I think what you’re doing should be a reality show.
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Oh, well, sure. Any reality show producers out there who want to showcase women’s comedy? Oh, I’m around.
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I think that’s cool.
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There’s a lot of really good behind the scenes stuff of how the, if nothing else, how the sketches get made. Like how did that team that you mentioned that did Spanx for an ex, which everyone should watch, is our team called No Worries If Not. And it would be so useful just to learn and to see how that sketch came together, where the idea came from,
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and how it turned into what it turned into.
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Well, we’re out of time, but I just want to just before I say goodbye to you, I want to remind everybody that, um, Lynn was also the person behind the very early internet success, uh, story and a co-creation with, um, a genius named Chris Kalb in something called Breakup Girl, um, which was a big story. Lynn Harris, the CEO and founder of Gold Comedy. I’m so glad that you said yes to my invitation. I love meeting you and when I read about you, author, comedian, brand builder, ass kicker, I’m like, I’ve got to meet this girl. So I’m going to join. I hope so. I would love to be there. Yeah. Goldcomedy.com, everybody. Go have a great, fun and funny day, Lynn.
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Thank you. Thank you. You too, Debbie. Thank you so much for having me.
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You’re very welcome. Gold Comedy Club, all-inclusive comedy world built for women and non-binary folks to succeed. Check it out.
