Have you ever seen a painting of a fire-breathing Brendan Fraser driving around the streets of Los Angeles? If so, you may have been in the midst of comedian Brandie Posey, whose stand-up album Opinion Cave debuted last month. I had the pleasure of seeing her painted legendary car in person and it was glorious. “In college me and my girlfriends, our way of making frat boys stop talking to us,” she explains, “we’d be like ‘name ten Brendan Fraser movies in sixty seconds and if you can’t do it, you can’t talk to us anymore.’” Walking around to the other side of her car, I saw there was a second mural; this side featured Abraham Lincoln fighting a T-Rex in space.
“I’m interested in being very authentic to who I am because I don’t know how to not do that,” Posey explains when I ask her about the comedy niche she occupies. Evident in her bright blue hair and checkerprint clothes, one of her biggest influences is ska music. She’s always reveled in the alternative. (She once did stand-up for an Against Me! show.) In a lot of ways, the ska music scene prepared her for the male-dominated world of comedy.
“I happened to be the only girl in the neighborhood [growing up],” Posey explains. But she quickly learned that solidarity with other women was essential, especially in comedy. “I love my guy friends but they aren’t gonna get everything. I remember hanging out with a bunch of my guy friends and they all ganged up on me and I was like ‘man, I didn’t realize I was an other to you guys and that sucks because I don’t see myself that way.’ But I will never be the same to you as you are to each other.” From a young age, she knew: “You need to find the people who are going to understand exactly what you’re going through.”
As a woman, it’s easy to be lumped in a broad “female comedy” category with other women even if you have little in common with them. Even in cities like New York and Los Angeles, most comedy line-ups feature several men and usually one “token” woman. But that’s changing.
“The internet’s made things really interesting,” she says, telling me about the myriad secret Facebook groups where women in comedy gather to provide each other with support. “If you’re not gonna book us on shows, we’re gonna find each other anyway.” Brandie pointed out that the week her album Opinion Cave debuted, three other women also released comedy albums. Three of them, including Brandie’s, charted on iTunes thanks to the help and support of the other women. Women are often forced to compete with each other for the few “female comic” slots available to them, but it doesn’t have to be that way—women are not a niche category. They have their own audiences and having more than one woman release an album at a time doesn’t cannibalize album sales, as people often fear. “Women like comedy,” Posey says with emphasis. “Comedy just hasn’t liked women for a long time.”