Laura Merli Wants to Be a Woman of Few Words

A Laura Merli joke sneaks up on you. It might be the one about how a cat café can quickly start to resemble your middle school experience. It could be the one about why “how did your loved one die?” is not a good icebreaker question. Or it could be one of the many found in her new special, Belly Slappin’ Fun, which marks the debut special for a comic who’s been making the rounds in the New York comedy scene for many years. It’s an appropriate title for someone whose comedy tries to get the kind of old-school laughs that come from a joke well-told and a punchline well-crafted.

Talking to Merli, as I did over Zoom, is a lot like talking to the funniest coworker at a dead-end job, the one whose deadpan nature makes you realize just how absurd this all is. Before turning to comedy, Merli worked as a store photographer, escape room zombie, and carnival employee, although she insists that this impression of her as the life of the escape room is mistaken. “I’m not really the best at being personable in a customer service-type environment. I’m actually pretty bad at that. You can’t fully script all your encounters with people,” says Merli, and it tracks that she would go from those gigs to writing comedy that, in the best possible way, seems scripted.

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As stand-up comedy trends towards introspection and longform storytelling, with projects such as Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, Bo Burnham’s Inside, and Jerrod Carmichael’s Rothaniel all receiving critical praise in recent years, it’s exciting to see a comedian like Merli who strikes a more structured pose. Her humor comes from the destination, rather than the long and winding journey it takes to get there. Drawing from the same well as her inspirations Mitch Hedberg and Maria Bamford, it is clear from Merli’s work in Belly Slappin’ Fun and elsewhere that she cares about honing a joke until it can be delivered in the sharpest way possible.

“I love getting to the laugh quickly, and I’m not someone who personally enjoys telling a story that takes a long time to get to the punchline. What [Bamford and Hedberg] did, and what I try to do, is pare a joke to the least amount of information needed to understand it. I like that sort of playful, out-of-the-box thinking,” Merli explains. The result is jokes that don’t seek to redefine the very nature of comedy itself, but instead take what works and what has worked about the form for decades, and showcase the writer behind the performer.

That’s not to say that Belly Slappin’ Fun will be entirely absurdist, either. Across her various social platforms, Merli has grown comfortable owning her self-described awkwardness, and the special will touch on her ADHD and autism diagnoses. So how do you square writing sharp, one-liner style style with topics that naturally lend themselves to being discussed in-depth and with nuance? The answer, for Merli, is to treat them exactly the same as she would any other thought that crosses her mind. “I can’t help but write jokes about the things I’m thinking about, and when I got the diagnosis, I started reading a ton about it and learning more about how I process the world, so those concepts were always in the back of my mind, just like how my dog is always in the back of my mind,” she tells me. “I don’t consciously think that jokes about my diagnoses are the ‘personal time’ of my special, they’re just concepts that were stewing because they’re part of my life.”

Of course, talking about personal details can be difficult for any comic, but Merli seems to want to broach these topics in a way that is true to the way she digests them. When she first decided to discuss her ADHD and autism in comedy, she says, “I didn’t want to talk about it unless I found a way where a significant amount of people would find it funny. I was worried that people might react in a questioning way, like ‘oh, isn’t everyone neurodiverse nowadays?’ But the reaction has been really positive.”

What all this has culminated in is a special that takes the trappings of more confessional works that give you a window into the performer’s anxious and worried and even neurodivergent mind just as much as their comedic one, but with a more cutting, deadpan style. The emotional core rests on a very solid structural foundation. And in keeping with a comedian who really loves the craft of comedy, everything about the special has been created with thought. Merli filmed it at Flophouse Comedy, a more recently-opened Brooklyn venue, because, “I wanted a space that felt intimate. When you go in, you feel like you’re in a cool grandma’s basement. The chairs are close to the stage, which is great for a comedy show. The one problem was their bathroom is also very close to the stage and the door is not well-insulated, and so we had to make an announcement before the show that no-one could use it during the taping.” As you can tell, everything was done in service of crafting the perfect environment for a joke to flourish.

So, fair warning, if you find yourself checking out the special (and you should), you will not hear anything from behind the bathroom door. But you might just hear the sounds of Belly Slappin’ Fun.

Belly Slappin’ Fun will be streaming for free on YouTube from July 18.

Dylan Fugel is a sketch comedy writer living in New York, NY. Check out his work with Young Douglas, Story Pirates, or DM him Knicks tickets on Twitter @dylanfugel.