Leah Kayajanian & Friends
9 p.m. Wednesday, March 25
Opolis | Norman
Leah Kayajanian is a comedy legend in Oklahoma. She was already at the top of the local scene when I started telling jokes in 2009, and she only got better in the small amount of time I was able to watch her before she moved on to Los Angeles in 2011. Since she left, I have watched numerous other comics tell stories about her and literally read her text messages aloud on stage because she left such a lasting impression with the people who got to work with her. There is an entirely new crop of local comedians who have grown during this time, and to see them get excited about her impending one-night-only return to Norman is telling, considering most of them have never seen or met her before; they’ve only heard the hilarious stories.
I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do Kayajanian justice in this article, since we aren’t as close as she is with some of the other local veterans. So instead of writing a story about my own personal experiences with her, I asked some of her closest comedy friends from Oklahoma to write about the type of person she is and why she was important to the Oklahoma comedy scene. This is the laziest moment of my writing career.
Local Heartthrob Spencer Hicks: “I met Leah on open mic night at the Loony Bin. Right away she was comfortable on stage, and was doing stuff in a unique voice — two things I’m still working on after 10 years of doing stand-up. I was terribly sad when she decided to pursue comedy in LA, but also very proud of her. She is one of the nicest, funniest people I’ve ever met. And I’ll bet you cash for Clark Bars that she’ll be a household name sooner rather than later.”
OKCComedy Co-Founder Bradchad Porter: “I remember one night in 2009 I watched her struggle with a tough crowd at the Speakeasy. Anybody who’s ever tried to confront an unruly crowd there knows that it’s easy to give up and let the talkers in the back of the room win the day. Instead of giving in or barking reprimands at the rowdy crowd, I watched Leah step out of the 2-by-2 square that she usually occupied on stage while delivering her bits, and she worked to get the crowd’s attention. She told all of her familiar jokes, but she did it with passion, with fire, with determination. It was the first time I saw a local OKC comic take the leap from an open mic-er trying to do comedy to a stand-up comedian doing her job. Most of the time, even today, when you get the chance to see Leah perform you will see her — like I did that night in 2009 — take the stage and demonstrate that she is in a different, better league than the other comics in the show.”
Robot Saves City Creator James Nghiem: “Leah was important to the Oklahoma scene because, in the simplest terms, she’s a great writer and performer. I remember talking to her once about how the scene kind of developed, and she was being self-deprecating. She was kind of talking about how she didn’t really produce shows and how she didn’t really matter because of that. But I remember saying, “You’re important because you’re good.” People could always book her and expect a good a show. A lot of comics back in the day were hot and cold. She was really consistent, and when she was hot, she’d get really hot. The crowd would be nuts for her sets. So even if she didn’t book shows, I think her level of skill kind of pushed everybody to be good. I guess we all kind of pushed each other after the first couple months. Like, we’d do a round-robin of just one-upping one another, but I feel like she definitely started the ball rolling. She was also the one who took me to the Loony Bin for the first time, so I guess I probably wouldn’t even be a comic right now if I hadn’t met her. Also, I feel like she broke a lot of barriers. There weren’t a lot of female comics here when she started, but I remember a few years later some of the best comics in the scene were women; Kristin Rand, Genevieve Rice and her were killing it, and all of them went on to keep killing it in the respective cities that they landed in. It’s pretty awesome.”
Now, before this starts to sound like a eulogy, on to the Q&A.
