Baby Boomer Comedy Show Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

My all-time favorite female keynote speaker/comedian Jan McInnis recently wrote the following piece in her regular ‘Humor News’ publication The Keynote Chronicle. (You may want to get on her mailing list.) I thought it so much fun — and simultaneously profound — that I’m sharing it here, with her permission.

What $19.99 Will Buy You

comedian and keynote speaker Jan mcInnis — Jan McInnis

I like hotels. I stay in a lot of them, and most of the time I stay in really nice ones. You know, where the bathroom is big enough for ballroom dancing, and there’s a TV embedded in the mirror? I guess if I want to feel like I’m a beautiful newscaster, I look at that instead of my reflection.

And as nice as these hotels are, they’re still worried about making a good impression. After my stay, they always send a survey so I can rate everything: did you use the internet? Yes? On a scale from 1 – 99, how was it? Did you use the gym? Yes? On a scale from 1 – 99, how was it? Did you use the toilet? You get the picture. I check “no” to all of it; otherwise there are more questions to answer. Nope, no gym, no internet, no toilet. . . I didn’t even sleep under the covers. Stop! Your hotel is nice, ok!

funny hotel article — Jan’s room in Africa

I’m still a fan of cheap hotels, however, because they kept me afloat in my early comedy years. Back then, it was kind of a crapshoot as to what you’d get with some of these hotels. There could be a TV in the mirror, but only because some drunk guest threw it there. Occasionally the bedding could be a little sketchy. I toured with a sleeping bag.

One of my first big gigs was at a major comedy club in Chicago. I was very excited, but I had to get my own hotel room. Plenty of really great comics live in that area, so no one was gonna put up an out-of-towner. No problem! I found an excellent hotel about an hour away in Portage, Indiana. . . and by “excellent,” I mean cheap: $19.99 a night!

The manager was a very nice older lady, and I explained that I was a comedian on tour. We had a pleasant chat, and I got my keys. The room was kind of what I expected: no TV smashed into the mirror, but I did have to wear my socks while walking on the carpet. . . and in the shower. But the week at the club went well, and at a little under $140 for my room, I could still go home with some money.

Funy picture — Hotel bed decoration — “To make me feel welcome, I think”

When the club booked me again a year later, I had the same hotel dilemma, so I headed over to my friends in Portage. But there was a different woman at the front desk, and the price had gone up dramatically: $29.99 per night! (Probably due to paying for new TVs and mirrors.) That $70 extra bucks was gonna break the budget, and I didn’t know what to do. This was back before cell phones and wireless internet; finding another place would be time consuming!

As I was discussing dropping the price to no avail, the manager popped out. She must have seen the panic on my face because in a moment of true kindness, she turned to the desk clerk and said, “I remember her. Give her the old price.”

Relief! I could kiss the ground (almost. . . the carpets were still the same). I had never been so happy to unroll my sleeping bag in a bargain bed. I thanked her profusely.

I’m sure she doesn’t remember now how much she helped me then, but I do. It probably wasn’t a big deal to her, but it was a huge deal to me, and she did it simply because she could. She had the opportunity to help someone, so she did. Without any fanfare, without any expectation that I’d give her a good review, without anything: she did it just because she could.

There’s always an excuse to not do something: “It’s not my job,” “It’s not our policy,” etc., and many people hide behind that because it’s the easy route. (Yes, you, Mr. Airline Gate Agent who wouldn’t put me on the earlier flight recently, because you said it would be too much of a hassle.) But, I think doing things that are in your control to help someone is how you earn a five-star rating in business and in life.

I once heard Tony Robbins say that we should look at everyone on the planet as being on the same team, and I agree. So be on the lookout for ways to help out your “team members” with the things that are within your power. You’ll make a great lasting impression on them. . . without the 99 question survey.

(Jan has shared her customized humor keynotes with thousands of associations and corporations, and is the author of 2 books: “Finding the Funny Fast” and “Convention Comedian.” She has also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and on Huffington Post. I’m proud to be a fan.)

“I went up in a hot air balloon 2200 feet in the air,” says Jan McInnis, whose taste in adventure is as zany as her comedic genius. “The scariest part was as we were climbing in, the guy asked us our weight. I’m not telling him that! I gave him my goal weight. This thing may crash, but that secret’s dying with me!”

The above (copyrighted) quip was included in the latest Keynote Chronicle newsletter circulated by comedian McInnis, sometimes known as The Work Lady. She is also co-star, with Kent Rader, in the Baby Boomer Comedy Show.

It’s hard to read The Keynote Chronicle – or see McInnis onstage – without either a chuckle or a guffaw, or two or three or more. And at the same time, you may fail to notice that the material is utterly without profanity, vulgarity or in-your-face sexual innuendo – the basic elements of much of today’s comedy. A Wall Street Journal article once noted that her clean comedy “still has plenty of attitude.”

This writer first saw Jan McInnis at a comedy competition more than a decade ago at San Francisco’s Boom Boom Room. She didn’t win the competition – although she said recently that she is now good friends with others she met at that event – but I have followed her career ever since. 2016 seemed a good time to interview her about the trajectory of that career.

McInnis grew up in D.C., the second of four children in a fairly traditional family whose home was in a nearby Virginia suburb. “My parents said they’d pay for college anywhere in the state,” she says. “So I chose Virginia Tech, which was as far away as you could get from D.C.” She earned a traditional (communications) degree, and went to work back in D.C. at a few traditional jobs, including the National Ocean Service and the National Academy of Sciences, where she worked on the original “Planet Earth” PBS television series. But her lifelong ambition to do stand-up comedy never let go, and at 34 McInnis started doing open-mike gigs. She spent two and a half years working at her day job while doing comedy clubs up and down the east coast. This involved grueling hours and often staying in what the clubs referred to as “Comedy Condos,” that customarily housed “twenty-something boys.” McInnis, meanwhile, was aiming for a manageable career. “The great thing about working in marketing (at the traditional jobs),” she says, “is that I knew about the convention market – as opposed to clubs.” And The Work Lady was born.

Jan onstage — McInnis joking on the big stage

McInnis moved across the country to Los Angeles 16 years ago – “It was either New York or L.A., because otherwise nobody’s going to see me” – and never looked back. From early on her parents were fans. “They heard me on the radio in D.C. a lot,” she says, “and I made sure they only saw me at the good clubs.”

There are apparently all sorts of clubs. “My goal when I started out working in tough one-nighters,” she writes in a recent book, “was to get so successful that I’d never again have to perform in a room in which you can hear the blender.”

On the road to what is today a highly successful career, McInnis performed at venues that would seem to make the noisy bar appealing: in a bakery, on a gigantic bowling alley with people inside gigantic, see-through bowling balls rolling by, on a turntable (“Lazy Susan for those of you over 50”) that made a 360-degree lap every 10 minutes, and in “a multimillion-dollar gymnasium with a $20 sound system.”

If you’ve missed McInnis at these or other appearances, you may be seeing her before today’s political dust settles. She does a spot-on Hillary Clinton.

Tag: Baby Boomer Comedy Show

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