Fem Com Laughter for women

IT is hard to tell that Lisa Allen-Agostini, 45, and Louris Martin Lee-Sing, 41, have not had a close friendship that spans decades. They’ve known each other for a while, though. They met in the mid-90s, when “they were teenagers or close to teenagers at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop (TTW) in the 1990s. They lost touch but met periodically over the years.

Their friendship truly developed when they joined rapso artiste and actor Wendell Manwarren’s group in the 2018 Mentoring by the Masters programme, a project of the Artists Registry of the Ministry of the Arts.

This newfound friendship has led to FEM COM Laugh Out Thursdays, debuting tonight from 8 pm at Euphoria Lounge, Port of Spain and planned to take place monthly, on the first Thursday of each month.

The programme “kind of facilitated that we would go and hang out after and lime and have a couple of beers and that whole getting back into that performer lifestyle,” said Lee-Sing.

It was this that made Allen-Agostini realise just how funny Lee-Sing is, they said in an interview at Newsday’s office at Pembroke Street, Port of Spain.

Lee-Sing always knew she was funny. “I always liked stupidness...I have always been good at making people laugh, especially in groups and stuff – to the point where I kind of stopped hanging out with people because they just thought I was entertainment, so they would just invite me. And then they would be like: ‘This is Louris and she is really funny,’” she said.

Allen-Agostini had done one stand-up comedy open-mic show before the mentoring programme and felt that Lee-Sing would be “great at it,” so she asked her to join the open-mic show. Since then, a release on the show said, they have been performing as Lyrix and Just Lisa at open-mic and comedy stages since last September.

Errol Fabien invited them to perform as guests on the Three-and-a-Half Men comedy show at the Central Bank Auditorium over the Carnival season. And Simmy the Trini (Rhea-Simone Auguste), a stand-up comic, brought them “into the fold of up-and-coming comedians who regularly perform at her bi-monthly Haul Yuh Mic comedy open mic show at Kaiso Blues Café.” They also took part in Kix-See Caribbean Comedy Mister Comedy 2019 pageant-style improv show at Woodford Café in March.

Simmy the Trini and Fabien have also been mentors to the new comedy duo.

Laughter has played a therapeutic role in both of their lives, as a revitaliser for Lee-Sing after her mother died and she sought to re-enter the creative world after being away for a while. For Allen-Agostini, while she found it both fun and terrifying, it was good for her as she has an anxiety disorder and “doing things that challenge that” is good for her, she says.

Lee-Sing said, l she was trying “to revitalise myself and my creativity – you know I’ve acted in all sorts of shows, and played all kinds of shows, and I felt like that was just slipping. I was still doing it, but I was not happy and focused. I was not feeling creative, like I was being a proper creative. And of course, I have all of these economic realities to deal with as well.”

The work they did in the programme brought up for Lee-Sing the “most wonderful and exciting thoughts and feelings.”

“Lisa and I were talking, and I always wanted to do the stand-up comedy. She had done it as part of her research and stuff and I said, ‘Let us do it.”

While some people might think comedy is about “vaps,” the comedic duo know it takes much more than that. Years of performance and writing experience make this venture feel as though they’ve preparing for it their entire lives.

Allen-Agostini said, “Stand-up comedy is acting and it is writing...it is almost like our whole lives.” Lee-Sing chimed in to sayperformance and writing are “a resume for stand-up comedians.”

Even though their experience has been preparing them for this – Allen-Agostini as an award-winning writer and Lee-Sing a professional actor, theatre director and filmmaker – comedy requires something slightly different.

That difference is, Allen-Agostini said, “Whatever the thing is that audiences respond to, it is you. You can’t bring any fakeness. Even if you drop a throw-away line, if it is not you, they won’t laugh, honestly.

“You have to take your failings and your fears and your terrors and take all of those things about you that you don’t like and some that you do like but you have to dig up in yourself to put you on the stage to be funny.”

There is a structure and approach to writing comedy, they also said, like writing spoken word or a tragic monologue.

“There is technique. Even when you are figuring out, ‘What do I write my comedy about?’ you go to the book and there are questions they ask you and you begin to build,” Lee-Sing said.

They use author, speaking/comedy coach, and speaker Judy Carter’s The Comedy Bible as their reference.

Fem Com came about when they recognised there were few female comedians. Lee-Sing said she saw a gap: there were too few female comedians and too few voices telling women’s stories and talking about women’s issues. And she wanted to fill that space.

Their comedy tackled the often difficult things that women might be ashamed of or afraid to talk about: like taking a “toots” (defecate) at work.

“And men don’t know anything about that. I was doing that joke for my husband and he was like, ‘What....?’ Every woman who hears that knows exactly what I am talking about,” Lee-Sing said. They said a male stand-up comic would not touch this because they do not know it exists. Their material also covers things like menstruation, child sexual abuse and even the ever-talked-about horn. Also they have a piece on monogamy and the prairie vole (a small rodent that is relative to mice which is known for its monogamy).

“It is nerd comedy but also feminist comedy. One of the whole tenets of feminism is that women’s stories need to be told and told from a women’s perspective,” Allen-Agostini said of their act.

For them, their comedy also provides an opportunity to educate and to create dialogue. Although it’s called Fem Comedy, that does not mean their shows will have no men in them. Tonight’s show features Stephon John and Kylie P, who will be in sketches in the show. They want the show to provide a platform for different voices, whether those voices are queer or differently-abled.

Next month’s show will feature Kevin Soyer, a paralysed comic who creates digital skits, they said.

Allen-Agostini and Lee-Sing ultimately see themselves being as big international stars, like American comedian Tiffany Haddish and having a sketch comedy TV show and even doing movies.

In the meantime, they’ll start a podcast soon called Giving Trouble, and hope to become corporate and event hosts.