Entertainment
A Comedian’s Path From Small-Town Tennessee to Breakout Fame
Leanne Morgan went from helping her husband sell mobile homes to sudden success in her 50s.
WHAT IN THE WORLD?!: A Southern Woman’s Guide to Laughing at Life’s Unexpected Curveballs and Beautiful Blessings, by Leanne Morgan
On many insomniac nights, when I’m trying to quiet the voices in my head, I listen to stand-up comics. I’ve been back and forth through Netflix’s roster: the blue-collar and the big city, the clean and the crude, the capital-W woke and the close-to-canceled, the ironists and the oafs, the oldies and the mere pups.
Greil Marcus, the rock critic, has said he plays comedy albums while he writes. I have no idea how that might work. But perhaps we’re not so far apart. I use congenial stand-up routines — especially after I know them a bit, when they’re worn in — to settle my mind down.
For months my favorite has been Leanne Morgan, a Tennessee-born comic, whose special is called “I’m Every Woman.” Morgan has a regal, self-deprecating, ex-beauty queen, seen-it-all manner onstage, one that reminds me of certain Southern and Appalachian women I’ve been lucky to know.
Morgan comes on like the family member you hope to be seated next to at dinner: the one for whom life is fundamentally a comedy and not a tragedy, the one who doesn’t need liquor on her breath to be anybody’s fun aunt, the one who makes any conversation seem like a little conspiracy between the two of you.
She’s a red-state comic who doesn’t touch politics. Instead, she unloads in public about private and sometimes squeamish things: perimenopause and its discontents, hemorrhoids, breastfeeding, the size of her undergarments (“you could use them to fight a bull”), Jell-O salads, weight gain and the “nasty” things men still want in bed when their wives are long over it. She’s working in the tradition of Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr, among others, but she’s got a spark that’s her own.
Morgan has a memoir out, titled “What in the World?!: A Southern Woman’s Guide to Laughing at Life’s Unexpected Curveballs and Beautiful Blessings.” As soon as I saw it, I knew I was going to read it.
