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Comedian Lynne Koplitz to play the Palladium Side Door
Sometimes, when people find out that comedian Lynne Koplitz grew in in Sarasota, they act all impressed.
“I tell them, I’m not from ‘now’ Sarasota,” Koplitz explains. Not the city with the posh restaurants, art galleries and millionaire high-rises. “I say I’m from Sarasota when it was one big palmetto bush, and we lived out on Cattleman Road.”
At any given time, she remembers, some animal – an elephant or giraffe – would get loose from the nearby Ringling Brothers Circus winter quarters and wander around their neighborhood.
But Sarasota was home. “Even when it had nothing else, it always had beautiful beaches.”
Koplitz, who performs July 25 at the Palladium Theater Side Door Cabaret in St. Pete, has a keen sense of observational humor, and a dry, blunt delivery. She’s been on Comedy Central often, hosted the Food Network’s How to Boil Water and the syndicated dating show Change of Heart, and her Netflix special, Hormonal Beast, debuted in 2017 and is still streaming.
In school, Koplitz reveals, “I was weird, but my mom raised me to think weird was really good.”
At first, her heart was set on becoming a comedic actress. She majored in theater at an Alabama college, and worked dinner theaters, regional theaters and outdoor theaters across the border in Tennessee. “I was always coming up second banana,” she recalls. “I just couldn’t land big parts. What happened was, I was in the right neighborhood on the wrong street.”
Her career GPS pointed Koplitz to New York City. “I had a dream in my head of always being a comic. Like that thing you flash on before you fall asleep. It was right there. But it was one of those things where I was getting a little older, and I thought ‘At 28 years old, who starts comedy?’ It seemed dumb. It was like saying, when you’re 28, you’re going to be an opera singer.”
Her friends insisted she was hilarious, though, and they talked her into doing an open mic night, at Gladys’ Comedy Room, inside Hamburger Harry’s restaurant on 45th Street, near Times Square.
She didn’t “kill,” but she didn’t suck, either. And so the fire was lit.
“I have a lot more heart than my stage persona. But there are two Lynnes, there’s the tough one – the adult – and there’s the kid. They’re both me, but one’s just a tougher version of me. I don’t walk around saying ‘f—’ all the time.”
Jim Gaffigan once asked Koplitz why she “worked dirty,” after he’d seen her do a “clean” version of her act. “I don’t know, I like being dirty, it’s funny,” she replied. “It’s funnier to me. I have more fun.”
Koplitz often gets philosophical. “Even the sex jokes I do and stuff, they’re always about being considerate,” she says, “Even though they’re dirty. But they are about men not hearing us, and women not hearing men …
“It’s about being nice to each other and being considerate, and getting older. It’s gentle and it has heart. But it also has this loud, bawdy ‘dame.’ Like every audition I go to know, it’s like ‘You could tell she was something once.’ A faded rose. ‘Hooker with a heart of gold.’
“When I was younger they’d say ‘Prom queen’s got a gun,’ and now it’s ‘Hooker with a heart of gold.’”
She thinks of herself, she confesses, as Belle Watling, Rhett Butler’s whorehouse confidante in Gone With the Wind. “I’m also the dog in Lady and the Tramp, who sings ‘He’s a tramp, but I love him.’ That’s me too. That’s the stage Lynne.” Offstage Lynne, the “kid,” is quiet and deeply spiritual.
Koplitz refers to the late Joan Rivers as mentor; she spent nearly a year on the comedy icon’s series Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best and spent weekends at Rivers’ country estate.
“She’d seen my sizzle reel and said ‘If I’m working with that woman, I’ll do the show. But I want to meet her first.’
“She wouldn’t have invited me if she didn’t think I was funny.”
Lynne Koplitz, with Lou Angelwolf, at 8 p.m. Friday, July 25 at the Side Door Cabaret. Find tickets at this link.
