Maria Bamford: the nicest person to ever heckle an audience member who fell asleep
Maria Bamford may have one of the strangest acts in comedy. At Acme Comedy Company this past weekend, she channeled quickly between personas and characters, hopscotching through emotions and experiences the way people once tore through a rolodex. One thing is quickly apparent about Bamford: She’s incredibly sensitive, but she’s found a wicked way of turning this sensitivity on its side. She’s self-deprecating and ruthless; cynical, but not a dick. Even when poking fun at a woman—an older lady in the front row—who fell asleep on her date’s shoulder, Bamford was very sweet, yet still perfectly biting. She’s a much larger presence than her tiny frame would suggest.
It’s true that Bamford, who is a Duluth native and graduate of the University Of Minnesota in the Twin Cities, is a character on stage. But it’s also true that she takes aspects of her true personality and blows them out of proportion, unraveling the things people say and do in a way that’s extremely satisfying. Her act is jumbled, though. She doesn’t tell a story so much as she performs emotions, and for any fans of chronology or traditional storytelling—well, they’re going to leave the club feeling a bit cold. The whole act is very actress-y, but the script is pleasantly bizarre. Sure, on occasion she does go overboard with her moaning or non-sensical bleating, and that might put off some potential fans, but those people are likely unable to grasp anything that doesn’t unravel in a staid, traditional manner. You can’t avoid Bamford’s charm, and at the end of the set, the audience has swept through an entire range of emotions. She’s an absurdist who manages to affect an audience on a sentimental level.
In her interview with us in May, we asked Bamford what her ideal career would look like, and she gave us an interesting peek into how she still thinks like a Minnesotan:
I’m currently living it. But I do want to work more with others. I haven’t been as good at that. I think that’s a Minnesotan thing. I was raised not to argue with people, or have different opinions than others. So collaborating with others is really still new and exciting for me. With stand-up, no one says what I have to do, and I don’t argue with anyone over jokes or what’s funny, so that [collaboration] is really a new thing I’m interested in. Otherwise, just keep doing work that I’m proud of.
But it seems like Bamford is too nice to collaborate. When she works alone, you get pure Maria, all of her charming neuroses included. If she worked with others more, we’d likely lose some of her—or at least some of her characters.
