Friday, May 21, 2004 | 4:20 a.m.
Lisa Ferguson's Laugh Lines column appears Fridays. Her Sun Lite Column appears Mondays. Reach her at [email protected].
For Debi Gutierrez, the least-stressful part of her day is standing on a comedy-club stage and making a room full of grown-ups laugh.
"I tell them I'm just happy to be out of the house," she says, only half-kidding. The mother of three -- whose professional nickname is "The Mommy Comic" -- headlines Palace Station's Laugh Trax through Saturday.
Gutierrez says that on most days, "I'll wake up in the morning; I'll make breakfast, pack lunches, send everybody off to school, do my housework, pick everybody up from school, go to the gig, come back and do it all over."
It's a hectic schedule the former high school English teacher has maintained for 11 years since deciding to follow her "pipe dream" of becoming a stand-up comic.
"Being a funny teacher was really my lifesaver, because I knew how to teach 'Julius Caesar' by entertaining the kids and making them laugh," she explained recently from the Los Angeles-area home she shares with her second husband (an ex-Marine-turned-multimedia designer), and children ages 6, 15 and 19.
"I think humor really helps when you're being a mom," she says, "when you're being a wife; when you're being a teacher; when you're just trying to survive -- just to laugh at your own situation at some point."
In a sense, Gutierrez still teaches the classics: Her act is loaded with age-old, perfectly frank truths about motherhood and marriage, among others. "Everybody has a mom. Everybody knows a mom. If you're not a mom, there's a mom touching your life somewhere, and maybe in a very irritating way."
That's not to suggest, however, that her shtick is limited to rants about dirty diapers, lazy spouses and whiny tykes.
"I don't know if it's because I kind of have a sweet look to me, like anybody's mom, but I get offstage and (audiences) don't realize I've talked about sex; I've talked about oral sex; about my husband being in the military," Gutierrez says. "I talk about things any other male comic talks about, but I think because I'm a mom, once I'm done they really still love me."
Much of the act is birthed from the experiences of her own family. "They know there's a grain of truth, and then we build on it," she says, assuring the kids have "grown up enough with it to know it's not personal." Meanwhile, the children are compensated ($25 per quip) for helping write Mom's material. "If they see a joke work three times in a row, they get paid."
Luckily, "I rarely get heckled," she reports. "But once, a guy yelled at me, 'You're a mean mom.' I go, 'You know what, a mean mom drives her kids into the lake. That's a mean mom.' "
In years past, Gutierrez would hit the road nearly every other week to perform shows throughout the country. She'd freeze pre-made dinners and otherwise prepare her husband and children for her absence. It's only been recently that she has begun relinquishing some of that control. "If I get home and there are three kids there, he did his job -- I don't even care if they're the neighbor's kids."
For the next several months, Mom will be sticking closer to home as she gets to work hosting a bilingual talk show, titled "A Place of Our Own," which Gutierrez describes as being "about and for moms and caregivers that work from home." It will be shown five days per week, three times per day on KCET (the Los Angeles PBS affiliate) and may eventually air nationally.
The series will offer "all kinds of practical ideas and expert advice" on preparing youngsters to enter school. "It doesn't have to be as hard as some people make it out to be," 44-year-old Gutierrez assures. Viewers will "learn through play and through art and through crafts and through songs how to get these children ready for kindergarten. Especially in my culture, the Hispanic culture, they see their job only as being nurturers instead of teachers."
While landing a TV show is a common want among stand-up comics, "One of the real goals for me was to stay home," she says, and see her children safely through their teen years. Also, "I used to feel really guilty about going out on the road, so I would let them get away with stuff. But now that I'm home, I'll put my foot down."
Also in development is a sitcom pilot for cable's Lifetime Television network, starring Gutierrez and based on her "blended family" situation.
"I have an ex-husband who I see almost every day, and everyone gets along really well. There are more families like us than not," she insists. Typically, though, such families are depicted on television as having "somebody who's evil or stupid or plotting, and it's not like that. We're hoping to show that there are blended families out there, and now that means that there are three or four parents for these kids to bounce ideas off of."
She also promises her TV-mother self will be based in reality. "I'm a mom that's honest," Guiterrez says. "We don't need one more perfect woman on television rubbing our nose in it, do we? We had Oprah and she was great, but then she got skinny and rich and now she doesn't relate to any of us. We need a mom -- not Sharon Osbourne, but not Carol Brady either."
Out for laughs
On Monday comedian Pam Matteson -- a Las Vegas Valley resident who was featured in the Oct. 31 installment of Laugh Lines -- will make a special, one-night-only appearance (filling in for Carole Montgomery) as part of the lineup of "Divas of Comedy" at Sahara.
Production recently wrapped in Los Angeles on "Cloud Nine" -- a comedy about a beach-volleyball team composed of female strippers -- which is due in theaters next spring. It is directed by comic Harry Basile, a regular performer at The Comedy Stop at The Trop. Some big Hollywood and comedy names are attached to the film, including volleyball star Gabrielle Reese, Burt Reynolds, Tony Danza, D.L. Hughley, Paul Rodriguez and Rick Overton. Also in the cast is Roger Behr, an L.A.-based comic who formerly performed at Las Vegas venues and is the brother of Comedy Stop publicist Florence Troutman. Meanwhile, Basile also recently worked behind the scenes on the forthcoming comedy "Hairy Tale," starring Matthew Modine, Roma Downey and Jeffrey Tambor.
archive
