Her stature supplies jokes, but also stories

By Jerry Fink

Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009 | 2:01 a.m.

Comedian Tanyalee Davis is a little woman who gets big laughs.

The 3-foot-6 native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, is a polished performer who will do five minutes at the drop of a hat — on the subway, in the washroom, at Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland.

“When I play Vegas, I feel like I’m on vacation,” Davis, 38, says by cell phone from Sonora, Calif. She is getting ready to perform at a Vietnam veterans motorcycle club camp out before heading to the nearby Black Oak Casino for another gig.

Davis will be at Palace Station Thursday through Saturday.

Her routine is a blend of jokes, observations and life stories. She humorously forces audiences to face their biases about people who are different from the norm.

“I know I’m different,” she tells audiences. “I’m a Canadian.”

She spends about half her time in Europe. Because she travels so much she spends a lot of time in airports.

“Really, do I look like a security threat?” she says.

Her act includes lots of dwarf humor.

“When I was a kid for Halloween I’d dress up as a California raisin.”

Her mother was a schoolteacher; her father, an airline pilot. They divorced when she was a child. In her act she quips that she put a guilt trip on her younger sister, who is normal in size.

“I told her they divorced because she wasn’t a dwarf,” Davis says.

When she started school, she said, everyone called her a midget.

“Regular people don’t understand why it is so offensive,” Davis says. “It’s constantly thrown at you, and never in a good connotation.”

Over the years Davis overcame her sensitivity and now pokes fun at that and other terms used to describe little people.

In college she studied sociology, but had a desire to perform.

She tried it for the first time at a comedy club on Jan. 23, 1990, and was a hit. But she bombed the next week and gave it up for a few years. She gave it another try in 1995 at a club in Vancouver, British Columbia. Bolstered by a successful show, she continued performing and moved to Los Angeles the next year.

“The comedy scene was crazy,” she said. “There were not enough clubs and everyone was trying to break in.”

She performed her first one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2007. With lots of autobiographical material, it was a major departure from her usual, joke-based act.

“It was a different style, more storytelling,” she says.

She has performed her act at most of the clubs in Vegas. Her ambition is to have a room of her own, like Vinnie Favorito at the Flamingo.

“This is so what I’m meant to do,” Davis says.