Ha HA Institute

Memorial Day Weekend in Provincetown
SAKI STAGE @ The Red Room
Friday, 5/22
Saturday, 5/23 &
Sunday, 5/24
6 PM Nightly

FUNNY DOUBLE TROUBLE
with famous veteran le***an comics

VICKIE SHAW & KAREN WILLIAMS

in their HILARIOUS Double Bill
that’s guaranteed to make you
LAUGH OUT LOUD!
It’s a comedy show you won’t want to miss!!!
Get your tickets today!
$40 General Admission
$50 VIP Seating

Hi! I facilitated an AGING JOYFULLY workshop online as part of the Cabin Fever Reliever series presented by Art to Change the World, hosted by Kelly Frankenberg. You can watch it here on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/

Thanks Kelly!

Art to Change the World The Mission: Art to Change the World (ACW) is a diverse non-profit coalition of change makers employing the arts in service of positive social change. We are a 501(c)3 organization overseen by a ten person board of directors.

Groundbreaking Ohio le***an comic Karen Williams gets her flowers for decades of humor and healing
“I know who I am, I’m secure in that, I know what my skill sets are, and I mostly want to give back.”

BY ISAAC IMAS ● BIPOC, CULTURE, HEALTH & WELLNESS, Q***R JOY ● AUGUST 28, 2024

In Netflix’s Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, a documentary charting the past century of q***r stand-up comedy through some of the scene’s best-known voices, comic Wanda Sykes pointed to the first Black woman she ever saw on stage, who “just happened to be gay”: Ohio’s own Karen Williams.

A free-range child who spent her youth romping through New York City and “was all up in the whole ’60s experience” as a teenager, Karen Williams — now proudly in her 70s — has a lifelong history of doing things her own way. She graduated from Cleveland State University in 1998 with a self-designed major in “Humor and Healing,” and two years later, with a Master’s of Education from CSU’s Adult Learning and Development program. She is also the founder and CEO of the International Institute of Humor and Healing Arts (the HaHA Institute), through which she leads workshops and seminars to promote the healing power of humor.

Life “can be a bit of a joyless adventure at times,” Williams said. “And people need to know that humor relieves stress. Humor elevates your endorphins. Humor gives you that little dopamine rush you want, you know?”

Williams has been performing openly as a le***an comic since 1983 — 14 years before Ellen’s explosive coming-out episode aired. But that’s not the main metric Williams would use to measure her own accomplishment.

“My son, who’s a sketch comic, said, ‘Mom, Wanda gave you the highest compliment because she said, ‘She was just funny,’” Williams retold. “I mean, as a comic, that’s what you wanna hear. Justfunny, you know what I’m saying? He said, ‘Mom, that’s gold.’”

“I do comedy too!”

A “painfully shy child,” Williams was drawn to acting and dance early in life, and modeled from the age of 15 into her forties. In any role where she put on a costume, she could embody a character and “come out,” in a sense. Comedy emerged as the perfect medium.

“Comedy is just the best use of all the skills that I have,” Williams said. “I like to talk. I get to move. I’m making eye contact, I’m feeling the energy from the people, I’m giving them energy. It’s just a really wonderful kind of artistic expression for me.”

As a 23-year-old single mother in 1970s Santa Monica, California, Williams got a close-up look at the life of an artist through members of her Buddhist community, including genre-defining performers like Herbie Hancock and Tina Turner.

Then, as a ghostwriter for Columbia Pictures, Williams grew intimately familiar with the balancing act of writing a comedy script, which meant adhering to certain patterns while maintaining a feel of spontaneity.

“What I really like about comedy is that, especially doing improv-style comedy, it appears as though there’s no form,” Williams said. “But there is a form. There’s a definite structure, and you get to play inside of there, but you are bumping up against the edges.”

When in 1983, a friend mentioned that he was doing a comedy show in Oakland, Williams was confident enough to declare, “I do comedy too” — despite never having performed a set.

Her friend offered her five minutes of his own act, which would be the first of Williams’ countless comedy performances.

Working the LG circuit

Williams started doing stand-up in small Black clubs in the Bay Area, but grew sick of hearing homophobic and misogynistic jokes from fellow performers while waiting for her turn to take the stage. She turned to the “le***an and gay circuit,” joining the groundswell of q***r comics making a name for themselves at gay and le***an clubs in the San Francisco of the ’80s.

Copy-of-KW15.jpg
(Photo courtesy of Karen Williams’ Facebook)
“Valencia Rose and Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint featured all of the gay and le***an comics,” Williams said. “And I was the first act to perform at Josie’s. The club wasn’t even open yet, so hardly any people came to my show. So [the owner] gave me carte blanche to come to the club anytime I wanted to. And I did, over the run of the club. I certainly did.”

Williams credits drag queens not just with providing her a segue into local comedy scenes, but with acting as the front line of defense against unwelcome incursions into spaces that hosted gay and le***an performers. She argues they deserve recognition in a big way.

“To me, it should be DQLG, because the drag queens were there before anybody,” Williams said. “I would be at shows in Oakland and people would come in to harass us, and the seven-foot drag queen would lift her dress up and go over there to kick his ass. You know what I’m saying? So, I have tremendous respect for drag queens.”

Karen Williams with co-stars Karen S. Ripley, Jeanine Strobel, and Tom Ammiano, with whom she performed at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco’s Mission District in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Drag queens also forced Williams to push herself to her creative limits — and for that, they merit her highest compliment.

“They’re just funny,” she said. “Like, if I had to go after the drag queen, I had to be super funny cause they were hilarious, you know?”

Mom of three, never closeted

Williams speaks unequivocally about never feeling the need to hide her sexuality or experiencing the “internal strife” many of her q***r contemporaries grappled with. But as her audiences grew, Williams wasn’t exempt from the official coming-out rite of passage.

“It was Marga Gomez who saw me at the club — Ollie’s, it was a women’s club at that time in Oakland — and asked me if I wanted to perform at San Francisco Pride,” Williams recalled. Gomez is a renowned fellow le***an comic who worked the LG circuit alongside Williams. “And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And she said, ‘Well, you know, it’s gonna be in the newspaper.’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And she said, ‘You know, you good?’ Basically, she was trying to warn me that it would out me.”

Karen Williams featured on the April 2008 cover of Washington LGBTQ+ magazine Metro Weekly.
Williams performed at San Francisco Pride. And just as she never felt ashamed of her sexuality, she knew she didn’t have to place a buffer between her life as an openly le***an artist and activist, and the lives of her three sons.

“I was [22], my son was 3,” Williams said. “So he grew up with me. When he was about 8 or 9, I was marching in Hollywood in like, some see-through top in high heels at LA pride. And he ran up to me, ‘Mommy, Mommy, I’m so proud of you.’ He was my ally right from the beginning.”

For Williams’ sons growing up in a “gay mecca,” having a le***an mom was the least of their concerns.

“In Berkeley, I had the feeling that I was okay there when my son was little,” Williams said. “But as he was growing into being a Black man, he felt radiant hostility sometimes towards him.”

But Williams’ experience bore out her optimism about the LGBT community’s willingness to reflect and self-correct.

“This community has not been racism-free or sexism-free or gender bias-free — we know that,” Williams said. “But the reason I love the community is because we’ll talk about it. We’ll have a meeting. We’ll have a conference. We’ll have a show. We’ll do something to at least address it, rather than acting as though it doesn’t exist. And I enjoy that, I prefer that.”

Aging joyfully

These days, Williams isn’t out to prove herself to anyone.

“At this point in my life in general, I feel more contributive than anything,” Williams reflects. “By the time I’m at the stage where I am, I have my friends, I know who I am, I’m secure in that, I know what my skill sets are, and I mostly want to give back.”

Her comedy tour was derailed by the pandemic, but rather than take up breadmaking or puzzling, Williams decided to use her quarantine time to earn a PhD. She is in her final year of writing her dissertation in social gerontology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, a journey that she describes as “so not about the PhD.”

“It was really about me falling in love with myself,” Williams said. “It was the first apartment I had with no children that had inhabited it. It was so liberating and so eye-opening for me to get in touch with what it is that I like, and who I am. And I started having this profound appreciation for myself. It’s been life-changing for me.”

Copy-of-KW14.jpg
Karen Williams presents “FINDING JOY IN DIVERSITY” at the New York State SHRM Annual Meeting in Verona, NY on September 12, 2023 to an audience of 250.
As a comic, Williams hasn’t slowed her roll either. She continues to perform comedy aboard le***an cruises with Olivia Travel, a company she’s worked with since 1990, as well as conducting online seminars on joyful aging through the HaHA institute and even writing a new book on humor and healing. But it’s undeniable that the comedy scene around her has changed drastically since the start of her career — in part due to her influence.

“I always felt like the mainstream would come to us,” Williams said. “I felt like eventually they would get tired of the ‘Take my wife, please take her,’ and all of the bad wife jokes, and the guys constantly talking about their pen*ses.”

“What makes stuff funny”

That’s essentially what’s happening. Not only is bald-faced misogyny generally frowned upon, but it’s a lot easier for q***r comics to use their personal lives as comedy material. Some of Wanda Sykes’ Outstanding co-stars emphasize that identity is central in comedy today — listeners want to hear the gritty details of your story, and the fastest way to connect with an audience is to get deeply personal.

The mainstream has come to Karen Williams in more ways than one. Performing sets for q***r audiences, where she openly discussed her identity as a Black le***an, was instrumental for gaining a foothold in the comedy scene. Now, up-and-coming q***r comics who don’t want to tiptoe around their sexuality face fewer obstacles — they don’t have to worry as much that coming out might cost them a network contract, for example.

However, Williams hopes young, aspiring comics take their craft further than solely speaking about their identities. She cites Sebastian Maniscalco as a relatively new comic reaching audiences through personal anecdotes only a guy with an Italian grandma could tell.

“He talks about his grandmother being in the basement, making lasagnas,” Williams said. “This guy is so Italian. I mean, I want to eat spaghetti after I watch him.”

Williams predicted that new comics who’ve grown their reach by presenting themselves as members of an identity group will likely move towards a more universal brand of comedy.

“There’s a growth and development of you as a performing artist, that begins to have acceptance about that part of yourself, and then goes on. And I think where you’re going on to, is towards your shared humanity. Ultimately, what makes stuff funny is that we all think it’s funny.”

That’s not to say that Williams is trying to put distance between herself and her identity. She’s no stranger to facing pushback for billing herself as a “le***an comic,” and in response to those who would rather entertainers keep their personhood out of their performances, Williams reaches to her philosophy of humor as healing.

“We are invisible. No one really cares about us, especially Black le***ans,” Williams said. “Who needs a laugh more than those people?” 🔥

ISAAC IMAS (HE/HIM)
Isaac Imas is a student at Oberlin College, where he has worked as Production Manager and News Staff Writer for The Oberlin Review.

I’m laughing and crying …
Go KAMALA🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

2024 Pre-Election Cold Open - SNL CNN's Kaitlan Collins (Chloe Fineman) checks in with Kamala Harris (Maya Rudolph) and Donald Trump's (James Austin Johnson) campaigns on the eve of the 2024 ...

Don't miss your chance to see The Palm Springs Sunset Music & Comedy Festival - SATURDAY! Tickets are still available, but they're selling fast. You can skip straight to the front of our line and secure your tickets by visiting our website.

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SBJ Presents the Sunset Music Series
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SBJ Presents the Sunset Music Series Presents: The Palm Springs Sunset Music & Comedy Festival - SATURDAY Tickets are available now! Dates: Sat. November 9th 2024, 7:00 pm

I need the simplicity of this in my life!

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAI2Pu6N1xt/?igsh=NnByMnhscGFyMHly

This created a huge shift in perspective for me. #anxiety #mentalhealth #depression #lifestyle #mindset #health #reels #psychology

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Festival PROMO Facebook Escape to Palm Springs for a Veterans Weekend getaway filled with music, laughter, and relaxation. The Sunset Music & Comedy Festival offers three days of no...

Go to https://www.whitehouse.gov/
LET’S BE PROACTIVE & GET THE MESSAGES OUT TO THE PEOPLE ABOUT THIS ADMINISTRATION AND WHAT IT IS DOING TO BENEFIT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE!!!
FOCUS PEOPLE…
NOT ON THE OPPOSITION BUT ON THE REALNESS OF THE SITUATION!

I was fortunate enough to make my storefront - The Healing Place Education Center - in Wickliffe, Ohio a tracking station during President Obama’s run for second term. College students came from all over the country, some with their parents, to go door to door in Northeast Ohio and tell our neighbors about the victories and challenges of the Obama Administration. We need GRASSROOTS EFFORTS to fight for and preserve democracy in this country. WE GET TO FIGHT!!! We cannot allow our rights to be eroded away by fear, apathy, violence, and misinformation while we just stand by, shake our heads, and complain. We have a responsibility to alert and inform others, to continue to be advocates and activists, and to leave a legacy of empowerment for our children and their children.
FIGHT LOCALLY!
WIN NATIONALLY!!!
ORGANIZE & VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The White House President Biden and Vice President Harris promised to move quickly to deliver results for working families. That’s what they’ve done.

I found this vintage Karen Williams performing at the Flying Beaver Pubaret in Toronto, formerly owned by Maggie Cassella. Mags and I have been friends forever…she produces the We’re Funny That Way Comedy Festival in Toronto…I’ll be there Saturday night!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4NTzc9gYQc/?igsh=MW54cXhuY2g1dGd4bA==

It’s Comedians who helped pave the way Week. Today We have Karen Williams. Karen has spent decades perfecting performing Standup & She has a Masters in it. Karen Williams is the Founder & CEO of the International Institute of Humor and Healing Arts aka HaHA Institute. Enjoy. . . #talkstanduptome #standupcomedy #oldschoolstandup #classicstandup #standupvinyl #comedyvinyl #standuppioneers #pavingtheway #pavetheway #KarenWilliams