For nearly 22 years comic Kathleen Madigan has been performing in front of live audiences. Now, at 45, after touring the states repeatedly, doing several USO shows in Afghanistan and Iraq, surviving being not only a contestant but also a judge on NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” she says she will happily deal with the traffic from her Los Angeles home to get to her show at City National Grove of Anaheim on Friday.
Madigan will be bringing a new hour of comedy with a few fan-favorites peppered in the act, she says. With so many other female comics taking on talk shows (Chelsea Handler with “Chelsea Lately”), sitcoms (Whitney Cummings with “Whitney”) and reality shows (Kathy Griffin’s “My Life on the D-List”), Madigan says that after her experience on “Last Comic Standing,” she’s not willing to put herself through any of that again.
“I can see why Paula (Abdul of “American Idol” and “X Factor”) lost her mind,” she says of being a judge on the fifth season of the stand-up competition show after being a finalist on the second season. “I’m not snippy and I’m not mean – those things are not me and to be a judge, we saw like 2,000 comics and really only 200 were funny comics, the rest, well with comedy you can get some real wack-a-doodles off the streets. It was seriously a free-for-all and I couldn’t think of 1,800 ways to say ‘You’re crazy’ without sounding mean. I don’t like making fun of people like that, that’s not in my nature and clearly there was something wrong with some of them and they shouldn’t have been on television. I would never do it again unless it was like a dog jumping contest or something that was fun and silly.”
