comic-linda-hill

Comedians @ AMUSEum

Linda Hill • Entertainer

Linda Hill
Improv • 1980 - 1986
Standup • 1983 - 1988

Linda Hill: Quirky Kansan Turns Top Comic

November 16, 1986 • SF Chronicle Datebook • Jeff Kaliss

Linda Hill’s comic material comes out of the closets in her Russian Hill apartment. It’s there that she stores stacks of glamour and family magazines dating back as far back as 1870 where she can research the styles and mores of the past. And there are yards, and yards of period clothing, from sexy sheath to hoop skirts, in which she appears on stage.
Using these resources and her perceptive imagination, comedian, Hill has played a variety of comic characters in a variety of Bay Area. Venues: comedy clubs, cabaret, Alex Bennett’s morning radio show and video productions. In her six years of local performance, she has also performed as an improviser, song stylist, and stand-up comedian. In short, she may be the consummate local funny girl.
Hill whiled away her Kansas childhood hours watching old movies on TV and dreaming of being Doris Day in a bubble bath; her house had no running water. In high school she became the chief character actress in the town’s school plays, and was offered a partial drama scholarship to Kansas State, but her father declined to co-sign a student loan because he didn’t believe women should go to college. She went to work as a newspaper reporter first in Abilene, KS, and then in the slightly larger town of Dodge City.
In 1980. Hill left Dodge City, Using part of her meager receptionist wages to take an improvisation workshop at the Old Soaghetti factory in North Beach. the Spaghetti Jam improv group, which ran the workshop, recognized the appeal of Hill’s wacky humor, accented by her red hair, toothy grin and booming voice.
By the summer of 1981, Hill guest appearance with Spaghetti Jam were gaining wider notice, and she was invited to join other improv groups, including Femprov, the Comedy Underground, and later the National Theater of the Deranged. She was performing five nights a week, by holding onto her day job downtown.
In May 1982, she went solo at an open mic at the Other Café. From the start. Hill has had a lot to say in her stand-up act between women and men. Her material is Frank and funny, as evidenced by her reaction to being invited by an ex-lover to meet his new flame. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t wanna meet a bitch. Hell has no fury like a woman playing second fiddle.“
One of Hill’s standup “little brothers,“ Jon Ross, got her her first paid solo gig on his show at the Holy City Zoo in February 1983, about a month after she’d been fired from her last downtown day job. She went through her notebooks and worked up 25 minutes worth of “stuff about relationships.“
She put the improv experience to work developing a set of characters for performance, based on people she’d grown up with in Kansas and encountered in San Francisco.
“I reallv don’t have time to write material, because I’m too busy writing down what people are saying on the bus. All I do, basicallv, is plagiarize from life”
Hill found stops on the emcee level around town, but discovered it tougher to advance. “When I wanted to do more of my characters.” she says, “I got, ‘You’re too weird. vou’re a little too off-the-wall.'”
Jon Fox of Fox Productions, got Hill an emcee gig at Caesars Tahoe in the summer of 1984. There she met comic superstar George Carlin who invited Hill to L.A. and decided to work one of her characters into the “Apartment 2C” series he was developing…

Read the full article

• Reviews • Pull Quotes • Blurbs •

“…the ubiquitous Linda Hill ~ SF Examiner • Dec 19, 1982

“Taking on the personae of, in turn, her older brother, father and mother, Hill acted out a sly bit of family intrigue. In process, she carved meaty slices of family life and peeled verbal snapshots of her small-time hometown. It was a well-constructed miniature.”~ SF Examiner • 198x

“A coloring book of wonderful monologues and songs by one of the finest character comedienne’s working today. These characters are superbly drawn by a woman with the eye of Norman Rockwell and the wit of Elaine May” ~ West Coast Arts • 198x

‘“She not only impersonates but becomes her characters. Hill ventures into territory that she inhabits with few other comedians.” ~The SF Chronicle • 198x

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Quick Takes

Improv Workshops

MAking Jim Cranna Laugh

I never will forget the first time I made Jim Cranna laugh at a workshop. We had the suggestion of ‘pizza’ and ‘iron lung’. Jim's rules were Yes and… and always play smarter than you are. I really didn't know what an iron lung was. As the scene is building in the class, I knocked on the door and say “Hello, I brought the pizza. I'm sorry I'm a little bit late but I have an iron lung.” That was the first time Jim Cranna ever laughed at anything I did. Oh my God Jim thought I was funny.

Improv groups

“the ubiquitous Linda Hill"

Spaghetti Jam • Comedy Underground • Femprov • National Theatre of the Deranged • Other Cafe Players • Spontaneous Combustion •
We? were all there ready to do a show on a Sunday night, except there were only 3 or 4 people in the audience. The players outnumbered the crowd. The rule of thumb was there had to be as many people in the crowd as letters in Lorenzo Matawaran’s name. The manager informs us there aren’t enough people do a show. Our piano player, Jim Cox suggests “Hey man, I have some loaded brownies and I think this group needs to bond, since we can't do the show, let’s do the brownies instead?" Agreed, so just as we’re finishing the last bit of brownies. The manager informs us “Hey a bus with 50 people just came in and we are going to put on the show!” We're trying to improvise our asses off as fast as we can, before the brownies really hit us. Of course, we do an obligatory Harold to end the show, which is many scenes about one topic. At one point, all of us were on stage in a hot tub and we realize we can't end the scene because we’re all on stage in the hot tub. There's no one to call the blackout. It was a very bonding experience.

Other Cafe

Comedy Theater Month

When I came up with the idea of a comedy theater month at The Other Cafe, where funny people, not necessarily stand-ups, would still showcase their comedic style in a staged piece and then collaborate with the others on the bill to create sketches with each other. Really, great that Bob listened to me and we did that.
One of our inside jokes at the time: The Comedy Underground was performing at the Punchline, we we’re back in the green room, talking about the lineup because we were slated to follow the stand-ups warming up the crowd. Chris Titus comes in, high on adrenaline from what was likely a great set. He said “Top that motherfuckers” to a room full of oblivious and puzzled improvisors. So when we finally put our theater week together with Debi Durst, Warren Spottswood, Alex Hershlag and myself… we called it the TTMF Review.

Ha Ha A Go Go

Listen with a click…

Favorite Club Denizen

Cantu @ Holy City Zoo

John Cantu at the Holy City Zoo wasn’t anybody’s favorite, but I liked John. He always greeted me with “How you doing tonight, hot stuff?” I always wore vintage dresses, and his advice was “You should never wear a dress on stage, because men can’t laugh with a hard-on.” I’d counter with “John, that hasn’t been my experience.” I’d see him put the moves on women and I gave him a hard time about it. Saw him one time at the bar telling this woman “All you need to know is I like my eggs over easy.” I said “John man, it’s presumptuous this woman is going to go home with, but to think she’s going to cook breakfast for you…really?“ He liked me because I didn't take his s***.

MISS HAIGHT ASHBURY PAGEANT

Great American Music Hall

From contestant (Miss Uranus, Linda "Sushi" Hill) to offering color commentary as Host for the next 5 years with Kevin Meaney and Jeremy Kramer..
••• Meaney delivered the opening monologue in a tux evidently cut for a trained bear. then turned a cartwheel. Hill provided a steady stream of tart observations on contestants' attire, such as "a fashion statement that verges on gift-wrap" and "an outfit easily cleaned with a damp sponge.” Hill's hair had that passed-too-close-to-a-vacuum look, complementing her Indiana thrift shop gown.
~SF Chronicle • September 9, 1986
••• When the show lagged—its endearing amateurism does not put a premium on crisp production values— co-hosts Jeremy Kramer and Linda Hill filled in admirably. Hill, especially, was in her element, providing waggish color commentary from atop a towering podium, changing from one puffy chiffon dress to another and speaking in a singsong voice familiar to devotees of the Miss America pageant and other very serious events.
~SF Chronicle • November 8, 1987

Vintage Wardrobe

Malfunction!

My friend, Trina Robbins, who was the first woman to ever draw Wonder Woman made my first paper dolls as a promo for my ‘Redhead in Rhinestones’ shows. We would go thrift shopping and found these two powder blue marabou feather jackets. She convinced me to get the three quarter length jacket of marabou because ‘it’s much more practical’. So I bought it, and wore it with a powder blue sheath dress, covered in rhinestones to do a set at Cobb's Pub. The jacket starts to molt into the air with little blue feathers like just gusting away as if I'm some sort of dandelion that's going to seed. And Tom Sawyer was so angry with me that my jacket was molting away all over his club. “It's a visual, they're getting blue snow.” So that's my tribute to the visual comedy.

worst audience

That Night in Reno

For the most part I was very, very lucky. Although, this one gig at a bar in Reno was… memorable. I was opening for Will Durst at a club, where the motel is actually within walking distance from this bar. The club had two levels, where the stage was a few steps down from a noisy bar, the sound system was bad so the excess noise from the bar was compromising being heard. It’s understood if you don't do your allotted time, you're not gonna get paid. You have to do your full time, whether you’re hating it, or not. Since there was no MC, they decided to do a gross joke contest to get the audience warmed up. Not going to repeat any of the jokes because they were just too…gross. So when the audience has reached a lynch mob mentality, they introduce me . “And now, your first comic… a woman…Linda Hill.” Classy! I kept addressing one side of the room that was really trying to listen to me, but there’s a table of real jerks treating it like a strip club, yelling “Take it off, show us your …” You get the idea. The ‘president’ asshole of the table orders one of those flaming drinks. Now I rarely had any hecklers, so I wasn't really versed in how to deal with drunks of this caliber, but I thought this was my opportunity to get control of the situation. “Hey, drink it while it’s flaming. If you don't drink it while it's flaming, you're a real wussy.” Thinking no one’s going to drink it while it’s burning, so I'm gonna win. Instead, he throws it on his face and his whole face is engulfed in flames, his friends are smacking his face to put out the fire. He goes to the restroom, then comes back to put ice on his face. He’s flipping me off the rest of my set, the rest of the audience has turned on me and I still have at least seven minutes left so I can get paid. I finish my set, bring Will Durst up as the headliner and just make a beeline out of the club right to my motel room, thinking “My god oh my god!” An hour passes, and Will knocks to check in, asking if I am OK. He can see I’m shaken and tries to comfort me. “You know, you did a really good job, you kept your energy, you stayed focused. I do think you kind of lost them after you set the guy’s face on fire.”

Influences

I created a community theater in Kansas and always loved when things went wrong. One time, I was playing the Widder Appleby in a melodrama and a flat fell down. I said “Ain't a person entitled to no privacy?” and pulled the flat back up and got a huge laugh and I was so thrilled that something went wrong that I could fix it. I was improvising, without knowing what it was. Every afternoon after school my Mom and I would watch the Mike Douglas show. Sandy Baron from the original Second City, and he would come on and talk about improv. Whoever were the guests would be on benches and they'd improvise. They didn't know what they were doing either.
There's this Jonathon Winters bootleg video they used to show at Cobb's Pub after the club closed. He's talking about Ohio and how he grew up. When the camera pulls out, you see that he's just on a set that's being taken apart by the crew, and one lone camera guy kept his camera running on him and when it goes in tight on him again, he's a genius. I think that's a lot of what stand up is. If you have too wide of a viewpoint of what the comic's saying, they're crazy. But if you can hone in on what they're actually saying and what their point is, it can be brilliant.

Comedy Day

Big visuals for Large crowds

I have always loved the camaraderie that we had on Comedy Day, but it also was really a teaching experience for me in terms of large crowds. There was a time when we had literally 10,000 people in that field to see us… and Jeremy S Mandingo Kramer, five foot, four inches of raw passion. The year I first saw him come out on stage riding this little tiny bicycle in a big plaid suit and I got the message… you need to do something hugely visual. You're going to be remembered far more for the visual image that you put out to a crowd that large as opposed to the words that you're going to say. So the first time I got to do my own stand up on that stage, I wore a big polka dot dress with a contrasting polka dot hat and my spring shoes, which I had got when I first shopped my way across America. And I bounced out onto the stage in my spring shoes and I felt like I'd created an image for a big audience. I owe Jeremy Kramer for that big takeaway from Comedy Day.
Photo credit: Sue Murphy

Characters

The Dynelles

This was my first experience into total immersion character comedy… once we were dressed we were only our characters—me as Darcy DeMuir, the gal who just couldn't say No!; Nora Dunn as the fabulous Fabiana Firello—the one you don't f**k with and Nancy Endy as Estelle Pedillo—the smart one because she'd been to VocTech! This was amazing for me-I learned so much and exploring the girl group sound was a gift! Also love Billy Jaye for acting as our manager in the clubs and writing us some amazing tunes like "Johnny Stay In Jail

OTHER BAY AREA GIGS / EVENTS OF NOTE

Comedy Tonite • 1988

Father Guido Sarducci's Vatican Enquirer

A Woman Possessed

That was then, This is since then… in NYC

website • bigcityhick.com

Published Music Link?

Performance EVEnts

Annual Johnny Cash
Birthday Bash

Hey gurl, hey! Found a pic of you in your Spring Shoes @ Comedy Day

This section will disappear when your page goes LIVE… once you’re finished filling in the gaps and satisfied with the look and feel of your ‘wing’ of AMUSEum.

Here’s the first draft of your page with the Linda-centric stuff from my collection in need of your curating. Any visual stuff of your own, to help illustrate/match up with your stories, (and save us from the drab calendars) is much appreciated. Was this your headshot from that era?

Tapping into your journalist roots… you will also be able to refine this first story pass with edits or additional clarifications, even the category labels, as needed.

If needed, use the Story Vault to add to these transcriptions. You know the prompts are flexible, so don’t let them cramp your style, other memories or creativity.

I created a section devoted specifically to your characters. A decriptive caption, like Negateevas would be helpful. Any other charactrers born in SF?

• Wish List

for ubuquitous: photo of Other Cafe players, Spaghetti Jam, Comedy Underground (instead of the listing?)

I’ll also need your help putting your page in a rough chronological order.