Check Out Shannon Leigh’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shannon Leigh.

Hi Shannon, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I started off in the corporate world, one month out of college and built my way up the ladder at a Fortune 500 company called CH Robinson, running their West Coast Sales Division, went onto become the youngest and first female to become a Transportation Manager, in a company of over 15,000 employees, by the time I was 27. I always had a flair for business from the beginning. When I was a kid, I would compel myself to pick flowers on one street and sell them on the next as bouquets door-to-door, created a “flash sale” when my parents had the same reoccurring babysitter – I’d run around to all the kid’s houses in the neighborhood, telling them I was having a food sale for 10 minutes only and had kids lined up around the block, selling them overpriced stale pretzel and bathroom cups of Sprite, which I would later subsequently blame on Susie Cade always being very hungry when she sat for us. I even started a magazine called Fresh Ink when I was 11 by accident, stumbled upon a way to market it to girls my age all over the world through an underground penpal network called “Friendship Books,” which very much mirrored a chain letter before its time.

When I went to college, I naturally majored in business management and when I hit the real world, I naturally sought the path I describe above. And in business, my favorite thing was and still very much to this day is selling – hunting the deals, closing them with killer instinct and building relationships. However, over time, the titles and the responsibility I had sought after had worked so hard for didn’t make me happy. I achieved every goal I put on paper and I couldn’t figure it out. My solace from this was the one area of my job in which I wasn’t really expected to do much other than go to conventions and board meetings and give presentations on transportation. Transportation Regulation speeches? So boring. Sometimes people even fell asleep. But I thrived in this environment. My goal was to make people retain the information, so what better way than to connect with them then by making them laugh? I would pre-plan jokes and what I later found out was called “crowd work” and people began engaging with me and the material. Asking questions, following up, taking action and most important to me, laughing and having a good time. One time a man who ran the “NWA” asked me to do a speaking engagement at one of their conventions. Side note, the NWA stands for National Watermelon Association. He told me not to talk about transportation and just do “the funny stuff.” This spoke to my soul. And a stand-up comedian was born. At some point around or before this, my friend (also named Chelsea) flew me to LA for my birthday to see my favorite comedian, Chelsea Handler. We sat in the studio audience front row taping of Chelsea Lately and I remember it felt like she was speaking directly to me, so naturally I spoke back. Until I realized you’re not allowed to do that and all of my friends were, hey you’re being embarrassing. It wasn’t a big deal, but the feeling I got when I was in that environment was palpable and something I’ll never forget. Something else took over and I felt like for the first time in maybe my whole life, I was in an environment that made sense and I didn’t know why. On our travels back home to real life, I went on and on about my experiences at that taping before it faded away as I got lost back into reality.

Fast forward 3 years, I’m going through a divorce, burnt out by my job and living in the very beautiful Carmel-By-The-Sea, where the median age was probably 80 and my best friend was an owl. One night I got caught at work late, per the usual, high-tailed it to San Francisco to try and make the last flight out to LA, for an international trip to Amsterdam, Scotland and Ireland to leave out of LAX promptly the next morning. I missed the flight stuck in terrible traffic going the north to the airport when LA was south, realizing I had no other choice but to drive all night to LA. As I turned the car around and headed south, I thought, I’m never doing this drive again and for some reason, Chelsea Handler popped into my head and I knew this meant something to me. After three-hour-long phone calls to 2 friends and my Mom, I vetted out my seemingly impulsive, spur-of-the-moment decision to move to LA and 4 months later, I resided in Santa Monica as a permanent resident.

It didn’t take long for me to start doing stand-up. I committed to an open mic date and wrote about 40 pages of material that I had to condense into 3 minutes. Every comic tells me I’ve done everything backward. I make more money doing stand-up in my first gig (NWA) than I ever will again for years, I write an hour special for my 1st open mic when everyone else is trying to drum up a few minutes of material and the list goes on. The last 8 years have been a blur of hundreds of live shows strung together, like one hard, never-ending dream that is sometimes really good and sometimes bad and always a mindfuck, as dreams very much are. Because it can take a lifetime to become an overnight success and that’s the breaks. Using my business skills to climb the comedy ladder, hustling, producing shows early on well before I knew what I was doing, in the grind of this playground where there are no rules, trying to log in my 10,000 hours, and this work is inner work, reaching and developing the voice that builds my career.

One night a few years ago, my friend called me, as a Facebook memory popped up from the night we went to Chelsea Handler. She said to me, “Shannon, this just reminded me of the conversation we had on the way home from the show and you said something you probably don’t remember. You said, if my life were perfect, I’d be divorced, you’d live in Santa Monica and you’d be a stand-up comedian. Well my friend, look around.” I got goosebumps. This perfect imperfect life I once said as what probably felt like an afterthought was my manifested reality.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No!

– Being in years of a crumbling marriage, becoming increasingly burnt-out at work, being the only woman in a male-dominated workplace trying to navigate being a boss while feeling lonely, unsure and unsuccessful

– Losing a power seat at the table in exchange for moving to LA for a personal upgrade, in a place where I spent over a decade and only way I knew to define my success as a person

– Navigating the comedy world, where there is no manual for how to build your career, no defined path and having a “win” by having an incredible performance doesn’t define success, as it comes and goes, constantly not knowing where you stand

– Learning that what you were doing was developing your talent, which is the parallel facet to developing your career

– Constantly living in the unknown, having to go through things like rejection, bombing, opportunities that fall-through and learning to temper your excitement without becoming cynical to build the ultimate strength it takes to do this

– Having to go to the places you don’t want to address internally and finding out the “why” to exploit your truth to be the best version of yourself in the craft.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am a comedian – Improv, sketch comedy, stand-up comedy and my favorite and most devoted medium is stand-up comedy, going on eight years.

I’m an east coast Philly sports trashfan, Irish Catholic Jewish girl with a fascination for organized crime history who makes no apparent sense to either gender, but connects with the common thread throughout humanity of feeling misunderstood. My astrologer told me I was a man in all 6 of my previous lives, so I take liberties for being a male comedian as well.

I am in now currently an LA feature for Comedy Store regulars, sharing stages with the likes of Ali Wong, Theo Von, Bret Ernst, Bryan Callen, and Andy Dick and more. Prior to the pandemic, I was producing 2 shows at the Hollywood Improv and 1 at Westside Comedy Club. I’ve won several stand-up competitions, have been featured on Sirius XM’s Rawdog Comedy station, Amazon Prime, ESPN, among other credits for film & tv.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
I wrote a lot in the previous submissions (you think) – Short answer: Good Luck. There is no such thing as bad luck, anything that could be deemed that way in the challenges I listed out were just the universe forcing me to move.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.shannonleighcomedy.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/shannonleeeeigh?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Image Credits
Photographers: Comedy Store Black & White Stand Up Photo – Troy Conrads All Others – Matt Misisco