Today we’d like to introduce you to Katie Love.
Katie, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember. I think it all started when I was about six or seven years old when I began creating storylines and snappy dialogue for my BARBIES™, demanding they live up to my vision for their perfect little plastic lives. I also penned several rudimentary books for my mother, written on lined binder paper and stapled on the side, which I then presented as awkward gifts.
If they made her laugh, I had achieved my goal. I lived to make my mother laugh. She suffered from severe depression, so making her laugh became like a full-time job for me. I was constantly doing a show of sorts. I had a lot of simultaneous productions going on around the house; I was a militant little showrunner with no cast or crew. I think that childhood experience qualifies me to work in a major studio somewhere, greenlighting comedy projects. I should put that on my resume.
Anyway, my childhood was pretty rocky. Unfortunately, my mother succumbed to her depression and took her own life when I was just nine years old. Our mother-daughter bond was so strong that I believe I knew the exact moment of her passing. I was taking a test at school and suddenly, I felt a coldness wash over me and all my senses became very acute. I can still see this giant clock on the classroom wall, ticking a warning to run home as fast as I could. So I did. I ran like hell across the playground and through our Oakland neighborhood, past the corner market, up the cement stairs, and to our front door. Once inside, I knew she would not answer me if I called out to her. She was already gone.
The neighbor was a new mother with a gorgeous, gurgling toddler who had blue eyes just like mine. I knocked on her door and in reporter-like fashion, informed her that my mother was sick, unable to articulate what I’d just discovered. She handed me her baby and told me to watch her while she went to check on my mother. I so loved that baby and would often stop by after school to play with her. I don’t know how I knew this at the time, but I knew that baby was a lifeline and that all I had to do was hold on. As we stared into the blue of each other’s eyes, I could hear the neighbor’s screams through the thin walls. Later, as I watched the paramedics wheel my mother’s body away, I made a promise to myself that I have never forgotten, “I will never be that unhappy.”
Life changed dramatically after my mother died. I went to go live with my older sister who was married and had an adorable toddler of her own. I was no longer the latch-key kid running home to watch the horror soap opera, “Dark Shadows” or the comedic antics of Jerry Lewis and Lucille Ball. Now, I was part of a family, and that family had recently found religion. They had become Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I didn’t know anything about the JW’s, but I was about to find out. About a week after my mother died, I was shown an illustration in a book featuring wild animals now docile, lazing by a waterfall. The once-wild beasts were surrounded by smiling people, all carrying bushels of fruit in their dress clothes. It was explained that this was Paradise and that if I wanted to see my mother again happy and alive, living forever on a paradise earth, all I had to do was do everything Jehovah said! My mom – alive and happy again? Sign me UP! Then I wondered why anyone would want to pick fruit in their dress clothes and how they got wild animals to pose like that.
The next twenty-some years were spent preaching about the end of the world to unsuspecting strangers, which as it turns out, proved to be great training for a comedian. On my 30th birthday, after ten years of celibacy, I left the religion in a big way, fornicating my brains out with a stranger on a white-sanded beach on “Paradise Island” in the Bahamas. Afterward, the stranger stole the last of my traveler’s checks. I guess that means I’ve actually paid for sex. Oh, and for the millennials – traveler’s checks were like monopoly money used on vacations. They made no sense, so no need to Google it. Anyway, when I returned home, I basically dug the sand out of my ass and left my religion. In true Scarlet Letter style, I was shunned as a fornicator and subsequently lost every friend I’d ever known and most of my family in the matter of a day.
I talk about that story and others in my memoir, “Two Tickets to Paradise, from Cult to Comedy” which is currently making the publishing rounds. The book is 80% funny and 20%, not funny at all. But, I think that’s kind of how life is and if you’re working with 80/20 percentages, you’re doing pretty well.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Smooth? In comedy? Not exactly, but I love it and I’m having a lot of fun now.
My first comedy performance was at the Holy City Zoo in San Francisco, sometime in the late 90s. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I met Aisha Tyler in line. We were pretty excited to hand over our two-dollar performance fee and get on stage. I did 2 minutes of jokes and I was hooked from the very first laugh.
I moved to L.A. with my cat and three sitcoms I’d written – an original, a Seinfeld spec, and a Murphy Brown spec. Yeah, that’s how long ago this was. During the day, I worked in sales and drove around L.A. listening to sales tapes and perfecting my skills so I could earn enough money during the day to do comedy for free at night. It wasn’t the best business model.
I did a few hundred face plants after that. My apartment burned down, I was fired from jobs, and one night after a set at the Laugh Factory, I was talking to some audience members and watched in horror as a tow truck drove down Sunset with my car. What a buzz kill! I had so many parking tickets from doing comedy in San Francisco, they added up to more than the car was worth. A few years later, I landed a sales job at the Los Angeles Times and eventually started writing for them, too. I worked for them during the week, wrote scripts on the weekend, and did comedy whenever I could until the stress got to me and I left the Corporate America scene. It was during that time that I wrote my first novel, “Cubicide,” a semi-autobiographical story about a singer-songwriter stuck in the bowels of Corporate America.
I went on to write several scripts with writing partners and a few got optioned. Recently, our script “Son of Rock” made it to the Semifinals of Final Draft’s “Big Break” contest. We were pretty excited. I mean… we’ve only been shopping it around for about ten years. So we’ll see what happens now. I also ran a live comedy talk show for a year, “The Katie Love Show,” which I’m planning on bringing back around. My friends, Joe and Jordana had their first date at my show and now they’re married. I am a conduit for love – not that it’s manifested in my own life.
I think my favorite thing about writing and performing comedy is that laughter really can make a difference in people’s lives. I did a show last year for a cancer benefit and I had to be clean, which is hard for me because my comedy is a Mae West bawdy-style. I had to omit several of my jokes to get into this clean show and afterward, an older gentleman came up to me and started chatting me up about how laughter was so important during his healing process. I agreed and told him maybe he should come out to a show where I go blue and he begged me to tell him a dirty joke. “Just one,” he said. “Please!”
Fine…I warned him.
“I recently petitioned Facebook to add my vagina as an official check-in location for those of you who are tired of checking into the gym.”
He laughed for a bit, shook his head, turned his walker around and left. I felt kind of creepy like I’d just broken some kind of clean-show rule and that soon I would be arrested by the Torrance police. A few minutes later, he came back to tell me that he laughed all the way to the car and wanted me to know that he hadn’t laughed that hard since his wife died a year ago. I can’t believe I teared up over a vagina joke, but I did. I’m kind of a sap sometimes.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
Predominantly, I make my living as a writer, punching up scripts, coaching writers on their projects and writing website copy. I also write for life coaches. I know. That’s me behind all that life coach magic-carpet-ride-to-success advice. But I’ve seen some shit. I’ve slain some demons. I’ve learned that the mind is a garden of thoughts and that at some point, you’ve got to pull the weeds. And sometimes those weeds grow back and get turned into jokes.
I have a big show at Flappers Burbank on Thursday, August 22 at 7:30 pm.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I’m not so sure about luck, but I once heard this story about Harrison Ford and how he said that success is all about “staying on the bus.” I think he’s right. I’m on the damn bus. It might reek of broken dreams and ill-fated punchlines, but I’m still here. I’m on the fucking bus and I’m coming to a stop near you.
Contact Info:
- Website: WriteLaughLove.com (coming soon)
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: katielovewriter
- Facebook: katielovewriter
- Twitter: katielovewriter
- Other: http://katielove.writersresidence.com/
Image Credit:
Adranna Torres, Lia Marshall, Kerianne Mellott, Joe Matamales
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