Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelsey Harper.
Hi Kelsey, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I’m a writer/comedian/native Texan living in Los Angeles by way of Brooklyn. I started off as a voice major at the University of Texas at Austin, where I also played tuba in the Longhorn Marching Band. (An important thing to note — and I don’tttttt mean to brag — but I was the first female president of the tuba fraternity (yes, there is such thing as a tuba fraternity (yes, my writing partner and I have a pilot about this (yes you can read it.))))
I moved to New York shortly after graduating to pursue writing. After tooling around for a year at UCB and other basements they let 23-year-olds do comedy in, I started grad school at NYU Tisch’s Dramatic Writing Program. Despite the debt, it was very much worth my time!
I suppose my magnum opus and the impetus for me to move to LA (thank you for having me!) was my audio series “What Can I Get Started For You,” which I wrote, directed, and co-produced with Lucky Doll Productions. It’s about my time working as a barista (I love being a barista. I got tattoos so that when I am old people will still be able to tell I was once a beautiful barista). The audio series did well on the festival circuit and was featured in Vogue Singapore (ilu Singapore!), and we are now shopping it as an animated series.
Since moving to LA in April 2023, I have put a lot of my energy towards my one-woman show, “Something Like… Musical.” The setup: I learn the music of a famous musical but don’t look up the plot, then perform what I think happens with finger puppets. I took it to the Hollywood Fringe, where it won the Jaxx Theatricals Cultural Arts Envoy Award. It now has a quarterly residency with the Jaxx Theater. We’re doing Phantom of the Opera next — stay tuned for dates!
In the meantime, I’m writing a pilot and a screenplay and performing on as many shows as possible.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Like everyone in this industry, my path to… wherever I am right now has not been completely smooth.
My most prominent womp womp moments include: finishing grad school seconds before the pandemic started, moving to LA to write just weeks before the writers/actors strikes began, and pitching to a company days before a huge merger/layoff spree.
Uncertainty is the name of the game, though. I’m fortunate to have steady jobs (though it would be soooo amazing to have one job at a time instead of three), steady supportive friends and family, and a good amount of projects going on to keep me busy. I get to perform and be creative without any overhead companies giving me notes from an algorithm, so I’m enjoying this time period as much as I’ll enjoy the next.
Ultimately, I’m not sure what other career path I would ever even want to do, so the bumps in the road are just part of the salt of life.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
It’s interesting to boil your work down into a few words. My music production teacher in undergrad once told me that my projects were “delightfully weird,” which I do still think distills my style well.
I am best known for my audio series, “What Can I Get Started For You,” my solo show, “Something Like… Musical,” and stand-up.
My audio series, “What Can I Get Started For You”, is in ways fantastical. The flies talk to the employees, the baristas (based in lower Manhattan) take a wormhole to get to Deep Queens, etc. It’s light and silly, and the characters generally like each other through the story conflict, but it is also ABOUT something. Sometimes, people treat comedy like it is easy/a throwaway genre or doesn’t provide as much insight into the culture as drama.
To me, writing a light and easily digestible comedy following baristas based on real people I know and love is much more palatable than making a 30-minute episode blatantly saying, “The plight of workers, specifically post-pandemic, is completely dire and exploitative.” It’s like… “Whoa, Kelsey is yelling at me.”
Of course, articles and think pieces like that are also vital. But I’ve found that my place in… all of this is essentially feeding people their spinach without realizing they’re eating spinach. I am the vaguely labeled quiche in the display case.
My solo show, Something Like… Musical and stand-up, I approach from a slightly different angle. Especially when I was younger, I used to worry that everyone was mad at me, or everyone thought that one thing I said was weird and stupid, or everyone was wondering why I went to that hangout. As I got older, I decided to lean into that and push through to the other side and point out how silly it is to assume anyone is thinking about you as much as you are thinking about you. In my puppet show, the puppets are always trying to undermine me and make me look like a fool, which is funny to me because no one really spends that much time plotting someone else’s public downfall. In my stand-up, I have this joke, “I am up to date on all of my apologies, and I’m ready to wrong others again,” which I like because 1) that’s, like, not how that works, and 2) I think it is funny to announce life things as though it’s an important press release that anyone would care about.
I also do these slideshow songs that tell humiliating stories from my childhood (Example: I once went on a choir trip in high school, and my teacher asked me to start singing a song called “Sikuyo” mid-air on a 10-hour flight and, readers… I did it. To this day, it is one of the most evil things I’ve ever done.) I really enjoy doing these, and I haven’t seen other things like it around town. They take a long time to make, but they’re one of my non-magnum-opus things I’m most proud of.
Putting my comedy through these two lenses have helped me make sense of my place in the world.
So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
1. Attaining world peace.
2. Solving the climate crisis.
3. Making sure that none of you guys are mad at me.
I hate to be saccharine in the middle of your lovely article, but something I try to show through my work is the benefit of giving others grace. Frequently, in my musical finger puppet comedy show, the main villain puppet, Little Bear, is trying to destroy my life. But often, it is because something I did hurt her feelings (most recently, I cast her as Beetlejuice in our October show but then cut all of Beetlejuice’s songs because I did not like them, and they did not fit in my voice well.) Little Bear doesn’t always express herself in the most productive ways (she released 16 demons from an Ouija board to ruin the show), but it’s because she is still growing as a puppet and as an artist, which I can sympathize with and connect with.
Pricing:
- I have an upcoming show; the date is in flux, but the tickets will be $15
- Musical happening February 29th and 1st at the Jaxx theater. Tickets will be on sale soon, follow @kelsey_______h info.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.kelseymharper.com/
- Instagram: @kelsey_______h
- Twitter: @harper_kelsey
- Other: Tiktok @kelsey_______h
Image Credits
Taken by Jennifer Wagley, Caleb Clark and Ronuk Johal
