Daily Inspiration: Meet Kelly Shanley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelly Shanley.

Hi Kelly, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today. 
Ahhh, my story… I was born and raised in Tahoe City, CA, which as you may have guessed, is not exactly an entertainment hub. Tahoe City is a ski town, so from the time I could walk, I’ve been on skis. I thought I might follow in my older sister’s footsteps and pursue a professional skiing career, but as it turns out, I hate the cold! I also felt strongly drawn to performing my whole life and had big dreams of moving to Los Angeles, becoming a famous sitcom star, and showing up to my 10-year high school reunion via helicopter with my many Emmys in tow. (Can you imagine? So pretentious!) While I do live in LA, I’m still working on the whole sitcom star with multiple Emmys part. I moved to LA in 2008 and started auditioning for whatever I could. I starred in many a student film and couple of short films, but after years of auditioning in the small pond and never getting repped by an agent, I kind of hit a wall. I decided to take a step back and reassess. 

I started creating silly YouTube videos with my BFF and roommate Sara, and it got me excited about the possibilities that could come with writing. I had always loved sitcoms, Saturday Night Live, and standup comedy and all I ever wanted to do was make people laugh. So, in 2015, I finally tried standup comedy, and I felt like I found a home. 

Nine years later, I still perform standup and enjoy producing shows as well. 

In 2019 I started using my writing as an outlet to vent my frustrations with the world on online dating in Los Angeles and created a dating blog called How Are You Still Single? Turns out there was an audience for that! In 2020, after I placed in their humor writing competition with my piece “David Attenborough Presents: A Drunken 30-Something Female Coming Home Alone (Again)”, Slackjaw Humor (a publication on Medium) offered me my own syndicated column! And so For Love Or Peanut Butter was born. FLOPB ran twice a month from January 2021-January 2022 and was a huge success. 

In 2024, I launched the podcast version of For Love Or Peanut Butter – you can listen to it anywhere you get your podcasts – and revived the column on Slackjaw, picking up right where I left off sharing the tale of how my love life went from heartbreaking to heartwarming. And that’s what’s keeping me busy these days! 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I struggled with auditioning when I first moved to LA. It’s part of the gig if you want to be an actor, but it’s also like having multiple job interviews every week (if you’re lucky!). How fun are job interviews? How natural and relaxed and “yourself” do you feel when you’re being interviewed for a job? Not very, at least for me. And, of course, you don’t book most of the jobs you audition for, so there is a lot of rejection. In my case, I didn’t get a lot of blunt rejection or anyone telling me I was awful/ugly/would never make it in this town. It was more passive, silent rejection, like being ghosted by a date you hoped to hear from, but over and over and over again. That’s why I ultimately stepped away from acting, but it is still my first love, and I hope to make my way back to it by creating content that’s right for me. Once I started standup, I felt more empowered but also like I was never good enough. The compare and despair game is so strong in standup, especially now that we all have social media. As comics, we’re asked to promote the shows we’re on, so we’re all constantly posting about every show we’ve booked, and when all you see online is other comics booking way more shows than you or better shows than you or bigger clubs than you, it gets to be an exhausting game of “Am I not working hard enough?” or “Why them and not me?” or “Am I even funny at all?!” It’s such a mind game. Lately, I’ve been trying to be more open about it with my comic friends, and as it turns out, they all feel that same pressure! 

I also had many personal struggles in my 20s, including breaking up with my long-term college boyfriend at 25 and enduring my first real heartbreak. Starting in my early 20s, both of my parents got cancer. They both beat it the first time, but it returned for both of them, and eventually, I lost my father at 27. My mom is still very much alive and kicking ass, though, and I am so grateful to have her. 

It’s not the easiest thing to do to create comedy when you’re going through personal heartbreak or grieving a family member. But those were also the times I leaned the hardest on the comedy of others to lift me back up, and that’s what keeps me going. I want to create comedy and help people smile during hard times, like other creators have done for me. 

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I have had my hand in a few different pots over the years, but all of them are comedy-related. These days, my main projects are my dating podcast and column and standup comedy. Here’s some more info about my current projects! 

For Love Or Peanut Butter: The Podcast 

The FLOPB Pod, as it’s affectionately known, is the podcast version of the original run of my dating column back in 2021. It all started with me writing about my extended stay on the dating apps, the unlimited supply of bad dates, the good dates who just weren’t that into me, and the lessons I learned from all of these experiences. The stories are funny and relatable, and the dates are kept anonymous, even though some of them deserved to be put on blast. 

Most of the reactions I get are, “That exact thing happened to me!” or “I am SO glad that’s never happened to me!” Either way, people connect with FLOPB. 

I like to describe it as Sex And The City meets How I Met Your Mother, only performed by a standup comic in a first-person podcast. Episodes are short, bingeable, and fun. It’s available to stream on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube; anywhere you get your podcasts! 

For Love Or Peanut Butter: The Column 

The original column ran from 2021-2022 and covered the bad dates as mentioned above, but then it got a bit romantic… (huh?) My luck finally changed, and I started dating four eligible bachelors around the same time, one of whom is still my partner to this day! So, the second half of the column became a How I Met Your Mother style scavenger hunt that led readers through my relationship with each of the four suitors, eventually revealing who turned out to be my person. 

In 2024, I relaunched the column, picking up right where we left off, which was basically the end of the rom-com when the couple finally gets out of their own way, faces their fears, and decides to be together (yay!). But then what? Reality, that’s what. The 2024 column covers the real stuff like meeting the parents, moving in together, talking about marriage, babies, moving, and more. It comes out twice a month on Slackjaw on Medium. 

Skimedian: Standup (Comedy) On Skis 

As I mentioned earlier, I grew up skiing and ultimately decided not to pursue it professionally, but I always felt slightly bummed that I wasn’t able to share my love of skiing with the world. Until recently, when I came up with the crazy idea to do standup comedy while I’m skiing. Yes, literally stand up on skis! I am the original skiing comedian, aka Skimedian. My sister, former US Freestyle Ski Team member Laurel Shanley, is the camerawoman who flies down the hill by my side, somehow keeping me perfectly in frame while not even breaking a sweat. You can find full videos on my YouTube channel @KellyShanley, plus clips across my Instagram and TikTok @KellyAShanley. 

Live Standup Comedy Shows: 

I perform all over Los Angeles regularly – check my Instagram @KellyAShanley for details if you want to catch me live! – and also produce a couple of my own shows. I produce the Star Baker Comedy Show – a super fun competition-style standup show inspired by the Great British Bake Off – as well as Shred The Mic Comedy shows live in Tahoe City whenever I go home to visit. 

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I think that anyone who pursues a career in the arts is a risk-taker. I didn’t always feel that way, but I do now. I always knew I would move to LA and try to make it as an actor, so it just seemed like I was following a path like anyone else. I didn’t understand why people found it so scary and called me bold for doing so. I just didn’t see any other option for myself. 

Once I started doing standup, I really got an idea of just how scared most people are of it. Every time I tell someone I’m a comic, they call me brave (unless they’re also a comic, in which case they just ask me where I perform). After years of feeling like a failure, because I don’t have paid vacation days, a 401K, or any idea where my next paycheck was coming from, it’s really nice to be called brave instead of reckless. To the masses, the idea of standing up in front of a crowd and speaking is apparently as terrifying to them as walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon is to me. 

But to me, the opportunity to craft and share my personal thoughts and observations with a room full of people and make them laugh over a shared experience or be shocked by a perspective they’ve never heard before is the best thing in the world. The live feedback is the thing that terrifies others but it’s what keeps me coming back for more. 

I think that risk-taking seems very scary to those who haven’t done much of it, but once you take a few risks and reap the consequences, you learn that they’re not so bad. Failure is how you learn. And not all of the consequences are bad. Eventually, you fail and get rejected enough from all your risk-taking that you finally reach the point where you know what you’re doing, and people start to notice, and then the hobby you’ve been doing for free to an audience of none for years becomes the job that you get to do for money for the masses. But it does take time and a lot of risk-taking. It’s not for everyone, but it’s worth it. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kellyshanley.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kellyashanley/?next=%2F
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kelly.shanley/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kellyshanley
• SoundCloud: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kelly-shanley
• Other: https://medium.com/@kellyshanley

Image Credits
Keida Mascaro
Christina DiBiase
Nicole Casaletto Photography