Ladies of Laughter Visit Prince George’s for Mother’s Day

By Raoul Dennis

Ladies of Laughter Comedy Producer Peggy Boyce was getting a manicure and pedicure in preparation for a wedding when she interviewed with The Suite about this weekend’s show. It wasn’t that she didn’t worry about planning for the show. It’s just that she knows the all-female comedy team is going to completely kill it---and it’ll be on full display at Prince George’s Community College’s Performing Arts Center this Mother’s Day weekend.

For over a decade, Ladies of Laughter has been a gateway showcase for dozens of talented women who’ve made their mark on the business, leaving audiences doubled over and tear-struck with hysterics.

“It chose me, I didn’t choose it,” Boyce says of the origins of Ladies of Laughter (LOL). ”She launched the awards and tour-based program in honor of a dear friend, Mary Jo Wobker, a comedienne, who passed away in 1992. “The Award was a memorial to Mary Jo but it was given to a woman we thought showed lots of promise in comedy. It was called the Mary Jo Award and then in 1999 became the Ladies of Laughter competition so now the winners of the national contest are known as the Ladies of Laughter national winners..”

It grew and Boyce, also a stand-up comic, began a tradition on April Fool’s Day of giving funds raised from the event to up-and-coming comediennes who won a comedy contest.

“That morphed into the Funniest Female Comedy Series, a live series, and then it turned into the Ladies of Laughter,” Boyce explains.

LOL has been on a skyrocket course ever since, playing top-tier venues (including Madison Square Garden in New York and Caesars in Atlantic City, NJ and getting call-backs from across the nation). Anheuser-Busch bought into the programming in 1999. More importantly, its developed a reputation for being the nation’s best talent pipeline for female comics on the brink of stardom.

“It’s become a career builder for women in comedy,” Boyce says.

The women who will grace the stage May 14 represent an array of backgrounds – a savvy black woman, a white, suburban mom and an edgy Asian with an attitude.

Each of them brings their own walk in life to their comedy. They’ve left behind careers in corporate America, journalism and law respectively – and combined they represent a broad age range and tone in their performances.

Leighann Lord, who was in Paris at the time of this writing and therefore unavailable for interview, is an African American from Queens, NY. Brilliant, confident and quick-witted, Lord’s journey ranges from the girl scouts and the marching band/drum corps to graduating magna cum laude and five years in the corporate world. It’s all a chapter that brought Lord to the place she always sought: stand-up comedy, her true home since she was 10.

Jane Condon is a Boston-Irish American mom raising a family (2 boys and 1 husband, she says) in Greenwich, CT. She recently saw a metrobus ad for the LOL show and thought it was almost as much fun as her recent show with star stand-up comic Lewis Black.

“Do you know Lewis Black? I just worked with him last week out in Arizona. He’s great. He’s my hero,” she said. “The show was with Lewis Black and Larry Wilmore [on his show]. Black has two Grammys and Wilmore has an Emmy. Jeff Stilson, a Letterman writer, has Oscars, Emmys and a Mark Twain prize. And me? I have a uterus.”

The former journalist for LIFE and Fortune magazines said “Somebody took out an ad on the back of a bus promoting our show in Prince George’s. It’s very attractive we got a lot of mileage out of it on Instagram,” Condon said. “The three of us were just laughing our heads off at that – it’s a first, so Thank You, Prince George’s! Is it OK to drop the F bomb in the show?”

When asked what her show will target, she says: “Husbands, wives, children, relationships, Mother’s Day – I’m going to talk about all of those things. Bring mom. You can bring your grandmother to this. It’ll be good for men to come to learn what women are thinking.”

She attests that the diverse range of the show is its strength and gives high praise to her stage mates (they each had to win the LOL Award in order to be part of the tour).

Boyce says it must have been interesting when Jocelyn Chia told her parents that she was leaving her law practice to become a stand-up comedian.

“Mom wasn’t happy about it. She still isn’t,” Chia says of the day she told her family she was dropping law to go into stand-up comedy. Chia’s been in the business nearly ten years now and goes toe to toe with some of the best in the business, including Sam Morril, Roy Wood Jr., Michael Che and Matteo Wainwright ---all on the same stage with her May 5. “It was an insane line-up,” Chia says. Her mom still occasionally asks if it’s not too late to go back to practicing law.

It’s not gonna happen.

“[When things weren’t so steady after three years], a friend of mine who had been on Letterman four times told me he was out there looking for a day job,” Chia explained. “I said to myself ‘if this guy is a headliner and he’s looking for work, this doesn’t bode well for me.’ Another friend told me to pray on it. Right. Eye-roll emoji. Well, I knew how to after years in an all-girls Catholic school. So I figured what’s the harm in giving it a shot? I prayed on it, asking for a sign. I immediately got four signs – one of them was winning the LOL Award.”

Leighann Lord Dry Bar Comedy Standing 2021 B.jpg

Chia was born in the U.S. but raised in Singapore. She found her voice to be stronger on stage than in a courtroom. But she’s still not perfectly satisfied.

“How does it feel to be on this stage in your career? Obviously, you’re growing fast.”

“Why do you say that?” Chia replied, sounding like she wanted to catch whomever started such a filthy rumor.

“Because everyone we interviewed told us so…that it’s not easy to get to this level…”

“Umm…I see...” she replied, thoroughly under impressed.

“You are part of the Ladies of Laughter program, right?”

“Yes. I guess to the outside eye it appears fast. To me, it seems slow as molasses. It’s like tectonic shifts: you don’t see it if you are looking in the mirror every day. But if you see someone you haven’t seen in ten years, it’s like, ‘wow, what happened to you?’”

For Boyce, the journey’s been good and the road ahead looks good for LOL. She wants to expand the tour to add more dates and there’s a year round demand that seems like it will make it possible.

“It’s good,” Boyce says. “I’m working and things are steady. My mother still asks ‘where’s the 401K?’” she says laughing. “But it’s coming together. I plan to keep doing this and building it.”

The team just released an album on iTunes (available on Amazon) entitled Ladies of Laughter At The Friars Club. It’s the first all-female recording from the legendary institution.