You can take the comedian out of stand-up, but you can’t take the stand-up out of the comedian. Whitney Cummings knew that intuitively before practically becoming a household name, with two sitcom deals and a high profile as a result of her 2010 special Money Shot. 2 Broke Girls became a hit with audiences and still is. Whitney did not, but Whitney Cummings was able to get her life back just as her creative resources were close to being exhausted.
“I think it’s really important for my stand-up that I have a life, so that I have something to write about,” she says in a July interview. “I started feeling, while I was doing sitcoms and talk shows, like art started imitating art. Because I didn’t have a life, I started running out of ideas. Like, ‘What do people fight about?’”
Cummings makes her debut this week as part of the all-female Lipshtick comedy series, which she introduced to the public during a May press conference at The Venetian. Her latest comedy special, I Love You, in which Cummings displays a seasoned confidence that contrasts with her raw energy in Money Shot, was broadcast on Comedy Central in June for the first time. Although the jokes in I Love You are fresh, her replenished creativity is proving too bountiful for her to perform a set of jokes Lipshtick audiences have seen before. She’s completely bounced back after writing for her sitcom characters left her feeling depleted. “I needed to go out and kind of recharge, you know, get back out there,” she says. “Especially since the stuff I talk about is like dating and sex and stuff, and everything’s changing so much. Even by the month, there’s a new dating app, there’s a new way people date.
“Stand-up is really where it all clicks for me. That’s where I kind of work things out. It’s like my think tank, and I have the audience there to guide me, to say, ‘Yes, this is relevant. Yes, we care. No, we’re not interested in this, go in a different direction.’ The audience is who, I see, that I really collaborate with. … They’re like my compass. To not have that direction—I think I got a little disoriented.”
What she didn’t experience, however, was self-doubt. “That was never the case,” says Cummings. “Most of the consensus I hear is like: Once you’re good at stand-up, you don’t lose it. If anything, I feel like I came back like a bat out of hell with so much pent-up energy and so many ideas, and so many emotions that I wanted to talk about, that I almost thought taking a little break made me better. It made me more grateful for working onstage and I never took for granted my stage time again. … I was just kind of spoiled with stage time, then after I took some time off, every minute onstage I cherished.”
Photography by Paul Mobley Hair and makeup by Heather Wilson Styling by Suzanne Bruley Digital artist Mike Campau
