A seriously funny hobby

"So this blind guy asked for my number. I gave it to him because I consider myself an equal opportunity dater," senior Molly Martinez says as her audience bursts into laughter. Martinez, standing firm, confident and self-assured, delivers her jokes as if she were talking to a crowd of friends. But the 18-year-old comedian is performing in a dimly lit room in Chief Ike's Mambo Room bar in Adams Morgan amongst a crowd of patrons and seasoned comedians.

On the March 10 performance, one of the bar's more inebriated patrons shouts at the stage. "Someone should get this girl some crayons," Martinez replies sardonically, eliciting some 'woops' from a sympathetic audience. Other considerably older comedians step on stage before and after Martinez, but the senior holds her own with all them, even getting more laughs than a few veteran performers.

Martinez has been performing stand-up comedy twice a month since November 2006. Her performance at Chief Ike's was her first there, as up until then she had been performing at the Rendezvous Lounge, the bar where she first tried delivering for an audience of strangers. While a change in venue to Chief Ike's means a different atmosphere and a larger audience, Martinez is not fazed.

An e-mail entry

Martinez was drawn to comedy after a bad brush with traditional acting in a traveling theater group she joined in the summer of 2006. Tired of dryly interpreting the work of others, she opted instead to perform for laughs with material of her own composition. "I'm a terrible actor," she says.

Later that year, in November 2006, she met Diana Saez, the manager of the Rendezvous Lounge, and watched her do stand-up. Saez and Martinez formed a fast friendship and Saez encouraged Martinez to perform herself. While Martinez had no grand designs for a future career in comedy, she decided to give stand-up a try. "I just felt I had the potential," she said.

As the Rendezvous only allows comedians 18 years or older to perform, Martinez had to convince the bar to let her on stage. She finally persuaded the owners of her talent through a humorous email describing hypothetically what might happen if they turned her down. "I'll just have to stand outside and do my act in front of homeless people," she wrote in the email to the owners. On the day Martinez sent in her email, Saez responded with, "Cute. How does next week work for you?"

In her first shot at stand-up comedy on Nov. 15, 2006, Martinez performed after 19 other college-age comedians from the Washington, D.C. area to a room full of the college students and a few lounge visitors who had remained until the end of the show. Martinez's satirical and observant humor kept the audience laughing continuously, ranging from quips aimed at teenage trends to jests about her ethnicity, rife with commentary about herself, her friends and her classmates. "I'm only Mexican on paper," she said, "which is great for applying to college."

The college-aged comedians commended Martinez after her segment. Fellow senior Breton Sheridan, who watched her performance, was proud of Martinez and enjoyed the show. "I hang out with Molly a lot and she's always a really funny person, but in different ways," he says. "I think she really brought all of that together that night."

Saez, who was also the night's host, was especially impressed, feeling that Martinez's act rose above and beyond what she describes as "painful" first-time acts. "Molly was a complete natural," Saez says. "She was comfortable, confident, and had good jokes that she obviously spent some time thinking about. She has everything on her side."

Making material

The Rendezvous Lounge recently closed down and Saez moved to New York City, forcing Martinez to seek a new stage at Chief Ike's. Whereas abstract paintings adorned the soothing, colored walls of the Rendezvous Lounge, dancing skeletons in leather jackets grin from wall murals at Chief Ike's. But Martinez says she appreciates the fewer comedians in the audience at Chief Ike's. "Comedians can be really judgmental. I felt less pressure with fewer of them in the audience," she says. While other stand-up comedians often intimidate her because they tend to earnestly critique each other, Martinez says that the intimidation does not translate into nervousness on stage.

Martinez writes a new set of jokes for each of her performances. Although she has been writing and delivering jokes for more than a year now, she says that coming up with material has not become easier with time. "Writing jokes is still a grueling process," she says. The difficult part of writing jokes is making them relatable. "You have this kind of bias," she says, "So it's hard to know how others will react to your jokes."

Martinez saves her material as she goes along; from the vague ideas she develops by observing amusing circumstances and situations to the finished jokes. She has accumulated approximately 100 pages of notes she uses to develop her stand-up material.

As a high school student, Martinez says she tries to approach her jokes from that angle and perspective. Most stand-up comedians are older and attend college or have steady jobs, so as a student in high school Martinez has a unique edge that translates into her comedy. "I'm not like most other comedians," she says.

Jason Saenz, the night's host at Chief Ike's, also thinks Martinez's youth is an advantage. "I started doing stand-up at a much later age," he says, "It's great that she's as good as she is at her age."

Future funnies

Although her friends and fellow comedians have praised her stand-up skill, Martinez remains humble. "I know that not everyone thinks I'm funny and I recognize that," she says. Martinez readily accepts criticism and recalls a time last month at the Rendezvous Lounge when she "bombed," or failed miserably to get any laughs. Martinez says that night her audience was weary and irritated after listening to numerous other comedians bomb as well. Martinez was the last to perform that night. "You feed off the audience's energy. If there's no energy, you have nothing to eat. That's something every comedian has to go through," she says, shrugging.

Her focus is on the present and while Martinez does not see an end for her amateur dabbling in comedy, she does not anticipate pursuing stand-up comedy professionally either. "I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket," she says. She says that she would be interested in possibly writing for a comedy show like Saturday Night Live, her "childhood dream." "I've always seen SNL as the pedestal of funny," she says, "I'd like to collaborate with people and do comedy that way. Stand-up is really hard." Nonetheless, Martinez makes it look easy.