July 04, 2019 at 11:47PM
Turns out, Tracy Locke came to learn, playing football can be a really good learning experience for a stand-up comic.
Locke, who performs this weekend at Cozzy's Comedy Club in Newport News, had been the little girl who signed up for football when everyone was trying to steer her toward cheerleading. So she was intrigued when she saw an ad years ago in Glamour magazine, of all places, for an adult football league. She tried out and spent two years playing in the National Women's Football Association, all 5-foot-2 and 115 pounds of her.
"I was small but fast, and on special teams I would be running kamikaze, like a bat out of hell," Locke said. "My first game, with my family there watching and everything, I was running down that field so excited and I got hit by this huge girl who I never saw. I just went helicoptering in the air. I spun around three times before I hit the ground. I'd never been hit that hard in my whole life."
Locke was doing stand-up comedy full-time by that point, but she is quick to say that the two avocations have much in common.
"Tons of similarities," she said in a phone interview from her home in New York. "In both cases you have to be fearless. If you're scared, either way — the audience knows it, and the other players know it — and it goes downhill fast. In football they tell you you can't worry about getting hurt — that when you worry about it, that's when you will get hurt. Same with comedy. When you first start out it's terrifying, but if you go up there worrying about what could go wrong, it will go wrong."
Perhaps the biggest comparison, she said, is the need to make adjustments on the fly. A football player reads the opposing team and determines the best game plan. A comedian reads the audience, from the first joke, and begins noticing what works and what doesn't, and decides which way to take the show.
For that reason, she said, no two stand-up performances are ever the same.
"In comedy, you're bringing your message and it's super individualistic, something only you can bring," Locke said. "It's your voice and your style, and nobody else can duplicate it. You've got to connect with the audience, so I'm very interactive — I use the crowd, talk to them, make them part of it. The show should feel like it's about us, not about me telling what I think. It's a shared experience, so whatever I do on stage any given night is based on what they give me."
Locke grew up on Carol Burnett and was drawn to other female comedians who did characters — Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Tracy Ullman.
She was working as a TV news reporter in Denver and found that off-camera humor helped her cope with the crimes, fires and bad news she was covering. At the encouragement of a colleague, she took a course in improv comedy and fell in love with it, continuing at Manhattan School of Comedy when she returned back east.
She draws her material from everyday life, involving her family, her boyfriend and her travels. She is on the road most weekends, and during the week in New York she finds a lot of work warming up crowds before the taping of talk shows hosted by folks such as Meredith Vieira, Katie Couric and Harry Connick Jr.
As a sports fan, she likes to joke about guys who can remember a favorite player's batting average ("they're like Rain Man") but not a girlfriend's birthday.
"There's going to come a point when the millennials are in charge of baseball," she said. "With the way the games are dragging on now, I don't see how they're going to do it. They don't have the energy to push out whole sentences — how are they going to talk for nine innings?"
If you go
Who: Comedian Tracy Locke
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Where: Cozzy's Comedy Club, 9700 Warwick Blvd., Newport News
Tickets: $15, 757-595-2800, cozzys.com
Mike Holtzclaw, 757-928-6479, mholtzclaw@dailypress.com, Twitter @mikeholtzclaw.
Turns out, Tracy Locke came to learn, playing football can be a really good learning experience for a stand-up comic.
Locke, who performs this weekend at Cozzy's Comedy Club in Newport News, had been the little girl who signed up for football when everyone was trying to steer her toward cheerleading. So she was intrigued when she saw an ad years ago in Glamour magazine, of all places, for an adult football league. She tried out and spent two years playing in the National Women's Football Association, all 5-foot-2 and 115 pounds of her.
"I was small but fast, and on special teams I would be running kamikaze, like a bat out of hell," Locke said. "My first game, with my family there watching and everything, I was running down that field so excited and I got hit by this huge girl who I never saw. I just went helicoptering in the air. I spun around three times before I hit the ground. I'd never been hit that hard in my whole life."
Locke was doing stand-up comedy full-time by that point, but she is quick to say that the two avocations have much in common.
"Tons of similarities," she said in a phone interview from her home in New York. "In both cases you have to be fearless. If you're scared, either way — the audience knows it, and the other players know it — and it goes downhill fast. In football they tell you you can't worry about getting hurt — that when you worry about it, that's when you will get hurt. Same with comedy. When you first start out it's terrifying, but if you go up there worrying about what could go wrong, it will go wrong."
Perhaps the biggest comparison, she said, is the need to make adjustments on the fly. A football player reads the opposing team and determines the best game plan. A comedian reads the audience, from the first joke, and begins noticing what works and what doesn't, and decides which way to take the show.
For that reason, she said, no two stand-up performances are ever the same.
"In comedy, you're bringing your message and it's super individualistic, something only you can bring," Locke said. "It's your voice and your style, and nobody else can duplicate it. You've got to connect with the audience, so I'm very interactive — I use the crowd, talk to them, make them part of it. The show should feel like it's about us, not about me telling what I think. It's a shared experience, so whatever I do on stage any given night is based on what they give me."
Locke grew up on Carol Burnett and was drawn to other female comedians who did characters — Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Tracy Ullman.
She was working as a TV news reporter in Denver and found that off-camera humor helped her cope with the crimes, fires and bad news she was covering. At the encouragement of a colleague, she took a course in improv comedy and fell in love with it, continuing at Manhattan School of Comedy when she returned back east.
She draws her material from everyday life, involving her family, her boyfriend and her travels. She is on the road most weekends, and during the week in New York she finds a lot of work warming up crowds before the taping of talk shows hosted by folks such as Meredith Vieira, Katie Couric and Harry Connick Jr.
As a sports fan, she likes to joke about guys who can remember a favorite player's batting average ("they're like Rain Man") but not a girlfriend's birthday.
"There's going to come a point when the millennials are in charge of baseball," she said. "With the way the games are dragging on now, I don't see how they're going to do it. They don't have the energy to push out whole sentences — how are they going to talk for nine innings?"
If you go
Who: Comedian Tracy Locke
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday
Where: Cozzy's Comedy Club, 9700 Warwick Blvd., Newport News
Tickets: $15, 757-595-2800, cozzys.com
Mike Holtzclaw, 757-928-6479, mholtzclaw@dailypress.com, Twitter @mikeholtzclaw.