Fresh Fruit Award winning comedian Kelli Dunham:
- Is frequently mistaken for a member of a boy band even though she is an adult female;
- Is a skateboarding ex-nun who has never been able to successfully get drunk and lied about her age to get her first library card;
- Has an undiagnosed medical condition that makes her crave nutritional yeast on bacon and diet soda with equal (and scary) zeal.
Really, how could she be anything BUT a stand up comic?
Now, over a decade into her career, Kelli regularly performs at colleges, clubs, conferences, festivals and pride events (you can get info out her upcoming show here, some audio and video clips here and check out her credits here). Kelli was declared one of the 3o Queer Women of Distinction in 2011 by Velvet Park Media, was recently named to the Campus Pride HOTLIST of most sought after performers on the LGBT college circuit, and has appeared on Showtime and the Discovery Channel. Her fifth book, a long-awaited collection of essays, stories and performance pieces, called Freak of Nurture will be published in April 2012 by the ground-breaking and award-winning Topside Press.
Her third comedy CD, Why Is The Fat One Always Angry, is her most challenging work and brings together comedy and tragedy in a devastating style that has become Kelli’s signature. Kelli is regularly booked at nursing conferences, hospice employee events and sexual assault awareness days. Kelli’s personal history, years of working as a registered nurse, and political and emotional sensitivity makes her niche of “entertaining the tormented” the perfect fit.
It’s true that Kelli attempted to be a normal, everyday comedy club comic. After a rather a ludicrous and potentially dangerous interaction with a broken bottle wielding homophobe in the parking lot of Philadelphia’s Comedy Cabaret, Kelli talked with friends who were indie musicians and realized that alternative venues were going to be more open to her brand of progressive comedy and she began booking herself at prides, women’s festivals, coffehouses, listening rooms and even once (once) a livestock festival.
Kelli released her first CD “I am NOT a 12 Year Old Boy” in 2005. (buy it here) It has been in regular rotation on Sirius Radio’s mainstream comedy channel since shortly after its release.
She released her second CD “Almost Pretty: live from the Stonewall Inn” (buy it here) in July of 2008. It immediately sold out at CDbaby.com and has since received excellent reviews from a number of diverse media outlets.
Kelli’s comedy is gently edgy, but she is not afraid to take her quizzical story-telling style into areas where even slam poetry dares not tread: a torn up birth certificate, the perils of responding to extreme sarcasm coming from a dying lover, trying to avoid being gay bashed while wearing a flowered shirt and Stetson cowboy hat in a Jacksonville Florida Denny’s. And while Kelli’s act is many times political it is also deeply deeply personal and often focuses on that magical moment of intersection when the LGBT and non-LGBT worlds meet, or–at times– collide.