Laughing Out Loud With Mary Lynn Rajskub

by Meaghan Angers

Laughter is the best form of medicine. After a stressful month filled with school, track practice and musical rehearsals, going to a comedy show was just what I needed.  Comedy shows distract you from what’s happening in the real world. Unlike watching a comedy movie or television show, comedy shows make you go out with friends or family and have a good time.

On Saturday I saw Mary Lynn Rajskub, who plays Chloe on 24, at the Laugh Comedy Club in Boston. As I am a huge fan of her on 24, I was ecstatic to see how her role as a computer genius flipped to the opposite of becoming a comedian. Her comedy style is awkward, but very relatable. She tells stories about how she is seen by fans as her computer genius character, stories about how she became a mom and her one and only dream, to be “stupid hot.” The climax of the show is when Rajskub describes how her dream has been to be stupid hot, the kind of hot that all you know is that you’re hot.

For the show I had front row seats and at one point, when she when she was describing how she wanted to be stupid hot, she saw me and my mom. Rajskub turned to my mom during the joke and gives her a high five saying, “you know what’s up!” As she high fived her, Rajskub look at me and says “Wait, you’re here with your daughter that’s so cool!” Being involved with the show made it more special, because you were in the joke. During the show, Rajskub named a table of people, the “Professors”, because they were dying laughing at her joke about a statistic she made up.

My personal favorite joke was when she was describing a day when she really was feeling down on herself. To make her feel like a “better person” she went to Whole Foods to spend “four times the amount of regular food.” As she went to the parking lot, Rajskub started crying about her life over how she has no friends. In the back of the car, her three year old son playing on his iPhone and said, “Mommy, me and daddy are your friends.” Rajskub responds by saying “You get a new app for your iPhone!” This story particularly stuck in my head because it’s so relatable.

Even if you never heard of the comedian, comedy shows are a good way to get out of the house and unwind. As Robert Frost said, “If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.” After all, laughter allows us to escape from our realities.