Comedian Kathleen Madigan is simply about the laughs

Don't expect comedian Kathleen Madigan to make a big entrance when she performs at the Modell Lyric on Saturday — or an exit for that matter.

"I'm not really one of those people that needs to have a strong opener or a strong closer," she said on the phone last week. And when she's done performing, "It's more like, 'OK, I gotta go pay my parking meter.'"

Dare we call it … an Irish goodbye?

"I have perfected the art of the Irish goodbye as a closer," Madigan said.

When Madigan takes the stage, a bar seems to appear behind her. She's like the funniest person who ever walked into your local Irish pub, holding court, talking about how she wound up going to Iraq and Afghanistan with her good friend and fellow comedian Lewis Black.

"I wouldn't go if I remembered the number and didn't pick up, it's just I'm too Catholic and too guilty to say no," she says in her 2013 Netflix special, "Kathleen Madigan: Madigan Again."

"And there's no alcohol in this country," she said of Afghanistan. "That's the No. 1 reason I would be angry if I lived there."

Black — "Lew" as Madigan calls him — compares Madigan to the woman at the bar who has half the facts, but a lot of opinions. But, as Madigan points out, that's when the best conversations happen.

Madigan, who grew up in St. Louis, in fact got her start in comedy while working as a bartender, which she says was actually pretty similar to being a comedian. She went to a few open mic nights and said she realized she was a lot funnier than most of the people performing.

Twenty-five years later, she's a full-time standup comedian, a job she loves. She's appeared on a host of late night shows, most recently as a panelist on Comedy Central's "The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore." Where others may moonlight with stints on sitcoms, Madigan said she has no plans to go that route (though she did accompany Black to the set of "The Big Bang Theory" when he guest starred on the CBS show).

"There's just too many cooks," she told Jerry Seinfeld in his web show, "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee." "I'm off-put by their involvement. Everybody get out, and let who's cookin', cook."

Audience members at Madigan's upcoming show in Baltimore for her "Bothering Jesus" tour should expect some political jokes, but not too much Donald Trump material, she told The Sun. She'll leave political rants to people like Black, and stick to what she knows best: pointing out the general absurdity of it all.

Madigan said she has a particular affinity for Baltimore since Black, who grew up in the Washington area, is an Orioles fan.

And after her show, she said, she plans on hitting her favorite Irish pub in Baltimore. She can't remember the name of it, but she knows where it is. It's down a hill. She'll figure it out.

ctkacik@baltsun.com

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