Annie Lederman Stands Out as The Next Big Thing in Showtime’s The Comedy Store Docuseries, So We Got Her Backstory
The Comedy Store is a place where the art of comedy is King and a tiny woman from Wisconsin, Mitzi Shore, was Queen. Mitzi used her eye for talent and love of comedy to create her kingdom and the most beloved members of her handpicked court were given the freedom to fail as they worked out their acts and found themselves as artists under her roof. I’ve been lucky enough to take three vacations to visit The Comedy Store and all three trips were as amazing as I dreamed they’d be. I’ve gotten to sit behind the judges’ panel in The Belly Room for Roast Battle, see my favorite comedians give hilarious yet genius feedback on Kill Tony, watch some of the biggest names in comedy up close and personal in Brian Redband’s Secret Show and watch the magic of what happens during Don Barris’s late nights in the Original Room until 3:00 in the morning. All the while I was at The Comedy Store I was overflowing with feelings of respect for Mitzi and gratitude for just having had the opportunity to set foot on that sacred ground. I never had the chance to meet her but luckily for all of us comedian, director and Comedy Store paid regular, Mike Binder has created a five-part documentary series for Showtime called The Comedy Store that creates a permanent record of some of the most epic stories, parties and tragedies that surround this historic club. I’ve watched the first 4 episodes of The Comedy Store and all four of the episodes were hilariously funny, told stories I had never heard before and had segments in them that moved me to tears. I absolutely LOVED this documentary and was super excited for the opportunity to talk to one of the featured paid regulars, who is hailed by Binder as a glimpse at the future of comedy. Who is Annie Lederman?
Before sitting down to talk with Annie, I did some homework and one of the obvious things I did was read her bio. It was so insane that I legit thought one of her comedian friends had hacked her wiki page and just added a bunch of crazy shit to it but after talking to Annie, I learned that everything on it was in fact true. She had to overcome a lot before ending up on the same bill as comedy legends like Freddie Prinze, David Letterman, Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Roseanne Barr, Jimmy Walker, Sam Kinison and Bill Burr who are also in this documentary.
We started our conversation with the time she spent in an alternative high school that she describes as being “full of juvenile delinquents.” Annie explained that her parents opted to send her to this school even though she really didn’t get into that much trouble until she was there. She said, “They put me with young criminals so I got in with and started hanging out with kids who were out of control. They had a good art program and there was a lot of stuff that seemed cool; like they had pillows instead of chairs but I actually ended up taking one of my teachers to court for sexual assault. After that, all of these other people started coming forward.” I was very impressed by the fact that she found the strength to come forward and actually press charges against the person who hurt her at such a young age but what really struck me about her was the way she was able to look back at those events and make jokes and laugh about them with me. It made me feel like she’s really synthesized her traumas and used those experiences as lessons to elevate her and lift her up instead of hold her down or keep her stuck in the past.
Annie credits her work as a comic for helping her get to the place of forgiveness acceptance that she’s at today. She said, “It hasn’t always been this way but I feel really lucky that I’ve been able to get here because when you’re in the trauma, you’re just seeing red. You have no idea what’s going on but comedy has really helped me get to this point. I can’t imagine another job that could’ve helped me the way that comedy has helped me work through all of this. I think my trauma response is telling jokes and that is what’s fun about comedy. I can take these really tragic events and I just can’t be mad at what happened because I have this creative outlet that I might not have had if I was sitting in math class paying attention. It’s the dents you have that make you unique and I love being able to do comedy about all of the fucked up things that happened to me and have other people be able to relate to it.”
I fully believe that comedy and trauma are two forces that have an incredible ability to connect people and when a comedian is able to take those two elements and put them together, the results can be magical. Making the choice to come forward is an extremely personal and complicated decision to make but I can only hope that talking about her experiences on stage has made Annie’s fans love her more and connect with her on an even deeper level.
Annie shared what her experiences were like when she made the choice to come forward as a kid and then later on as a comedian. “Coming forward with my sexual assault was a nightmare. There were some people who didn’t believe me. It was like being on an episode of Survivor. I swear the biggest lie our parents tell us is that we should never lie. It’s not how I chose to live my life but lying would’ve actually made things a lot easier. It’s very complicated to tell the truth because it forces everyone else around you to either tell the truth or to lie and go against you and sometimes telling white lies to get through the day is much easier. Once I became a comedian, the first time I really talked about what happened publicly was on Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF and I was still really deep in the pain of it. Right after it came out, I started getting flooded with emails about peoples’ rapes. I really had to turn my empath tendencies off and it wasn’t until then that I really understood the extent of what had happened to me. For me, it was always easier to blame myself than it was to acknowledge that all of these grown-ups in my life had let me down. It was actually the boyfriend I had at the time who was the first person to tell me that what happened wasn’t my fault.”
I was glad she had the support of her then boyfriend and reiterated to her that absolutely none of it was her fault. It was her parents who sent her to that school and allowed her to sleep over at her teacher’s house and it was her teacher that assaulted her. These were all adults and they were supposed to be the ones protecting her, not making her vulnerable and available to predators or committing assault against her. Annie was explicitly clear about the fact that she loves and idolizes her parents and has been able to forgive and move on from what happened to her. We took a bit of a deep dive into their relationship and she helped me to understand how she arrived to where she is today with her parents. She said, “They believed me when I told them but my parents really didn’t know what was happening to me. They just weren’t aware. If they would’ve known, they would’ve done things differently. I talked about this a little bit in the documentary but they really did do the best that they could with what they had. My mother was adopted, so she had some trauma around that but she was raised by a nice, well-to-do family in Upstate New York and all of the issues she had were about fitting in with her family and peers. I’m not in my mom’s head, but from what I gather, that was her wound. She didn’t have the same traumas that I had. She always wanted to be cool so then, in these situations when I’m like, ‘Mom the teacher wants me to sleep over. All the other kids are doing it.’ She wanted me to be able to be cool so she didn’t say no. Then to go even deeper with it, she went to an all-girl boarding school and a few years ago she called me and goes, ‘Oh my god, I just found out that a lot of the girls in my grade were molested by one of the teachers.’ She never knew about it because there was the cool teacher that lived on campus and he would invite all of the cool, pretty girls over but she was never invited and she always wished she was one of them. So, now, CLICK! It makes perfect sense why when I asked her if I could sleep over she was fine with it. She didn’t know what was really happening to the girls at her school, all she knew is how she never felt accepted by the cool kids and now her daughter got picked to be one of them. We only see what we know, so how could I be mad at these people?” What happened to Annie does not define her and it does not define them either. They love her and she loves them and they have been able to move on from it as a family.
After high school Annie moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico to go to college and after all of the trauma that happened because of her school, she decided to become a special education teacher. Maybe she thought she’d be that trustworthy, supportive teacher to kids that she never had but whatever the reason, her gig as a special education teacher didn’t last long because soon after working for Easter Seals, something happened that would change her life forever and inspire her to leave Santa Fe, move to New York and become a stand-up comedian. She said, “The Adam Sandler movie, The Longest Yard came into town to shoot and I met Adam Sandler, Nick Swardson and a bunch of other comedians. They came to Swig, the nightclub where I was go-go dancing in Santé Fe and they saw a drag queen, a stripper and Annie Lederman. The minute I saw them in person and I saw that they weren’t just these giants you see on the screen, I realized that comedy was what I really wanted to do. I worked at a camp with Easter Seals but I never made that my full time job because I could see that I was going to get burnt out, but with stand-up, I just knew that it was what I really wanted to do but I was an alcoholic at that point. At first, I thought about moving to California because that’s where all of the people from the movie lived but I had a drinking and driving problem and I knew that if I moved to L.A. I’d probably end up dead, so I moved to New York instead.”
There are so many killer comedians in New York and yet she didn’t just survive the scene, she thrived in it! Not long after moving to New York she got up and did her first open mic and quit drinking soon after that. Getting sober was a game changer for her because all of the time and energy she used to put into drinking suddenly went into her comedy and that’s when her momentum started changing and things started happening for her to advance her as a comedian.
First, she met and befriended Mike Lawrence who helped give her that push she needed. She was doing maybe five open mics a week and Mike seemed to have strong opinions about who was funny and who wasn’t and she wanted his approval really badly so she cornered him and said, “You seem to think you know what’s funny. What do you think I should do to get good? He said that I should do at least ten open mics a week. I asked him how many he was doing and he said 15, so I said I’d see him at 17 and we became friends.”
It didn’t stop there either. She had a motley crew of friends back then. Some of them were Mike Lawrence, Mike Recine, Dan St. Germain and Brian Baldinger. Just the way Mike Lawrence offered advice to help her out when she was brand new on the scene, she shared with me the advice she would give to any new comedian who may be starting out in stand up. It was, “Go to the open mic and befriend whoever intimidates you the most and just work as hard as they do. It’s what helped me. I always had this group of people I could call and be like, should I stay at home and write? And they’d be like, you’re bullshitting yourself. Stop avoiding it and go to the mic. It was so tiring, but it was so much fun.”
Then, when she was about two and a half years into comedy, Sean Patton gave her a recommendation and she got Just for Laughs in Montreal. She started comedy in January of 2009 and was in the Unrepped, New Faces in 2012. Annie explained that she actually did her first audition for them in 2011 and they really liked her but they told her she was too green and gave her some things to work on. Then, in 2012 she went back and auditioned again and this time they said, “Oh my god, you did everything we asked you to. You’ve improved so much! Do you want to go this year or do you want another year to keep working and go next year?” Annie took the offer and went that year. In a matter of three years Annie Lederman went from being an alcoholic go-go dancer at Swigs to being a “New Face” at Just for Laughs in Montreal. That is a pretty amazing trajectory.
Annie laughed and was humble enough to admit that once she got to Just for Laughs she actually ended up bombing in front of the industry and Howie Mandel but even though her showing was less than perfect, like it does for so many others, the Just for Laughs comedy festival opened the door to the next stage in her career. From doing JFL Annie got a spot on a Fox showcase and Michael Cox, who was the booker for Chelsea Lately at the time, was in the audience. Although she was embarrassed to admit it, she told me that being on Chelsea Lately was actually on her goals list and at the time when she set her intention and wrote her list, being on that show seemed completely unobtainable but she ended up booking the job. She was flying out to do Chelsea Lately once a month and was pretty much breaking even making around $500 for each appearance so it just made sense for her to take this opportunity and move to California.
So in 2013, she left New York and moved to Los Angeles. She was sleeping on couches and living out of her car, just trying to get by… but she was doing Chelsea Lately so people kept saying things to her like, “You made it! You’re famous!” and she’d be like, “Sure… Can I borrow money?” She did that show for about a year and a half but also kept doing stand-up and was opening for Marc Maron and Jim Norton.
Annie met Jim Norton at Caroline’s March Madness even before she got Montreal. She waited in line, “Last Comic Standing style” and did a one-minute set for all of the owners and bookers. They liked her so they had her come back and from there Jim Norton chose her to open for him. Annie said that finding out she got the job with Jim left a lasting impression in her memory, “I was leaving a coffee shop when I got the news and I let out a fart and I shit myself! I was literally so excited about the job that I shit my pants! I called my dad and was like, I have two pieces of amazing news. One is that I’m opening for Jim Norton and the other is that I just shit my pants! And he goes, ‘I’m so sick of this!’ and hung up on me! I called him back and was like, why did you hang up on me and he goes, I thought you and your mother were pranking me because she just shit her pants too!” I guess her and her mother are more connected than she realizes! Annie opened for Jim for a couple of years, then ended up meeting Marc Maron when she moved to L.A. She opened for Maron in her home town of Philly. She said, “That was really fun. My mom had an eBay drop off store and she had a minivan that said, ‘We’ll sell your stuff on eBay’ across the sides of it in primary colors and I drove him around in it. I am kicking myself that I didn’t take a picture of it. Would there be a better Throwback Thursday than that?!”
It turns out that Maron was actually the comedian that recommended her at The Comedy Store but believe it or not, she had no idea what a huge deal that place was. She thought it was cool and liked how all of the names are on the wall but didn’t know the process or what a big deal it was to get passed as a paid regular. She just thought she was a comic from New York who had moved to L.A. whose friend was recommending her at a club. “I was like, ‘Great! I would love to get spots!’ I was all about that stage time! Tommy was the booker back then and he told me to come by that Monday during Pot Luck. I didn’t know that it was an audition. I didn’t know people got passed as paid regulars. I didn’t know any of this. I showed up and did a regular five-minute set and when I got off stage, Tommy goes, “Alright, I’m gonna pass you as a regular.” I know that Annie is funny but I still could not believe she got passed that quickly! There are people that work the door or answer phones or do open mics for years and are still waiting to get passed!!!! What a story!
Annie said that Tommy told her she was a “funny, smart female comedian” and he could see exactly where to put her. He said, “I want to put you in the line-up in between famous people and I want them to pull you up.” But she still didn’t know what a big deal this was. “I was just like; why does everyone hate me at The Comedy Store?! Why is everyone mad at me?!” I asked if she could tell me someone that maybe took a while to warm up to her after she got passed so quickly and Annie Lederman was such an open book that she did! She said, “It’s funny but I would hear people say, ‘We go to try to watch you bomb’ and I was like, ‘what?!’ I honestly don’t know if she knows who I am now but when I first met her, Leslie Jones was like, ‘I don’t like you. I don’t like your confidence.’ And I was like, ‘honestly, it’s Asperger’s!”
Annie got passed at The Comedy Store during what Mike Binder refers to as, “The Dark Ages” in The Comedy Store documentary. It was before Joe Rogan came back and before Adam Eget took over and really resurrected the place to it’s original glory. Although she started there during, “The Dark Ages” she said that it wasn’t badly run, it just wasn’t the power house it used to be or what it is now and that she’s always thought of The Comedy Store as being a great family and a great community.
Annie never got to meet my idol, Mitzi Shore, but once she started working at The Comedy Store, the sky has been the limit for Annie Lederman. She’s kept her own advice and continues to befriend the funniest people in the room including Kurt Metzger, Whitney Cummings, Tony Hinchliffe, Pauly Shore and Joe Rogan. She’s been on the road with Jeff Ross and Dave Attell on their Bumping Mics tour, told a story on Ari Shaffir’s show This is Not Happening, has gotten to write, produce and consult with one of my Mount Rushmore comedians, Sacha Baron Cohen and has been a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience.
After speaking with Annie and hearing her stories, I am so glad she’s made it through her traumas and past the haters that tried to hold her back. Annie continues to earn the respect of some of the biggest names in show business and it’s because the great ones aren’t looking at her through the lens of competitive rivalry. The great ones only see her for her talent and that’s awesome. Annie Lederman takes it all with a grain of salt had has no problem brushing her shoulders off. She has her head on straight and has a real grasp on what causes rivalry in this industry.
She said, “Rivalry is so understandable. It’s just people trying to find a reason why they don’t have something they want and they’re using their external locus of control and going, ‘why didn’t I get this thing I want?’ Then they project blame onto others; when what they should be doing is asking themselves, ‘what more can I do to make it happen?” That was great advice and it reminded me, there was one thing that I wanted to point out to her that caught my eye in The Comedy Store. There was a scene where Bill Burr and Joe Rogan tell the story of how they had an intervention with Bert Kreischer. They told him to quit his T.V. show and focus on his stand-up act because that is where he would shine. Then, fast forward all of these years later and that is exactly what Bert did and he is bigger than ever. Now, the last time she was on The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe gave her and Whitney Cummings some of his sage advice and I feel like, when Joe speaks, thou shall listen. He opened the episode with it, then later on in the show he said it again and I could tell that he truly meant it. Rogan said, “No bullshit. Seriously, you guys should 100% have a show together… You guys would dominate that shit!” He then proceeded to give them all of his reasons why he believes that she and Whitney would be a monster combination and even offered to help promote it! I completely agreed with everything he said and would absolutely love to see that partnership happen!
I asked Annie if there is a chance of a Whitney/Annie partnership in the future and she said, “Sara, I would love to do it. Let’s just say it’s still in talks.” Don’t get me wrong; her solo podcast, Meanspiration is great, but that Trauma Bond idea is STRONG!
Ok, enough about that! I asked her if she you could have anyone in the whole world as a guest on Meanspiration, who it would be and she said that she would love to talk to Jim Carrey. That was a great answer and I hope it happens for her!
The last thing I had to know was what the significance is to the ring she always wears and she said, “The ring that I wear is a matching father/daughter mood ring that my dad and I got when we were in San Francisco like ten years ago. We called ourselves, ‘Team Fun’ and my mom and my brother were, ‘Team Responsibility.’ I love my dad so much. The rings stopped working forever ago but we never take them off. We finally let my mom in and we got her a ring too. We all know we’re lying but she gets to be on “Team Fun.” With that beautiful story we brought it back full circle. That ring finally gave her mother the acceptance from the “cool kids” she so desperately needed and we’ve learned that sometimes little white lies make life a lot easier so it is more than ok to let her into “Team Fun”! It was so great talking to her and I can’t wait to see Annie Lederman in The Comedy Store when it comes out on Showtime!
Episode Four of The Comedy Store Airs This Sunday, October 25 on Showtime at 10pm EPT/9c.
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Sara Dahms
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