Strange we can believe in

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE We’re cuckoo for Halem.

Photo: Misty Winter

“He’s totally going to eat your pussy tonight, and you’re going to think about me the whole time.” Until last August, Chicagoans could hear lines like that one at the Lincoln Lodge and other venues around town. But when stand-up comic Jessica Halem left for Olympia, Washington, where her partner, Red Tremmel, landed a teaching job, the self-described queer feminist Jewish narcissist took with her a distinctive brand of explicit, in-your-face humor. On Friday 20, she’s bringing the bawdy back for Solar-Powered: an evening of luminous comedy.

A Kent, Ohio, native, Halem, 36, attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, before relocating in the mid-’90s to New York City, where she landed a plum job as executive assistant to former Congresswoman and women’s-movement leader Bella Abzug. Halem moved to Chicago in 1996 when her stand-up teacher in New York suggested she pursue improv here.

Although she studied with the Second City Conservatory for two years, Halem describes herself as an “awful” improviser; still, she considers improv “one of those great life skills. Being able to speak well in front of a public, think fast on your feet and work on a team, there’s nothing better.” While polishing her stand-up around town, Halem served as executive director for the Lesbian Community Cancer Project (now in partnership with Howard Brown Health Center under the name Lesbian Community Care Project). In 2006, Halem stepped down from that position to pursue comedy full-time, taking her personal politics with her. “I feel I’ve done this traditional advocacy work,” she says. “Now I need to dedicate more time to comedy as a different vehicle for the same sort of changes and vision.”

For Halem, that means using comedy to challenge stereotypes about sexual orientation and gender identity. To that end, she puts her queerness front and center the moment her routine begins. “I’ve always really felt it important to self-disclose and identify immediately,” she says. “It’s good to prepare people for what they’re about to get into. I’m looking for people to articulate ways of living in the world that are different. When an African-American comic is up there, I like to know about their experience of being black in America.” Not surprisingly, Halem’s biggest comic inspirations are Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and Richard Pryor. “I love to see an African-American man talk so honestly about the experience of racism in America in a way that brings everyone into the joke,” she says. “As a white person, I want to know what that experience is like.”

Yet Halem’s act, like those of her idols, is no lecture. On the contrary, this risqué, outrageous comic possesses a rare ability to carry her audience along with her for frank talk about sex, like when she’s riffing on fisting—“putting your hand inside of a vagina is just hot, like puppet hot”—or talking girl-on-girl oral: “You don’t know the difference between labia majora and minora? So you just put your whole face down there and shake it around?” Rather than alienating the crowd, her candid humor disarms it. “More often than not, the people sitting up close and the people I’m interacting with are straight couples on dates,” Halem says. “Afterwards, they’ll come up to me and talk about how funny it was. I know that maybe they’ve gotten some permission they’ve never gotten before to see themselves aligned with a queer feminist.”

And while Halem does play the angry-lesbian card, she does so with a wry smile. “My interpretation of angry lesbianism is about how power works in this world, and inequality and injustice,” she says. “It has nothing to do with individual men. When people hear ‘angry lesbian,’ they’re picturing somebody who hates men. For me, anger is a great tool for articulating deep desire for change. It is a positive.” And a very funny one at that.

Solar-Powered plays Friday 20, 8pm at Center on Halsted.

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