Did you hear the one about the comedienne with brain cancer?
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| Chris Rich (R) talks with Carole Montgomery backstage |
Keep reading. You will.
Life is a long series of potential punchlines waiting to be told. Redheads, shaving, a Scottish sheep shearer, Irish setters, near death experiences, pregnant husbands. Those are some of the ones that Lower Makefield resident and stand-up comic Chris Rich has perfected.
Rich is well known in professional comedy circles where career longevity is often as fleeting as Katy Perry’s latest hairstyle. She counts herself among the first tsunami of female stand-up comics that landed on comedy club stages some 30 years ago when the entertainment industry realized that, hey, women are funny, too.
Almost 20 years ago, Rich won a prestigious national comedy competition that secured her a long-running guest appearance on the Comedy Central network. She has opened for Jerry Seinfeld, Gilbert Gottfried and Roseanne Barr, and traveled the world performing with the USO. She spent three months at an Atlantic City casino performing with former “Jeffersons” TV star — and fellow Philadelphian — Sherman Hemsley. Today, as she, in her words, is “circling” her 60th birthday, Rich continues to work regularly at comedy clubs and other venues across the tri-state area and is working on a one-person show, “Hope Street,” based on short stories about her Irish ancestors life in America.
Most recently she landed at a packed Newtown Theater as part of the traveling live comedy show, “Women of a Certain Age,” delivering jokes and one-liners so dry Rich swept the crumbs off her chin. Her 30-minute set flowed from her experiences as a Kensington-born, “Norfeast” Philly-raised transplant living in “Hardly Yardley,” and her working-class Irish Catholic roots highlighted by the story about how every Halloween her parents dressed all six skinny, pale, red-headed kids in matching outfits, teased up their hair and sent them out as a pack of matches.
The mostly middle-age audience didn’t laugh; it screamed like 10-year-olds riding a roller coaster. Even Rich could barely keep from cracking up at times, covering her mouth like a school girl feigning shyness and twisting her face into cartoon-worthy reactions.
No one in the audience could have guessed that less than a year ago, Rich was diagnosed with cancer, her latest life-changing experience.
Triple threat
A talking matchstick is how Rich sees herself. It’s a description that also serves as the punchline to her signature joke about growing up in family of redheads. (“We had an Irish Setter, too.”)
Off stage, Rich more closely resembles Raggedy Ann’s skinny sister, with milk-colored skin, saucer-sized, clear blue eyes and the mischievous smile of a 3-year-old who just did something naughty. The radiation treatments for the cancer that she was diagnosed with last year stole her long, flame-colored Bernadette Peters-worthy ringlets. She’s opted for a short shag wig in a near-matching burnt orange.
Rich has called Bucks County home for the last 25 years, but her Philadelphia “ackkcent” remains so unmistakable while touring with the USO overseas in Japan, a native in the audience easily picked her hometown, she said.
Rich grew up in what she calls an Irish stew of characters, including a milkman dad, a nurse-turned-homemaker mom, a bar-owning grandpa and her comic idol, Uncle Jim, a U.S. Marine. She started training in childhood to be a triple threat (dancer, singer, actress) and carried a love for performing into adulthood, appearing in stage productions that included so many musical comedies that she boasts her appearances in “Oklahoma” qualify her for Farm Aid.
But, eventually, Rich could feel herself growing disillusioned with the theater. The best lines, the funniest lines, always seemed to belong to the guys. I can be funny, Rich told herself. A good comedian can take anything and build a good story around it. Life provides endless new material and jokes can take decades to refine. The moment she wrote the joke about the pack-of-matches childhood Halloween costume, she knew it would always get a big laugh. It still does, too. Every time.
Around the time Rich was transitioning from the legitimate stage to unpredictable comedy clubs, she started dating Mark Adami, a future high school horticulture teacher and amateur Appalachian folk dancer. The couple met at a mental hospital. (No joke.)
Adami worked as a groundskeeper at Friends Hospital, a psychiatric center in Northeast Philadelphia. Rich worked nights there as a part-time psychiatric aide, a job that freed her up for auditions and rehearsals during the day. Adami wooed her with a fresh-cut rose every time he saw her. The couple married in the hospital garden in 1991.
While Adami has dabbled (with his wife’s encouragement) in community and dinner theater, he has always been content to remain in the chorus, and occasionally the punchlines.
“It was very exciting for me. I’m riding on her coattails all the time,” said Adami, as he waited backstage at the Newtown Theater. “It’s given me, as an individual, an experience that if we led a normal lifestyle we wouldn’t have been able to do. It’s so much fun to live with her and be a part of her life. I could never do on a daily basis what she does.”
There was a time when Rich had doubts. When she started in comedy nearly 30 years ago, club owners and audiences were not used to seeing women comics. She believes her androgynous first name probably helped her land those early jobs.
She recalled stepping on the stage at a New Jersey club and watching a burly bald guy in the front row swear at her before turning his seat around.
But Rich didn’t let it throw her. She put the guy in her act, turning his back-turning into a prop. At one point, she pretended to shine his head before adjusting her makeup in the reflection.
The audience loved it. So did the guy. Eventually he gave in and turned back around, she said. He even laughed.
That kind of fast thinking is why comedian Carole Montgomery, the creator and producer of “Women of a Certain Age,” immediately thought of Rich when she was looking to rotate a new comedienne into her show. She has known Rich since their early days on the club circuit. Though Montgomery said she hadn’t seen Rich in a decade, she had no hesitation about hiring her.
“I’m very picky about who I let on my show. She is just a strong comic; as a producer that is the most important thing,” Montgomery said. “I don’t’ have to worry about what she is going to do. She can do anything.”
News of Rich’s cancer diagnosis didn’t give Montgomery any reservations.
“Comics have dealt with so much crap,” she said. “You make a joke out of anything life throws at you.”
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| Chris Rich on stage at the Newtown Theater |
Heal thy funny bone
Next month marks one year since Rich found herself in a hospital emergency room with a severe headache and confusion. Imaging tests found evidence of a brain tumor, which doctors later confirmed.
Within weeks, she underwent surgery where doctors removed a malignant tumor on her right temporal lobe and created pockets in her abdomen where stem cells from her body were implanted. (“The scars make me look like I’m wearing a little Chanel suit when I’m naked.”)
A month later, she was back on stage at a country club in northeastern Pennsylvania. A week after that, she started 30 rounds of radiation treatments.
Cancer and comedy aren’t so different. Both can be ruthless killers. Good timing is critical to survival. As are patience, persistence and luck.
Luck is another Irish birthright Rich inherited along with her hair color.
After all, how many people can say they survived a plane crash? It was 25 years ago when Rich, who was one of two passengers (the other a minister on his way to perform a wedding) in a small-engine plane, survived after the plane crash-landed in Connecticut. The pilot and the minister abandoned Rich, who had suffered a shattered wrist, in the damaged plane. (“What sweethearts,” she added.)
Her wrist wasn’t the only thing left forever changed that day. Rich was left emotionally scarred, too. She lost faith in people. She lost a little of herself. Life didn’t seem as funny anymore.
Four years later, Rich still felt stuck between bitter and betrayed. She was still doing stand-up shows but her heart wasn’t in it. She didn’t think she had the emotional stamina necessary to make that crucial audience connection. It was a friend who pushed her into entering the second annual “Ladies of Laughter” contest, among the biggest comedy competitions around. To her, it was a no-pressure situation; a 10-minute set is easier than a draining 45-minute show.
“I liked the challenge. I needed something stimulating, not routine, to get my brain sparking again,” she said. “It was a nice escape from the round of hospitals and bad news my life had become.”
She wasn’t trying to win, she said. But she did.
“Welcome back,” Adami whispered in her ear moments after her name was announced, Rich said.
The win allowed her to put the plane crash behind her in the best way she knew how. She turned pain into punchlines.
As Rich told an all-female audience in 2011, when people learn she survived a plane crash, they tell her she looks OK.
“I’m glad you think I look OK,” Rich told the group. “Before the crash ... I was a man.”
Luck smiled on Rich most recently last year. She and Adami initially were told she had stage 4 brain cancer, the most advanced and life-threatening. But after doctors dissected the tumor tissue, it turned out it was stage 2, greatly improving the odds of her long-term prognosis.
Recently, Rich has noticed her earliest comedy routines, which she had given up on remembering, are coming back to her. On stage she will be in the middle of a story, and suddenly a phrase, a word, a punchline she forgot she knew, pops back into her memory.
She has already written her first cancer joke. But it’s not funny enough to share. Yet.
Cancer has changed her comedy, the same way it has changed her, Rich said. If she flubs a punchline during a performance, she doesn’t beat herself up. If someone doesn’t think a joke is funny, that’s OK. If a throw-away line doesn’t land how she expects, there is always another gig.
“Nobody can hurt me anymore.”
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