Two things guide the work of comedian Amy Miller: holding to one’s ethics and fighting to protect one’s community—values the Bay Area native learned in part from the punk scene at 924 Gilman. Now she brings her own hour-long special to the beloved space she first visited as a kid.
There’s no place quite like Gilman, a venue created by punks, for punks in the ’80s that’s inspired generations. Miller’s will be the first comedy show ever taped there.
“I went to my first show there when I was probably 8 years old,” Miller said over Zoom. She watched her brother play. “Now my nephew plays shows there,” she added. Her relationship to Gilman has been a long and strange family affair.
In the 1980s MTV brought heavy metal imagery into living rooms, setting off a “Satanic Panic,” something Miller experienced from both sides. Her brother performed in the earliest days of Gilman, while her parents attended a conservative Baptist church in the area. Her church’s efforts to vilify punks backfired.
“My pastor encouraged everyone to pray for my brother because he was going to hell,” which was basically Gilman in their eyes, she said. Instead, her brother went on to a major record deal as the singer of the band Samiam, active to this day. “We found out years later that the youth pastor was, of course, a child molester,” Miller said with a chuckle. “I shouldn’t be laughing, it’s not funny—but the idea of it is ludicrous.”
Comedy as a form carries with it social power; the ability to say literally anything and laugh together as a group. A shared off-the-wall, even inappropriate moment, can be healing.
“I just feel like [laughing together] is so beautiful, so I get puzzled when people use it for the exact opposite,” Miller said, “which is to try to do harm. What a waste of the platform.”
In this golden age of the American bully, the acute aversion to empathy spills out of boardrooms and into the halls of comedy’s small professional community. At one time, public revolt over the revelation of sexual abuses of power by comedians Bill Cosby and Louis C.K. served as a warning that seemed to have broad structural impact. But instead the bro-verse pushback to all that shines progressive enabled a new batch of mean-spirited comedians to cash in. For a woman comedian, it’s really nothing new.
“They’re literally willing to kill us all so that they can fucking high five each other over their cybertrucks in the hallway of the comedy club,” Miller said, connecting the trend to current political and economic folly. “I have to walk amongst them like, ‘I’m here for my $50 to talk about my radical, left-wing politics,’ which is actually just jokes about my body.”
Not just the conservative, libertarian comics benefit from the prevailing winds. Many of today’s heralded progressive comics got to that position by not rocking the boat. By contrast Miller recently pulled out of a Netflix showcase when C.K. was added.
“I’m not gonna shake hands with a predator because we both work at the Comedy Store,” Miller said, referring to glad-handing comics credited with being progressive. “You’ve compromised the entire time and now you get a pat on the back for being like, ‘Hey, we shouldn’t be mean to trans people.’ Shut the fuck up. You showed up at the end of the republic and our art form to try to scrape up some final views before you die.”
She feels strongly that women in comedy need to look out for each other. “I’m just like, I hope I don’t get assaulted. That’ll be a good weekend,” Miller said, illustrating the reality for traveling comics. “In every city, I request at least one woman opening for me. Maybe it’s her first weekend at that club, but it just takes a couple people to do that to really be the difference between someone keeping at it or quitting.”
Event promoter Blonde Medicine’s Craig Billmeier, a Gilman veteran himself, said, “Gilman encourages that kind of intimacy. So while Amy’s comedy does this natively, I’m excited to see her do this in the Gilman environment.”
The lesson is that it matters how we go about things, and who we do it with. Being from the East Bay, Miller grew up in and around other groups of people and other types of food, with that insight that diversity gives us—that the world is bigger than just ourselves, that we have a role to play in caring for each other.
“I had these punk ethics beaten into me, not physically, but you know what I mean,” she said, laughing again. “Just those sort of core values of protecting your art form, protecting your community.”
Amy Miller will record her first hour-long special on Sunday, Aug. 23, at the Alternative Music Foundation, 924 Gilman St., Berkeley. Chris Estrada opens. Doors at 7pm, comedy at 7:30pm. Advance tickets $20; $25 at the door. 924gilman.org/tickets
