Chloe Wright, Executive Editor
A love triangle between two pandas and a gay crocodile. The mother of Beowulf’s Grendel crying over a dinner party and the patriarchy. If any of these premises sound familiar to you, then you are familiar with the distinctive and timely work of comedian, playwright, professor and solo performing artist Megan Gogerty. Now, she has come to teach the Sewanee community how to make people laugh, the meaning behind what we find funny and what laughter can bring to society.
Within the span of two days at Sewanee, Gogerty led a comedy writing workshop, gave a lecture on political comedy and performed a reading of her new play “Fair State.” She is a Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow and member of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. She received her MFA in Playwriting at The University of Texas at Austin. Her comedy “Bad Panda” played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Theatre without Borders in Beijing, China and in Spanish at Del Teatro Milan in Mexico City, Mexico.
Interim Chair of the Creative Writing Department Elyzabeth Wilder invited Gogerty to come to Sewanee. Wilder said, “I was thrilled when Megan accepted my invitation to visit campus because her background as both a scholar and a practitioner in the field of comedy studies and solo performance would provide our students with an opportunity to explore this particular genre through two different lenses.”
Gogerty chose to perform “Fair State” to test its material with audiences before its official publication. As a solo performing artist, she needs as much audience feedback early in the writing process as possible. “My ‘scene partner’ is the audience,” she said. “So, until they show up, I’m just talking to myself. So, I like to get my work in front of audiences even when it’s at an early stage so that I can figure out what it is I really wanna say. It helps me refine the piece.”
According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Gogerty’s plays are as “thrillingly unconventional” as they are emotionally touching. She combines political commentary with absurdist situations. On her website, Feast is a play about Grendel’s mother (yes, from Beowulf) reincarnated as a middle-aged woman having the audience over for a dinner party. Over a glass of wine, she realizes her hand in creating “the rising forces of authoritarianism.”
Because a lot of her plays have political commentary, her views have influenced a crucial part of her art. Her works help her understand herself and the world better. “I have these roles: my role as a professor, my role as an auctioneer, my role as a wife and mother. But who I am at my core is an artist…And my craft is all about how I create my art in such a way where people are interested in what I’m doing…My job as an artist is to make something so true and real that you recognize yourself in it.”
In order for her plays to combine absurdist comedy with political commentary successfully, she recognizes that the real absurdity is in human nature itself.
“I believe it is not our natural state to be in realism,” she said. She commented on the bizarreness of watching a play from the audience and buying into whatever the play is about. “And [the actors are] just talking and saying, ‘Yeah, we’re in a room in Victorian England.’ And you’re like, ‘No, you’re not, you’re in a theater in Tennessee! Like we’re just gonna pretend?’ That, in itself, is weird…If you think of it like that, a talking panda is nothing.”
When not performing, teaching or writing, she also finds joy in auctioneering. Her first experience with emceeing was unexpected; she had to emcee for a gala last minute. Luckily, the event was a great success, and it helped her realize how much she loved working with these organizations.
Ever since, she has been a professional auctioneer for almost a year and has emceed fundraisers for the Iowa Abortion Access Fund, ACLU of Iowa and more. “It’s very fun,” she said. “I like it so much more than stand up comedy.”
She unites her love for auctioneering and comedy writing with her act: “O, Auctioneer!,” performed only once on Sep. 21, 2024 at 2 p.m. in Iowa City. It was a project to fund her tour of “Fair State” and offset any expenses the small communities and theaters would have to pay for on her tour.
But it wasn’t any normal auction. “The things I auctioned off [were] metaphysical objects. So, I auctioned off a ticket that said, ‘The Death of Your Enemy.’ So when your enemy dies, it’ll be dedicated to you. This is the certificate that proves it.” She was concerned with how well the event would go, but the audience loved the concept. She hopes to do more events like the metaphysical auction.
She is also a professor of comedy studies and playwriting at the University of Iowa. Her classes include Advanced Comedy Writing, Stand-up Comedy Practicum and Musical Theatre History.
She said on her experience on workshopping students’ comedy, “I think a lot of students are interested in writing comedy but can be intimidated about how to start. That’s true with everyone, but I think it’s especially true for people who don’t always feel welcome at open mic nights. So women, queer folk, people of color in certain neighborhoods…So, it’s my hope that students who attend my workshop will have an idea they can start. How do you even begin? So, they’ll walk out with some tools they can experiment with so that’ll bolster their confidence a bit.”
When hosting the Comedy Writing Workshop at the Tennessee Williams Center, Gogerty freed her students from perfectionism. She granted them permission to write imperfect jokes. She joked, “The only way to Mediocrity City is through Terrible Valley.”
During her stay, she also talked with Wilder’s THTR 337 Writing for Solo Performance class and gave tips on how to improve their final project.
Wilder said of the meeting, “Giving them an opportunity to talk to Megan about her work as a solo performance artist and to participate in generative exercises to get them on their feet was such a gift.”
The lecture she gave was titled, “How Many Feminists Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?: Political Comedy and Its Effect on Political Rhetoric.” She asked the audience the question in the title, and when the audience asked back how many, she gave a deadpan expression and said, “That’s not funny.” The audience still laughed.
She overviewed the history of political comedy through the lens of the four waves of feminism. Her message was simple; political comedy might not be able to completely change someone’s mind, but it can nudge the needle. “Comedy,” she said, “like weapons, depends on who’s holding the sword.”
Addressing the community members and students in the audience, she acknowledged the fraught time the country is living through. She closed off her lecture with the sentence for people to remember the most: “Art is a radical expression of hope.”