San Francisco-based comedian Emily Van Dyke has been performing stand-up for over a decade, but she has yet to put out an album of her work. That all changes on Feb. 9 as her innovative debut, Feeling Myself, will be available in all its hilarious glory via Blonde Medicine.
In approaching the recording – which was done at The Independent in San Francisco – Van Dyke did things a little differently than most artists. Rather than focusing on an hour’s worth of her most recent material, she mined the last ten years for deep cuts, favorites, and newly adapted jokes from her comedy career.
“I’m just so happy and grateful that Blonde Medicine produced the album and that I was able to stitch together these themes throughout my twenties and thirties that kind of bring people up to speed. I feel like it gives a good starting place of who I am as a person, as a comedian. I’m really excited to go from here and I hope people giggle in their car. Or wherever they are listening to comedy albums. I hope it makes their day a little bit lighter and fresher,” she explained by phone late last month.
Some of the early material, that will have listeners giggling, comes in the form of jokes inspired by Van Dyke’s initial move from her hometown in Indiana to San Francisco, which can be a bit of a culture shock for anyone at anytime.
“I moved to San Francisco in 2007 and yeah, there was the shock of being in sort of this George Jetson city of the United States and all that goes with it as far as the gender politics and dating and career stuff – those were all kind of initial reactions but they’ve evolved over time with new tags and details, act outs and things like that. Those jokes still resonate with people. I think they still hit really close to home,” she said.
More recent material was mined from Van Dyke’s personal life and interactions with her kids and her Cuban, soon-to-be-ex-husband to hilarious results.
“I listened to Ali Wong’s Audible and she was talking about how she expressly asked for consent from her husband and anybody that’s in her jokes,” Van Dyke said with a laugh explaining that she does not ask for loved ones’ permission before writing her own material. “I try to keep it kind of light, I don’t think I say anything too mean. I think anybody can relate to just getting irritated with their partner, especially when we were trapped inside for two years. It was like gosh, literally this person could be an angel, but just seeing them eating chips, I can’t take it. ‘Can you breathe softer? Can you put your headphones in?’ There was a laundry list of things from my girlfriends on the group chat that were annoying them about every single person that was in their pod.”
Along with commemorating jokes from the past, another unique aspect of Feeling Myself is the way Van Dyke incorporates speaking Spanish into the set.
“It’s fun. Sometimes I do a lot more Spanish tags, but you never know who’s listening or if people get it. Sometimes it can just get lost on the crowd. And I never like being at a comedy show where I feel like I didn’t understand the punchline, so I never want to alienate people,” Van Dyke said while expressing interest in doing a full Spanish set one day.
She added, “That is on my to-do list. I have a couple buddies who are Spanish speakers and they say, ‘You should really go through your material and see what translates funny-wise and try to write a Spanish setlist because it would be really interesting to watch a gringa white girl bumble through some Spanish jokes that are definitely still pretty relatable.’ That’s something on my goal list for the next couple of years, to put together a Spanish set to take that risk. It’s really vulnerable to try to perform in a language that you don’t fully speak, but I guess that’s how all immigrants and second-gen people are in the United States. So, if they can do it, I can probably pull it together to give it a try.”
Now that Feeling Myself is done, Van Dyke is taking some time for herself and her family to enjoy a sabbatical from work and comedy.
“I’m actually taking six months off of work and comedy to hang out with my kids because they are two and about to be five-years-old and I feel like I’m constantly telling them ‘No.’ They’re like, ‘Come play,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I gotta go to a show’ or ‘No, I gotta do the dishes.’ I just feel like I’m missing it, so I’m hitting the pause button on life,” she said noting that she’s been performing three to five nights a week for the last 12 years.
Van Dyke may be on sabbatical, but she is already looking ahead. While Feeling Myself gives a glimpse of her personal experience on this planet, she is now feeling more inspired by the world – and the galaxy – at large.
“I’m entering a more goofy philosophical era. I want to do more about current events and I just want to talk about space,” she said, laughing. “I don’t know. These really beautiful pictures of galaxies have been coming out and, you know, we really are just on a rock floating through a galaxy revolving around a star. I don’t know why we’re trying to hurt and oppress each other. It’s really quite dumb so I want to talk about survival. I’ve got some apocalypse jokes and some current events tied in with nerdy stuff.”
Van Dyke added, “I’m going to try to talk about some more structural things, a little political. I think people will call it political, but I don’t think it is political. Just gender, relationships, politics, voting, the environment, just some adulting. My next album will be about some conscientious adulting with a lot of goofy stuff sprinkled in.”
Feeling Myself by Emily Van Dyke will be available via Blonde Medicine beginning on Feb. 9. Click here to pre-order the album and head over to Instagram to keep up with Van Dyke’s latest comedy news.