Physicist’s wife Amy Brown mines comedy’s nuclear core.
Amy Brown was eating Cheez-Its and drinking white wine when she had a vision of herself 20 years later, still the wife of a nuclear physicist, still the mother of two, still snacking on her Buckhead sofa, but with a rounder physique.
She decided to do something drastic to change her future: She took an improv class, then a standup comedy class. She was comfortable in front of an audience from her time as a musical theater student, and stepping onstage for a comedy graduation performance felt good, like slipping into a warm bath.
Eight years later, her husband is still a physicist. Her 19-year-old son is in college; her 17-year-old isn’t far behind. And Brown is part of a growing army of female Atlanta comedians who trained at Lace Larrabee’s Laugh Lab at The Punchline in Buckhead and gather for pool parties at Brown’s house each summer.
“I don’t make my children watch my material. That would be, I think, child abuse,” Brown says. “We do laugh together a lot as a family. When I can, off the cuff, make them laugh, it’s the absolute best moment in my life.”
Her “nerdy dirty” comedy mixes the sexy side of science with the life observations of a woman who grew up on a New York farm so far north that her hair and nostrils froze on winter mornings. She escaped to Sweet Briar College in Virginia so she could see daffodils before June.
Moving south, she discovered pimento cheese, white gravy, chicken salad and pork in every vegetable, along with 15 added pounds. “I don’t have the immunity to handle the food.”
Brown is a regular at clubs around Atlanta, including the monthly Top Shelf Comedy shows at the Distillery of Modern Art in Chamblee. She typically travels two weekends a month to perform.
Connecting with the audience is crucial for Brown. She loves the terrified faces of young people hearing her tales of middle age, and she cherishes the memory of an older black gay man at a show in New Orleans. “He said I was a national treasure.” S
he’s honing her comedy as she prepares to record her first album.
“I’m trying to make something beautiful and multilayered.”
Brown is also writing a book about her experiences from childhood to young motherhood in Colorado, where the family lived before moving to Atlanta 12 years ago.
“I’m dyslexic, so it is a freaking nightmare,” Brown says of writing.
Her weekly Nerdy For podcast on YouTube began in March 2023.
It gives her a chance to highlight funny friends and touring comedians, produce content she can chop into Instagram clips, test jokes and show off her personality.
As her own manager and promoter, Brown uses the podcast to build a following to persuade clubs to book her as a feature act. “That’s just more stage time,” she says. “You work on more material, rinse and repeat, until one of your videos goes viral.”
One video did. It’s a joke about her young sons’ asking what happened to her penis. “I told them I didn’t eat my vegetables, and it fell off.”
The video has almost 80,000 likes and 2 million views on Instagram, but she still has fewer than 4,000 followers. “At least I’m not eating Cheez-Its and drinking white wine every night.”
AMY BROWN
amybrowncomedy.com
youtube.com/@amybrowncomedy
@amybrowncomedy
