The lights went dim Tuesday night at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater in Bloomington. When the crowd got quiet, a voice boomed over the speaker system.
“Good evening, Bloomington! Are you feeling unhinged?”
As the audience applauded and music started to play, Moms Unhinged made its Bloomington debut.
The Colorado-based comedy group, Moms Unhinged was created before COVID-19 by Andrea Marie, a comedian based in Colorado. The group gained a lot of traction after the pandemic when Marie decided she wanted to take the show on the road and expand the group. Marie expanded the group's long roster of comedians which now includes around 28 female comedians based all around the United States, which allows for a different lineup of three to four comedians at each performance.
“I thought we could take the show on the road and that's where I started connecting with comedians all over the country and doing shows all over the country,” Marie said. “Last year, we had 125 shows all over the U.S. And last year I also quit my full-time business to do comedy full time.”
The group's Tuesday night show was its first in Bloomington and with four comedians to entertain them, the audience of around 400 was left laughing the whole time. Though the show primarily focuses on the trials of motherhood, Marie said members of the audience don’t have to be mothers to enjoy the performance.
“It's just really focused on the struggles of being a woman today,” Marie said. “That's what I think makes it really unique and allows people to come with their girlfriends or, like I said, with their own moms or daughters, and just laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.”
As to why Marie chose Buskirk-Chumley theater for this performance, she said her son —who is an IU student — played a big part in that decision.
As the first comedian in the lineup, Marie focused most of her material on what it is like to raise two older boys and just getting older in general. As the name of the group suggests, motherhood is a huge part of Marie’s material, especially when her career initially began.
“For me to get up and say, ‘I’m struggling here, and this is harder than I thought, and I had no idea kids want dinner every day’ has actually been super healing for me, and I realized that I'm not alone in these struggles,” Marie said. “I usually like to just kind of shine a light on where I'm not crushing it, and hope that it helps other people feel less alone and feel like it's okay to not always have it all together.”
This ability to highlight the struggles of motherhood while keeping it fun and lighthearted for the crowd was what drew in the audience for Moms Unhinged’s Bloomington show.
“You know, we're both moms. We both have adult children, and we needed a reason to laugh,” Bloomington resident Donna Hackney said after the show. “So, that's why I’m here.”
After Marie finished her stand-up set, the audience was met with the energetic and maybe even out of the ordinary comedy of Jan Slavin, one of Moms Unhinged older comedians.
“I'm a late bloomer, as you can see,” Slavin said. “I'm the oldest one in the show. I'm more of a Grandma Unhinged.”
What really set Slavin apart though wasn’t her age but the musical portion of her set. She isn’t new to the music world, along with comedy she works at a program called Music Together, which works to introduce young children to music. While a song about the urinary tract isn’t something one might expect to hear at a comedy performance, when Slavin picked up her ukulele and began singing parodies about her life the audience was quick to applaud her.
“I always had a special gift, if you will, toward the funny stuff,” Slavin said. “And it was really when I started doing cabaret music that I realized what I love most of all about that process is the pattern. It was the things that you say in between the songs leading up to the songs that I enjoyed doing the most.”
The performance also featured comedians Lindsay Porter, a Moms Unhinged comedian based in Chicago, and Janae Burris, the show's headliner from Colorado. With an audience comprised of men and women, Porter loves to see all kind of people when she performs.
“There was a dad, a young dad originally from Chicago, and he brought his wife, or as he said, ‘my baby mama’ to come and see the show, and he just loved it so much,” Porter said. “And it was that moment of just realizing that you really can bring people together from all different walks of life to laugh.”
Together all four performers proved just how funny moms can be and why Moms Unhinged has made such a big impact on their corner of the comedy scene.
“I think that anybody who underestimates women in comedy, they're being dummies,” Porter said.
Until Moms Unhinged one day returns to Bloomington with their special brand of mom-themed comedy, the audience was given plenty of things to laugh about at their Tuesday night performance.
“I haven't laughed that hard in forever,” Bloomington resident Tricia Dishman said. “And I really, really needed it.”
