Comedy Goes Quantum

Picture this. You’re in a nightclub in New York City (no longer smoke-filled of course), waiting for the comedy act to begin. A tall, dark haired, rather exotic looking beauty strides onto the stage and up to the mike. Expecting the usual comedy shtick about ex-husbands, mothers-in-laws or first-date fiascos, you hear a different patter:

“We human beings don’t relate to our view of life like it’s a view. We relate to it like it’s the truth! We see this narrow slice of reality and we insist it’s all of it! It’s like we have on one of those cones they give your dog when he’s been neutered: (mimicking a dog with a cone on its’ neck): Oh My God! I cannot lick my sore genital area! Life sucks! Oh, great, and I will not be sniffing butts today. Great, just great.”

What’s this? A New Thought comedy routine about consciousness and personal evolution? Yep - and it ain’t just nice comedy for what Vanda calls “The Angel and Dolphin crowd”. Throw in a few jokes about particle physics, superposition and multiple potentialities existing at the same time and you begin to get the flavor of Vanda Mikoloski’s outrageous quantum comedy routine; a way-out of the ordinary laugh at life as we know it. Take Vanda’s response to the state patrol officer who has just stopped her for speeding. “Let me explain superposition to you, officer, because clearly you’re enslaved by a Newtonian viewpoint. See, there is a Vanda going 85 in a 55, but there's also a Vanda going 55 in an 85. There's a speed of light Vanda and a perfectly still Vanda. There are many, many Vanda potentials, officer, you see? You just collapsed the wave function on the wrong Vanda, that's all.”

Speaking of wave functions – the fact that Vanda’s collapsed back into comedy after a nine year absence is pretty outrageous, especially considering she left the smokey-bar routine to pursue work as a full-time yoga and meditation instructor. So what induced the professional yogini to return to the mike? Coincidence? Happenstance?

“Well, first of all, I’m not a very good yoga teacher. I’m the kind who smokes and judges people” Vanda pretends to demonstrate a yoga pose with a cigarette in her hand… “Whoa, THAT guy’s out of shape…”

Actually, LA comic Rick Overton, who is friends with Elaine Hendrix, the actress who played Jennifer in the quantum physics meets religion movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? suggested the idea of quantum comedy to Vanda. “I told him, ‘I don't want to be back in nightclubs!’ and he said, ‘You're an elder. It’s time to give back to the tribe now.’ And it was like one of those pivotal things that people say to you. I came out of my cave and thought ‘What do I want to give my life for?’.”

Encouraged by the thought that greater years bring greater wisdom, Vanda realized she could re-approach comedy on her own terms, say what she wanted to say and attract the audiences she wanted to attract - a far cry from her earlier attitudes as a hungry young comedienne just looking for gigs. “I actually want to make a difference for people.
You know, when I’m not focused on survival, life looks like a big, fun, grand adventure. I thought it would be cool to make people laugh as I inquire into the things that fascinate me, like the trap of being human and, at the same time, divine. For example, I went to a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat and spent the first four days focusing not on nirvana, but on a little, tiny argument I had had with a close friend. I broke my ‘noble vow of silence’ when I tripped over a rock and cursed! I love that whole paradox of the glorious divine coexisting with the petty human.”

“I think it was John Lennon who said, ‘We are all Hitler; we are all Jesus Christ,’ though I do think it’s the ratio that matters.”

At the moment, Vanda finds herself writing and doing her routine in “New Thought” churches and at conferences more often than she does clubs and bars. But her routine seems to appeal to a wide audience. One day she finds herself with Byron Katie (author of Loving What Is) on her blog www.thework.com then she hits the streets with the people who have never done any personal growth or spiritual work the next.

“I want to occasionally use the clubs to keep my chops, so I can access everyone, not just this rarified “spiritual” crowd,” she says. “I do love Unity people and Unitarian Universalists and the Churches of Religious Science. Those guys are just so happy that a comic actually addresses stuff they care about.”

Her reception is so good, a Unity Church in Portland, Maine actually tithed her more money than she negotiated with them, something that definitely doesn’t happen in nightclubs. And the Interfaith director at Evergreen State College in Washington State, Chaplain Fred LaMotte says Vanda’s act is a great counter-balance for spiritual self-importance. “Vanda's willingness to be vulnerable and poke fun at her own ego is really a model of courage for us all,” says LaMotte. “Her humor is not only wild, wonderful fun: it is a breath of grace that sweeps away our self-importance and allows us to blossom in simple humanity, in the present moment. Of course, this is where spirituality really begins.”

Vanda does find it interesting how broadly appealing her material actually is. Even though many of her jokes wander into the realm of blasphemy, the good ol’ boys in the bars don’t seem to mind.

“Well, I’m incredibly sexy, as heretics go, so that helps” Vanda explains. “Every now and then I know I’ve gone too far when they look at me like I’m the headlights and they’re the deer.”

But, as Vanda points out, audiences will eat steak if you feed them steak, and hamburger if you feed them hamburger. Doing what she calls “writing up,” creating higher-brow material than ordinary, works as long as you give the audience context and authentic examples. And “writing up” is what Vanda is all about.

“My intention is to have a comedy show that not only is funny, but one that actually inspires and heals people as we laugh at what unites us: our crazy humanity. What would it be like if you came back from a standup comedy show saying, ‘Well I laughed a lot and that was great. I also perceive reality from an expansive context and …I grew a limb back!’ That would be way cool. Really.”