Comedian Lisa Barber grew up in the small Midwestern town of Winchester, Illinois. Only 52 students made up her high school class. Today she's a member of Chicago's Second City Touring Company, the upper echelon of the comedy minor leagues, from where the big leagues like Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central find a lot of talent.
So how did a small-town girl make it to the big town comedy echelon of Chicago's Second City?
Desperation.
"I would always look at the corn fields and think 'I have to get out of here,'" she says. "There has to be something more."
And there was: in education, theater and comedy. She got a degree and did community theater, but she combined all three at Second City's Training Center, from which she graduated after studying improv and writing.
She's coming with her fellow Second City comrades to Carmel's Sunset Center 7pm Tuesday to perform a sketch and improv show they call the Nut-Cracking Holiday Revue (see the story in this week's Weekly). She says they do a lot of material revolving around the holidays, family and relationships, but that she has a piece that's very physical, with a twist ending.
She's got a web series with Pat Reidy called Growing Alice, which has been nominated for three LA WebFest awards, about child-rearing. More specifically, about a hyper-informed and culturally elitist brand of child-rearing. It shows off Barber's flavor of writing and comedy.
"When I was in graduate school I worked at a daycare," she says of its origin. "I always watched a lot of children. Parents have changed. There's been a cultural shift. The little girl in the video, her parents are French. They do things drastically different. This was a great thing to explore. I had some fun with it. We take the truth and push it further."
Bien sur.
Here is the episode about raising a bilingual kid.
Here's the episode about assembling a high-anxiety lunch for a toddler.