Aida Rodriguez Wants You to Laugh at the Pain

AUSTIN, Texas — “I did not know I was 50 percent Dominican right up until I got more mature,” the comic Aida Rodriguez mentioned from the stage at the Stateside Theater. “They broke it to me like it was poor information.”

The group laughed, but Ms. Rodriguez was critical. This is a issue close to her coronary heart. The vary of Latino identities in The us generally falls underneath the broad group of “Hispanic,” a box to test on a census chart that blurs the richness of the many cultures it encompasses. In a place where a handful of famed Latino comics arrive generally from the Southwest, Ms. Rodriguez desires to provide a Caribbean perspective to the forefront.

When she was 3 yrs old, her mother still left her father and moved them to Miami from Santo Domingo, the Dominican funds. She grew up with her Puerto Rican aspect of the family members, imagining she was only Puerto Rican. It was not right up until this 12 months, when she met her father for the initially time since then, that she reconnected with Dominican tradition.

She now utilizes comedy to procedure the components of her lifetime about which she did not have any manage.

“It’s really hard to see points that are a component of you that you never keep in mind that very well,” claimed Ms. Rodriguez, from the greenroom in advance of her established at the Moontower Comedy Pageant on Sept. 22. Earlier this yr, she filmed a one particular-hour comedy exclusive, which premieres on HBO Max on Nov. 4. In the demonstrate, she works by using substance that touches on her upbringing and her hardships. She seems at it all unflinchingly. In fact, she even experienced cameras rolling when she achieved her father, capturing elements of their reunion to weave into the hourlong online video.

The pieces are setting up to fall into area for Ms. Rodriguez’s comedy job, but when she initial started she was a single mother of two, and stand-up was additional of an outlet than a path she imagined she would choose.

“I couldn’t pay for a therapist,” she said.

In 1998, she left her spouse, a former football player for the Chargers, and moved from San Diego again to Miami. “I went dwelling for two yrs to get well,” Ms. Rodriguez claimed. “I did not fit into that world.”

At the exact time, she was functioning on a script that she submitted to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, a workshop where new screenwriters are paired with seasoned writers who assist them complete their manuscripts. When she was recognized into the software, she noticed it as an affirmative signal to go after her acting occupation, so, in 2000, she moved to Los Angeles. She took a occupation at a financial business in among acting careers and was signed by a talent agency.

“I was signed really speedily,” she claimed. “It was aspect of the illusion that I was going to make it.”

The trickle of performing employment she had been scheduling before long dried up. In 2007, she started showing on “Speedy’s Comedy Corner,” a radio show on Jamie Foxx’s Sirius XM radio channel, The Foxxhole. The team of the show set with each other a comedy present at the Orpheum Theater in Phoenix and invited Ms. Rodriguez to be aspect of the lineup.

It was her very first time onstage, and she was a strike. The audience roared through her five-moment established. She was hooked on that feeling, but it would be a lengthy time prior to she’d be equipped recapture it. Again in Los Angeles, she managed to get a 3-minute “First Impressions” spot on a “Chocolate Sundaes” show at the Chortle Factory.

“I bombed,” Ms. Rodriguez claimed. “I did effectively for the very first couple of minutes, but then I bought cocky.”

She then booked yet another five-moment established, this time on “Comic Perspective: Just one Mic Stand,” a Wager clearly show hosted by Kevin Hart. But she was not ready. “Five minutes when you’re bombing, feels like a few hrs,” Ms. Rodriguez claimed. “I understood it was also early for me and I desired to focus on the craft.”

She commenced demonstrating up for open up mic nights at the Westwood Brewing Business in Los Angeles. Quickly immediately after, she started off internet hosting a weekly comedy clearly show at the Hollywood Studio Bar and Grill. Soon after two decades there, she picked up a further hosting gig at a comedy club in San Diego for three several years.

In 2010, she was opening for Paul Mooney at the Punchline, a comedy club in Sacramento. By 2013, she was no extended opening at the Punchline she was now the headliner.

Her big split came in 2014, when she auditioned for Season 8 of “Last Comic Standing,” a fact competitors exhibit on NBC whose executive producers integrated Wanda Sykes. Other comedians warned Ms. Rodriguez about the snare of reality demonstrates, but she felt it was her very best shot at results.

“It was a truth present, but as a Latina it was the only chance I experienced,” Ms. Rodriguez, 44, mentioned. “I experienced to be very thorough that I did not perpetuate stereotypes. It was heavy.”

Ms. Sykes suggested her to enable go of her inhibitions. “It just will take a although to experience relaxed with who you are,” Ms. Sykes stated in an job interview. “I assume the journey is difficult, but once you get there and you can do it, it is so liberating and cathartic and just raw and gorgeous.”

Although Ms. Rodriguez didn’t earn the level of competition, she explained it helped her find her voice, and she began scheduling mainstream comedy clubs across the state. She carried out at colleges, went on a 10-working day military tour in Korea, and landed a position in “The Comic,” a 2016 film about an aging comic starring Robert De Niro.

Anything appeared to be falling in put, but Ms. Rodriguez even now felt like an impostor, she mentioned. She frequently felt like she was cheating, like she could be found out at any instant.

“I just assumed, I continue to keep acquiring away with it,” Ms. Rodriguez reported. Still emotion like she had a thing to verify — at minimum to herself — she went to New York.

As the saying goes, “You go on the highway to get excellent, you go to New York to get great, then you go to L.A. to get well-known,” she stated. The New York comedy scene helped her experience validated. Ms. Rodriguez is now a standard at the Comedy Cellar. “I go every single thirty day period to do stand-up due to the fact that’s exactly where you get the regard,” she explained.

Her satire is awash with the themes of race, religion, millennial wokeness and motherhood.

“People were throwing up Black Life Make a difference indicators in the course of the marches,” she claims for the duration of her specific. “And they only put those signals up so no person will crack their home windows.”

Onstage, Ms. Rodriguez lastly will get to enjoy the highlight and she wishes to use it to inform and use humor to carry her identification to gentle, she reported. “I want to develop extra space for other people today.” As she puts it in her unique: “We have this ethnic spectrum that is made up of all the races — we have white, Black, Asian, Indigenous, we have all people.”

With her newfound fame came a broader arrive at and better expectations. In 2018, she was criticized for suggesting that Louis C.K., who had been accused of sexual misconduct by five females, use his regimen to educate other gentlemen.

“If he takes advantage of the possibility to handle his shortcomings, maybe he can modify a couple minds among his admirers and perhaps he can conserve a pair of ladies from unneeded and unwelcome incidents,” Ms. Rodriguez informed The Hollywood Reporter.

“They known as me a rape apologist,” Ms. Rodriguez explained, although in the greenroom of the Stateside Theater in Austin, minutes away from carrying out her to start with hour of stand-up because the get started of the pandemic. “Because I said when he will come back, he should use his privilege and his platform to speak to the folks who feel like him mainly because I can never attain these men and women.”

In 2019, Ms. Rodriguez was 1 of 6 comedians chosen by Tiffany Haddish to be element of her Netflix anthology series, “Tiffany Haddish Offers: They Ready.” Every episode is a 30-minute distinctive from a different comedian. When again, Ms. Rodriguez manufactured headlines. This time, for jokes that were regarded homophobic.

“If you want to have a dialogue with me and say, This is problematic? Let’s converse about it,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “You want to blast me on social media and try to choose me down understanding that I’m at the bottom? I get paid out the least out of everyone in comedy. Latinas are getting paid fewer than everyone, comedy is not exempt from it.”

Now, Ms. Rodriguez mentors other Latina comedians, in hope that they can keep away from starting to be caught in industry traps.

“She almost certainly is seeking out for me in means that I never even know,” explained Glory Mora, 33, a comedian in New York who made a clearly show Ms. Rodriguez headlined, identified as “Morir Soñando,” immediately after a well-known Dominican drink. “When she did our show, she gave us props and she did not even have to do that.”

Ms. Rodriguez is also starring in and producing a 50 %-hour comedy exhibit centered on her life, which is in enhancement at HBO Max. Ms. Haddish has signed on as an government producer. “I just want to present my men and women in an sincere mild,” Ms. Rodriguez reported. “I want to be real to us.”

It was simply call time and she headed to the stage. In a camo jacket, grey denims and a brilliant pair Jordans built by the rapper J. Balvin, she acquired to the microphone and opened up with a Karen joke.

Several individuals acquired up and exited the theater.

“That’s Ok,” she reassured the relaxation of her viewers. “Paul Mooney advised me that if 10 people today don’t depart when you are onstage, you are executing it wrong.”