Calise Hawkins is 40 AF and Still Figuring It Out
On February 28, 2020, Calise Hawkins gathered friends, family, and comedy fans in Brooklyn for the recording of her first album, Calise Hawkins is 40 AF. Not only was that date her 40th birthday, but it also marked the anniversary of another career milestone for her: 2019’s Black Women in Comedy Festival.
To hear her tell it, the gathering that the festival facilitated was instrumental in shifting her perspective on her place in the world of comedy. “On a regular lineup – and I hate calling it a regular lineup – but on a regular lineup at a typical New York comedy club lineup, the diversity is the Black woman. Or an LGBTQ person or a foreign person. But at [the festival] it was all Black women. And there was so much diversity within the women there!” She went on to share just how monumental that was for her to see:
We all know we’re each so unique and dynamic within ourselves, and it was so good to see it onstage. I was told that we were gonna see the same jokes…and nobody told the same jokes! Nobody has the same experiences, even when you’re one race. It encapsulated so many different American experiences as Black women. We have our own experiences with gender, with parenting, with our parents…everything about us is just as diverse as mixing up a lineup with different races.
The “peace and communion” the weekend provided for her, also gave her the space to realize just how unique and valuable her perspective was. “I had always questioned whether my standup was original enough, or if my comedy was unique enough, and once I saw everybody’s stories as personally unique enough for them, it gave me the strength to tell mine. To stand behind my own self. Because I could watch all these Black women tell different stories, and I was behind it.”
Calise Hawkins is 40 AF shows off many of those stories for her. Filled with stories about her daughter and parenting, dating, mental health, and race, it’s the first major opportunity that Hawkins has had to share her standup stylings with the world. Because relatively little of her standup has been featured nationally, she found herself drawing on fifteen years of jokes to shape her taping…a task that challenged her and wracked her nerves, right down to the day of the shows. “I rewrote my whole set the day of and then just went over and over and over it, the way I would practice for March Madness at Caroline’s. I did it all day over and over and over.” The prospect of this left me sweating – true story – as she recounted it, but it came down to a truism for her that is also true of me, and of anyone who fights to make their own opportunities: “When you don’t have enough time to prepare, when you don’t have the experiences that led you to this moment, you will still figure them out. You just get it done.”
Get it done she did – and it’s a good thing too. With a taping date like February 28, 2020, I don’t have to tell you what happened not too long afterward. Hawkins isn’t unaware of the added significance to the moment, either. When asked what she is most proud of through the whole process, she answered, “Honestly, I’m most proud that I pushed myself to do this in the first place. Because I wasn’t getting this push from anywhere else. It had to ultimately come from within. There was no one person going, “Calise make an album! Calise do a special! Calise we want to hear your comedy!” And as we conducted this interview from from our respective houses, aware that the world is materially different now from when she taped, it was inescapable to also note, “if I hadn’t done it? Right after that, the world shut down. There wouldn’t be an opportunity for me to get this album out the way I would have liked to.” But now that the album is out in the world, she chooses to see the leap she took to record as a cue to keep pushing herself forward:
I just keep thinking about all the things I’ve hesitated to do, that the timing would have been perfect for if I hadn’t hesitated. I’m trying to build up my non-hesitation muscle, because I know there are a couple other paths that I’m sitting on that I haven’t revved up to do because I’ve been painfully shy about myself.
In the immediate future, Hawkins sees herself flexing that non-hesitation muscle as she explores how comedy will live through virtual spaces. It’s a challenge she’s admittedly nervous about (“I’m comfortable doing this in front of a live, warm, breathing crowd”), and recognizes that crowds play a major role in how she performs. In talking about it, she names them as integral to her process. “The audience is part of the conversation, and whether they laugh or not is part of the rhythm, that’s their feedback.” She went on:
They don’t shape my opinion, they shape how I’m able to get them to understand what I’m saying. That’s what the audience is there for: they’re a testing ground for the tactic I’m using. And because they are also in the world, they have an impact on what I’m saying.
It helps mold your argument. What is the best way to get people to laugh at this thing that is true for myself?
Comedy in digital spaces – be it through the Zoom shows that are proliferating across the country, or via recorded pieces on YouTube – challenge Hawkins’ comfort zone. But she recognizes them as a necessary part of growth in her career. As she puts it, “it looks like I’m gonna have to be brave.”
But if this new album, and the circumstances under which it came to be, is any indication, bravery suits her. As her friend Rae Sanni said about her once, ““Calise knows she’s funny, she just doesn’t believe it.” Now, with the release of her first hour, she’s coming around to believing it.
Photo by Phil Provencio
Amma Marfo is a writer, speaker, and podcaster based in Boston, MA. Her writing has appeared in Femsplain, The Good Men Project, Pacific Standard, and Talking Points Memo. Chances are good that as you're reading this, she's somewhere laughing.
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