Veteran stand-up comic Karin Babbitt determined to speak her truth, be it amusing or appalling

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, there was an ambitious, sharp-tongued comedian relentlessly working the famous “brick-wall” circuit named Karin Babbitt. Today, in Santa Cruz, there is a 70-year-old former teacher, comic and veteran theater performer named Karin Babbitt.

Technically and legally, these two Karin Babbitts are the same person. But the years gone by and the experience and perspective those years have accrued, at least spiritually and emotionally, made one person into two different stand-up comics.

On March 21, today’s version of Karin Babbitt will perform at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center for a show in which she will be recording the first comedy album of her long career. Longtime Santa Cruz comic DNA, who recently moved out of town to pursue his comedy career, will be a co-headliner, also recording his debut album. Both albums are to be released by the Bay Area-based label Punchline Records. 

For Babbitt, the show is her most prominent Santa Cruz gig in years, and another step forward in figuring out who she is and what she believes about comedy beyond her years spent on the careerist hamster wheel. 

“You know how you write a story about yourself [in your own mind]?” she said. “Well, I wrote this story about myself — you’re not at [the famously star-making Los Angeles comedy venue] The Comedy Store anymore. You blew it. You didn’t become a household name. And then I had to look at that and go, y’know, the whole point is that [stand-up comedy] is art, you’re privileged enough to have a platform. Why don’t you work to make your chops good again, stop blaming people and feeling sorry for yourself, and feeling envious of those who did become household names?”

In the past five years, she’s not only been performing on stage, but she’s also been learning and teaching at the San Francisco Comedy College, and coaching younger stand-ups, all in an effort to honor the art of making people laugh.

“I found that you can actually get your chops back,” she said. “They’re just different from the chops that you used to have. So, now, it’s not so much based on any kind of recognition or fame or attention. It’s based on one thing: Can I get good again? And I was pleasantly surprised to find out — at least according to the opinion of some people — that I could.”

After becoming disillusioned by the San Francisco comedy scene and leaving the stand-up circuit in the 1980s, Babbitt worked as a high school teacher in various schools, including a decade at Scotts Valley High School. Her determination to return to stand-up is rooted in an experience at the old Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas (which has since been closed and demolished to make room for erstwhile Oakland A’s). The year before the pandemic, she was visiting family in the area, but stopped by to see a show featuring comedian friends Felicia Michaels, Carl LaBove and Andrew Dice Clay, all of whom had come up in the comedy clubs with her. Not knowing how or even if she’d be remembered, she sent a note backstage to let her old friends know she was in the audience.

That small gesture turned out a lot better than she expected. “They all come running toward me,” she said, the emotion of the moment in her voice. “And they drag me back to the green room. They were so welcoming and so happy to see me.”

What’s more, they encouraged her without hesitation to do comedy again: “They kept saying, ‘You gotta do this. You gotta do this.’ And I just started bitching and moaning, ‘Aw no, I can’t do this again.’” But Michaels offered her own story as an inspiration. She had left the business for several years to raise her children, then worked to get back in as a middle-aged comic, starting at the small clubs and getting back to more prominent venues, including the fabled Comedy Store. That was just the kick in the pants that Babbitt needed.

So, Babbitt, then in her 60s, got back on the hamster wheel, first enrolling at the San Francisco Comedy College. “I make a total ass of myself,” she said. “I mean, I suck rocks. I’m writing this stuff that is so desperate and it’s not funny and here I am, 100 years old with all this desperation. It was so sad.”

Still, she booked a gig at a tiny bar in San Jose. “I was like, I’m just going to go have fun,” she said. “I’m just going to act stupid and enjoy my night and just be as silly as I am normally at home or with a friend.” 

It was a gamble that worked. “So, I was really stupid, and [the audience] went crazy. They just lost it. And what I realized right there was that it was this sense of urgency and the desperation that was the problem. And once you let go of all that stuff, everything kinda flows.”

Since then, she’s been honing her on-stage chops in clubs, performing at addiction recovery conventions (she’s in recovery herself), attending comedy classes and working with a South Bay comedy troupe. “It’s just become a source of joy.”

Having grown up in the Hollywood Hills (her father was a successful Disney animator), Babbitt moved to Santa Cruz in the late 1980s. Her mother, Dina Babbitt, who also lived in the area for many years, was a Czech-born painter who was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Karin’s experience as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor shaped her personality and informs her comedy.

“One tends to make people who survived Auschwitz into saints,” she said. “But the fact of the matter is, they survived by having some kind of acumen. And I would say that this acumen, or savvy or whatever she used to survive, was easily something that became my burden.”

Outside her experience during World War II, Babbitt’s mother was also a Slavic woman from a traditionalist background, particularly when it came to parental authority. As a young person, Babbit became a rebel. “I figured out that I was never going to get permission for anything ever,” she said, “so I just have to get in trouble all the time.”

That defiance, that irreverence, that suspicion of authority remained with Karin Babbit the young comic, and the older one as well. That fierce independence, even if it’s costly, is reflected in the title that Babbitt is considering for the comedy album to come from next week’s Kuumbwa show: “Not in a Cult.”

“So, I’m just going to barf this thing out,” she said of her upcoming show, “and it will either get me some [attention] or money or whatever, or not. I’m trying to figure out whether this album will be kinda like a fight song for people who are concerned about being irrelevant or your age or your history, and just to drop all that and do what you love to do. 

“I just feel like I must — must — say these things, and either appall people, or we can all roll together in debauchery and how we can laugh at anything and nothing’s sacred. It’s really only one of those things, or both at the same time. But goddammit, I gotta have a right to say the warped, dark things in my mind because I’m one of the only comedians I know who can say that I have that history.”

Karin Babbitt and DNA will perform live, recording their first comedy albums, at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on Friday, March 21. Showtime is 7:30 p.m.

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