In our July/August issue of Boca magazine, I caught up with Lisa Corrao, one of South Florida’s premier standup comics, who released her first comedy special, Lisa Corrao: A Cute Crisis, earlier this year on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube, and other streamers. The recognition has been a long time coming for Corrao, who entered the standup scene some 20 years ago—which is when I discovered her, as a budding entertainment critic, at venues such as Fort Lauderdale’s legendary, dearly departed dive bar The Mental Ward. (Its slogan: “We’re All Here Because We’re Not All There!”)
In this exclusive Web Extra, Corrao shares more about her development as a comedian, the inspiration behind finally recording a standup special, her deliberately difficult-to-access podcast, and more.
When did you first discover that you were funny?
I remember my kindergarten teacher telling my mom that I was funny. It was definitely taken as a compliment and was meant as a compliment. … And I remember my kindergarten teacher was really supportive of that. And then I got to first grade, and that teacher was not so supportive, and I became this quiet, shy kid in school for almost the whole rest of school. But when there were people who wanted to laugh, then this other side of me would come out. But if that side is not accepted around me, I shrink into nothing.
Were you working full-time as a teacher when you started out?
I was. My daughter was young. I was still teaching. I actually, come to think of it, wasn’t officially in a classroom. I was still on maternity leave, because you can do maternity leave for a couple of years. My daughter was real little. So I was still technically a teacher. I was planning on going back into the classroom, but then I started this, and I remember I had a really lovely beginning to comedy. And I did think, I don’t want to teach anymore. I would rather be a stay-at-home mom, and I’ll sneak out and do comedy whenever I can.
And sometimes I would do a set, and it would be two months, and then I would do another set. It wasn’t like a consistent thing. I just really did it when I could. And it was funny, because men would always ask me, “Where’s your daughter?” anytime I would go out. And I thought, you’re probably not asking men where their kids are. And I would always say, “she’s in the car.” Like, where do you think she is? She still has a dad.
How many years did you, say, toil in the unpaid open-mic scene before you became a paid headliner or feature act?
Oh, that’s a good question. That’s hard to answer, because there wasn’t like one time where all of a sudden that happened. It was more like it would happen in spurts. So it was pretty early on that I was getting hosting gigs at the Improv. I was too green to be paid for comedy, but they did like that I was on the cleaner side. They did like that there were almost no women at the time doing it. So they liked that it was different to have a woman come out. And they just kind of liked me, because I took that initial class, so they all knew me there. They’re like, Oh, we like Lisa. And that was really nice.
But at some point I worked with a headliner who, for some reason, really hated my guts. He fired me, but the worst thing that he did was, for some reason, he started spreading a rumor about me to the owners of the Improvs, saying that I was sleeping around, and that’s how I was getting the gigs that I was getting.
And mind you, couple of caveats here: Had I been sleeping around that should be fine, because that’s someone’s private life. But I so wasn’t. I was, at the time, still married. I had only ever been with my husband in my whole life. I was such an almost prude kind of a woman, because I was so sheltered growing up. It was horrifying to me. And how did I know that he was saying it? Because one of the owners got drunk one night and told me, because they had blacklisted me after he fired me. So I went from being this little darling in the beginning to nothing, no work. And it was like two years later that they admitted it to me. It was so upsetting.
And I keep saying things that are blessings and curses, right? So here’s the great thing about that happening to me. That’s why you met me at places like The Mental Ward [a former dive bar in Fort Lauderdale—Ed.], because here I started comedy, and I’m doing just the Improv. I wasn’t working these underground rooms. Why would I? I barely went out to do comedy. Why would I go to a smoky bar when I can be in the nicest club in the area and work with all the biggest stars and whatever else?
So this forced me into the underground scene. What I love, and have always loved, about comedy is the purest heart of it, of thinking of something funny and polishing it into a joke and making people laugh. And if I can’t do it at the Improv, let me go wherever it’s happening. Cut to The Mental Ward, that dirtiest little dive bar ever. Late at night on a Tuesday, it’s smoky. I actually had to get an inhaler from doing shows there, because I have real sensitive lungs, and I developed a cough from doing The Mental Ward, and it ignited asthma and everything else. But, gosh, I really learned how to be a comedian on a different level there, because now I wasn’t coming out with these jokes that I wrote and rehearsed that were very sort of polished and robotic, where, if I was a good actress that night, those jokes would kill. But if I was not, I didn’t know how to connect to the audience yet. I didn’t have those skills.
But places like the Mental Ward, these open mics, I threw away all of that and said, let me just go up and just talk to people. Just connect to people. I can always fold in material later, but let me understand how to connect with human beings sitting in a room, because otherwise they’re just watching something they could watch on TV. I’m a real human and have to figure out the connection, just like in a classroom. How do you connect to them and go, I’m a real person. I am right here, and can really feel what the audience is feeling, too. I can size up an audience before I get on stage. I hear sometimes how the sound guy in the back is going, “How’s everybody feeling?” When the crowd makes a noise, I can judge how the audience is going to be, because I feel their energy. I feel maybe they are coming in tired. Maybe it’s Friday, and they worked all day, and they are just exhausted. I feel it then, and part of that is that training that I was forced into thanks to this jerk that was spreading rumors about me.
How did the opportunity for your new special, A Cute Crisis, come about?
Directly from working with Patton Oswalt. I kind of gave up on the idea of recording anything. A lot of comedians, when they start working clubs, they’ll at least do an album, and they’ll have something to sell as merch. And in more recent times, you record stuff to put it on the internet. And I wasn’t doing any of that. I never felt like my jokes were ready or fully cooked ever. It also doesn’t help that I have OCD, and not the kind of OCD where it’s like, Oh, I’m just organized. It’s the kind of OCD that’s crippling, and there comes a lot of fear and worrying about doing things the right way. And I like to use comedy as an exercise to fight that, and to be messy.
And so I just thought I’d never do it. But working with Patton at some point, he kept asking me, “When are you going to record something?” And finally he said it to me this one last time, and I was like, “I think maybe I’m scared.” And he was like, “Scared of what? Do it.” I go, “Alright, I’m open to doing it.” And here we are now. I’m putting clips on the internet, and I’m putting stuff out there, and it’s so much better than I thought it would be, actually. It’s being received so nice. Of course, there’s haters out there, but even haters, I’m like, wow, you’re still giving me engagement.
Now that you have a special, do you feel like you need to have a podcast, because every comedian has a podcast?
A lot of people have been asking me about that. It’s funny that you should say that. I don’t currently want to do my own podcast. I do a podcast with some friends that’s very hard to find. And we do it sporadically, so you almost never see me advertise it. It’s kind of an anti-podcast by design. It’s behind a paywall, so the only people who are there, they really freaking want to be there. I do it with Dino Stamatopoulos And Dana Snyder. Dino is a famous comedy writer. Dana is a famous voice-over actor, and we have a couple of other guys who are completely unknown sweethearts who are a couple of the funniest people I’ve ever met, Bob and Ron.
And we get together every so often. On Halloween, we actually do a big one. We do a marathon one on Halloween. And we’ve had guests. Listen to these guests we’ve had on our podcast, ready? Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, Dana Carvey, Bob Odenkirk, and the list goes on. We’ve had the biggest people come in, and they know probably no one’s watching, and they’ll come on as a character sometimes. I have the coolest podcast that nobody knows about. It’s called Safe Space with Dino and Dana. Initially, years ago, I came on as a guest, and then I never left.
This Web Extra is from the July/August 2026 issue of Boca magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
