Previews: BELL COMEDY NIGHTS at Bell Theater

For anyone embroiled in a senseless drama, or suffering from a case of summertime sadness and in need of some friendly uplifting, consider Ophira Eisenberg your BFF for an evening. 

On Wednesday, June 12, the standup legend will take the stage at Bell Theater in Holmdel for an hour of comic relief, especially those in futile situationships that are everywhere in today’s mystifying dating world. While there may not be a formula for those who have arrived to a melancholy headspace, there is one to finding a way past them: Tragedy plus time equals comedy. 

“I feel the general tone of my show is, 'let’s escape and laugh at this wacky world we live in and feel the fun of this world,'” Eisenberg told BroadwayWorld in recent phone interview.

Though she’ll offer a dose of dark humor as an antidote for the overwhelmed, the edgy Calgary native will speak to Canadian culture and the misadventures of motherhood. Whether laughing at her gags or at her, cracking smiles is her MO. That, and offering attendees a cathartic break and a good time. 

Her act, which begins at 6:30 pm, is part of a new theater launch called Bell Comedy Nights executive produced by Jessica Pilot (The Late Show with Stephen Colbert) assisted by Vinnie Favale (The Late Show with David Letterman, Comedy Central).

Eisenberg — who served as one of the quick-witted commentators providing hot takes of popular culture on VH1’s Best Week Ever, game show host of “Ask Me Another” and star of the 1999 Toronto Fringe production of The Drowsy Chaperone, which hit the Broadway stage years later, among her many television credits — vents about her parenting woes in her Webby honored podcast, “Parenting Is a Joke." In it, she interviews fellow celebrities about their travails balancing a satisfactory personal life with the odd work hours tied to the privilege of living out their dream career.

A New Yorker of the past 20 years, Eisenberg previously lived an existence likened to “Sex and the City." (In 2013, she penned an apt memoir as an homage to the single life: “Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy.” Opposing the modern woman's neuroses behind her vicious quest to find The One, Eisenberg championed the idea of stress-free isms akin to a female Jeff Bridges in "The Big Lebowski" -- choosing to embrace the sea at large over a fruitless pursuit baiting and failing to reel in that that one stubborn "catch." 

“I think there’s a lot of good people out there you can have a good match with,” she mused. “I never dreamed of being married or having a kid. When I was dating I was like, ‘I want to experience all kinds of things.' I didn’t have a type. I’m having a good time. My approach to having a relationship was figuring out what I like and what I didn’t like.”

So, she donned her metaphorical spectacles and assumed the role of the scientist, conducting field work in the dating pool and gathering data. But relationships are as much an art as they are a science. And as whimsical as art is, so goes life. An unexpected pregnancy in her 40s changed her outlook on how she saw herself and her relationship with the commodity of time. Soon, she was reinvesting in her identity as much as she was investing in her son’s future, who is currently entering preadolescence.  

Tee-Hees in Tutus 

Flashback to Eisenberg's preadolescence in the 1980s, little girls weren’t allowed to be the class clown, she recalled, let alone ballet dancers if they were to be taken seriously. Needless to say, Eisenberg  — the youngest of six children — was the funniest ballerina in her class -- even if she didn’t win any of the awards given to the other dancers graceful and pointy-toed enough to be considered a promising dancer. She, did however, earn a tiara of sorts as Miss Personality. At home, the zinger cracker delighted in repeating the amusing wisecracks she’d eavesdrop in the schoolyard and bring them to the dinner table. Eisenberg described her ability to grab people’s attention in a comedic sense “intoxicating.” 

In her childhood, she was exposed to comedy queens Joan Rivers and Carol Burnett on the family television, but her consideration of the profession as a career path wasn’t entertained until after college when the scope of her comedic inspirations grew to include the observational comedy of Jackie Kashian and the self-deprecating humor of Maria Bamford. 

After three decades as a successful comic, appearing on Comedy Central, This Week at The Comedy Cellar, Kevin Hart’s LOL Network, HBO’s Girls, Gotham Live and The Late Late Show, Eisenberg was selected by Backstage Magazine as one of "10 Standout Stand Ups Worth Watching" in their Spotlight on Comedy Issue, hailed a "Highly Recommended Favorite" by Time Out New York and a Manhattan Association of Clubs and Cabarets finalist for Best Female Comic in 2009. Nowadays, she’s working on a one-woman show slated for 2025 centered on the moments in life that leave a mark — literally and metaphorically — and the stories behind them that deserve to be reopened, much like a wound, but not quite. 

“I was covered in scars from a car accident when I was little,” she said. “These marks have influenced my identity and how I see myself and walk through this world. Tragedy plus time equals comedy… equals a scar.” 

To promote the new comedy series, Bell Theater is offering a buy two tickets (starting from $35) get the third free offer. To access this offer, visit www.belltheater.org and check out Bell Comedy Nights.

To post a comment, you must register and login.