Loraine Braun was coming out of a dark period of her life when she saw a posting for a comedy class at the former Funny Bone at Newport on the Levee. She’d always loved comedy and had been told she was a funny person and thought the class might help with her writing.
“I totally misunderstood what it was,” she says. “It was performance-based. And like the teacher said, you can’t teach somebody to be funny – they either are or they aren’t.”
Fortunately for Loraine, she was.
Loraine stuck with the class, which taught things like putting a comedy set together, stage etiquette, and how to handle a microphone. Her graduation was a live stand-up performance before an audience of mostly friends and family.
“Each week, we’d do so many more minutes,” Loraine says, “and the teacher said he didn’t know how I felt up there, but that I looked like I owned the stage. He said I looked totally comfortable. And I was.”
She says she’s only gotten nervous a couple times when she’s in the “on-deck circle” waiting to be called up to the stage. That first night, when she started to get butterflies, she says, “The first thing I thought was that it wasn’t that long ago that I wouldn’t have been able to walk in to watch the show. And here I was entertaining. And as the years have passed, I remind myself, each time on stage is a victory.”
For years, she had suffered from clinical depression. “I was lucky in that I was able to go to work, but I would come home and I would just zone out. And I couldn’t be around a lot of people, which was killing for me because I have an extroverted personality who gets energy from people.”
“When you’re in that dark place, if you don’t have that ember of hope, it is really hard,” she says. “I was lucky, I was able to tend that ember and got it back to a flame. But it wasn’t easy. It was a lot of hard work.”
She found comedy to be an escape. “For me, it doesn’t matter what’s going on anywhere else,” Loraine says. “In that moment, you’re on stage and if you’re in the moment, it’s not even something you think about. And I think there’s something about having positive feedback. You say, ‘I’ve got one thing going for me right now – these people, I made them laugh.’
Loraine has been making people laugh since she was a child. Her father called her Donna Rickles because she loved to watch comedian Don Rickles. She also did a strong impersonation of her mother – which even her mom enjoyed.
Her brother Tom (“Tommy”), who recently left after a 48-year career at SD1, has always been one of her biggest fans. He was there that first night, and every March 15, he pulls out a DVD of that performance to commemorate the start of Loraine’s comedy career.
“Mom was there that night,” Loraine says. “She loved it, but she was afraid, as Tommy says, that I was going to ‘join the circus.’”
But at 49 years old when she made her stage debut, Loraine knew the lifestyle of an up-an-coming comic wasn’t for her. She wasn’t prepared to sleep in her car, etc. “I have a lot of respect for those who have made performing comedy a career. It is not an easy life.”
“I told my mom if I was 20, she might need to worry,” she says. “But when I was 20, I was probably too sensitive. If someone had yelled out, ‘You suck!’, I probably would have fallen apart.”
Standing there on stage that March night at the Funny Bone, Loraine was hooked.
“There was something about that first laugh,” she says. “And that place was packed – it was a very friendly audience. And still to this day – 16 years later – I cannot put into words adequately the feeling to have written a joke that I think is funny and then to have total strangers affirm that with laughter and applause. There’s a rush there that I can’t express. I don’t know – a switch was flipped, and it was fun.”
While her performance schedule has slowed down, thanks in part to COVID-19 and also her full-time job as a Paralegal at SD1, Loraine says she’s always writing new material and is excited to get back on stage.
“Comics are always writing,” she says. “I’ve got stuff in my phone. When you get an idea, you have to get it down. I have a notepad next to the bed and sometimes I think about an experience or something weird and then ask, is that something I want to build on?”
In addition to her childhood favorite Don Rickles, Loraine says she loves Steve Martin, George Carlin, Lewis Black and Robert Hawkins.
Loraine says that comedy has taught her a lot about business and how people react to things. “Envy, camaraderie, support,” she says. “People are looking for an escape to laugh. When you think about all the tension in the world, to know that you can have a part in easing that, even for just a little while, it’s fun and life-giving.”
Loraine has been on radio and television, and she has also produced several successful comedy shows. She’s performed in Lexington, Louisville, Columbus, Dayton and even Las Vegas – “way off strip.” She also loves working benefit comedy shows, helping people raise money for a cause and to have fun while doing that.
She says of all her sets, her favorite was at Fort Campbell, entertaining the troops. It was the only time in Loraine’s career that she worked “blue,” a term used when a comic uses curse words and covers controversial topics.
“I’m a clean comic or PG13,” she says. “And it was kind of funny because I have a 'potty mouth' in daily life most of the time, but for some reason I don’t on stage, even though it’s harder to work clean than dirty. But they said they wanted a dirty show. When I got on stage, I told them I’m a PG13 comic and there was an audible groan throughout the audience. Then I said, but if you can risk your life for your country, I can say…and then I just let a bunch of them [dirty words] out. And I got all these cheers. That’s the best show I ever did.”
Another memorable performance came several years ago as part of SD1’s Zapper program. Her brother Tom set up an opportunity for her to perform at a local convalescent home. Throughout her set, most of the audience was asleep.
“I think the nurses took some time off and just put every semi-comatose patient in the room,” Loraine says. “This one man was drooling my entire set. The only way I could get through it was to think, ‘He’s so hot for me, he’s drooling.’”
Loraine has been a Paralegal at SD1 for nearly nine years. Prior to her time here, she worked for 26 years as a Legal Assistant at Dinsmore & Shohl in Cincinnati.
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