Leanne Morgan Got Her Comedy Start Going Door To Door

With a Netflix sitcom, two comedy specials, and roles in Hollywood films, Leanne Morgan is hitting a career peak at the beginning of her sixth decade of life. Her most recent Netflix special, Unspeakable Things, received a fair bit of critical acclaim for her reflections on life as a mother, wife, and comedian. The sharpest parts of the set were when she used a bit of southern charm to interrogate just how often she had to prioritize life in that order. 

In a new podcast interview with Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out, Morgan details the very beginning of her career. She worked clubs in Austin when she really got started, but before that, Morgan—whose southern accent marks her as one of the easiest comedians to pick out of a crowd—had a different test audience. 

“I tell everybody, I really feel like I got started in comedy—I started selling jewelry like Mary Kay,” Morgan told Birbiglia. “I had a degree. I had a college degree, but I wanted to breastfeed and be at home. But I needed a little money, my own side hustle. Yeah. So, I started selling jewelry like women sell Mary Kay in people's homes.”

“Honest to goodness, it was like my own little comedy club,” Morgan said. “But I had all these women that I could talk to and some of the first material I had came out of those jewelry parties.”

After her kids were a little bit older, at ages three, five, and seven, Morgan was able to start taking her jewelry party material to real stages for paying audiences. “But then we moved to San Antonio and I worked at the River Center. Did you ever work in the mall? It wasn't fun,” Morgan said. “And then I would drive back and forth and do the Capitol City Comedy Club. But that's where I said, you know, that I'm a comedian."

Still, even when she started booking clubs, it wasn’t consistent work; she was always a full time mother. Her husband, who she always refers to by his full name, Chuck Morgan, was “climbing the corporate ladder," she explained to Birbiglia. She had to fit her budding career around her children’s needs. 

“I just had to carve out a different path than most than, you know, boys that'll do clubs,” Morgan recalled. “I wanted to do clubs and I did them, but you know, like five or six a year that would maybe book me twice a year. And then I would fill in with—I did breast cancer fundraisers. I did corporate private little corporate things, or whatever anybody would let me do.”

Now that she’s achieving major success, career wise, Morgan only has one little regret: “I thought I would have hit it bigger when I was younger and thinner, but that's okay.”