Comic Leanne Morgan is an insistently Southern performer, a rare grandma working stand-up. She is 57 and never lets audiences forget. She found her lane, and grabbed it - even if it took two decades for her to blow up.
The jokes are about being too tired for intimacy with her husband, failing Weight Watchers nine times, fatigue about almost everything. She calls her audience "my precious darlings."
"If I could get out there and straddle everyone of y'all and kiss you on the mouth, I would," she says, at the beginning of her recent Netflix special. Morgan never works blue, but she sashays right up to the panty line, "Big Panty" being the name of her previous 100-stop tour.
Karen Morgan, 58, is another Southern comic - Georgia instead of Tennessee - though she resides in Maine. ("My children are bilingual," she quips.)
The Morgans share much in common though they are not related and perform separate acts. Karen is also a tall, blond mother of three grown children, and deeply observational about domestic life and the attendant challenges of aging.
Hormonal imbalance has been good for them. Menopause, comedic gold.
"I've got too much estrogen," Leanne recounts her act, "which evidently makes you hateful and bitter and angry."
"There's something magical, particularly as a woman, about being over 50," Karen shares, "because I don't care what people think anymore and it's very freeing and it's really fun."
These are proud women of Generation X, who have marinated into middle age, some might say late middle age, and found the humor in it all. They are finally, unrepentantly, AARP people; wise women and tired mamas. Who are they? In Leanne's case, recovering party girls who were once short on common sense and all-in on fun - fun being her calling card and college major.
"Maybe those horrible decisions I made in the '80s smoking behind a dumpster are actually going to pay off!" Leanne shared on Facebook announcing her Netflix special, "I'm Every Woman," which premiered in April, cracking the streaming giant's top 10.
Leanne and Karen talk shopping at Target, and embarking on titanic night sweats. In a way, they occupy that valuable comedic real estate once owned by Phyllis Diller, Moms Mabley, syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck and later Roseanne Barr, before she sunk in a sea of trouble. Leanne's special on Dry Bar, a clean-comedy channel based in Provo, Utah, has been viewed more than 4.7 million times; Karen's more than 2.7 million times.
Their comedic style is dry, too. Their timing, befitting well-raised Southern women, is unhurried and garlanded with "y'alls." Karen is prone to tilting her head as to suggest that our world is slightly off-kilter. Leanne deploys an arsenal of hand gestures as comic punctuation: a pinch, feigned smoking, an upturned palm toward the heavens.
Leanne calls herself "the Mrs. Maisel of Appalachia," though she found success at a far later age than the fictional character of the Prime Video series. It came once her children were grown, which is key to her novelty and appeal, multigenerational fans nodding their heads in agreement.
On her Facebook page, with 1.6 million followers, fans rhapsodize "Leanne, you are hysterical. If I'm having a rough day I just go to one of your videos and howl laughing!" Also: "Dolly Parton is my Tennessee hero and now I believe I have another one in you!!! Thank you for keeping it real and telling how it really is to be a wife, mom and daughter!"
Leanne long wanted to be famous. Her first taste of stand-up was selling jewelry to women in their living rooms, like Tupperware but for bling. She realized how funny she was - honestly, this is a tale she shares often, even on the "Today" show - while she was hawking baubles. One woman laughed so hard that she wet her pants. Also, the sofa.
Middle-age success is fine by her. "If this had happened to me when I was in my 20s or 30s, I just don't think that I would have had as much to say," Leanne says over Zoom from her home in Knoxville.
Neither Morgan is ever political in their act. They're were raised to know better than that. Leanne tries to blame her recent weight gain on "that mean old stupid covid - and Vladimir Putin," adding "but I can't." The devil was in her diet.
With apologies to male comedians their age, whining constantly about wokeness, anti-wokeness and other third-rail matters, that's not where this audience lives. Like most country music performers, these Southern ladies don't wish to offend their precious darlings. Instead, their humor establishes an instant rapport with audiences that increasingly include more men, which Leanne's kudzu-thick East Tennessee accent manages to elongate to two syllables.
The Morgans' comedy hearkens to an earlier era of domestic fodder. They dwell in intimate moments. Leanne cracks girdle jokes. "I can feel fat coming out of my back. I want y'all to know that I was so cute back in the '80s." On TikTok, Karen talks bra shopping and the absurdity of making this a couples exercise: "We went past a couch filled with men. Sad men who had been forced to go bra shopping with their wives that day."
They're untraditional traditionalists. The Morgans credit their husbands as the breadwinners and heads of household. They view themselves as, by far, the principal parent - yet here they are on the road performing stand-up.
Their humor tilts toward gentle. It's deeply "bless her heart" and the many nuanced deployments of that phrase. The person they mock most are themselves, with family a close second.
In addition to the Netflix special, Leanne scored her first movie role as the older (and considerably taller) sister of fellow Tennessean Reese Witherspoon in double-booked, destination-wedding "You're Cordially Invited" with Will Ferrell and directed by Nicholas Stoller ("Forgetting Sarah Marshall"). It began filming this month in Atlanta. Leanne has a management team and a social media team. She's in the midst of conducting another 100-stop tour with fresh material, playing arenas and large theaters in flowy mother-of-the-bride dresses. Her Netflix number resembles an updated, knitted afghan blanket. She's playing venues well north of Waffle House Belt where she was once confined.
"Maybe I'm like a warm blanket on the world, nurturing," she says. "I'm comforting people. Also, I think there's something going on with women our age. People are realizing that we are vibrant and our life is not over and we have a lot to offer."
"There's something about this age, all of these Karens, that it's my time and I'm going to do this," says Karen who, despite a law degree, has practiced comedy longer than law. (Given the shade for the name - a fetching name, by the way - she may likely be among the last of these Karens.) She worked on her comedy during the pandemic, developing new outlets for fans to find her comedy. "Covid changed my creativity. I learned to do TikToks, Instagram reels and to make all these crazy little videos," she says.
Like the one about "It's hard to be introverted & Southern," with Karen holding a Mason jar of sweet tea, pretending to be gracious yet covertly miserable at a backyard gathering: "I made the pimento cheese. It's just pimento - and cheese." Or the one about pickleball, "the deadly epidemic that is ravaging our community," which Karen likens to a drug "invented by a drunk person."
Leanne and Karen were both finalists for Nickelodeon's Funniest Mom contest, where a thousand entrants whittled to seven. This was in 2005. Their careers failed to blossom.
Leanne landed four potential sitcom deals - four! - with the likes of ABC and Warner only to watch them crater. It took time plus a pandemic for their humor to discover audiences. Through social media, their Gen X mama humor found a larger audience, a home without leaving theirs.
"I couldn't get booked where all the cool kids are. But they would say, 'Oh, you're different. We don't have anybody like you.' Like Comedy Central didn't want me," says Leanne, who grew up in rural Tennessee, descended from generations of tobacco farmers. Her first professional gig occurred in a sandwich shop.
"We're Southern women. We're storytellers," Karen says. "We're a little bit different." The Morgans court audiences that other comics forgot. Karen has opened for Steven Wright and Jeff Foxworthy. Leanne tours with Foxworthy, too.
"Now everybody's talking about perimenopause and menopause. Women want to know how to feel good. They've got a lot of life left in them," Leanne says. "It was kind of taboo when I first started talking about it. But I do think that people are realizing that it's not over for us."
If it took until their 50s for audiences to finally find them, so be it. Leanne says, "I've worked like a mule, a mule" - which she also manages to stretch to two syllables - "and I think I'm speaking for a lot of people that have not felt like they've been heard, and have been ignored by Hollywood," she says. "I have hit a niche with all these darling women." And, maybe at last, Hollywood as well.