Comedian Susan Rice, Portland’s 73-Year-Old Breakout Star

Last year, at age 72, Portland comedian Susan Rice went viral. “Hi! Wow, wow,” she lets out, taking the stage in a YouTube video from the “secret” event series Don’t Tell Comedy. “I know you’re going, ‘Is this Don’t Tell AARP?’” she cracks, as her granny smile turns rictus. “It’s nice to be here, nice that I got up those fuckin’ steps.” Bits about shoplifting hospital gowns and getting a tramp-stamp of her essential medical info follow. As Vulture later put it, “She killed,” as she’s been doing since 1983, when the business of being funny first hit Portland in a real way. “I was 31 and I was old then,” Rice says. She watched the boom peter out in the ’90s after a brush with stardom in LA. Instead of chasing a sitcom role, she found a rhythm of corporate stand-up gigs and a day job back in Portland. Now, 40-odd years in, she’s fallen into fame. Over a million people watched the Don’t Tell set. America’s Got Talent called. This month, she released a streaming stand-up special, Silver Alert, and her second Don’t Tell set drops in June. “These kids seem to make their own noise online,” Rice says, as if she isn’t one of them. 

I’m not a great comic. I’m the first to admit it. I am familiar. I’ve always been a comic, even in my early days, that people wanted to hug. I remind people of someone that they love. It’s usually a kid coming up with tears in their eyes, and they go, “Can I have a hug?” And I go, “Did I make you cry?” And she goes, “No, you just remind me of my grandma.”

I’m cathartic, and I used to think I couldn’t do anything with that. I realized at one time that people would bring their moms or their grandmothers or their aunties. They would come with older people. I got more and more feedback
from other comics going, “There’s old people in the audience.” And I’d go, “Yeah, there are, because I represent something to them, and they feel heard. Don’t talk down to them, because they’ll eat you for lunch.”

My biggest surprise is having [young] people be interested in what I have to say. Don’t Tell, when I taped that first one, I looked at the audience. The oldest person in that room was maybe 50. The rest of them were in their 20s, maybe a little 30s. I was nervous. I thought, I shouldn’t be here. I’m standing by the stage, he was introducing me, and I heard this young girl, probably in her early 20s. She looked over at me, and we caught an eye, and she looked back to her friend, and she goes, “Oh my god.” And I looked at her, and I go, “Watch this, bitch.” But they are the first ones to come up and want a hug. There’s always a touchstone that people find in a comic. I’m that familiar person that everybody loves to…I mean, I’m the auntie that, you know, everybody whispers about in the kitchen.

[If I’ve] got 10 minutes left, I’m going to make the best of it. So when this all happened, well, you never know, you know? When I first went to LA, I realized you had to wrap it up in a package and present it to them. Well, now, with this success, I am a character. And I have had meetings with big production companies that want to build a reality show around me, and I laugh, because I don’t want to do that! I really like performing, and as long as this body will hold out, I’ll be on a stage.

Maria Bamford asked me one time, she was getting ready to turn 40 and we were doing Bridgetown [Comedy Festival], and she says, “How do you do stand-up after 40?” I said, “You just put on the support hose and do it.”

Simon Cowell, when I was doing AGT, after my set, Simon says to me, “You know, when you walked out onstage, I thought, Oh my god, here’s an act.” I said, “No, this is it. This is what you get.” I can’t do it better than this, you know? I can’t hide anymore. I can’t try to be something I’m not. This is it. Big glasses, big mouth, fuzzy hair. That’s me.