Weaving Humor into Life’s Hard Lessons
Confessing your most embarrassing moments to a packed house is most people’s worst nightmare.
But for Phoebe Potts, it’s a dream come true.
For two decades, the Gloucester-based storyteller worked a day job as an educator while writing and performing. This fall, an inaugural opportunity as writer-in-residence at Endicott’s Tadler Center for the Humanities gave her the push she needed to quit and become a full-time creative.
“Breaking into show business in your 50s is kind of scary, yet I feel like I have to try,” she said.
As part of the residency, Potts has been teaching a narrative nonfiction workshop this semester. “These Endicott students are game to try things with their writing—they really put one another at ease, which is key when sharing personal stories.”
To become a good writer, Potts believes that you need to read good writing.
As they began to draft their own stories, the class dug into meaty work by authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nora Ephron, and Mary Carr.
Her students attended Potts’ October 9th campus masterclass, “Bad News Makes Good Stories,” in which students learned how to transform a challenge into a hilarious, unforgettable tale. They brought lots of questions to their next class meeting, such as “What happens if your humor doesn’t connect with your audience?” and “What if you bomb and are standing there onstage waiting for them to laugh, and it doesn’t happen?”
“They wanted to know all about my process for putting together one of the stories,” Potts said. “It was like lifting a skirt and seeing how the seams are sewn together.”
Potts admitted that sometimes she bombs, but more often than not, she connects: “It’s worth sacrificing your ego to create something that some people connect to, and it’s usually those real-life moments of conflict, humiliation, or transformation.”
Storytelling has always been sewn into the fabric of Potts’ life.
She grew up in a loud, heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, and both of her parents were journalists. She had to tell stories and speak up to get airtime at the dinner table. Potts saw it all as being part of an ancient tradition.
“Storytelling holds Jews together in hard times when we have to laugh or we would just cry. Telling stories and asking questions is how we make sense of the world.”
Trying to make sense of hard times through humor also sums up Potts’ book, Good Eggs.
The graphic memoir, which she both illustrated and wrote, follows Potts and her husband, Jeff, as they struggled to get pregnant, then miscarried, and endured grueling rounds of infertility treatments. Though it’s heartbreaking material, Potts also found a way to make it hysterical, whether it was returning home for her Jewish mother’s Christmas party or farting on the couch while cuddling with her husband and their childlike cat, Reuben.
“Humor is a way to exercise a little bit of control and not feel like a victim,” Potts said. “When you tell your own hard or sad story, you control the narrative.”
Eventually, Potts and her husband pursued adoption. Too Fat for China follows that quest—and is named for a scene in which Potts, an average-sized American woman, is informed by an adoption agency that she is “too fat” to adopt a Chinese baby according to the requirements for parents outlined by the Chinese government. Comics accompanying each scene serve as her backdrop, rotating on a 6-foot-wide scroll in the background.
In the end, Potts and Jeff became parents to an Ethiopian boy. Still, her performance is as much about that joy as it is about Potts’ guilt and discomfort with a broken and biased system where, as a white woman, she is inherently privileged.
“I knew I had to come up with an adoption story about the process to tell my son,” she said. Potts started to write it onstage at the Gloucester Stage Company’s Fish Tales, a local version of The Moth storytelling franchise. Soon, she was given her own night to perform solo. “It’s a story that asks: How far will you go to get the things you want?”
Potts wrestles with taking her son away from his birth country and culture. “And yet, knowing all that it’s unethical, I still really wanted a baby,” she sighed.
“My local fans and performances gave me legs,” Potts said. Her bookings somersaulted, with performances around Greater Boston and then at the legendary Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.
Potts is working on her next piece when she’s not teaching or holding office hours. “This residency has given me much-needed time to write a draft of my next show. It’s basically about what happens when that child comes home,” she hinted.
Founded in 2018, the Tadler Center for the Humanities supports interdisciplinary work in the humanities through fellowships, programming, and special projects. Learn more.