Laurie Kilmartin

Martinez, August 1987

Kilmartin was born on 16 July 1965 in Santa Clara County and grew up in Walnut Creek, east of San Francisco. Her father was a civil engineer whose work took him to Iran, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines during her childhood, so the household ran on absence and postings. She went to UCLA as a competitive swimmer and a drama major, and left without finishing; in an interview with UCLA Radio published on 21 April 2026 she said an eating disorder was the reason, and that she found stand-up later rather than at university.

Her first set was on 27 August 1987 at Fubar's Comedy Club in Martinez, California — a date she still cites exactly, which tells its own story about how she keeps score. The Bay Area circuit of the late 1980s was where she learned the job, in the same rooms as Margaret Cho and Greg Behrendt. The grounding was club work rather than theatre: short sets, hostile Tuesdays, punchlines that have to land on strangers who did not come for her.

Monologue jokes, eleven years of them

The television work came through writing before it came through performing. Kilmartin wrote for Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn and The Late Late Show, and then spent eleven years as a staff writer on Conan O'Brien's TBS show Conan, turning out monologue jokes to a daily deadline. That tenure brought an Emmy nomination and a Writers Guild of America Award, and it also put her on screen often enough that the writing and the stand-up stopped being separate careers. She has also written for the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

The performing credit that broadened her audience was NBC's Last Comic Standing, where she reached the top ten in season seven in 2010. Books followed: Sh*tty Mom in 2012, which became a New York Times bestseller, co-authorship of Sherri Shepherd's memoir Permission Slips, and Dead People Suck in 2018, a grief manual written in jokes. O'Brien's own assessment, quoted on her site, is that she has an "uncanny ability to find humor in the darkest situations" — which reads less like praise than a job description.

The dead-parent trilogy

The run of work that made her name is about death, and it is specific rather than general. 45 Jokes About My Dead Dad, released in 2016, built an hour out of her father's cancer and the mechanics of dying; her site notes it was named to Vulture's top ten comedy specials. When her mother died of COVID-19 complications on 18 June 2020, Kilmartin live-tweeted jokes from the hospital and the aftermath, and the thread travelled far beyond comedy audiences. The album Corset arrived in 2021 and, according to the material circulated for her London run, went to number one on iTunes.

Her most recent special, Cis Woke Grief Slut, was taped at the El Portal Theater in Los Angeles, directed by Matt Kubas, and released by Comedy Dynamics on 30 January 2024. It ranges across 9/11, climate change, Boy Scout badges and her mother's death. Paste gave it 8.2 out of 10 on 29 January 2024, praising the flat, matter-of-fact delivery against absurd material and singling out the pandemic jokes, while finding a Karen bit and a riff on surface-level male feminists already worn thin. NPR's Bullseye with Jesse Thorn named it one of the best specials of 2024.

The cost of that approach is not theoretical. Speaking to Wisconsin Public Radio on 9 February 2024, Kilmartin described the fallout from an abortion joke she made on television in 2022: Sean Hannity ran it on Fox News, somebody posted her home address, and she paid for a security system. "I just couldn't believe that all this came from one little line," she said. In the same interview she rejected the idea that her specials are built as narratives — "I'm a club comic" — which is the key to how her hours are assembled.

The day job in 2026

Kilmartin is currently in the writers' room at Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and that room had an unusual year. At the 2026 Peabody Awards the show won in the Entertainment category — its first Peabody — cited for embracing the responsibility of comedy to reveal truths amid political volatility. Kilmartin is credited among its writers alongside head writers Molly McNearney and Danny Ricker.

She has also been loaned out. Kilmartin wrote for Conan O'Brien's hosting of the 97th and 98th Academy Awards, in 2025 and 2026; she told UCLA Radio that Kimmel's show granted her a hiatus to do the second one. Alongside all of it she continues to co-host The Jackie and Laurie Show with Jackie Kashian, a long-running conversation about the business of being a working comic that functions as a trade publication for the circuit.

Building the hour in public

Since spring 2026 Kilmartin has been working up a new hour in small Los Angeles rooms rather than previewing a finished product. She ran it at the Elysian Theater at 4pm on 16 May, went back on 11 July for what her own listing called the last Los Angeles hour before London, and tested newer material at the Lyric Hyperion on 13 September.

The London date was the milestone. The Non-Refundable Plane Tickets Tour reached Soho Theatre's downstairs room on 27 and 28 July 2026 at 7.15pm, her first headlining run in the city, sixty minutes, billed 16+. Steve Bennett reviewed it for Chortle on 28 July and gave it three and a half stars, describing a comic reclaiming dark comedy from shock merchants by building logical punchlines out of grim honesty, handling a muted Monday-night crowd without softening anything, and assembling "barely connected bits, rather than a British one with a sense of greater purpose." The Reviews Hub scored the same run at 80 per cent, noting an hour of one-liners, self-deprecation and innuendo that moved quickly, with topical references — Erika Kirk, Luigi Mangione, Anthony Fauci — that some of the room would have needed to be following American news to catch.

What is left of the year

The autumn has been structured like a comic sharpening material rather than selling a show. Kilmartin spent 25 September to 2 October in New York doing more than twenty-five sets across the city's clubs, taped for Don't Tell Live in San Diego on 3 October, and plays Commonwealth Comedy Club in Dayton, Kentucky on 10 October, with tickets around $22 and a 7.30pm start. Comedy Up North in Anchorage follows on 17 October, then a full week at the San Francisco Punchline from 21 to 24 October — a return to the city where she started.

After that she headlines a benefit for Women's Economic Ventures at the Rubicon Theater in Ventura on 2 November, and closes the year with three shows at Punch Line Irving, Texas on 11 and 12 December, a room she is headlining for the first time. The Los Angeles Times has called her one of the most fearless, respected performer-writers in the city's stand-up scene; on current evidence she is also one of the most consistently booked.