Marsha Warfield: Reflections on Her Life in Comedy Jumpstarted by 1979 SFCC Win

Officially, the evening was billed as “George Wallace with Special Guest Marsha Warfield,” though the promotion looked for all the world like that of co-headliners. After all, Marsha Warfield, though perhaps best know as Roz from Night Court, has been a stand-up headliner for 46 years, almost from the moment she left Chicago for Los Angeles.

The breadth and depth of her experience were plain to see as she took the stage in Pleasanton, CA. The packed audience was immediately drawn in by Warfield’s calm, assured presence. Her act is at once sharply funny, incisive, and unfailingly conversational. She seems as though she was not only born with expert comic timing, but that she’s spent the better part of five decades sharpening that timing, and it is all delivered as though a good friend is casually telling you an engaging story.

Warfield never rushes. She lets her bits breathe, allowing the audience to settle into her rhythm before hitting them with a twist, and always a twist that remains relatable. Whether riffing on the challenges of aging, the absurdities of social media, or coming out as gay at the age of 63, her material landed with an effortless punch.

But what truly sets Warfield apart is her ability to connect with her audience. There’s a warmth to her
comedy that invites listeners into her world, making them feel like they’re in on the joke, even if they’ve
never shared her exact experience. Her observational humor isn’t just smart—it’s deeply human.
By the time her set wrapped up, it was apparent that Warfield had solidified her position as not just a
special guest but a co-headliner in every sense. Her performance was stellar, a clear demonstration that
her truest calling, despite decades of acting in films and television, is and always was stand-up comedy.
Marsha told us as much when we sat down with her in the Tommy T’s green room to reminisce about her
win in the 4th annual SFCC, in 1979, as well as her early days as a young, hungry comic.. She discusses
her memories of the a competition in its relative infancy, moving from her hometown of Chicago to L.A.,
trying to pay the bills in a pre-comedy-boom era, becoming a license-less car owner, operating a
switchboard, how there used to be more drugs, and finally, being honest with yourself about who you are
and what you truly want to be.

It was the San Francisco International Comedy Competition, 1979. How old were you then?
Twenty-four.

Wow. Was it a lot of shows back then, too? And how long did it last?
A month. Yeah, it was a lot of shows!

Was it all different kinds of shows? Did you guys do bars, theaters, all different, a wide range of
stuff?

Pretty much. There really weren’t a whole lot of franchise clubs at that time. They were just starting and
taking a toehold, so I remember Rooster T. Feathers opening in the first location. And then moving to
another location. I don’t know that this club was here, Tommy T’s. If it was, it was under another name.
[The competition] wasn’t here, but you did do clubs as part of it.

How long had you been doing stand-up comedy when you entered?
I started in 1974. Okay, yeah. So five years.

Was it your first SFCC, or did you try it a couple times?
No, again, this was a brand new thing, comedy competitions. We had to be convinced to compete against
each other. It still doesn’t make a ton of sense to me, the competitiveness against another. The
individualism was what attracted me to stand-up. You’re just your own version of yourself. It’s between
you and an audience, and not between me and you. You can do what you want to do. But he talked me
into it, Jon Fox talked me into it.

Talked you into entering?

Yes. And I could do it because I had just bought a car, and I didn’t really know how to drive. I’m from Chicago. We didn’t drive in Chicago. So I finally got enough money together, and they were having a sale on Chevy Novas. They were being discontinued that year, so you could get a Chevy Nova for $1,900 or something like that, a new one. I didn’t have a license. I didn’t know how to drive. So anyway, I went in, and I was 24, and they gave me a car.

That’s great.

I went to drive it off the lot. I had an ID, but I didn’t have a driver’s license. He said, “Well, we’re not supposed to.” So I drove off the lot, and I went to the gas station to get some gas, and the man said, “Why you got your brake on?” And I’m like, “I thought that light meant that I had brakes.” Anyway, I drove to my friend’s house. She lived on a hill, like a Hollywood hill. And I drove to her house and up that hill and remembered up, up, and away!

I told her, “I bought a car!” She said, “No you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did,” and they had to come down and see and look, and they said, “You bought a car.”

Without a driver’s license.

Then I went and got my driver’s license. I would get in the car at midnight or two in the morning and just
drive. Drive to San Diego and back. Drive up the coast and back. And I did that, taught myself how to
drive.

Now, some of the SFCC shows are very far away from San Francisco, Grass Valley, past San Luis
Obispo. In 1979 how far did you have to go for the shows?

I remember it being a lot of travel. I don’t remember exactly where we went when, but I remember it was a
lot of travel. The fact that I had just bought that car is what facilitated it.

And Jon Fox talked you into it. Were you based in LA at the time?

I did a lot of work here [the Bay Area] with Jon, at the Punch Line. It had an earlier location, and then they
moved to the old Waldorf. The Bay Area was…you have no idea what the Bay Area was. It was the last
end of the hippies, the Haight, and all that kind of stuff. There was drugs. They had started putting porn in
legitimate movie houses, so we had Debbie Does Dallas and all that kind of stuff going on, and you had
Hare Krishnas in Los Angeles. I mean, it was a whole different kind of time.

And different from Chicago.

Well, that’s my hometown. I love Chicago, but nobody I know wants to move back with me. They hate
winter, so…Anyway, everybody was young and everybody was running around, and comedy was just
starting to burst.

Had you done comedy competitions before?

There weren’t any.

This was the first one? Because I don’t even know if other ones existed back then.

No, I mean, if they did they were like small bar show things, and I don’t even remember them.

A one-night thing where you win something like 50 bucks or whatever it is?

No, we didn’t make money. We didn’t make money. Clubs like the Punch Line were starting to open up and provide venues for comedians to get paid. All of that was budding. It was just coming into fruition.

The competition starts with 32 comedians. In the 1979 SFCC, did you know a lot of the other
comics?

Most of ‘em, yeah. I worked with a lot of people, had worked in LA, you know, and it was a pipeline back then. We went wherever there was work.

Did you look at any of them and go, ‘Oh, they’re my biggest competition’?

The guys did that. I didn’t do that. I mean, the guys were like…they would be very concerned about, “Well, I don’t wanna go first. You’ve gotta go first. I don’t wanna go last, and the middle is the best part because then you get it.” And they would ask me when I wanted to go, and I’d say, “I don’t care. Whatever’s left.” They thought that was weird, and I thought they were weird. I think the night I won I went on first the first show and last the second show.

So how’d that feel? Was it exciting? Were you like, YEAHHHHH!!!”?

No, I’m not a “YEAH!” kind of person. I mean, it was nice to win, but I needed a gig after that. I was looking for the next thing.

How was the prize money?

I don’t remember. Don’t remember. For me, if somebody said, “We’ll put you up. You can have a place to
live and all that stuff,” I wouldn’t worry about money. I’m not looking to be rich and famous and hang out,
you know, I do stand-up. That’s it, I do stand-up.

One of this year’s shows was at the Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa, and it’s like 1,600
people. Most of the comics have never performed for anywhere near that many people. Did you
have anything like that, any shows that really stood out to you?

No, we didn’t have that. We had much smaller rooms and venues than that. I didn’t get that until much
later. We had the finals at the old Waldorf, and I thanked the waitresses because I had learned that, well,
a lot of the guys were kind of superior to the waitresses, or always hitting on them and stuff. I would talk
to them and, you know, just hang out, and they liked me. I realized that if they liked you, they’d take pains
not to interrupt your show. So even though they might have to get the tabs, you know, or set down the
drinks, they would wait until they weren’t being a distraction. Whereas for some of the guys who were
jerks to them, they’d just walk in front of the stage.

That’s true of all the staff, you know, If you’re a jerk to the guy who’s seating people, they’ll sit people that
are obnoxious down front. If you’re nice to people, they’ll be nice to you.

Plus, we were all stoned. Everybody was stoned.

Right. Well, they still are.

We were really stoned. I don’t think there’s that much drugs in America anymore.

Not at the level of 1979? Quaaludes?

You just have no idea. Quaaludes, I think they were still legal then, but we weren’t getting them legally. It was all cocaine. Cocaine and weed. There was cocaine and weed everywhere. It was snowing in the Bay Area a lot of times.

So, what was your set like at the time? Has it changed a lot over the years in terms of your stage
presence, your material?

Yeah. I mean, it changed. I couldn’t do whatever it was I did, even if I could remember it. I couldn’t do it
now because that woman was 24, and this woman is 70. That would be silly. It would just not even make
sense. Plus, I was not gay. I wasn’t out. I didn’t know anything about that. I was still a whole different…a
different person.

Right. You weren’t just gonna be able to openly talk about that stuff at the time.

I could have if I had been aware of it, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

There are shorter sets in the SFCC, especially in the first round – I think they’re five to seven
minutes in the first round. Without time to really settle in, did that change anything for you? Did
you feel like you had to come out really punching?

No. I walked on stage and just stood there. I stood there until everybody had settled down. I’ve never felt compelled to… you know, and when I have, it’s never worked out. That doesn’t get you anything in the

long run. You end up yelling at the audience. You’re all frantic and that doesn’t work for me. So, I try to be the same. I try to be as close to who I am sitting here with you as I am with the audience.

It’s taken me a long time to start figuring that out. It’s like you have to learn to be yourself, and that’s very strange.

First you have to know who you are, and it takes a lot of introspection and time. Being willing to look in the mirror when you might not feel like you look nice, you know, or what you’re doing is something you really want to see in yourself, so you kind of look at the mirror sideways. You have to develop the ability to look at yourself. Look at yourself.

Well, obviously at 24 you were already rolling. I think a win was pretty huge at 24, amazing.

It never dawned on me. My mentor was a man named Jimmy Cook. He was a stand-up comedian out of Philadelphia, and he was like my parents’ age. He decided that me being on my own at my age, I needed protection, and so he took me under his wing. He said, “When you come off stage, I’m gonna ask you how you did, and you’re gonna say, ‘Okay.’ And I’m gonna ask you if you did your best, and you’re gonna tell me the truth, and then we’re not going to talk about it again.”

And so every night he said, “How’d you do?” I said, “I did okay.” He said, “You do your best?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Where are we going to eat?”

And so I was never allowed to ride that emotional thing where it’s got to be…if you did your best, you
couldn’t have done any more, no matter how it turned out, I did my best. No matter how I did, I had done
my best for that night, I had given my best. So it didn’t work? That was the best I was going to do that
night because I did my best, no point in going on and on.

So after you won the SFCC, did it open any doors for you or was it just right back to work? Did
you feel the same?

Both. After the finals and stuff, within six months or so, Jon had a national competition, and five comedians from across the country competed for a national title. And I won that. And all the comics were mad, because it was four guys and me. I won, and I was a black woman. I didn’t care what they said, but yeah, I won that too, and I found an agent. If you’ve ever watched old movies with an agent kind of character, he was that guy. “Kid. Kid. Give me a call.” He handed me his card, and I took a few months, and I finally called him, and he became my agent.

I was still working clubs. You know, again, in 1979 there was the Improv in Los Angeles and the Comedy Store. The Comedy Store had a club on Westwood as well as on Sunset, and she had a club in San Diego. The club in San Diego was one of the three-act clubs, where you got paid for the week. You know, there were three comics for the week, like all the clubs now. There was The Ice House. The Comedy Store and the Improv had, you know, it was more workout rooms, but they all started to open franchises. The Punch Line did, too. There were a few others, The Laff Stop, these circuits, they started building circuits, and you could work enough to pay your rent back then.

I was doing okay, and I had decided in 1977 or 78 that I was not gonna be a middle act. They always put the girls in the middle, and they treated us like novelty acts. The middle act was always either a prop comic, or a guy with a guitar, or somebody who juggled, or a girl. And I said, “I’m a headliner, I can hang with them,” so The Laff Stop in Newport Beach said okay, and I became a headliner. I became a headliner at the Punch Line, and I was a headliner in clubs around the country, and I could make enough to pay my rent, which is the goal.

When did you make that decision to start comedy full-time? Was this long before the SFCC, or
you said ‘77 or ’78 you were doing that?

I did stand-up comedy full-time pretty much my whole career. When I got to Los Angeles, I had $125 in my pocket, and a ticket home. My mother had given me a two-week stay at the Continental Holiday House next to The Comedy Store. I was 22 years old, and that’s all I had to my name, and I had no intention of going back to Chicago. So I got there on…I think it was a Friday, it was my birthday. I went to the comedy store that night. That Monday night I went on, got passed over, as they say. They told me I could call in for spots.

Then the next Monday I went to Beverly Hills and got a job as a switchboard operator. They used to have answering services. We didn’t have machines, so I was the one who said, “Bobby’s house,” or whatever. I sold my leather coat, and after my two weeks were up at the Continental Holiday House, I got a room at the Howard’s Weekly Hotel for $39 a week. I stayed there until I got enough money to get an apartment.

How long were you there?

A couple of months.

That’s incredible.

Then a friend of mine who said he was leaving to go home to get married, he had an apartment, a little studio apartment. He said, “You can stay with me until then,” and he gave me his mattress, and he took the box spring. I stayed with him until another friend of mine came, and he needed a place to stay, and the other guy hadn’t left to get married, so I told him to get out. Because my friend was coming.

Haha!

That probably wasn’t that blunt, but…so I stayed there, started working. You know, The Richard Pryor Show in ‘77 was one of the shows I got to do.

It never dawned on me that I should do something else, or that there was something weird or special about being a young woman alone, with nobody around. It didn’t dawn on me to be intimidated by that in any way. When they started the franchise clubs, they put them all in strip malls and stuff, so I traveled across this country by myself, being the only black person in town. I mean, I’ve been to Montana, and I did some college tours and stuff. I’ve been to some small towns. They probably had signs, you know, for me. I still did stand-up.

Lastly, I just wondered if you had any particular memories from the competition, or stories that
really still stand out.

Like I said, we were all young, and when I say young we’re talking a young Dana Carvey, young Robin Williams, young people’s names that you would know, Mike Winslow and A. Whitney Brown, names that have gone on to become comedy icons. I mean, we were just kids doing stand-up.