It’s a weekday afternoon and Lisa Marie Riley is chauffeuring kids around.
She’s a mom, a comedian and a social media personality from Staten Island, New York, who is known online as “onefunnylisamarie.”
Even though she has close to a million followers on social media, she’s still a down-to-earth mom who accidentally fell into a standup career. Except, she doesn’t really even believe herself to be a comedian and she doesn’t call what she does standup. She considers herself a storyteller.
She’ll bring those stories at 3 p.m. June 1 to The Comedy Vault in Batavia.
Riley was a court stenographer for 20 years when her husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2019.
“When he got diagnosed with cancer, my sister opened up an Instagram page to joke around,” she said. “It was a healthy vice for me. Before I was getting paid to do it, it was something I turned to as a healthy vice.”
She had to leave her job to care for him full time, but she continued to make the videos. A comedy promoter found her page, liked her videos and asked her to perform some comedy shows.
“I said, ‘Absolutely not. I’m not a comedian.’ He said, ‘You know I’m going to pay you, right?’ and I said ‘I guess I’m going to do it,’” she said. “I sold out my first four shows … and it took off from there.”
She performed locally because she couldn’t leave her husband.
Fast forward to 2022 and her husband had succumbed to the disease. She made the choice to not only continue down the comedy path but to take her show on the road.
“It became a career, that’s what happened,” she said. “I’ll do this until it doesn’t work anymore and then I’ll find something else to do.”
If you’ve seen her videos on TikTok or Instagram, that’s exactly what her live shows are like, she said.
“I talk,” she said. “Everything that’s on my social media. Regular life, being a mom. I used to talk about being a wife. I’m not one any longer, obviously. I joke around about my sisters, my mother, my Italian family. Anything. It could be something like I was at CVS today in the self-checkout. Just regular talk, nothing at all serious.”
She doesn’t write out her act or even think about what she wants to talk about when she gets onstage.
“I just go up and wing it. I just talk because I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “My real job is a stenographer … this job just fell into my lap when he got sick. I had no money, a sick husband and three children.”
It’s that fake-it-til-you-make-it mentality that pushes her to get out from behind the phone camera and on a stage in front of people.
“The only reason why I’m in front of people and I can do it is, if you’re going to pay me, I’m going to play,” she said. “If you ask me to do your hair tonight, I’m going to do your hair. When my husband was sick, I did hair, makeup, tutoring — because I had no job. I didn’t make excuses, I made choices. What was I going to do? Those were the cards I was dealt.”
She still makes videos regularly and is grateful for her audience. When asked about her comedy influences, she named Sebastian Maniscalco and Kevin Hart.
“Those two are my favorites. I never thought I was going to be a comedian but they’re who, to me, is funny,” she said. “I don’t find myself funny. I can laugh at myself, but I don’t find myself funny. I’m a storyteller, not a comedian. I don’t tell jokes.”
Annie Alleman is a freelance reporter for the Courier-News.
One Funny Lisa Marie
When: 3 p.m. June 1
Where: The Comedy Vault, 18 E. Wilson St., Batavia
Tickets: $35
Information: 630-454-4174; comedyvaultbatavia.com
