Gina Brillon
We Dare You!
Learning how to tell a joke is a practical and fun skill to have in your back pocket. Whether you’re breaking the ice, defusing a tense situation, or just entertaining your friends these expert tips will captivate any crowd.
1. Practice for perfection. Test out your joke on a friend, or try your mirror. Rehearse until you get the timing down by using pauses and gestures for extra emphasis.
2. Know your audience. Before the big debut, revisit the joke and make sure it will be appropriate for the situation.
3. Wait for a lapse in the conversation, but don’t announce your intention. Jokes thrive on surprise.
4. Pace yourself and enunciate—if they can’t hear it or understand it, what’s the point!?
5. Confidence is key. If you say it, believe it. If you don’t believe it, they won’t either. If you’re having a good time, your audience will too.
6. Don’t focus on the people who aren’t laughing. Concentrate on and connect with the ones who are.
7. If all goes well, have a follow-up funny ready to go and you’ll wow them again.
Funny Girl
July 2010
While auditioning for a potentially breakout role, Gina Brillon faced a dilemma of career versus conscience. Friends urged the young comic to pursue her chance at a network sitcom, but the show’s stereotypical tendencies caused major doubts. “If I turn this down just based on morals, it’s going to be a what-if situation—what if this sitcom could’ve become big?," Gina remembers thinking. Initially, the lure of fame persuaded her to give it a try, but in the end her integrity won out. “Once I was there reading lines from the script it was so ridiculously racist. I just looked at the producers and said ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’ Being in entertainment, you have to be willing to give up a little bit of that pride to a certain extent, but I looked at this situation, and I just knew I couldn’t.”
Having begun her standup career at seventeen, this Bronx-born Latina is no stranger to asserting herself in public. She graduated from winning local community contests, to securing clubs in New York City, touring internationally, and even hosting for Kathy Griffin, one of her favorite comedians. The thought of performing in front of a crowd night after night would terrify most people, but years of practice have helped Gina blossom. “Believe it or not, I’m actually kind of a shy person. But when I’m on stage it’s probably the most free I’ve ever been. And off stage it’s made me more confident in social situations.” Despite her success and experience this funny girl still gets pre-performance jitters, which she copes with by loosening up with tongue twisters. Then just as she hears them announce her name Brillon reminds herself, “this is my dream, and I’m doing it. This is what I do!”
And that childhood dream of cheering people up and making them laugh was never more poignant than at a show shortly after 9/11. Two men approached the performer at the end of her set and thanked her for making them laugh again. They had been cleaning up Ground Zero and searching for survivors. They told her they hadn’t gone out and hadn’t been able to laugh for a long while. That touching conversation stayed with Gina. “Sometimes you don’t think that what you do really makes that much of an impact on people’s lives, but then when someone comes up to you and says, ‘I haven’t laughed in a long time,’ then you really see.”
Although Gina’s still on the lookout for the right sitcom, she also channels her talent into independent films. Her latest project is a dramedy titled The Next Hundred Days. The happy/sad storyline centers on an agoraphobic woman who discovers she has a terminal illness and commits to using her final one hundred days to do everything she’s ever wanted. The script she wrote is not autobiographical, but Gina is certainly on the road to getting everything she’s ever wanted and laughing as she goes.