Bay Street Theater’s Summer Comedy Series will kick off on Saturday at 8 p.m. with a performance by Ophira Eisenberg, a Canadian-born standup comedian, writer, and longtime host of NPR’s comedy trivia show “Ask Me Another.”
Based in Brooklyn, Ms. Eisenberg is a fixture at New York City’s comedy clubs, having performed at the Comedy Cellar, Gotham Comedy Club, New York Comedy Club, and Carolines on Broadway, as well as the Bell House, Union Hall, and Littlefield in Brooklyn.
But stand-up is only one element of her multifaceted career. Over nine years at “Ask Me Another,” she interviewed and played “silly” games with Patrick Stewart, Awkwafina, Rosie Perez, Yo-Yo Ma, Chelsea Handler, and Michael C. Hall, among others.
“If you love NPR, you already know Ophira’s voice,” said Tracy Mitchell, Bay Street’s executive director. “And if you don’t, this is the perfect place to discover it. She’s wicked funny, whip-smart, and exactly the kind of performance we want in the room right now.”
Ms. Eisenberg’s personal life figures prominently in her creative output. The parent of a 6-year-old, she is the host of “Parenting Is a Joke,” a new comedy podcast co-produced by iHeart Radio and Pretty Good Friends Productions, that reflects the comic highs and lows of raising a child while performing for a living.
Her first book, “Screw Everybody: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy” is a comic memoir about her experiments in the field as a single woman, traveling from “futon to futon and flask to flask.” It has been optioned for a feature film.
And: Ms. Eisenberg filmed her comedy special “Inside Joke” when she was 8 1/2 months pregnant. The material revolved around how she told everyone she was never going to have children, and then unexpectedly found herself expecting at “an advanced maternal age.”
She is a regular host and teller with The Moth, and her stories have been featured on “The Moth Radio Hour” and in two of The Moth’s collections, including “How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth.”
Her credits include Comedy Central, HBO’s “Girls,” “The Late Late Show,” “Gotham Live,” and “The Today Show.” The New York Times called her a skilled comedian with “bleakly stylish” humor, and New York Magazine cited her as one of the “Top 10 Comics That Funny People Find Funny.”
Tickets range from $99.99 to $139.99.
Next up in the comedy series is Paula Poundstone, who will bring her observational humor to Bay Street on July 26.
