Santa Clarita resident Erin Cholakian was working as a stagehand at the Santa Clarita Performing Arts Center at College of the Canyons. Her job was to make sure the stand-up comedians went onstage at the right times and that they had what they needed before going on.
Comedian Jamie Kennedy had just gone out to perform and immediately pointed out to the crowd that there was no stool — a big no-no in the stand-up comedy world, according to Cholakian.
Of course, being a stagehand, Cholakian was tasked with having to fly a stool out to Kennedy during his act.
“Being a lifetime performer, I was like, ‘I don’t think I should do that,’” Cholakian said during a recent telephone interview. “I’m supposed to interrupt this person’s show to deliver a stool on stage? But I listened to my boss, and I entered center stage to a sold-out theater, and I placed a stool on stage. He (Kennedy) heard the audience uproariously laugh, and he turned around and made eye contact with me and the stool. And then I, in a panic, made eye contact with him, and I curtsied.”
Cholakian then exited the stage, and Kennedy roasted her for the next six minutes. Cholakian couldn’t believe it. It was in that moment that she fell in love with stand-up comedy.
She said Kennedy probably had a full show of prepared material, which he eventually got around to doing, but he took advantage of the space he occupied, the circumstances, the people around him, and he made jokes about a thing that everyone in that moment had just witnessed. His comedy, Cholakian said, was a living, breathing thing.
“It was just so fun to listen to the audience,” she said. “I just love him (Kennedy) for that.”
Cholakian, 29, was born and raised in Santa Clarita. Upon graduating from William S. Hart High School in 2013, she attended College of the Canyons before going to California State University, Northridge, to study theater.
She said she’s performed her whole life, but she only started doing stand-up comedy last year.
“It’s just completely taken off in a way that I didn’t expect,” Cholakian said. “Currently, I’m all over Los Angeles. I have nine shows in March, one of them being at the Hollywood Improv.”
She’s quickly building quite a reputation in Los Angeles, she said, and gaining a large following on social media. As a result, she’s planning a tour at the end of the year, including stops in New York, Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Cholakian caught the performance bug early in life. She took her first dance class at 4 years old, and she’s been onstage before audiences since she was 5. She began doing theater work in high school. Even then, she said, she was often the comic relief.
“I was the character piece in a lot of things,” Cholakian said. “But I stopped acting when I shattered my ankle in 2017 during a freak accident. I mean, I say ‘freak accident,’ but I was skateboarding, so, it was really my fault, but that kind of stopped my entire trajectory. I was the lead in a play at the time, and I was two weeks out from opening, and they had to replace me, and that was it. That changed everything for me.”
Cholakian didn’t perform in a theater production again. But she had an itch to entertain others somehow. Once a performer, always a performer, she said, adding that she couldn’t stay away from it. But with her ankle problem, she couldn’t bounce around as she once had done.
And so, last year, she decided to try something she always enjoyed watching. She wanted to give stand-up comedy a shot.
“Why not give it a try?” she said. “I took a class at UCB (Upright Citizens Brigade) in Los Angeles, and I’ve done 30 shows since.”
Cholakian’s first show was in June of last year. She responded to the work immediately. Whereas in theater where she played a character, reciting someone else’s words, as a stand-up comedian she could play herself and express her own ideas.
She compared what a comic does to psychology.
“Our job is to understand our audience,” she said. “There’s this weird relationship between an audience and a stand-up comedian, which is, they have an expectation of you. They want to laugh at least two times a minute. They’re here to laugh, and if you don’t deliver on their expectation right out the gate, your job, then, is to figure out how to win them back.”
Cholakian said she’s lost an audience before. She does a bit about going to the gynecologist, which often gets a good response from audiences, she said. But she’s encountered some folks who were just not into it.
The problem, however, is that it’s a longer bit. And once she’s started it, it’s tough to back out.
“I have to kind of make the decision when I realize the audience isn’t onboard whether it’s worth continuing the bit or finding a way to wrap it up quicker so that I can get back to something that they might like,” she said. “But I think the beauty of the job is that you have a freedom. There’s a freedom of listening to the room and knowing what they want. It just takes a keen ear to hear what they’re looking for.”
And while Cholakian has been doing stand-up for less than a year, she’s already got about an hour of material to pull from if whatever she’s doing happens to not land with a particular crowd. One of her favorite things to do in her shows is talk about the present space that she and her audience share.
She’ll often bring up, for example, the bathroom at the venue.
“They’ve all been to the bathroom at some point that day,” she said. “And they all have some kind of thought about the bathroom that they don’t realize they had. Sometimes it’s as simple as, like, ‘The walk to the bathroom was scarier than walking the plank.’ And now they’re reminded that we’re all in the same space together, and at the end of the day, we’re all on the same level. Like, ‘Just because I have a mic, doesn’t mean I’m … any more important than you guys.’”
Cholakian recalled a time when she thought she had come up with the dumbest joke. The audience let her know instantly what they thought when she performed it.
She said she was at the Hollywood Improv, doing a show called “Horror Nerd.” Right out of the gate she felt disqualified, she said, because she’s not a horror fan. She self-applied the name “wuss” to explain how she feels about scary movies.
But it was Friday the 13th, and the comedians in the show were to roast “Friday the 13th” slasher horror icon Jason Voorhees. Cholakian was literally scared to go up with the jokes she’d planned. She went for it anyway.
“One of my jokes,” she said, “was: ‘I don’t understand why we’re roasting Jason Voorhees. I thought we all liked him. Because there’s that one song.’ And then I made the whole audience sing, ‘Voorhees, a Jolly Good Fellow’ with me.”
Cholakian sang the song to the melody of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” It got another laugh. At the show, the audience, she said, absolutely loved it.
Sam Gullo, Cholakian’s roommate, said Cholakian had tested the joke on him beforehand, worrying it was bad. He said he reluctantly laughed at it but encouraged her to use it.
“Sure, it’s stupid, but in the same way a really good dad joke is stupid,” Gullo said. “It’s funny because of how silly the word play is.”
Gullo is often Cholakian’s test subject at home, he said, and he’s honored to do it. The two of them have been friends for about seven years and did theater together at College of the Canyons. When Gullo learned that Cholakian was going to give stand-up comedy a shot, he said it totally made sense since she’s a natural storyteller.
Fellow stand-up comedian Meg Tilton said storytelling is one of Cholakian’s greatest gifts. She makes the audience feel like they’re in the scene she’s describing, but she also makes them feel a part of a conversation.
The other thing Cholakian does so well, Tilton said, is help others have fun, and not just the audience. She’s good at helping her fellow stand-up comedians enjoy what they’re doing.
“Comedy is obviously a craft, right?” Tilton said. “But it’s like, we do this because we want to have fun. It’s meant to be an enjoyable thing. We want other people to enjoy it as much as we do, but some people can get super jaded by that, especially in the comedy scene. She (Cholakian) is always like, ‘We’re doing this to have fun.’”
Cholakian said that, above all, what she cherishes most about stand-up comedy is the human experience she gets on the job.
“I love getting to meet people in different areas and walks of life,” she said, “and finding common ground.”
That common ground, she added, is laughter.
Months into her stand-up comedy career, Cholakian was doing a show and saw that, of all people to be performing with her, one of the other comics was none other than comedian Jamie Kennedy. She couldn’t believe it. Here was the guy who made her see what comedy could be, and now she was going to be performing with him on the same stage.
She wanted to tell him that she was the one who brought that stool out to the stage at College of the Canyons — the person he ranted about — and how he inspired her to do stand-up, which she was now performing alongside him on the same stage.
“I didn’t want to tell him the story if I didn’t get the opportunity,” she said. “Like, I wasn’t going to go out of my way to tell him because I didn’t want to look like a stalker, but if I got the opportunity, I was going to say something to him.”
As luck would have it, Cholakian found herself in the same room with Kennedy and his producer before going on. Cholakian introduced herself, and then she shared her story, concluding with the part about how Kennedy had provided a life-changing moment for her.
The producer laughed. He wasn’t laughing because Cholakian’s story was so funny or so unbelievable or even so entertaining. The guy laughed, Cholakian said, because he thought Cholakian was funny. Funny because, as the producer told her, Kennedy was never going to remember the incident.
Kennedy told Cholakian that he did not, in fact, remember the incident. Not at all.
“But,” Cholakian said, “he told me, ‘I do want you to know that that means so much to me that you do remember it.’ And he looked at me, and he was like, ‘This is so crazy that that was such a life-changing moment for you, and here you are, and we’re sharing a stage.’”
Later that day, Kennedy reposted one of Cholakian’s social media posts, adding the following comment: “Erin told me such a touching story, about her origins of comedy. I’m honored. Give this young lady a follow, she is doing it right.”
“So, yeah, I owe Jamie Kennedy a lot,” Cholakian said. “Not only for that first moment of, ‘I want to do this,’ but then to reiterate it once we met again. That was something he did not have to do for a baby comedian. And he did it.”
For more information about Cholakian and for updates about where she’s appearing, go to ErinCholakian.com.
Know any unsung heroes or people in the SCV with an interesting life story to tell? Email [email protected].
