Comic Katie Bowman isn’t afraid to make crowds squirm

Katie Bowman is quick to describe herself as a “neuro-divergent nightmare,” despite bringing laughs to countless audiences in hundreds of stand-up sets in the last decade.

“I don’t think it’s a negative thing,” said Bowman, a 36-year-old Denver comedian and visual artist who makes an impression with a bright shock of red hair and oversized glasses. “Some people hate it, but it resonates with people who have ADHD, like me, or cognitive disorders. All the crazies, underdogs, outcasts and losers — bring them to me. I picture the people in the audience as friends at a party, and I want them to feel welcome and heard.”

Bowman and her loopy, bawdy, intensely personal humor, which features practiced jokes and improvised asides, just returned from a national tour where she performed what will become her first stand-up album.

Dubbed “Neurodivergent Nightmare,” she’s recording it on Saturday, Dec. 2, at the Bug Theatre in the Highland neighborhood (tickets are $10; see bugtheatre.org). It’s the site of Bowman’s first stand-up try nearly a decade ago, as part of the open-mic variety show “Freak Train,” and well-trod comedy ground that Denver’s Grawlix trio has used for its monthly, often sold-out showcases.

“I would watch those (Grawlix) sets in the beginning, especially all the awesome women they booked, and dream of seeing myself up there,” Bowman said. “But I never really felt like I knew how to get up on that stage.”

Bowman, who quit her job at Planned Parenthood to work on comedy and art full-time in 2021, is now well established in Denver’s crowded, competitive stand-up scene. In addition to local festivals such as Trinidad’s Chief Comedy Festival and Denver’s High Plains, she’s forged a persona at national events, and on dozens of club and bar stages during scrappy tours with husband and comic Brad Galli.

Together they also host weekly comedy nights in the basement of Highland’s Sushi Hai, a Thursday institution they took over in early 2020 — just as the COVID pandemic was shutting down public performances. (They’ve only missed a half-dozen nights since then, Bowman noted proudly, and most have been due to weather or special events).

Bowman has grabbed more stage time these days because she’s also finished with her 43-episode podcast about horror movies, “Help Me, I’m Scared with Katie Bowman.” Meanwhile, she’s also ramped up her support for unhoused people. She visits downtown camps, she said, to talk to people and hand out blankets that her dogs have nibbled on and made imperfect (but still very clean and useful, she said).

She sells her paintings, “urine sample” beer koozies, crop-top shirts, and other merch her website, katiebowman.rocks, where her University of Colorado Boulder art-school training shines through. Her progressive politics bubble over onto the nude figures, nature scenes and animals. It’s a complement to Bowman’s comedy, with a thematic emphasis on personal traumas, body image, and sex (often, about removing the stigma of discussing its messy, multi-gender details) aligning with her stances on women’s health, which were developed as a health center assistant for Planned Parenthood.

There she performed blood draws, dispensed medications, conducted sex and birth-control education, and helped women with the process of getting an abortion, from paperwork to overviews of what the procedure entailed, she said.

“I was on tour in Clinton Country — Arkansas, Missouri — and while people in those cities liked the dirty sex jokes, they got tight on abortion jokes,” she said. “Even in Atlanta, which was surprising. How can they be so open-minded sexually and then watch these abortion jokes just go into the void?”

Bowman is accustomed to negative feedback from some audiences, especially men. They’ve scolded her for saying “just kidding” and “you know” too much in her set, she said, which has prompted her to lean into those tendencies even more. She knows that nervous, fast-talking comics can find strong audiences; see Robin Williams, or beloved Canadian comic Debra DiGiovanni. Their comedy is vulnerable, but confident and edgy.

“I’m really eager and forceful in the way I portray myself,” she said, “People will come up after the show and say, ‘I felt like I was on the same wavelength as you!’ It’s great feeling like they can keep up with me. But I’m also making it part of the punchline at the same time. I hang my ego at the door because I don’t want to act better than the audience. We’re just making fart sounds together and having a good, weird time.”

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