Comedian Whitney Cummings eager to get back to stand-up stage

You don’t have to tell Whitney Cummings it’s been a long two years since she last played Las Vegas.

She’s jonesing for us. She’s been “really imbalanced, really anxious.”

She needs us. Or at least a microphone at Treasure Island today.

Sure, more people know who she is now, after two seasons of her own NBC sitcom “Whitney,” and a producer/co-creator credit on the CBS hit “2 Broke Girls.”

But the 30-year-old comedian sounds more like she measures those months since the South Point (in July 2011) by what she hasn’t done — stand-up — rather than by what she has achieved.

“You become a comedian because that’s what makes you full, it’s what makes you balanced, whole,” she says.

There are guys, from Jay Leno to Jerry Seinfeld, who will never give up stand-up no matter how much money they bank. If you didn’t count Cummings in their company, figuring stand-up was a springboard to her current endeavors, she is here to set you straight.

“I am meant to do stand-up. There is no version of my life where I’m not doing stand-up the whole time,” she says. “I know it’s something I can’t function without doing.”

The Washington, D.C., native interned as a broadcast journalist and landed a few TV jobs, including MTV’s “Punk’d.” But a lot of us first noticed her on the Comedy Central roasts of Joan Rivers in 2009 and David Hasselhoff the next year.

By then, she says, she knew “I had to hire myself because no one else would hire me.

“I think a lot of people think, ‘Oh Whitney came out of nowhere, overnight got a TV show and stuff.’ I was rejected pretty aggressively for a very long time by Hollywood until I created my own show and was doing stand-up.

“That’s what made sense to me, because I could never fit into somebody else’s mold of what they wanted,” she adds.

“I was always too weird or too quirky or too dark or too tall or not pretty enough. I was always told I was not pretty enough to be a leading lady.”

NBC came around for “Whitney,” which has finished its second season. Critics were lukewarm, and audience reaction hasn’t matched that of “2 Broke Girls.”

At the time of this phone chat, Cummings said she would not know until about May 13 if her show would get a third season.

“TV’s a very fickle business. Nobody knows why anything is succeeding,” she says. “Everything on cable is doing well, everything on network’s really challenging.”

In the broader realm of television, the comedians she came up with are now in the driver’s seat: Chelsea Handler, Daniel Tosh, the “Workaholics” guys.

But the multicamera sitcom — the type usually filmed in front of an audience — “has a little bit of a stink on it, because people think it’s outdated, it’s retro.”

“That’s not true,” she is quick to add, noting the combined ratings strength of CBS comedies. “Hollywood tends to negate middle America’s tastes, which I think is a mistake.”

Fact is, “It’s a scary time to be in television. (Executives) kind of know it when they see it, I think. I wouldn’t give them enough credit to think the TV business has any idea what they want. Everyone’s just chasing what’s already been successful.”

Another good reason to hire herself.

“You realize the most pure form of the truth and of comedy is to be in front of people,” she says. “You say something and you get an instant laugh. You don’t have to have executives and movie people telling you what they think is funny.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.