About the show:

Alicia Dattner creates stand up comedy that is edgy and confessional. Irreverent insight into the human condition is her specialty. Her outrageous stories and characters are packed with punchlines, and intersect themes of love, politics, and modern culture.

Alicia has shared the stage with many funny, talented comics including Jasper Redd, Bill Santiago, Eugene Mirman, Arj Barker, Ryan Stout, Vanda Mikoloski, and Amy Stiller.

She has performed at Cobb's Comedy Club and the Punchline in San Francisco as well as the Knitting Factory in Hollywood and Ha Comedy Club in New York. Click here to see a full list of venues where she's performed.

Alicia's new show, The Punchline just won "Best Female Solo Act" in the San Francisco Fringe Festival 2008, and also one of four "Best of the Fringe" overall awards.

San Francisco stand up comedian Alicia Dattner perceives the grand cosmic joke: that pain exists in order for us to take ourselves less seriously.

What audiences are saying:

"It may be just a matter of time till she's well known. Until then, Alicia is one of the funniest, non-famous comedians I have ever seen. And I know comedy. When I was a kid, my dad owned a comedy club on the Laff Stop circuit. I grew up watching artists like Jeanine Garofalo, Ron White, and Chris Titus get their start. I can't wait to round up bunches of friends for her shows about town. ...join us!"-Bryan Neuberg

"Good God, you're funny." - Christina Kowalchuk

"For those of you who haven't been lucky enough to see Alicia's standup yet, if you like to laugh, you should! Girlfriend is f***ing hysterically funny. As in, 'my- sides-hurt-for-the-next-24-hours- funny."

-Karin Wertheim

"Dear Alicia -

I saw your show last night with a friend... I thought it was incredible.

I had just seen an HBO special from 1986 hosted by Rodney Dangerfield with a bunch of comics (one of whom was Seinfeld) headlined by Sam Kinison. All the performers prior Kinison him seemed stiff and frankly not that funny. When he hit the stage all that changed. Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance? Great book. Its main theme is that there is a phenomena that goes by a couple of names - he gives it the name Quality - that should inform everything we do. It's not a fascist thing - actually it's just the opposite. It's relation to Zen is this - it demands presence of mind, body, and spirit at the actual moment of creation, performance,calculation, etc. It's a seeming abstraction - much of the book is devoted to the exploration of how it is that we all feel like we know Quality when we see it, yet it is pretty fucking hard to define - but it exists. Anytime something is informed only by present moment experience, the potential for Quality exists. It lies outside the bounds of of dualistic, right and wrong Judeo-Christian ethics, which is why Quality exists rarely if at all in the thought and actions of fundamentalists of any persuasion. Maybe this is what people mean when they say 'God/dess loves Truth.'

To me, you put on a Quality performance last night. I suppose you might not even see it that way - I don't know anything about you except what I saw last night. I've been a musician for 30 years, and I've known the feeling of 'hitting it,' but I've never done anything like stand up before, so everything feels new and real and exciting. Anyway, I'm sure that you've seen shows where there were only a few people there for a performance, or the audience consisted mainly of fellow performers, and yet someone starts to hit it and you realize that you're in the presence of something great and special. Watching Kinison going off, nailing his performance without any debilitating self-consciousness, was amazing...it was art at it's best, which is to say that what it did you can't explain with language and do justice to it. For me that's what you did last night. A kalaidescope of brains, vulnerability, cockiness, humility, guts, humor...wow. Truth. Also - totally inspirational. Your performance last night seemed to me to be exactly what we're always striving for... A comedian I know says "I don't want to go up and do a bunch of jokes. I want to find my truth, get my fear and my ego out of the way, and be who I am. If you can do that, then you've got it."

So thank you for doing just that. I hope this doesn't seem embarrassingly gushy, but I didn't want to waste energy trying to euphamize my way through. That didn't seem like the Quality thing to do.

Sincerely,

Rick Tweed