Who is Lynn Ruth Miller?

Lynn Ruth Miller, dubbed the new Joan Rivers of Fringe Comedy, is the poster girl for growing old. She started doing stage comedies when she was 70 years old and had since received many accolades and recognitions. She won The Time Out and Soho Theatre (TO&ST) Award in 2014; 2015 Old Comedian finalist; made the top 100 in the UK in Britain’s Got Talent, won People’s Choice in 2009; 2015 Liberty Award Leicester Comedy Festival; semi-finals in the SF International Comedy Competition and Star of the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2009 and the finals in Bill Word’s Funniest Female Contest 2009. At 86, she has numerous comedy and five-star cabaret shows and has toured all over the world. She is currently considered as the oldest performing stand up female comedian on both sides of the Atlantic.
 
In a 2019 interview, Miller revealed that she didn’t plan on being a stand-up comic. She considers herself as a writer, a newspaper, a columnist, and a ‘tv lady’ but never in her wildest dream to be a comic. At age 67, she published Starving Hearts, her first book, an autobiographical novel about her struggle with her overwhelming mother and her battle with bulimia. The book sold over 6,200 copies and kickstarted her speaking engagements talking about the book and inspiring others with eating disorders like her. Miller then released a compilation of her essays previously published in her local newspapers. Her writing has been published in more than 100 outlets nationwide and she has read passages from her books all over the US and abroad. 
 
She took a stand-up comedy class in San Francisco intending to write about it – it turns out that she has a talent for creating her jokes. When asked if she has always been funny, ” I have always been able to tell canned jokes and I have always come up with smart remarks that got me into trouble…”. 
 
Miller going into comedy is no surprise if we based it on a University of Mexico anthropologist, Gil Greencross’s study. Greencross participants went to a series of abstract-reasoning and intelligence tests. He then asked them to write captions for New Yorker cartoons. The captions were then judged without any identifiable information on who wrote them. As he expected, the students who scored higher on the intelligence tests also created the funniest captions. For, Greencross, comedy involves putting disorganized ideas together, all while being perceptive to offend your audience but not too much. When Greencross ran the tests with professional comedians, they were able to produce caption after caption that was really funny. 
 
Miller mentioned that despite of her wit and somehow local celebrity status, getting into the live comedy circuit has not been very easy for her. Although everyone is always polite because of her age – she’s old enough to be everyone’s grandmother – people running the private clubs were not taking her seriously and dismissive. The worst was when the head at the Comedy Store told her she was not any good because all she talked about was being old. That’s why she decided to branch out into cabaret.