How a Miscarriage Led Abby Wambaugh to Become a Comedian

After having a late miscarriage, Abby Wambaugh decided to, well, “replace our baby with stand-up comedy.” To be fair, she was both under anesthesia and grief-stricken at the time, but when the meds wore off, Wambaugh decided to follow through.

The result is Wambaugh’s new off-off-Broadway comedy, The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows, running through October 25 at Dixon Place. Here, Wambaugh gets candid about loss, grief, and turning pain into art.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tell me about your path to becoming a comic.
I had done improv in high school and really loved it. I went to college for acting for about a year and it wasn’t for me. I really stepped away from performance. Then, I was living in New York City, and I had a kid, and then I had another kid, and then we moved to Denmark, where my partner is from, because that’s where we could afford to have two kids.

I was pregnant with my third and I knew I was gonna return to the arts at some point. In New York, I had run a summer camp and I was a teacher, and I was working hard to make being a parent and working work. Then we moved to Denmark, and I had all my basic needs met. And so, I started thinking, what do I want to do? I couldn’t do the same things that I was doing here. I was pregnant with my third kid and my experience is, you have three years where it’s hard to do anything but be a parent. After I had this kid, I will figure out how to be an artist.

But then I had a late miscarriage at 17 weeks. I was still high on anesthesia and one of the first things that I said to my partner was, I’m gonna replace our baby with stand-up comedy. In my head, I was putting off returning to the arts, and then, while I was in this drug-induced state, there was no excuse.

And then, you know, the drugs wore off and I was very sad. I had a few months of having grief. But this thought never left me. I figured out where to do my first stand-up set. And I did it.  

Was this a way of coping with your grief? Do you lean into dark humor? 
It’s all different kinds of comedy in the show. Mostly very silly. I don’t think I do dark humor. I’m the opposite of that. I’m very hopeful. I said in my first set, “We’ve all been sad. We’ve all eaten pizza in the shower.” But there is stuff in my show about miscarrying.  

How did you settle on the idea of doing the first three minutes of 17 different shows?
I have a lot of ideas, in general. I’m inspired by all these different kinds of comedy, and I felt like it was fun to throw stuff at the wall and be silly and then move on. I knew I wanted to tell the story of how I started comedy after a miscarriage. It feels really connected all the way through. It’s tied to that moment when I was so sad and lost and I had to pick a new direction.

As I was making the show, I had this incredible creative experience of finding that there is a theme running through the whole show that I didn’t know when I came up with it. It feels convoluted for me to say it was an epiphany, because I was like “I have this funny idea about the number nine,” and I built a long piece about the number nine, but how does this fit in the show?

I kept doing it and being like “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” and then I found out. My partner and I found my pregnancy pillow from the miscarriage, which was hidden in the basement and forms a perfect number 9 when you hold it on your shoulder. I remember seeing that and being like “That’s how many months a pregnancy is supposed to last. It’s taunting me.” It just really all came together.

How did Hannah Gadsby get involved?
Hannah and Jenney Shamash came to the show in Edinburgh. There’s a pre-recorded piece of the show where I read the audience’s minds and there’s a line after the sad part of the show where my friend who loves Hannah Gadsby says, “What is this? A Hannah Gadsby thing?”

Hannah Gadsby walks in and they sit right under a light, so I’m watching their reactions the whole time. It’s a 52-seat theater, so everyone is very aware that Hannah Gadsby is in the room. That part comes up and everybody turns to Hannah Gadsby. And Hannah just kind of throws their hands up in the air and smiles and everyone lost it for 90 seconds.   

They have been so generous with their time and experience, and Jenny then stepped in to help produce the show. It is a dream. 

What’s comedy like as an English-speaker in Denmark?
When I was building this show, there were lots of times I was performing for three people above a bar in Copenhagen. I had a clear idea of what I wanted it to be, and I do believe that I’m funny and good at this, but when you’re doing it for three people who have English as their second or third language, they couldn’t even laugh enough to make you convinced it was good no matter what. It was so awkward.

I was hovering above my body during some of these test shows, especially one time when there were six people in the audience and one was my brother-in-law, and one was my sister-in-law. I was singing a song about fucking his brother, which is not in the show anymore because of this experience, and I was looking at him in the eyes and I couldn’t actually stand to be in that room. I was picturing that one day, people will like this show, and now people love this show. It feels incredible when I remember that.