How do you harness a hurricane?
Syracuse native Jessimae Peluso — a big-mouthed, bright-eyed blonde now based in Brooklyn — is a kinetic comedienne who refuses to rest until she makes the big-time. And, at age 28, she’s already more than halfway there.
Raised on our multi-ethnic North Side, she talks fast, walks fast and rides a hot pink scooter. In her act, no subject is taboo as she waxes wackily on everything from sexual shenanigans to her dead grandfather.
On stage she’s a like a category five hurricane wreaking havoc with wicked humor at 150 miles per hour. No wonder she lists spasmodic comics like Robin Williams and Jim Carrey among her influences.
Jessimae brings her “Hometown Humour Tour,” also featuring award-winning local comedian Moody McCarthy, to Eastwood’s Palace Theater, at 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 9.
Henninger High alumna
A Henninger High School alumna, Jessimae was selected as a cast member of the original improv group The Tribe a half-decade ago in Boston.
After re-locating to Brooklyn, she has become a regular at Big Apple hot spots such as the Broadway Comedy Club. CNN’s world-famous talk-show host Larry King calls her “one of the best undiscovered comedic talents in New York City.”
“I’ve been performing since 2001,” Jessimae said, noting that pursuing stardom has sometimes soured her social life. “I’m currently dating my career,” she sighs.
Her friends describe her as “weird,” “loud,” “an oddball, “a great dancer,” “a really bad cook,” “sincere” and “outspoken,” she said. “But my mom’s favorite is ‘obnoxious.'”
When I caught her act four years ago at downtown’s Jazz Central, Jessimae rocked, ranted and rambled through a full hour of material funny enough to make the Sphinx LOL.
They call it a “stand-up” act but, the way Peluso does it, there’s no standing still. Instead, she races from stage-right to stage-left and back again while yakking all the way.
Silly and sarcastic
At Jazz Central, she opened from offstage, playing a series of hilarious messages left on her answering machine which she pumped up with silly and sarcastic on-mic replies.
She improvised on a living-room set serendipitously left on the stage by a Salt City Center show. First she imitated her dad, Joe Peluso, cleaning the entire house with a single paper towel, then she spoofed her mother, Nancy Juliano, sucking up dust with all manner of vacuum attachments, and later she plopped onto the couch to imitate Maxim magazine models striking poses more appropriate for the gynecologist’s office.
Her mom and dad, whose divorce is a staple of Jessimae’s monologues, both agree that she was a precocious performer.
“Yeah, she was a devil from day one,” recalls her dad, Joe Peluso, “a good devil but a devil for sure.”
Her mom best remembers the impressions her daughter did even as a toddler.
“She’d do things like sneak up behind me then pop up and blurt out in Elmer Fudd’s voice, ‘I’m gonna get you in the end, you waskly wabbit,'” Nancy Juliano said. “Then when she was about 8 she started doing an evangelistic faith-healing minister. At a young age she grasped what other people did, and she’d embellish that and make something hilarious out of it.”
Big Apple barmaid
But it wasn’t all games and giggles at the Peluso household.
“It wasn’t funny raising her,” Juliano said. “She was, and still is, temperamental and stressed and all that goes along with having a talent like that and trying to make a living at it. Entertaining people, making people laugh, that’s what makes her the happiest.”
“I was born funny,” Jessimae insists. “My dad is funny. My mom is super-funny. My sister, Emily, isn’t funny at all. My grandma smells funny. My grandpa looks at me funny, mainly because he’s dead.”
Jessimae has been working as a Big Apple bartender at Puffy’s Tavern while honing her comedy routines. Her audition reel shows her mixing her favorite vodka cocktail, a numbing concoction she calls “The Sleep-Over.”
As a Tribeca barmaid, she hears all the pick-up lines in the world.
“Some guy came up to me and told me he was Greek and Latino and that made him a suave lover of the dance,” she quipped. “I told him I was Italian, Irish and Native American and that makes me an angry drunk with buffalo.”
The bubbly blonde often sings the boyfriend blues.
“Men are like french fries,” she said. “I only like the hot ones and they always burn me and yet I still crave them but after I’ve had a few I feel gross.”
Flaxen-haired funny girl
The flaxen-haired funny girl speaks fluent Spanish, owns a chihuahua, studies astrology, watches horror movies and, not surprisingly, loves to dance, especially to Greek music. She likes two kinds of people, those obsessed with aliens from outer space and those who tell good stories.
“I especially love to hear stories if they end with ‘and that’s how I lost my pants at church,'” she said.
At her “Bag o’ Nuts Show,” which drew nearly 800 people to the Palace last year, Jessimae made a memorable entrance, motoring up the aisle of the theater atop her Razor-brand scooter before she lampooned Syracuse traditions like the politically troubled State Fair and the polluted Onondaga Lake.
Post-Standard reviewer Mark Bialczak was duly impressed by her hyperkinetic stage presence: “She bounced around the stage, dancing, pantomiming aerobic — and other — positions,” he wrote.
Jessimae explains her sassy cynicism and her onstage restlessness as two crucial facets of her comic persona.
“I’m all about making people have fun,” she said. “The thing that comes most natural to me in life is to make others laugh. It’s a universal language. I’m a people person, as well as a pickle person…Everyone loves a dill from time to time.”
‘Hometown Humor’ Oct. 9
Jessimae Peluso presents her “Hometown Humour Tour,” hosted By Brad Loekle of TruTV’s The Smoking Gun and featuring New York City native comedienne Harriet Halloway and Syracuse’s own Moody McCarthy, at 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 9, at the Palace Theater, 2384 James St., in Eastwood.
Tickets cost $15 in advance and $20 at the door and are available at the Palace (463-9240), and at the Change of Pace, 1802 Grant Blvd. (472-4409).
