Retired teacher Helaine Witt performing onstage at Comic Strip Live on the Upper East Side.
While living in San Francisco in her 20s, a laid-off office worker and sometime substitute teacher named Helaine Witt was strolling past the Holy City Zoo comedy club when a barker beckoned her inside.
Witt had never dreamed of becoming a comedian, but by the time she walked out of the club, she had signed up for improv, stand-up and joke-writing classes. In lieu of tuition, she typed up a manual for the manager and loaned him her vacuum to clean up whenever a rising comic named Robin Williams appeared there. Her big coup at the time was selling several jokes to comedian Joan Rivers for $10.
Witt ultimately returned to New York City — where she had been a substitute teacher. She continued to sub and held temporary positions before settling in as a permanent 2nd-grade teacher at PS 140 in Jamaica, Queens. After 23 years of service, Witt retired from teaching in 2011. Fueled with decades of funny stories about teaching, Witt decided to go full throttle in making a return to the comedy scene as her second act.
In addition to jokes based on her experiences as an educator, Witt regales her audiences with the story of how Rivers bombed during an appearance on the “Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” with one of Witt’s jokes. The wisecrack had an accountant dancing to “Let’s Get Fiscal” — instead of to Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical” — on tax day. Rivers told the joke three times and no one laughed.
As Witt tells it now, with her typically dry humor, “I say to the audience, ‘And that’s why I’m in this basement in 104 degrees here tonight 40 years later — because my joke did so well on Johnny Carson.’”
Witt performs in early shows and at open mics at Manhattan clubs like St. Marks Comedy Club in the East Village and Comic Strip Live on the Upper East Side. She gets paid gigs at senior centers and libraries. She has a standing arrangement with comedian friend and mentor Vanessa Hollingshead to drive her to a gig in New Jersey in exchange for time to perform her “tight five” onstage.
Witt took comedian Jo Firestone’s senior comedy class at the Greenwich House Senior Center, an experience that Firestone turned into the critically acclaimed “Good Timing with Jo Firestone” documentary on Peacock in 2021.
Witt also has appeared in comedians’ independent films — short works they try to enter into film festivals — playing various roles from a woman dressed as a shark to a conservative activist.
Another claim to fame? Meeting John Lennon and Paul McCartney. On May 12, 1968, she and her friend Jude (yes, like the famous Beatles tune) met the Beatles’ pair after hiding in a hotel closet on a tip from band staff members about where they could “run into” them. The two young Beatles fanatics ended up strolling with the singers through Central Park and even took photos with them.
Witt celebrates each May 12, she says in a clip posted on YouTube: “I know that anything you want in your life, your dreams could come true because it happened to me.”