Aida Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican and Dominican comedian, actress and writer. In 2019, she had her own half-hour special on the hit Netflix comedy series “They Ready”, produced by Tiffany Haddish and Wanda Sykes. In November 2021, she released her early stand-up special “Fighting words,” which premiered on Max, and in October 2023, Rodriguez released his memoir “Legitimate child.”
For Mental Health Awareness Month, we asked Latino comedians we admire about how comedy has helped them overcome trauma and face life’s biggest challenges. Read the articles here.
I’ve always seen comedy as a coping mechanism for people who are in tougher economic situations or just dealing with very difficult circumstances. In the words of Kevin Hart: “Laugh at my pain. » My upbringing was no different. I didn’t really dabble in acting when I was younger because I was a very shy and timid child. But humor has always been around me and I learned the power of laughter very young.
My grandmother was a very funny woman. She had this incredible ability to present heavy subjects like poverty and even death in a humorous way. At first I thought it was insensitive, but I quickly realized it was just a coping mechanism and a way to make things digestible because life was already hard enough. Growing up, I saw it all. There was poverty. There was violence. There were drugs, adultery and misogyny. For some people, laughter was the only tool they had to navigate all of this.
It was at school that I really started to find my comedic voice. Comedy became my way of surviving bullies and mean people. It became my armor and my way of protecting myself from the kids who were clearly going through things at home but needed to make fun of others to feel better about themselves. Instead of being confrontational or volatile, I was just funny.
My grandmother and mother have heavily influenced my comedy and sense of humor. They were naturally funny women. My mother is a very conflicted woman. She would get into it with the other women in the building or neighborhood, and always came out on top because she knew how to shut people up with her words – and often the things she said were just plain funny. My grandmother was always very witty about it. It’s funny when I hear people say that women aren’t funny, or I sometimes hear Latino men say that they don’t really like female comedians, and then we hear them tell their stories. They always say how hilarious their grandmothers or mothers are. Latinas are truly the comedians of the family. Many of us are naturally funny – it’s in our blood.
I started watching stand-up comedy when I was little. My uncle listened to Richard Pryor. That was my first introduction to stand-up comedy. I loved Johnny Carson and I loved “I Love Lucy.” I watched El Chavo and La Chilindrina with my grandmother. In Miami they had a show called “Qué Pasa USA”. It was a show about a Cuban family, and the grandmother on the show was one of the funniest people I’ve ever seen. I began to appreciate humor and feel the relief it provided at a relatively young age. But it wasn’t until later in life that I realized I wanted to do this for a living.
Comedy came after acting. I modeled for years and moved to Los Angeles in 2000 to become an actor. I started doing stand-up in 2008. I was out to brunch to celebrate a friend’s birthday and she asked us to roast her. I roasted her and a friend said, “Oh, you should do stand-up. You’re naturally funny.” He gave me the address and the information on an open mic, and I went and did it, and I never stopped.
Once I started performing at open mics, I started to notice how healing comedy was – not only for the audience but also for me. I didn’t really start with observational humor. I went straight to the wound. My first jokes were about my modeling career and becoming anorexic. I addressed difficult things I had experienced in my own life, and it helped me heal from those experiences while making people who could relate feel seen.
My work became cathartic when I started writing about my childhood. People would come up to me after my sets and say, “Oh my God. Thank you. I’ve never seen a version of myself or a reflection of myself.” My childhood started to influence my material so much that it became like therapy for me. I began to unpack and heal from many of the traumas I experienced growing up, which ultimately inspired me to write my memoir, “Legitime Kid.” It made me realize how much our stories matter, and we shouldn’t downplay them because white America tells us they don’t matter. This is what gave me fuel.
Making jokes about my family, my neighborhood, and the difficult things I experienced growing up allowed others to see themselves in my stories. When it came to my own healing, that relatability was part of it. It was seeing that I was not alone and that there were others who also did not grow up with their father in their lives. It was the first time I started to feel proud of where I came from, and it helped me overcome some of the difficulties I was facing. Even with the jokes about my mother, a lot of people would come up to me and tell me their mother was the same. In many ways, it also healed my relationship with my mother, as performing and healing people through my words contributes to my own healing.
As a Latina, we were raised with this mentality that you don’t share family affairs. So even though I had hesitations at first, they approved every joke I ever told about family before it came on stage. I always make sure they’re okay with it. I was especially careful when it came to my mother and daughter, because sexism and misogyny, especially in our communities, are rampant and real, and people love to demonize women. So I was always very wary of presenting them in a way where it would take off on its own and people would say shit.
Making jokes about the things I experienced growing up also allowed me to see the beauty in my upbringing. It wasn’t completely dark and everything wasn’t so bad. When I first started doing stand-up, I would hear people all the time saying things like, “All these black and Latino comedians talk about is their life in the neighborhood, the vouchers.” food and being broke. “You’ll hear this in white comics about how our comedy wasn’t “high.” But I never allowed them to push me into a situation where I felt like I had to imitate them to be valuable, because a lot of people do that. Early in my career, I saw that there was a lot of pressure on actors of color not to perpetuate stereotypes, but the truth is that some of our closest people are crooks. Some of our loved ones have behaved a certain way, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s not exclusive to people of color – there are white people like that too.
Comedy brings us all together. There’s a connective tissue there, especially in such a diverse community. Through humor we can find ourselves and find connection. People loved it when George Lopez talked about his grandmother because it’s something many of us have in common. Comedy also functions as a universal language. Even though we’re not from the same culture, everyone laughs because they have that connective tissue. Comedy connects people from all walks of life and backgrounds through laughter.
— As told to Johanna Ferreira
Johanna Ferreira is the content director of POPSUGAR Juntos. With over 10 years of experience, Johanna focuses on how intersectional identities are a central part of Latinx culture. Previously, she spent nearly three years as an assistant editor at HipLatina and freelanced for numerous media outlets, including Refinery29, O Magazine, Allure, InStyle, and Well+Good. She has also moderated and spoken on numerous panels on Latinx identity.
