She's six-feet, two-inches tall, she's in her 7th decade and her humorous down-home stories attract millions of viewers to her YouTube channel with clips like "Don't Send a Man to the Grocery Store." On Sounds Good, Kate Lochte meets former Miss North Carolina storyteller, wife of "Left Brain," Jeanne Robertson, who entertains at the GlemaMahr Center for the Arts in Madisonville on March 12.
Jeanne Robertson says she likes to tell stories where her audience says, "the same thing happened to me, she's like a fly on the wall of my house." She has a few stories in mind for her upcoming performance in Madisonville, some favorites and new material from a recording that came out last fall.
She won Miss North Carolina 52 years ago and says no one else has milked winning the pageant more. She made more than 500 speeches in the year she held the crown and developed a reputation for being funny. She began public speaking and fell in love with teaching. She never went the comedy club route, rather built a career at meetings and conventions. A few years ago, her YouTube clip "Don't Send a Man to the Grocery Store" went viral. She began doing public events soon after that and divides her time between speeches and shows.
Robertson considers herself a humorist not a comedian. She says a comedian's sole goal is to get the audience to laugh. They can go after anything or anyone and if the group laughs then they've succeeded. In the meeting or planning world, potentially offensive material could cost the meeting planner their job. So she's always from the beginning told stories.
"The one piece of serious advice I would say is: we've always heard 'you can't take it with you' and we're talking about money and possessions, but if you don't record your family stories in some way, you do take them with you. Or pass them down to the next generations. So I tell several stories that I got from way back two generations ago in our family. And once they've died you can tell it on them."
Jeanne Robertson "Don't Send a Man to the Grocery Store!"
North Carolinian humorist Jeanne Robertson entertains at Madisonville Community Colleege's Glema Mahr Center for the Arts on Thursday, March 12 at 7:30 p.m. To reserve seats, call 270-821-ARTS or visit glemacenter.org