Comedy clan
Family fun turns into comedy routines for Browns

The Brown Comedy family is made up of the father Dalbert Brown and three of his children. Left, Brigadier, right, Delicate, and bottom, Kieth. The ventriloquist doll will be introduced for the first time Saturday, it is called "Gleln The Shetlan." [Photo by Daniel Zollinger/Independent]

By Natasha Kaye Johnson
Diné Bureau

GALLUP — If you haven't heard about the Brown Comedy Show yet, it is just a matter of time.

The family of professional comics is climbing their way up to becoming a household name in the circle of Native American comedians. Hailing from Gallup, the Browns have been invited to places as far away as Florida, New York state, and Minnesota, to put on their comedy show.

It all began six years ago when Brigadier Brown, who was 11 years old at the time, and her mother Arlene Brown were browsing through the newspaper and saw an ad for an open talent show in Window Rock. The show was being hosted by James June, now of James and Ernie Comedy ( who they would later open for.

"I said, 'Let's go enter this dad,'" Brigadier said. "So we started to practice."

Back in the'80s, Dalbert Brown did sporadic stand-up comedy at local festivities and fairs, so comedy wasn't necessarily new to the family. It had been 20 years since Dalbert put comedy on the backburner to invest more time into raising his family.

"My wife said go to work and stop being a funny guy," joked Dalbert. So when Brigadier came to her father that day and asked him to write some comedy skits for her, he was thrilled.

"My dad really got me into it (comedy)," said Brigadier, who is now 15 years old and a junior at Gallup High School. "He used to always joke around in the house."

Her first jokes on stage centered on her mother's quirky habits.

"She (Arlene) was the butt of the jokes," Dalbert said. "Her mother started her career."

It was something the audience could relate to, and Brigadier got an overwhelming positive response from the audience. It had been her first time on the stage, but that moment became a turning point for the preteen, and she knew that comedy was something that she wanted to pursue.

After the show, Dalbert and Brigadier began doing comedy shows together, and Arlene was slowly becoming their manager as they booked more gigs.

Meanwhile, Dalbert's oldest daughter, Delicate Brown, 24, was the emcee for their shows, and did short bouts of comedy to keep the audience entertained between breaks. Then one day, Delicate caught the "comedy bug," so to speak, and made a suggestion to her sister.

"I said, 'Let's put our comedy together and see if it works.' I'll make fun of you and you'll make fun of me," she told Brigadier. "And it worked. People liked it.'"

While the idea of them working together sounded good in theory, finding out whether they would mesh together as a comedy duo was easier said than done. When they finally decided to test whether they could perform together successfully, they almost psyched themselves out at their first show as a team.

It was at SIPI in Albuquerque when Brigadier was trying to scheme her way out of the whole thing.

"I was pretending to be sick so that we could go on separately," admitted a laughing Brigadier.

Delicate admitted that she was just as nervous.

"Usually I don't get nervous before a show, but at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, I wasn't sure if I would get on (stage)," she said.

"You guys were sick and nervous," Dalbert teased.

Backstage, Dalbert offered his daughters some advice, trying to pump them up for the show.

The show did go well, and from that point on, they began working together. Since then, they've made audiences break into roars of laughter with some of their most popular skits, like the watermelon contest skit and a skit where a Native woman gets pulled over by a tribal police officer.

It wouldn't be long later after their first show that they would be introduced as the up and coming "Queens of Comedy" by established Native comedians.

Coming together as a family comedy show
Soon after his sisters' skits began taking off, Keith Brown, 10, unexpectedly began following the footsteps of his father and sisters.

His first performance came after his dad offered him a proposition that he couldn't turn down.

"My dad told me to get on stage, and I didn't want to," said the Lincoln elementary fifth-grader. "Then he said, 'I'll pay you $20 bucks to go out there.'"

A few bills with the face of Andrew Jackson later, Keith began doing jokes between his dad's and sisters' performances, and even magic tricks at the end of show.

"The thing I mostly joke about is girls," said Keith, who is the youngest and only boy in the family. "It's about the bad things about living with three sisters."

When asked whether he gets nervous, Keith nonchalantly answered, "Not necessarily."

Dalbert was then hopeful that his daughter Noelle, 17, would jump on board as a comedian. But she wasn't interested.

"I wouldn't be a comedian," Noelle said. "So my dad said, 'If you won't be a comedian, you will do sound.'"

It turned out that being a sound tech was something she liked and was good at.

"She's the fuel behind the show," Dalbert said.

Dalbert is already making plans to have his 14-month-old grandson, Elias, to be part of the show.

"Delicate gave birth to a little roadie," he jokes. "I tell her to really feed him, so later he can carry our stuff."

Being funny is serious business
Although it may seem that being a comic is all fun and jokes, the Browns weren't hesitant to share their low points.

At one show, just six months after Brigadier decided to dive into comedy, she had her first "bomb out show," as her father calls it.

It was in St. George, Utah, when she began to work into her jokes, which consisted primarily of jokes about rez life. But her audience consisted of professional football players of the Miami Dolphins, and PGA golfers ( an audience that needless to say, knew nothing of rez life, and had no way to understand the jokes.

"They didn't relate to our jokes. We got booed off the stage," Dalbert said. "We were flipping backwards, we tried everything." But being "booed," Dalbert explained, is inevitable for comedians, or any other on-stage performer.

"That is why it is so nerve wracking," he said. "Because you never know when you're going to bomb out."

In his years performing, Dalbert said he has seen comedians crash and he has crashed himself, but that it is all part of a learning experience. So when his daughter experienced that feeling of "bombing out," he said he felt some relief for her.

"She was crying back to the motel," he said. "It was so cute."

He explained to her that she got a tough obstacle out of the way.

"You know that taste, you know that feeling," he told her. "You're only going to get better now."

It would be minutes before they arrived back at the hotel before they would begin laughing hysterically at the whole event.

When it comes to show time, Dalbert said every audience and every group is different. Most of the time, the family has a Native American audience, who can identify with their jokes, but even then, they have to figure out how their material can relate to different tribes, such as Din, Zuni, and Apaches.

"You're always trying to find that groove that everyone can relate to," Dalbert said.

Fine-tuning their comedy is something that they work on constantly, often jotting down things they find funny and trying to find a way to mold it into a skit.

"When somebody says something funny, we write it down," Delicate said. "That's what we'll work on."

After that, they begin to work together much like a research team.They sit together and brainstorm on how to make a joke work, and if they're lucky, they can formulate a way to structure it into a skit. Then they test the skit, as they put it, to see if an audience thinks it's funny. Sometimes it is, sometimes it just isn't.

"That's just the thing,"Dalbert said. "A lot of people say we can do comedy and we can write comedy, but you have to remember that what you write might not always be funny."

Of 10 well-thought out skits, Dalbert said that maybe just one or two skits turn get a positive reaction from an audience.

A positive message for the audience
One of the main reasons Dalbert and Arlene pushed their children to go into comedy was to keep them from getting involved with drugs and alcohol.

"If they sit around and are idle, it gets dangerous," said Dalbert. "And I can't have that. I want them to get up and be doing something positive."

Naturally, encouraging audiences to steer clear of substances and do something positive is an emphasis they make at their shows.

While some kids are into sports, bands, or barrel racing, Dalbert said his kids are into comedy. Like other parents, he constantly pushes them to work to perfect their skill.

"I pressure them a lot," he said. "I ask, 'Did you guys practice?' Practice."

Because attendance policies limit the number of shows the family can perform during the school year, the Brown family plans to take their comedy tour to the Navajo Nation this summer.

The biggest reward for the family comes after a show, when it is certain by the continuous laughter and applause, that their show was a success.

It is those moments when the Brown family becomes overwhelmed with a sense with the idea that they were able to make people smile and laugh. They each agreed that making people laugh gives them a great feeling that cannot be produced by anything else.

"It's like leaving the actual world and entering a world where you can laugh and make people laugh," Brigadier said of being on stage. "You get a good feeling out of that."

Brown Comedy will be performing on Saturday, June 23, at El Morro Theatre at 6 p.m.