Abby Bland’s Godzilla’s Not A Dinosaur debuts this Friday at KC Fringe Festival

Kansas-City-based comedian and slam poet Abby Bland will debut her second Fringe show, Godzilla’s Not a Dinosaur, this Friday at Westport Fleamarket’s Sparkle Room.

After starting slam poetry competitions in 2018, Bland landed herself on the first-ever team that the Kansas City poetry slam sent to a national competition in Chicago that same year. Her natural career progression led her to comedy in January 2022, followed quickly by the debut of her first Fringe comedy show You Are Here at KC’s 2022 Fringe Fest.

Tackling similar themes as last year’s debut, Godzilla’s Not a Dinosaur is a pop-culture-centered one-woman show blending self-deprecating humor and slam poetry. Through a series of autobiographical anecdotes, Bland seeks to remind audiences to not take life too seriously while delving into discussions on the vitality of Princess Leia and all her favorite pop culture figures.

We sat down with the KC native ahead of the show’s debut to talk about blending poetry and comedy and the genesis of Godzilla’s Not a Dinosaur.

The Pitch: How did you get started in comedy?

Abby Bland: I got started first as a slam poet. And then I had always had an interest in stand-up comedy. So I started pursuing comedy in January last year and started going out to the open mics, because I was working on my first Fringe show that I did last summer. I’ve always been a writer and performer and comedy just naturally fit into how I found my voice as I was growing in my career. It’s been a fun addition to the toolkit.

What has your journey looked like in slam poetry? What inspires your poems?

I got interested in poetry when I was pretty young as a teenager. And then I studied English in college and studied a lot of contemporary living poets. I loved the way poetry acts as a storytelling medium for especially a lot of marginalized voices. And then slam poetry is just this fun competition that was invented in the 80s where poets get up and they read their poems and random judges give them a score, and then the highest-scoring poems move on. But it’s really founded on the idea of poetry as truth-telling, and about sharing their story and making sure that everyone knows that their voice matters and can be heard.

What inspires me in my poetry and also in my comedy is the idea of storytelling, and how the way we look at things and the way we talk about things is important. And sometimes, it can be really laughable—how seriously we take certain things versus things that we don’t think are as serious. With my poetry, I’m always asking people to pay attention to things they might overlook. And with my comedy, I feel like I’m doing the opposite of getting us to laugh at things we’re so focused on all the time.

Courtesy Abby Bland

How did you transition from poetry into comedy or start to merge the two?

I had always loved watching stand-up comedy, and it had always been something I was interested in. I had been performing slam poetry for a few years at that point, and I honestly really wanted to work on my stage presence as a performer. Because there’s a big difference between the way that poets perform and the way that comedians perform. My poems had always been kind of funny, which is not the traditional slam style. And then I had a couple of friends in the comedy scene who suggested that maybe pursuing standup would help flesh out my idea for the show that I was working on.

This month you’re premiering your show Godzilla’s Not A Dinosaur at KC Fringe Festival—can you tell us about the show?

Godzilla’s Not a Dinosaur is a show about pop culture, about the stories we tell, and about making sure everybody knows that they can just be themselves. I don’t want to give too many spoilers about the twists in the show, but it’s a combination of poetry and comedy. And it explores different events from my life and different pop culture things that I really love, like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “Adventure Time,” and things like that. It’s a fun, feel-good show that I hope people walk away from knowing that it’s okay to be themselves and that your story matters. And the story can change. And sometimes there are things that we need to pay more attention to.

How do you combine the two seemingly dialectic elements of comedy and then the more serious messages of poetry? Why do you think that is impactful?

I think it’s important to realize that people are multifaceted and I think by using two different mediums, it really helps hone in on that. You don’t have to be just one thing. And combining the two is pretty easy physically because you just need a mic and a room to be in.  And I’m still constantly experimenting with the way I flow between the two. But it’s a fun combination. And I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback about it. I think comedy and poetry ask for different things from the audience. It’s a lot of giving the audience signals to understand what’s happening on stage. So like, knowing when a poem is happening, versus when I’m just doing stand-up is an important aspect of how the show flows.

Would you say a lot of the topics you cover are autobiographical in your show?

Yes, and I think that’s pretty true to the nature of both poetry and comedy. They’re usually pretty autobiographical mediums. So it’s a lot of anecdotes from my life, cast on larger issues and talking about just kind of the way that we exist in the world because the human experience can be kind of absurd sometimes.

You’ve made a name for yourself by writing what you call “response poems”—can you tell us about that?

A lot of my early work came, honestly, from a lot of things that men will say, because just of how I exist in the world. Response poems are this idea of responding to something. I have a poem about Princess Leia that was originally written in response to someone saying that Princess Leia wasn’t important to the Star Wars franchise. And response poems are a pretty popular way of organizing your poem in slam. I think every poem is a response poem, if you really think about it because it’s responding to something that you saw in the world. A lot of my work is rooted in sort of that autobiographical response, where it’s like “This happened to me, and so I created this piece of art.”

I have poems that are in response to men catcalling, or men commenting on how short I am because I’m five-two. And so a lot of men have commented on that over my life. Then a lot of my show is also just responding to female characters that I really enjoyed. So like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and other stories that have impacted me as I have grown up.

What was your inspiration for the show? Is it your second Fringe show?

Yes, this is only my second Fringe show. But I’ve been putting on poetry shows for a long time. What inspired this show was, I really liked the idea that Godzilla’s Not a Dinosaur. It honestly came from a silly little Tik Tok that I made during quarantine when Godzilla Vs King Kong came out. And people were talking about who was going to win in that fight, and they were reducing Godzilla to a dinosaur, and that’s not what Godzilla is. That kind of overlays on my own personal experience existing as someone raised a woman in the world and those sorts of expectations that get placed on you, no matter who you are. Expectations get placed on you that maybe you feel are incorrect, or that you can’t live up to or don’t want to live up to. That was kind of the impetus behind creating this specific show.

Why do you think Fringe Festival is important in Kansas City, especially for comedians?

Fringe is important because it’s uncensored art. These are the shows that you’re not going to see anywhere else because they’re not being put on through what I understand as the traditional theater process. It’s a really free environment, but it’s also a really challenging environment because a Fringe show can only be about 50 minutes and you only have 10 minutes to set up and 10 minutes to tear down. And you’ve got artists coming in one after the other in these venues. So it’s a great chance for the Kansas City public to get to see a bunch of different shows all at once.

Bland has five showtimes for Godzilla’s Not a Dinosaur at KC Fringe, set to perform July 21, 22, 25, 27, and 29 at Westport Fleamarket’s Sparkle Room. You can get your tickets here.