To a Friend Who’d Like Mail

Comedy in Grand Rapids, according to Betka-Pope, is the second-fastest growing industry in the city, after beer of course.

“ e amount of people who are coming to the shows and being exposed to our local comedy community has grown more in the last year than it had in the past six years,” Betka-Pope explained.

 ey say this is all because of the Comedy Project, Grand Rapids’  rst comedy theatre.  e Comedy Project, where Betka-Pope works as the theatre manager, features improv, sketch and comedy variety shows as well as a comedy training center. For Betka-Pope, the Comedy Project allows them to create a space where anybody and everybody can learn to be funny, if they are not already.

“Unlike New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago, comedy here is very supportive,” they said.

At the start of their comedy career in Grand Rapids, Eirann Betka-Pope contemplated moving to Chicago.

“I knew I could move to Chicago and press the reset button and be a small  sh in a big pond, or I could stay here and instead of wishing that something existed, try to make it here for other people who don’t have the means to move to Chicago, or don’t want to move to Chicago and still want to do stu in Grand Rapids,” Betka-Pope expressed. “I  gured I wasn’t the only one and it turns out I wasn’t — there are other people who want to do comedy in Grand Rapids.”

For a long time, the city’s comedy scene has been overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white, but Betka-Pope saw this as an opportunity to foster a space for women and minorities in the comedy world.

“I kept noticing there weren’t a lot of female stand-ups, or spaces where they felt support in the stand-up world and so I called up my funniest female friends to play together at the Grand Rapids Improv festival and we read our old diaries and our old notebooks to the audience and we improvised and after that we decided we wanted After the Grand Rapids Improv festival in 2015, with fellow comedians Katie Fahey, Kristin Hirsch, and Jenna Pope, Betka-Pop started an all-female comedy collective called Funny Girls.

Today, Funny Girls hosts weekly rehearsals that are always open to the larger public with no requirement for past experience but a willingness to use comedy seriously. Funny Girls has performed in 28 di erent shows since its inception. For 2020, Betka-Pope has big plans for the all-female collective.

“We want to actively  gure out how to continue to co-create a group that is a more diverse and representative group that includes people of color and nonbinary individuals,” Betka-Pope added.

Historically, Betka-Pope says comedy has always been about turning a mirror on society.  ey say it’s a way to help society at large  gure out how to be a better person, neighbor, leader or community member.

“It’s not pointing a  nger and saying you are doing something wrong,” they said. “It’s mimicking what’s wrong and having somebody discover it for themselves or laugh at it.”

And once they laugh at it, says Betka Pope, they are thinking more about it.

Michelle Jokisch Polo is a Grand Rapidian transplant from El Salvador & Ecuador. She loves asking questions and will take any opportunity to do so. She is passionate about creating spaces where intersectionality is encouraged and marginalized voices are elevated. Besides speaking Spanglish on a regular basis, she enjoys writing, drinking coffee, taking walks, reading poetry and riding her bike.

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“To a Friend Who’d Like Mail”

Kind folks in the community have been sending handwritten letters addressed as “To a Friend Who’d Like Mail” with sweet notes of support to Clark residents. Our residents are absolutely loving these letters and some are even writing back.

If you’d like to send a letter “To a Friend Who’d Like Mail”, you can send it to:

To a Friend Who’d Like Mail Clark Retirement Community 1551 Franklin Ave. SE Grand Rapids, MI 49506