Benefield: Retired Santa Rosa doctor gets bitten by the comedy bug in her 60s

Jade Wong is nothing if not brave.

Proof: She regularly patrols an area of Spring Lake Regional Park in search of strangers.

After she stops them, Wong’s pitch is simple.

Delivered with a wide smile, she tells folks she is a stand-up comic and asks if they’d be interested in being her audience for a 4-minute set?

In some cases, she’s turned down.

In others, the curious accept and take a seat on the designated bench where the 66-year-old Wong, a relatively, recently retired local ophthalmologist, launches into her set.

She compares this routine she has established to busking on a city street. She just happens to prefer the lakeside setting at the park.

Unsure if she coined the term, she’s calling it “Stealth comedy.”

It’s also her daily learning experience. And she’s incredibly serious about her laughs.

“During the pandemic there were lots of ways to study online,” she said. “The way to get better is not only to learn the craft of writing a joke, but to get in as much performance as you can.”

So five, maybe six, days a week, Wong rides her bike or drives to this corner of the park and pitches potential audience members. She sometimes uses the down time between sets to practice yoga.

But her primary focus — her goal these past two years since her retirement — is to sharpen her stand-up comedy skills.

“I retired unexpectedly during the early part of the pandemic,” she said. “I was looking for something to do."

She tells the story of washing dishes one evening while her adult son watched a Dave Chappelle stand-up special.

“I just fell in love with stand-up comedy almost instantly,” she said. “I wasn’t a fan before that.”

She has taken part in Zoom collaboration groups, participated in a comedy podcast, and watched a lot of videos.

But these park sessions give her a chance to hone her craft in front of a live audience, and there is nothing more productive, she said.

“This works quite well,” she said. “It almost gives you an intimacy effect.”

So frequent are Wong’s comedy sessions in this corner of the park that multiple people on Monday morning paused to say they had seen her set on prior visits.

Still others, when given Wong’s pitch to be an impromptu audience, just kept walking.

One woman said she had to relieve the babysitter. Another trio said they were hustling off to get pedicures. Another man simply said, “I have an appointment.”

But Wong remained upbeat and undeterred.

And she got takers.

Some said they stopped just because they admired Wong’s pluck.

“It took a lot of guts to ask this country boy-looking guy if he wants to hear some comedy,” said Jon Damron of Santa Rosa. “She looked like she really wanted to do this.”

And what did Damron think of Wong’s 4-minute set that launched with a bit on her chosen profession (ophthalmology) and ends with tales of jokes landing hard or losing audiences to attention drift?

“I liked it. I did,” he said. “I thought she was pretty funny. She needs some practice and some polish, but she’s obviously a student of it.”

Jakota Rivas, her husband J and their daughter Jalie, all of Napa, stopped mainly because Wong reminded them of Rivas’ mom.

“I wanted to see it,” Jalie said. “Four minutes ― what could the harm be?”

Pointing to her dad talking on the phone a few paces away, Jalie said Wong scored a win without even realizing it: “The fact that he even laughed once before he took a phone call, that’s something.”

Friends Holly Mead and Lilli Fowler said yes just to acknowledge Wong’s gumption.

“It’s hard to approach people,” Mead, of Santa Rosa, said. “It’s hard to reach out and show yourself.”

And in the end, they were entertained, they said.

“I’d sit at this bench again,” Fowler, of Rohnert Park, said. “I just wanted to see it. I’ve never said no to comedy.”

Wong is disarming, said Ann Butler, who was approached while walking in the park a few weeks back.

It’s hard to be entirely cynical watching a woman speak into a tube of sunscreen or use a water bottle as a stand-in for a microphone.

“I’m usually quite skeptical,” Butler said. “She didn’t seem dangerous and I thought, ‘Well, we’ll see how this goes.’

“Honest to Pete, we were laughing,” she said. “The beauty of her stuff is it’s on the ordinary, especially from a woman’s perspective.”

Growing up in Wisconsin, where her parents ran a restaurant, Wong said she was never considered the funny one.

In fact, when she and another student were chosen to address their high school graduating class and the other speaker had the audience in stitches with his jokes, it was something of a revelation for Wong.

“I gave this serious speech about idealism and doing good for the world ― what was expected,” she said. “Then Dave Sutton, son of the biology teacher, captain of the football and baseball team, he gets up there and tells jokes. I didn’t even know that was a thing.”

She dipped her toe in the water years later, but that wasn’t encouraging either.

She recalled attending a women’s retreat some 15 to 20 years ago. There was an open mic night and she signed up.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll tell a joke.’ and I didn’t even know a joke,” she said. “I had to have my husband teach me.”

The response?

“Crickets,” she said.

Again, Wong was undeterred. Years later, she tried again when she joined a local Toastmasters group.

The idea there wasn’t to hone her comedy chops but to confront her fear of public speaking.

She described her first icebreaker speech as stale. She scrapped it for a talk sprinkled with jokes. Much better.

“I wasn’t trying to get good at it. I was trying to face my fear,” she said of that initial foray into public speaking. “I ended up facing my fear of public speaking and really loving being in front of a microphone.”

The result was getting bitten by the comedy bug.

“A thing that made me stick with it is I thought people were just spontaneously funny. I thought funny was just at the top of their head, but they really have to work at it,” she said. “I realized, ‘Oh, it’s not just inherent funniness. It’s not always the class clown who does this.’ If you work hard and persist you can actually do it.”

In addition to her sessions in the park, Wong has taken the stage at local open mics at Brew Coffee and Beer, Barrel Proof Lounge and Hopmonk.

She had a gig in New York.

She’d like to grow her audience but also wants to solidify her work. That’s what the park sessions are for.

But they are also just for fun.

“I started at ground zero,” she said. “But I have made a lot of strides.”

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.