WINCHENDON — I went to see Stormy Daniels do comedy because the very idea was irresistible. What I found was considerably more interesting.
There are some sentences you simply cannot read without wanting to know more.
“Stormy Daniels is doing stand-up comedy in Winchendon, Massachusetts” was one of them.
Not Boston. Not New York. Winchendon.
And so, on Saturday night, my husband Jamie, and I found ourselves sitting front-row center in a packed room of about a hundred people waiting for one of the strangest figures in recent American political history to tell jokes.
I honestly didn’t know whether Stormy Daniels would be funny. I wasn’t even sure it mattered. The sheer idea of attending a Stormy Daniels comedy show in Winchendon was already entertaining enough.
There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about it. America has a long tradition of people becoming famous through some extraordinary collision with history, scandal, or celebrity and then taking the show on the road. Before podcasts and reality television, there was the lecture circuit, vaudeville, nightclub appearances and county fairs.
Fame happened to you. Then you bought a suitcase and took it on the road for as long as you could milk it.
Stormy Daniels, I suspected, might simply be the latest incarnation of that thoroughly American tradition.
Then she walked onto the stage and she seemed almost shy. That was the first surprise.
Here was a woman who had produced, directed, and performed in over 150 adult films, testified in a criminal trial under the national gaze involving a former/future and highly-polarizing president, endured years of international media attention and became one of the most recognizable adult-film performers in the world.
And yet, she entered the packed decommissioned church sanctuary with something of the energy of a teenager who had reluctantly agreed to give a presentation in front of the class.
She acknowledged the problem immediately. She is not, she told us, a stand-up comedian. Fair enough.
The prepared portion of the evening confirmed it. Some jokes landed. Others arrived a fraction of a second before or after the moment when a more experienced comic might have delivered them. The material could use some directorial tightening for sure.
But strangely, none of that mattered very much. Because Stormy Daniels turned out to be considerably more interesting than Stormy Daniels doing stand-up comedy.
The show was billed, more accurately, as “Comedy and Storytelling,” with a live audience Q&A. The promotional warning was that audience members shouldn’t ask anything they didn’t want answered because she would be “bringing receipts.” Her own words.
That proved to be much closer to the actual experience.
The evening wasn’t entirely about the president, either.
There were stories about the adult-film business, her life and relationships, her husbands, horses, filmmaking and the peculiar circumstances of becoming Stormy Daniels.
Her husband Barrett Blade, himself a longtime figure in the adult-film industry, was running sound and lighting for the show, occasionally becoming the target of affectionate remarks from the stage.
Though yes, there was still the looming figure of the president, of course. He was, after all, the cannon which launched her into mainstream awareness.
Among the details I did not previously know and perhaps could have happily gone the rest of my life without knowing: according to Daniels, Trump was chewing Big Red gum before kissing her.
You’re welcome.
The audience was clearly left-leaning, which proved to be a great source of disappointment to a conservative journalist who arrived shortly before the show expecting to photograph, with schadenfreude, an empty house, only to be proven quite mistaken. He left.
Stormy Daniels has never fit comfortably into the political character other people have written for her. Her opposition to Trump did not make her a liberal activist. Her involvement in one of the defining political scandals of our era did not begin because she wanted a political career.
She insists she wanted the truth told.
And she seems constitutionally incapable of responding well when somebody tells her she cannot do something.
That explains the comedy tour as much as anything. Tell Stormy Daniels she can’t do stand-up comedy and there is apparently a reasonably good chance she will find a microphone.
Of course, there is money involved. Let’s not be naive. This is a business.
But the prices hardly suggested an attempt to wring every possible dollar out of notoriety. Tickets were less than $30 for general admission, $52 for the Silver VIP level we purchased, which included a post-show photograph, and about $135 for the pre-show meet-and-greet package. And while the show merch was mentioned, it was definitely not pushed.
The bills don’t get paid by whistleblowing, for the record. Quite the opposite, in her case. Even the $130,000 hush money she received was exactly half consumed by agents and lawyers.
Daniels has described years of death threats and harassment directed not only at her but at her family. She has said that threats intensified following Trump’s indictment and that her address was leaked online. Her documentary showed some of the messages and described the degree to which she feared for her life and worried about the safety of her daughter.
At one point Saturday night, she mentioned her horse. Someone had shot it. There was a quick catch in her voice. The room gasped in sympathy. And then she moved on.
She didn’t milk the moment. She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t turn it into an emotional centerpiece.
In some ways, not talking about it said more than talking about it might have.
Suddenly the comedy tour didn’t seem quite so absurd. Or perhaps it was still absurd, but the absurdity had acquired some context.
There was defiance in her presence on that stage. She wanted to tell her story. She also plainly wanted to be believed.
And she repeatedly emphasized that the things she was telling us were verifiable — that, in her terminology, she “came with receipts.”
That became especially apparent during the second half of the more-than-90-minute, uninterrupted performance.
Audience members submitted questions on cards that were collected once the comedy portion ended. There were too many for her to answer them all but she got to nearly all of them. Our own questions, though received last because of our front and center placement, never received an answer because she flipped the stack over and started at the bottom of the pile.
But what fascinated me was how she handled the stack. She didn’t rifle through it looking for friendly questions. She didn’t appear to select the safest ones. And they certainly weren’t selected for her. She took them as they had been handed to her, one after another. Including when they repeatedly asked the same question about a certain presidential bit of anatomy.
She treated the stack fearlessly. And ironically, this was where she became funniest.
Once freed from prepared jokes, a couple of which she even admitted were written by her own teenage daughter, her natural humor emerged. She was quick, self-deprecating, profane, candid, and willing to follow a thought wherever it went. Even if the punch line didn’t land.
That may ultimately be the lesson of Stormy Daniels as a comedian. She doesn’t particularly need jokes. She needs a room.
The strangest thing about the evening, however, was discovering where her vulnerability actually lives.
At one point Daniels said she was considerably more comfortable taking off her clothes in front of people than speaking publicly. I believed her. It was evident from the moment she walked onstage.
For most of us, nudity represents exposure. We imagine clothing as protection. For Stormy Daniels, the equation appears almost reversed.
Her naked body is publicly familiar territory. It is something she understands how to present, direct and control. Her private thoughts are another matter.
Standing fully dressed in front of a hundred strangers and telling them what happened to her seemed somehow more exposing than taking off her clothes ever had.
And that is when the evening stopped being about Stormy Daniels, the political character, or Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star, or even Stormy Daniels, the unlikely touring comedian.
It became about Stephanie Clifford, the human being underneath all of those things.
Even the peculiar Winchendon appearance turned out to have a perfectly ordinary explanation. A personal friend of hers named Dave knew the man responsible for bringing entertainment to the venue.
Apparently that’s all it takes to get Stormy Daniels to Winchendon. Well, that and ghosts.
Because another thing I learned Saturday night is that Stormy Daniels is a ghost hunter.
Of course she is.
She plans to return to the area later this fall to film some of her paranormal adventures.
By the end of the evening, after the pre-show VIP gathering, more than 90 uninterrupted minutes onstage and barely enough time for a bathroom break, she still had another obligation.
Pictures. Lots of them. For well over another hour, she stood with people who had waited to meet her.
By the time we reached her, she was understandably tired. So I won’t pretend we shared some profound private moment. We took our pictures. We said hello. And eventually we went home.
I had gone to Winchendon because the sentence “Stormy Daniels is doing stand-up comedy in Winchendon” made me laugh. I left grateful that I had gotten to see a little more of her humanity.
Fame has a peculiar flattening effect. Once someone becomes a character in our national story, we begin unconsciously treating them as though they are fictional. Or even as property.
Stormy Daniels becomes Stormy Daniels. The porn star. The Trump accuser. The witness. The punchline. The scandal. The symbol.
But somewhere underneath all of those nouns remains a human being who can be surprisingly shy, whose voice catches when she talks about her horse, who would apparently rather take off her clothes than tell a roomful of strangers what she’s thinking, and who seems to possess an almost pathological determination to do whatever someone tells her she cannot.
Including stand-up comedy.
Was Stormy Daniels the best comedian I’ve ever seen? Decidedly, no. But that was never really the point.
She showed up. She stood in front of a room full of strangers. She told her story. She took the questions in the order they came.
And she wore fantastic shoes.
Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist Minister of the First Church in Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
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