We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sunny Laprade. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sunny below.

Hi Sunny, thanks for joining us today. Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?

I started doing standup at 15 years old, and I come from a SUPER small town, so word about me being a comic got around pretty quick. At 16 I got asked to do a set opening for a band at this local man’s private party/family reunion called “Millerfest.” He told me that everyone was going to be super drunk, so that I could get as dirty as I wanted with my material, as long as I didn’t get political, and that he would give me 20 minutes on stage, which at that point in my life was the longest set I had ever done by a pretty large margin. So, because I had his permission, I wrote a TON of FILTHY jokes to fill the time, and then, right before I got on stage, I looked out into the audience and realized in horror that 50% of them were under the age of 8 years old. So I turned to the drummer of the band and said, “Oh no, my set is super dirty and the audience is full of children, what do I do?” and he looked at me, shrugged, and said, “Fuck ’em.” so I went out and did my nasty set, and I KILLED. A kid asked for my autograph after the show, and then the man who had booked me drunkenly stumbled over and handed me a wad of cash that turned out to be WAY more than what we had agreed upon!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I first became interested in standup in 7th grade, when I would listen to the standup comedy radio station on Pandora (remember Pandora?) John Mulaney quickly became one of my favorite comics, and a year later I learned that he was performing in my area, so I went with a friend. Part way through the show he starts doing crowdwork and he asks me a question. Apparently my answer was funny, because he went backstage and came back with a second microphone, which he handed to me. We talked for a minute or two before he took the mic back, and that night I decided that I would pursue standup as a career. When I was 15 I started opening for visiting comics at the college in my hometown, and at 17 they hired me to headline a show. After that I left for college and continued to do standup, mostly in Western Massachusetts for the next four years. Then, in 2021 I started working on a standup special called “Queer Enough,” which I spent the next year writing. It ran for 2 nights in a row in April of 2022 to sold out audiences at a small theater venue at Hampshire College called Emily Dickinson Hall, and was released in August of that year! The themes of that special largely revolved around my identity as a transgender woman, which is the basis for a lot of my comedy. I’m deeply proud of my identity, and there’s not a ton of high profile trans women in the standup space, so it felt really cool and important to release something that was so loudly, unapologetically trans!

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

In college I took a bunch of courses about how social media impacts politics, so I ended up reading a bunch of academic papers about the algorithm, Eventually I thought to myself, “this really doesn’t seem like it would be that hard.” So I decided to test it out by posting on tiktok over my winter break using little tricks I had learned the semester before, and by the start of the next semester I had already accumulated 10,000 followers. From there I continued to post consistently, and in the time since then I have managed to acquire over a quarter of a million followers combined across all my social media platforms, as well as run social media for brands, drastically increasing their followings in my tenure there.

My advice for people starting to build their social media presence is this: your foundation is learning how to game the algorithm. Once you have that established, then you can focus on the content, but it doesn’t matter how incredible your content is if you don’t play ball with the algorithm. Once you figure out the algorithm everything else will fall into place.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

For me the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is the feedback I get from my community. I get people of all ages reaching out to tell me that they resonated with my comedy, or that they hadn’t seen their experiences represented in standup before, or even that my work caused them to realize something about themselves. I occasionally have people come out to me in my DMs. Transitioning is scary, and so many of us struggle to find community or feel understood, especially at the beginning. I remember that feeling so well, and so much of my drive comes from the desire to create the things that I wish I had had when I was first coming out, so the idea that in some small way I’ve achieved that, that my voice and my work can provide for others what I wished I had, is so unbelievably rewarding, and makes the overwhelming amount of hate I receive as a publicly transgender woman worth it.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: sunnylcomedy
• Facebook: Sunny Laprade
• Twitter: sunnylcomedy
• Youtube: Sunny Laprade
• Other: For booking or job offers please reach out to sunnylcomedy@gmail.com, and please check out my special Queer Enough, which is free to watch on YouTube. If you want to catch a live show you can join my mailing list through the links in my social media bios! Also you can find me on tiktok at sunnylcomedy