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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits Podcast. I’m your host, Seth Payne.

I’m so freakin’ excited to present this episode to you guys. I got to sit down with a very dear friend of mine who used to live in DC who now resides in New York City. Her name is Sarah Ann Houghton. She is such a delight. Very sweet, very weird, very funny.

I first came across Sarah performing with her duo, Dream Spooners, with Erin Murray in DC and was hooked. I also got to see her perform on her Harold team in DC and do Character Shows at Dojo. Then she moved off to New York City, and she’s been doing sketch comedy, going through the UCB program, and a bunch of other really fun stuff. We’ll get into her acting background, her clowning background, her writing background—she’s been doing it all.

Highlights from my interview with Sarah Ann Houghton

I got to sit down with Sarah at the York Fringe Festival a few months ago. I had such a blast interviewing her. She has such a crazy comedy history. I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I did.

Some of the following responses have been edited for clarity. You can hear the full interview by listening to the podcast.

What’s your performance background?

I grew up doing community theater starting in elementary school. Later, I did high school musicals, and I got my BA in theater. Comedy really didn’t happen for me until college when we did sketch. Our theater department put on the shows, and it was just an opportunity for people to write and then perform what they wrote.

For that program, I collaborated with friends. I don’t think I was super confident as a writer yet. I wasn’t super confident yet as a comedian. I think I found my voice a little bit in college through a character I liked to do. My friends made me kill her off in a show, though. They were like, “Please don’t ever bring that character back.”

Her name was Karen Fillone, and she was pretty much a character made up of all of my worst qualities, heightened. She has really bad allergies, so she’s a mouth breather. Her pockets are full of stuff, like dirty tissues and loose food. She’s the friend in the group that no one really wants. They keep her around because she’s got a good heart, but she’s also a little too sexual. She’s a pelvis-first kind of mover. She moves with her groin. That’s where she makes a lot of her decisions, whether it’s food or another person she seems to be attracted to.

It’s who I would like to be more. Karen doesn’t second-guess her choices. It’s a very fleshed-out character.

How did you get into comedy?

After college, I went abroad to teach English in South Korea. My plan was to be gone for a year, but I was gone for seven years.

Korea has a pretty strong expat community. There are a lot of people living there from other countries. There’s also a large community there for the US military bases, a lot of journalists, and people who are married to others who live there. So there are a lot of native English speakers.

I connected with those people,