Two funny ladies will descend upon Tucson this weekend for two very funny shows.
Standup Anjelah Johnson (“Nail Salon,” Bon Qui Qui) will kick things off Saturday night with a sold-out show at Desert Diamond Casino. Actress Jane Lynch (“Glee,” “Best in Show”) will perform “See Jane Sing” with the very funny entertainer Kate Flannery (“The Office”) on Sunday for the University of Arizona Hillel Foundation.
We caught up with each of them to get an idea of what to expect.
All laughs and the return of Bon Qui Qui
There’s one thing Johnson, 32, must do at every show she performs: “Nail Salon” — the routine where she gets upsold in a Vietnamese nail salon that went viral on YouTube in 2007. As of today 33.5 million people have seen it, making it one of the most successful comedy videos of all time.
“If I don’t do ‘Nail Salon’ I think I would get stoned to death,” she said, calling from home in Los Angeles. “I definitely love to give people a little bit of what they came to see. They know me from this. It’s how they heard of me. It’s kind of like ‘the moment they’ve all been waiting for’ type of thing, and I would feel horrible to deprive them of that.”
She’s also likely to slip into Bon Qui Qui, the ghetto-fabulous and fantastically rude fast-food employee character she created during her “Mad TV” tenure in 2007. A couple of years ago, Johnson put Bon Qui Qui on hiatus.
“I was really just done with the character; I didn’t want to do it any more,” she said. “After ‘Mad TV,’ people still wanted to hear from her but I didn’t have a way to bring her to the people in a way that I could be proud of.”
Her husband, the Christian hip-hop singer Manwell Reyes from Group 1 Crew, convinced her to give Bon Qui Qui life as a rap artist. In January, Johnson as Bon Qui Qui released the rap parody album “Gold Plated Dreams.”
“To think that this character I did on ‘Mad TV’ years ago is alive and well and she has her own album on iTunes now. Her career’s doing better than mine,” Johnson said.
See Jane Laugh, See Jane Sing
Lynch will not be doing any standup when she takes the Centennial Hall stage on Sunday, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of laughter spilling out from the hall.
Lynch can’t help but be funny; it’s in her DNA. Just watch her on the highly rated Fox comedy “Glee,” which ends its six-season run with a two-hour swan song March 20.
Lynch has been on the show since the beginning, playing the aggressive cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, hellbent on putting the glee club in its place.
“It’s gone off the rails in terms of crazy,” Lynch said of what to expect from the finale. “Sue Sylvester is thinking that she is going to be retiring and she wants to go out with a blaze of glory literally. She’s just ruining everything. ... She’s just up to her craziness.”
Lynch said the series coming to an end was a little more sad and bittersweet “than I expected it to be.” When we spoke in early February, the show was three weeks from wrapping up.
“It’s been almost seven years. ... I’ve known these people a long time, especially the crew,” she said. “You don’t see your fellow actors every day but you see the crew every day.”
Lynch’s stage show mixes song and musical numbers that cross all genres. She teams up with a five-piece “killer band” and vocalist Flannery for what the 54-year-old Emmy Award-winning actress said will be “an hour’s worth of musical fun.”
Lynch is taking “See Jane Sing” to 50 venues over the next six months. This month she also returns to host the NBC game show “Hollywood Game Nights.”
