August Cover Lisa Marie Riley of @OneFunnyLisaMarie on Healing, Humor, Food and Family
I was sitting in my living room with my parents when I started writing this article. Like a lot of native New York “Boomers,” they now live in a condo in Florida for 11 months out of the year. They were both in a funky mood, probably because visiting me reminds them of all the amazing food they gave up to move down south, so I decided to just get some work done. I started my “research” – listening intently to Lisa Marie Riley’s reels on Instagram – when I realized my parents were listening too, and howling with laughter. With every new video I put on, they laughed harder. Like a lot of the people who come to see her stand-up comedy shows on tour, her thick New York accent and sarcastic wit had them feeling right at home.
Lisa Marie Riley, a.k.a. @onefunnylisamarie on TikTok and Instagram, lives in Staten Island with her 7-year-old son. She was born and raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, which becomes immediately apparent once you hear that signature Italian-American inflection. For fellow New York natives like myself, her content is relatable and hilarious. But those who aren’t from around here find her just as amusing!
If you ask Lisa Marie whether she’s a comedian, she will say no. She doesn’t write jokes, she doesn’t perfect her set, she usually doesn’t even know what’s about to come out of her own mouth before she picks up the phone to film her often-viral videos. After almost 20 years as a court stenographer, a job which she very much enjoyed, she never expected her career – or her life – to take the turn that it did.
After learning that her husband was extremely ill in 2019, Lisa Marie began posting funny videos to social media as a way of coping with the stress, a creative outlet meant mostly for the eyes of close family and friends. But her uproarious musings ended up catching the eye of many, many more. She now has almost 250k followers on Instagram and nearly half a million followers on TikTok.
Sadly, Lisa Marie’s husband passed two years ago, leaving her to raise their young son alone.
Initially, I thought she and I would discuss how humor has helped heal her grief. I imagined her story might inspire others facing such a devastating loss (and I’m sure it has). But there’s a good reason funny people don’t like to be too serious, and Lisa Marie is no exception.
As we talked and as I continued watching (okay, binging) her videos, I realized that for Lisa Marie, healing doesn’t actually require a sense of humor at all. For someone who is hilarious when they aren’t even trying to be, the funny just comes naturally. It’s as much a part of life as breathing. For Lisa Marie, healing comes from family, friends and even food (she’s Italian after all!).
Her family – notably her mother and sister – is featured heavily in her videos. They are often cooking; she says that in her family, they “live to eat, not eat to live.” I suspect that whoever makes the honey chicken on Sundays at Bruzzese’s Salumeria in Staten Island and New Jersey has helped her more than any therapist ever could (#iykyk). She’s even toying with the idea of writing a cookbook next.
I sat down for a chat with Lisa Marie (while she was getting her gorgeous glossy locks done) to discuss parenthood, family, her new career and growing up in Brooklyn.
Tell me about starting @OneFunnyLisaMarie and how it has affected your life.
I started in 2019, right before covid and I wasn’t thinking about anything coming from it. I just did it to laugh and joke around with family. I wanted to forget about what was going on in real life for like five or ten minutes a day. I needed a healthy vice. I needed a place where I could go to forget about my reality. Everybody on there, for a minute or two, escapes from their reality to laugh and joke. I mean, your problems are still there but you are able to escape for a little bit. So it became a healthy vice for me. And then it became a thing.
Back then, my page was about my husband, being a wife and parenting, but then when he passed I had to switch it. So now I talk about my sister, hanging out, getting my hair done or just whatever I think of at the moment.
Social media gave me a new lease on life. It gave me a different career. It led my life in a different direction that I never knew I was going in. And this is life. Life is life. Things happen, but you keep going. I don’t want to be all depressing. I want to give people hope that there’s new life. Life goes on. You got to just go with it.
I’m grateful for this different life. It’s a wonderful thing. I enjoy it, and I love it. It’s a wonderful thing to work and get paid doing what you love. This is all new to me, but it’s a beautiful thing when you could just fall into the right job, the right thing, something that’s perfect for you. I’m lucky for that.
You seem so close with your family. Have they been a major source of strength for you?
Yes, they are great. We are a very, very close family. But my source of strength and reason I keep going is my son. My son is everything; he is my whole life.
Does your son think you’re funny?
No, there’s nothing about me he finds funny at all!
Do you joke around a lot together though?
I play with him a lot but I’m very strict with a lot of things. I don’t let it be where we are like friends. So we joke around and we laugh, but serious is serious, and things have to be done. I parent him different. One Funny Lisa Marie is somebody that I am, and it became who I am, but we’re not a constant house of goofing around all day long. Behavior, respect, things like that are very important to me.
Sometimes in my posts I’ll talk about camp or school or stuff like that, but I don’t want to make a mockery out of that stuff. I don’t want to be one of those people that makes everything a joke. I talk about the projects, I talk about crazy hat day, stuff like that. But to me, school is important, so I don’t want to mock it.
And I don’t want his life to be all about the fact that his mother’s comedian on social media. I want to be his mother, and his mother works and she does what she does, and that’s it.
Is he ever in your videos?
No, there’s no reason for it because people are cruel and people are nosy. Social media is the devil’s playground. When you’re putting kids on there, you’re opening them up to “here he is!” Why do they need to see him? I don’t feel there’s a need for anybody to see him. I’m very overprotective. You hear so many stories. I don’t want him to even have social media, because to me, there’s no reason for him to.
Go back in the day to when I was a kid. This would have been unheard of, doing something like social media and letting people know your life, your comings and goings. You know, it’s a new world. It’s really a new world.
Do you feel like the persona that you portray online is different from your real life persona?
Well, that’s how I really am. But I know when to be serious and when to conduct being One Funny Lisa Marie. It became a job for me. But the reality of it is, I’m not like that all the time.
How do you come up with ideas for your videos?
I just pick up the phone and talk about whatever. I don’t think about anything that I do. Nothing’s prepared. My phone isn’t set up, I don’t have any of the gadgets. I just pick up the phone and I talk. It’s like, just what’s happening.
Wow! That’s impressive. What about when you do your stand up comedy shows?
I wing it. I have no set. I don’t have anything. I just go off and I talk. I kind of just talk about whatever comes to me at that moment.
I’m not a professional comedian. I’ve become one because of social media. They said they were going to pay me, so I became one. Literally, somebody called me ten times to do a show. I said, What are you talking about? I’m not a comedian. On the tenth phone call they said ‘you know we’re gonna pay you, right?’ So I said, Well then I guess I’m a comedian.
What do you love most about living in New York?
Growing up in Brooklyn. I absolutely loved everything about my Brooklyn childhood, and I miss it a lot.
What are some of the things that you enjoy doing with your son?
We don’t need to do much. We hang out. He’s a play-outside kind of kid. We play outside all day long. Just regular, normal stuff. We’re not jet setting and spending thousands of dollars a week. That’s not what I am. That’s not what we do. I don’t keep up with the Joneses. I do what I can do, and that’s it. We spend a lot of time with friends and my sister lives down the block. My mother lives downstairs, which means a lot of just sitting in the driveway all day long. Just like how I grew up.
Lisa Marie Riley may not consider herself a comedian, but we know otherwise. Get tickets for her ongoing standup comedy tour “I’m Done With It” at CoastalEntertainment.com/events and follow her on Instagram and TikTok at @OneFunnyLisaMarie.
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