Judi Marmel And Loni Love Kick Off Women Of Live Programs With A Bang

– Judi Marmel and Loni Love

Levity Live co-founder and President of Talent Judi Marmel was interviewed by client and comedian Loni Love to kick off a day of programming celebrating the 2021 Women of Live, honored by Pollstar and sister publication VenuesNow, on March 25.

Marmel, who was featured on the cover of Pollstar’s Women Of Live special issue that published last week, and Love sat for a “Fireside Chat” that preceded a roundtable discussion moderated by Live Nation Women’s Ali Harnell.

Love brought her longtime manager through her earliest days right out of high school as a “door girl” at the Comedy Center club in her hometown of Colorado Springs, Colo., where she “sold tickets, checked coats, then sat in the back of the club and got to see the headliner before I gave people their coats back.” 

Inspired as a young girl by Norman Lear sitcoms in the 1970s and a film called “The Idolmaker” starring Ray Sharkey, Marmel says she set her sights on a career in comedy early on.

“Little did I realize that all of these different jobs of promoting your own one-nighters, or doing press with comedians, or working inside a comedy club, or booking dates, all of those things would eventually end up becoming that career,” Marmel says.

Not only were there few outlets for comedy in Colorado Springs, there were even fewer for women to gain entry into the business of comedy.

“There were a lot of men back then,” Marmel says, “when people were still paying comedians half cocaine and half cash. And there were plenty of men that I think were just like, ‘Who is this broad and why does she keep calling me?’”

She eventually began booking rooms across Colorado and got a call one day from a writer and comedian looking for work. She agreed to book the political satirist named Steve Marmel, who became her husband and encouraged her to move to Los Angeles, and see what kind of a career she could have.

Marmel had already been booking the Aspen Comedy Festival when she was introduced to a talent executive at HBO, where she was hired as a talent scout. But Marmel knew she wanted to work for herself and after leaving the cable network, which she calls her “grad school,” put out her own shingle.

That was around the time Marmel started working with Love, who’s been a client for more than 20 years.  

“It was a magical time for that because there were standups that were getting development deals and there were some clubs that started happening and all of that,” Love said. “And then something happened where you left and called me one day and said, ‘I’m going to be working at my house.’”

Marmel says she has high expectations not only for herself, but for anyone she works with, including a mutual vision of the future and work ethic.

“One of the things that was really amazing that we did was we weren’t afraid to bet with our own money,” Marmel says of Levity Live’s earliest days. “You know, it was the boom of the DVD business. It was the boom of Comedy Central. We really sort of created this model to try to make stuff that we believe in. So we went out and we deficit financed a bunch of specials very early on.”

And in doing so, Marmel and Levity Live helped break a new generation of comedians. 

“And those specials were Sebastian Maniscalco, Bert Kreischer, Gabriel Iglesias. They were Jeff Dunham, they were Daniel Tosh, really some just fantastic people through all of that,” she says. “We would license some of them to Comedy Central or Showtime and then do a DVD model with it. And it broke a lot of careers. I think that that was a very innovative way to break comedians at that point in time.”

And even through a pandemic, those comedians and Marmel have had each other’s back. Kreischer came to her with an idea for outdoor live comedy at drive-in theaters. She helped Maniscalco develop a livestream cooking and comedy show that’s now in development for a series on Discovery+ and Netflix. Taylor Tomlinson, a rising star, performed 21 shows “under a freeway onramp” near the Punch Line in Philadelphia.

Along the way, Marmel says the biggest lesson she’s learned is about kindness. 

“Kindness to everybody you come in contact with,” she explains. “Your job is not any better than anybody else’s job and it’s not more important. And if you’re passionate about somebody and you have a gut instinct about somebody, don’t let anybody talk you out of it.”

And “don’t be an asshole,” Marmel says.

“When we started the company, I said, ‘Let’s have a no-assholes policy. Let’s don’t partner with anybody that’s an asshole and let’s don’t represent anybody that’s an asshole.’ Life’s too short.”