The BUZZZZ Surrounding Tanyalee Davis!

Tanyalee's Press Page!

By JULIE SZEGO
Tuesday 10 April 2001

Ladies and gentlemen ... (spotlight, drum roll)
presenting two fat ladies and a midget. That
made you squirm, huh? To laugh or not to laugh?
That is the question.

The two generously proportioned ladies, Faye
Younger and Linda Haggar - aka Miss
Candy-Girl and Miss Gerda from comedy duo,
Miss Itchy - sit around a table in Melbourne
Town Hall. The "two fat tarts in taffeta frocks"
as they call themselves wear their pearls and
aqua eyeshadow. Between them is the
self-described midget, Tanyalee Davis, who has
a stand-up routine, A Damn Midget, at this
year's festival.

Miss Itchy produced Davis' show and they introduce the American
newcomer to Melbourne audiences. Physically the trio may not fit, but their
subversive comedy comes from roughly the same place.

"Throwing Tanyalee in with us is a double conundrum," said Younger. "It's
nice to be caught in the middle of it."

How did these three come together and how on Earth do we take them?

About the time Younger and Haggar were acclimatising Melbourne
audiences to Miss Itchy, Davis was struggling to get known in her native
Canada.

It was about eight years ago.

Davis, then in her early 20s, had big ambitions.

She left her hometown and headed for Hollywood with an established routine;
a racy, quirky look at life through the eyes of a woman whose mother made
her join "Little People of America," when she was a child. She was pissed off
but inspired too. So she stood in line for eight hours outside the Laugh Factory
on Sunset Boulevard to get three minutes on stage.

Clearly, it was worth the wait. Davis quickly established her name and
became a regular at the Comedy Store.

"I established a following especially in redneck circles," said Davis, reeling off
the names of cities: North and South Carolina, Tennessee.

"They (the rednecks) tend to live vicariously through me," she said. They also
expect that someone with a disability should be shy and reserved which I'm not ...
so some of them come to me and say things like 'hey, you're really dirty'.

"Los Angeles can be very conservative, very politically correct and some
people would take offence at me calling myself a midget, they say 'hey, come
on, you shouldn't use that word'. It makes them uncomfortable."

She admits that some in the short-statured community have been less
accepting of her routine, mainly because of the word "midget".

"Look, if it offends people I don't want to piss them off," Davis said. "But
personally I've come to terms with that word ... I took it and made it positive."

A few years later, Davis got talking to Miss Itchy in a comedy newsgroup
online. They met when Miss Itchy travelled to Los Angeles in 1999, and a
meeting of wicked minds soon followed.

And so here is Davis, a guest of these festival veterans, unleashing her
routine on genteel Melburnians, sparing nearly nothing as she ponders toilet
cubicles, tampon strings, and the sexual, well, advantages, her height brings.

Get the picture? Now put that picture alongside Miss Itchy's. Younger, 33,
and Haggar, 43, call their form of entertainment a "brutal" exploration of their
"dark inner self."

"It's scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel and seeing what's down there,"
Younger said.

They introduce Davis with a video filmed in Disneyland: Miss Itchy fussing
over Davis, pretending she's a six-year-old. "Where's your mummy, where's
your mummy?" they demand.

Squirming again? Any twitching at the corners of your mouth? Go on, you can
do it.

"I MAY BE TINY… BUT I'M BIG ON TALENT!"

(New York, NY - May 22, 2000)

On an upcoming show MAURY welcomes incredible people
from around the country to take the stage. These guests
may be small in stature, but you would never know it
with their talents.

Tanyalee Davis, a 3'6" comedian from Los Angeles, CA
is married to a six foot man. Making her third appearance
on MAURY, Tanyalee says that people always ask her what
it's like to be married to a normal-sized person. She
tells Maury, "We're like any average normal married
couple - I'm the boss! I let him know when his opinion
matters!"

MAURY airs locally on KCAL-TV at 9 A.M.

FANSHAWE COLLEGE, ONTARIO

"This will be the best week of comedy this year at
Fanshawe!!! The Thursday nooner is another fantastic
comedy event! Two great comics! Tanyalee Davis was
the middle the night I saw Cowan. She stands up on
her stool and blows you away! She's as far from politically
correct as she can be! She's HILLARIOUS!"

First in a decade - woman makes the comedy finals

Nov. 26, 1999

By Gene Stout

The funniest five will face the finals this weekend.
Comics Tanyalee Davis, Damonde Tschrilter, Darryl Lenox,
James Heneghen and Rick Kunkler duke it out with quips,
jokes and one-liners during final rounds of the 1999
Seattle International Comedy Competition. Davis, of Los
Angeles, is only the third woman ever to make the finals
- and the first in a decade.

more buzz on Tanyalee is CERTAIN to be pouring in soon, so be sure to check back!

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