‘Did you hear the one about …?’ – Scratching an old itch, Sally Jackson takes her humor on stage at 86

A few years back, Spokane Valley community activist Sally Jackson started paying attention to her bucket list.

At 86, she found a few items yet to be accomplished.

“Well, there’s spending a night with George Clooney,” she laughs.

It’s a big laugh and it’s a Sally Jackson trademark.

Rather than sit around, waiting on Clooney, who has been busy attending the royal wedding, she moved on to the next item.

Time’s a wasting.

“I’m past senior citizen age,” she quips. “I’m at ‘Oh my God, you’re still alive?’ ”

Armed with a legendary wit, she tried her hand at doing stand-up comedy.

Well, to be honest, it was more of a sit-down version of stand-up, since Sally uses a scooter to get around these days. It makes for quite an entrance.

“It’s just something I’ve always wanted to do,” she says. “You know, if I was 30 or 35 again, I would want to write for ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I think that would be the best!”

The thought of taking to a stage and telling jokes first began to percolate when she was 82. Four years later, her kids suggested she might want to get started if she wanted to check this one off her list.

So she did.

Jackson has done several sets at the Spokane Comedy Club, and she just might do more. She has an open invitation.

“They wanted me to be the opening act for some of the headliners coming to town,” she laughs. “They said, ‘Can you do June 30?’ I said, ‘I’m 86! I don’t know if I’ll be here June 30!’ ”

Jackson has always been a comedian – quick to tease her friends and joke with and about her rivals. If you were a rival who could trade a few good-natured barbs, so much the better.

She laughs easily and often. Often about what it’s like to be 86.

“I’m in a state of shock,” she told her audience when she first took the mic. “I didn’t know I knew this many people who stayed up after 8 o’clock!”

First-timers attempting stand-up usually do a three- to four-minute routine. It can be a long, long few minutes for some.

Not Jackson. She rolled onto the stage and did a full 15-minute routine that has become a social-media hit.

“Unless you’re hung over, you guys jump out of bed in the morning,” she told her audience. “I don’t. I sit up and I look over my shoulder to make sure everything is getting up with me. And then I pull myself out of bed with my stripper pole.

“I gotta tell you, it’s one helluva strong pole!”

She’s pleased with her growing notoriety.

“Someone posted my first stand-up routine on Facebook, and I’m told it went viral,” she says. “And then it got pulled. I got banned by Facebook because I do drop the F-Bomb.

“Can you imagine that? I’m 86, and I got 86ed.”

It’s kind of a point of pride.

Both of her stand-up routines can be found on YouTube, and much of her second set can be found on the evening news in Seattle, and a local station picked it up last week.

Eric Johnson, who anchors the evening news on KOMO-TV in Seattle, grew up in Spokane Valley and played American Legion baseball for Sally’s late husband, Ron. He’s known Sally his whole life.

He recently brought a camera crew over the mountains to catch Jackson’s stand-up set at Spokane Comedy Club for a segment called “Eric’s Heroes.”

“I don’t have a computer so I don’t do all that stuff online,” she said. “But my kids read me a few of the comments people posted online. One woman wrote that she’d been depressed lately, but after seeing me get up on stage it’s given her a whole new outlook. Another woman wrote that her husband has Parkinson’s. Well, you know, that’s what Dad (Ron Jackson) had. She said he hasn’t smiled in so long, but when he saw my standup routine he laughed for the first time in a long time.”

“It just feels so good,” she says. “I can still do something: I can make people happy.”

It’s been her goal for all of her 86 years.

It’s why she helped found a girls fastpitch softball league in the Spokane Valley, why she’s helped coach baseball for decades and why she works hard for causes she believes in.

It’s what prompted her to dig a swimming pool in her backyard. By hand. With a shovel.

It’s where she’s taught thousands of Spokane Valley kids to swim over more than 60 years.

Through it all, she’s left friends and family laughing.

“Everybody would tell me, ‘Sal, you’re so funny,’ ” she said. “Well, if I’m so funny, maybe I should do stand-up.”

And now she has.

“You know what? I’m just enjoying life,” she said. “You have to keep going and take advantage of every minute of it.”