Playing for laughs: For Michelle Wolf, if there’s no punchline, ‘It’s not even worth saying’

Don’t be surprised this weekend if you see a woman with a shock of red hair running through Riverfront Park. That’s comedienne Michelle Wolf in town to headline the Spokane Comedy Club on Friday and Saturday.

An avid runner, Wolf uses her time before shows to explore new-to-her cities in which she’s performing. Also …

“It’s a good way to see where to get drugs if you want them,” she said with a laugh. “You run into a park and you’re like, ‘This is where they do meth here.’ ”

Well then.

Wolf is in town with a brand new hour hot on the heels of her latest hourlong special, “Joke Show,” which premiered on Netflix in December.

You also likely recognize her from her work on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” as the featured performer at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and her Netflix series “The Break With Michelle Wolf.”

Wolf filmed “Joke Show” in August and is set to work on her next hour in September.

Wolf estimates it normally takes comedians anywhere from six to eight months after finishing a special to begin to “cobble anything together,” but she somehow found herself in a place to start writing almost immediately.

“The fact that I have a whole new hour is kind of unheard of, but I’m not mad at it,” she said.

These Spokane shows also will feature material Wolf started working on during recent shows in Thailand and Manila with Dave Chappelle, as well as jokes she cut from “Joke Show” because they weren’t yet fully formed.

Some of the jokes still need work, Wolf said, and she’s curious to see if the material she started working on in Asia will translate from page to stage.

“It’s really fun when you’re like ‘I think this will work,’ and then you say it out loud and you’re like. ‘Wow, it didn’t work at all,’ ” she said.

“The whole process to me is fun and trying to figure it out throughout the weekend being like ‘ All right, well, what if I say it this way? What if I try that? What if I do this instead?’ It should be a good weekend.”

Wolf’s quartet of shows in Spokane are leading up to her goal of performing at least 100 shows before she films each special. Once Wolf has a solid idea of what her next hour will be, she begins counting. Before filming “Joke Show,” she had performed the hour about 120 times.

Those 100-plus shows give Wolf plenty of opportunity to explore the “nooks and crannies of the jokes” and play with the order of material.

“You always end up, a couple months into that, finding something new and then working on that a little bit, replacing some of the stuff, like, ‘I’ll keep that for another time,’ ” she said. “It’s really fun to find all the different avenues you can go down with jokes and how far you can expand things.”

The audience, too, is a big part of shaping a special, Wolf said. Different audiences give her a chance to switch how a joke is said or realize she isn’t being as clear as she could be. She experiments with wording, timing and emphasis until the joke feels right.

“If you have faith in a joke, you can normally find a way to make it work,” she said. “You just have to keep figuring it out. There’s no right way to do it; you’ve just got to figure out each joke is its own little animal.”

Though she’s already turned her focus to her in-the-works hour, Wolf is happy “Joke Show,” months after its taping and press to promote the special, is available for viewing.

She loved releasing her previous special, “Nice Lady,” through HBO but chose to work with Netflix this time around so her international audiences could watch “Joke Show.”

In the special, Wolf touches on everything from possible conversations among Titanic survivors had they been millennials (“It’s so annoying the boat sunk,” Wolf says in a whiny voice during “Joke Show.” “Like, how do you not see an iceberg?”) and how giraffes give birth to more serious topics like feminism and her abortion.

Wolf has a knack for riffing on those serious topics in a way that makes audience members feel as if the humor has momentarily taken a backseat before surprising them with a big punchline.

It’s a good trick, and Wolf knows it.

“My whole philosophy is if you can’t find a good punchline, it’s not even worth saying,” she said. “I’m not one of those comics that’s going to go out there and say something serious and not try to get a laugh out of it. I love to do stuff where it seems like I’m really going after something and then come out of left field and really hit them with a good laugh.

“I feel like the more serious you can get, the harder the punchline can be, which is a really fun thing to play with. I feel the more confidence I get onstage, the more I’m willing to do that. I love circumventing people’s expectations, and I always say that ‘I think good comedy isn’t what you wanted to hear, it’s what you didn’t know you wanted to hear.’

“You’re keying people up to be like, ‘Oh, this is where she’s going,’ and then you’re like, ‘Oh, she didn’t go there at all.’ It’s a lot of fun to play with.”