Marilyn Martinez, 52; comic performed with Latina comedy groups
Marilyn Martinez, a stand-up comic who also performed with other Latina comedians in the Hot and Spicy Mamitas, the Hot Tamales and the Original Latin Divas of Comedy, has died. She was 52. She died Saturday at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center of complications from colon cancer, said her husband, John David Crowder.
Martinez was known for her edgy, outrageous humor.
“Marilyn talked about things women think but don’t say,” comedian Johnny Zzzap said in an interview with The Times this week. She created skits with characters who acted out their fantasies, inviting a valet parking attendant out for tacos or cruising Home Depot “to pick up guys,” Zzzap said.
“Nothing was off limits for Marilyn,” her agent, Scott Montoya, said this week. “If it was on her mind, she’d say it.”
Martinez had small roles in several movies, including “Pauly Shore Is Dead” in 2003, and she made a guest appearance on the television series “My Wife and Kids” with Damon Wayans in 2001, but friends said that her style of humor was not made for prime time.
“Many times, people told Marilyn to tone down her act and she’d get farther,” comedian Paul Rodriguez, who worked with Martinez several times, told The Times this week.
“Marilyn’s humor was an acquired taste,” Rodriguez said. “What I admired most about her was that she was unapologetic about it.”
In interviews, Martinez said she worked with all-Latina comedy groups, in part to push back against her male-dominated profession. She and the other “mamitas” -- Lydia Nicole, Dyana Ortelli, Ludo Vika and Sully Diaz -- used humor to “challenge prejudice and stereotyping,” according to a 1999 Times article.
In the late 1990s she joined the Hot Tamales, a rotating group of Latina comedians that features Eva Longoria and has often performed at the Comedy Store. More recently Martinez was a member of the “Latin divas” along with comics Patti Vasquez, Sara Contreras, Sandra Valls and Monique Marvez.
Jokes about Latina stereotypes flowed when the women were together onstage, but in interviews Martinez said her heritage was only one source for her jokes. “My humor is not based on my being a Latina or a woman,” she said in a 2005 interview with the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper. “I’m a comic who happens to be Latina.”
Born Feb. 9, 1955, in Denver, Martinez discovered at a young age that she could make people laugh. Through her school years she performed in talent shows and had acting roles in plays, but soon after graduating from Colorado State University in Fort Collins she became a professional comedian.
She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s. By the 1990s she was appearing at the Comedy Store.