A Funny Lady in Serious Times

In her 22 years as a United Airlines flight attendant, Kathy Westfield has been buffeted by turbulence and unnerved by emergency landings for sick passengers. She has never seen a jetliner rip through a skyscraper and explode in a gigantic gray and orange fireball.

As she awaits her first flight assignment since Sept. 11, Westfield now thinks about that possibility every waking hour. She even jokes about it ... in her stand-up routines.

For 11 years, Westfield, 43, has moonlighted as a comedian at Los Angeles-area clubs. Since terrorists toppled the World Trade Center towers and damaged the Pentagon, killing thousands, she has poked a little fun at her own and others’ reactions to the attacks--the sudden love affair with the American flag, the way nobody envies her the career once considered so glamorous, the irrational lumping of all Arab Americans into the armed-and-dangerous category.

On Sept. 12, 85 patrons who forsook the grim TV replays of crashing planes and flaming buildings were able to catch Westfield’s weekly act at the 4305 Village Theatre in the Crenshaw district. When she joked--tentatively, at first--about the tragedy, everybody laughed. That reassured Westfield again that humor, her chosen therapy for all manner of stressful occurrences, can be a balm to even the most hideous wound.

“I was hesitant, and I didn’t want to seem distasteful,” Westfield said. “But those people were there on Wednesday night. That tells me they needed some type of relief, to laugh, to get away from the TV.”

Comedians generally are apprehensive about spouting new material of any sort, let alone riffing on tragedy. But Westfield’s savvy ability to read audiences helps her pull it off, said one producer. “She really knows how to talk to people,” said Dave McNary, who produces the Sunday night show at the Ice House Annex in Pasadena, where Westfield is a regular emcee.

For days after the attacks, David Letterman and other television funny men felt self-conscious about cracking jokes.

“But people want to laugh,” said Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. “Laughter and humor are ways we gain understanding and perspective.” After a disaster, Keltner said, the first people who feel justified in injecting humor and who will not attract the ire of others by doing so are those most closely affected--those who lived through the event or who lost loved ones or who must get back on the horse, as it were. As a flight attendant, he said, Westfield qualifies.

Westfield, who has been on a medical leave because of a sinus infection since the day before the attacks, knows that one day soon she’ll be walking down a jetway at Los Angeles International Airport to board a plane similar to those that plowed into the twin towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

Early signs are that she won’t have the job flexibility that she has enjoyed for the last several years. Since the birth of her two sons--Taj, 7, and Chaz, 3--she has routinely worked only two to three days a week and has been able to limit herself to quick-turnaround trips on United’s West Coast routes.

Now that United has cut its number of flights by about 20%, she realizes she might have to incorporate layovers into her busy dual-career life. She hopes, thanks to her seniority, to escape the layoff notices that are going out to tens of thousands of other airline personnel.

When she feels well enough to go back to work, she figures, she’ll slip out of the house with her dark blue uniform on a hanger, to avoid tipping off her youngsters that she’s flying again. They tend to “go ballistic,” she said, when they see her uniform.

Although Westfield enjoys being a flight attendant, she’d love to keep her feet on the ground--onstage, in fact--if she could make a living at it.

Eleven years ago, she thought the humor business would be a snap. She was one of two students chosen from a comedy class to be profiled by an ABC news program. The news crew, intrigued by her day job as a flight attendant, shadowed her on a trip to Tokyo and then videotaped her doing a stand-up routine as her “final exam.”

But that early spotlight proved fleeting. These days, Westfield keeps her hand in with a couple of regular gigs, in which she “laughs a lot about myself and everyday life and heartaches and pain.” But she definitely treasures her day job for its regular paycheck. Her husband, Darrell Carter, whom she met at a comedy club, is a driver for the MTA.

Westfield’s dream is to appear on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”

To ease her fears, Westfield uses somewhat twisted logic, noting how relatively few people died on the planes that crashed Sept. 11 versus the thousands killed on the ground. In the meantime, she jokes to her audiences that she’ll never again hassle a passenger with a cell phone--a reference to the valuable information that victims relayed to friends and families as the disaster unfolded.

For Westfield, humor is clearly no fly-by-night cure. It helps her shake free the thoughts of all the friends she has who fly the nonstop, transcontinental routes that the hijackers targeted. Blessedly, her friends are safe. Yet many other colleagues are not.

“You can’t live in fear,” she said. “You definitely need laughter. It has been a godsend for me.”

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Kathy Westfield appears at 8 and 10 p.m. Wednesdays at the 4305 Village Theatre of the Lucy Florence Coffee House in Leimert Park. Info: (323) 293-2395. She will also appear Oct. 28 and Nov. 4 at the Ice House Annex in Pasadena. Information: (626) 577-1894.