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There are 200 opportunities to see comedian Erica Figueroa perform this year. Not 199, not 201—200. Figueroa figures that to get good at standup comedy, she needs to be going up four or five times a week, so she sets her schedule and attaches it to her fridge. Example: Tuesday “Helium Comedy Club,” Wednesday “Nu-Glitter,” Friday “Tits Up,” Saturday “Defiant Joy.”
“It becomes a fact,” she says. “It doesn’t matter what I feel like when I get home from work. I have to clock in for comedy.”
There’s more. Figueroa keeps a comedy notebook—not uncommon—but she switches out to a new 5-by-8-inch, perfect-bound book exactly every 100 shows. She numbers each show and writes the location and her set list. When she’s really on her game (this is often), she listens back to a recording of the set and writes detailed notes about how each joke landed and how she could improve it. She’s doing all of this while holding down a full-time day job doing project management for a nonprofit organization.
The quantifying keeps Figueroa on track toward her goals, and she’s hitting some big ones lately. Not only is she in WW’s 2026 Funniest Five, she was “passed” at Helium this fall, meaning she’s now on the club’s roster of paid regular comics who open for the traveling headliners. She has started traveling more herself lately, too, throughout the Pacific Northwest and to Atlanta for the West End Comedy Fest. Her pace is unforgiving. That’s the point.
“If your goals don’t scare you a little bit, they’re not big enough.”
Set #781 was a guest-hosting gig for the show Laugh Basement at the Goodfoot on Southeast Stark Street. Figueroa gave off feminist cool-girl energy with her bangs and an outfit of wide-legged pants and chunky boots that was stylish but not trying too hard. Her opening set covered roller derby, a funny sign near the Sellwood Bridge, and more than one reality TV show (Love Is Blind and America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders).
But her bread and butter is making fun of men.
“I hang out with straight men a lot. Well, I go do comedy and they’re there.”
Another one:
“After many years, I had to get on the apps, and something that I see a lot is the word ‘spontaneous.’ ‘I’m looking for a woman who is spontaneous.’ And I’m like, do you mean impulsive? Do you mean gets fired a lot? Why do you want spontaneous? Spontaneous slashes your tires.”
Figueroa, 35, grew up outside Cincinnati with three older brothers and no sisters, which is how she thinks she developed an eye for gender observations. She has lived in Portland since age 21. She started writing jokes around then, but didn’t get up onstage to do an open mic for about another decade. She went big and did sets #1 and #2 on the same night in July 2022. During set #2, she riffed for the first time. Noticing a woman in the audience wearing extremely high heels, Figueroa teased that she could tell the woman was single just by her shoe choice. It killed.
“I remember putting the microphone back in the stand and thinking, ‘This is your life now.’”
Figueroa co-hosts the comedy happy hour Tits Up at the Alberta Street Pub, along with show founder Aimee Sinclair. The show is almost all women comics, plus some queer folks and sometimes a lone straight guy. (“We call him our sacrificial man,” she says.) Tits Up celebrates its second anniversary with a Feb. 6 show at The Siren Theater. If the math is mathing, that will be set #797.
She’s always making fun of men “with a wink and a smile,” she says. Her comedy is not mean-spirited.
“Even if I am making fun of men, I want them to feel in on it,” she says. “I want to cultivate a good time for everybody. That’s what I’m striving for.”
What’s the funniest thing Erica Figueroa has seen in Portland?
“My car was stolen this fall, very Portland. The next day, the Multnomah County Courthouse called me to say there was a warrant out for my arrest because I was a no-show for my grand jury service. I’m already all mixed up from my car being stolen; next thing I know, I’m at a Walmart Supercenter in Washington state prepared to wire the courthouse $3,500 before I realize it’s a scam. All of this four days before my Helium host tryout show. I had to get rides to and from the show. In retrospect, hilarious.”
