Nonprofit #@$%&^#*!!
Stats maven does stand-up by the numbers

By Michael Cohn
Quiet please. There’s a lady onstage. Although, with a mouth like that… Ann Kaplan normally speaks at nonprofit and higher education conferences, not at nightclubs. But on the night Chris Rock was shaking up Oscar tradition in Hollywood, Kaplan was debuting her standup routine at Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York City.
“A lot of people give me advice on how to handle relationships,” Kaplan told the audience. “My mother’s advice is, ‘From now on, don’t date anyone who hasn’t been in therapy.’”
This is the economic consultant’s first experience in front of a live audience, the culmination of a six-week class at a comedy school sponsored by Caroline’s. On a bill with her fellow classmates, she’s wowing with the crowd of friends, family, and comedy club hangers-on.
“So, I’ve been hanging out with this guy, and I take him to a party, and one of my girlfriends comes up to me and says, ‘Don’t you feel a little weird that your date’s mother is younger than you are?’ Like that’s my fault. Like when she was 20, I held a gun to her head and forced her to bear children.”
As director of the Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) survey and the VSE Data Miner application at the Council of Aid to Education (CAE), a unit of the RAND Corporation, Kaplan doesn’t always have the opportunity to yuk it up. Offstage, she oversees a major national online survey on higher education and private pre-college fundraising.
It’s her job to analyze data on higher education giving and estimate the total philanthropic support of higher education institutions and the underlying trends.
But on Oscar night at Caroline’s, her job is to get the audience laughing, and she did with a series of jokes, most of which simply can’t be printed here. While her routine isn’t as raunchy as most of her fellow classmates’ acts, it still isn’t what you expect to hear during the typical conference presentation.
“Gee… I don’t know why I do this. I don’t know why I do anything really. I don’t know why I’m doing this. You are aware, right, that we performers, do not get on iota of this two-drink minimum, which is so condescending. I mean, who ever drinks one drink? Do you really need it in writing that two drinks is the minimum?”
After a few experiences with avant-garde theatre troupes like the Bread & Puppet Theatre Company and the Performance Group, where Spaulding Gray and others got their start, she found her niche in the profit world. In 1991, she became the research director and a writer and editor for the AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy. Before joining the CAE in 2002, Kaplan worked as a consultant on various research projects with Indiana University and Perdue University’s Center on Philanthropy, as well as the Council for Aid to Education and the Foundation Center.
Much of Kaplan’s routine relates to the classic standup comic theme of the frustrations of dating. Kaplan’s twist is descriptions of cyber hookups facilitated by instant messaging chat conversations with younger men who don’t seem to know or care how to spell simple words like “you” when they make their coarse propositions online.
“Oh, I know people who think that in instant messaging spelling doesn’t count, but, OK, spelling so counts. Particularly if you’re 21 and haven’t developed an interesting personality, yet.
Seriously, kids. Is the word y-o-u so ling that you’re going to get carpal tunnel syndrome type that whole sucker out.
She explained that she has more meaningful relationships with men who have different priorities.
“In the Fire Island Pine, two drinks is breakfast,” she tells the audience. “I know this because last August, my treasured friend William invited me out to his share in the Pines. It’s so beautiful out there. It breathes life into the concept that not all gorgeous men have it as their mission in life to screw women. It was awesome. It was like one of those MasterCard ads. You know those ads? Here, I’ll do the ad for you. It goes like this: train fare:$23; ferry ticket: $12; men cooking for you three days: priceless.”
Chances are she won’t be covering this particular topic at the next nonprofit conference, but Kaplan still hopes to bring some of her onstage moxie to her conference speeches. “I do a lot of public speaking about charities, which makes me feel comfortable on stage,” she said. Kaplan sensed that some humor could liven up her presentation. “I thought it would be helpful for public speaking where I’m not always relaxed. I’m talking about numbers with graphs, and sometimes I think some of these people must be like, ‘Hey, it’s cocktail hour.’”
Her experience onstage from her earlier theatre days also helped, though it was much different from either the comedy club circuit or conferences. “I interned with an environmental theatre group in the 1970s, and I did a lot of political theatre in college,” Kaplan recalled. “But I never did a standard production. It’s always been off the beaten trail.”
Kaplan said that she gets a rush from being in the limelight, especially n her new setting. “It’s a lot of fun,” she declares. “You do a routine over and over and over again, and you do it in front of people who haven’t heard it before.”
One family member got a sneak preview of the routine. “I did it for my daughter,” Kaplan said, “and she said, ‘Well, maybe other people will find it funny.’ But they told me, ‘That’s a little bitter.’ So I kind of reworked everything.”
Kaplan might even decide to do a routine about her day job, which she mentioned only briefly at her Caroline’s appearance. “I have other routines, but I could only do five minutes tonight, so I just did this one,” she explained. “I’d like to do one about my job. But I haven’t thought of the hook for that yet.”
There is this one about the two statisticians who walk into a bar…