I’ve been calling myself the Susan Boyle of stand-up comedy,” Celia Contreras laughs with a beer and friends for a warm reunion in Phoenix for the weekend. She came back, not just to visit and shoot the shit, but to open for Tony Hinchcliffe at the Celebrity Theatre. The opportunity was not lost on her. Her emotional, unassuming reaction for the chance to open for him in her home state went viral, and comedy fans mindlessly scrolling were taken aback; some confessed they wiped away tears. Her life in comedy had been changed. But, her? She remained the same.

Contreras’s table on the patio at Devils Advocate Sports Grill in Tempe appeared to be magnetic. While she quietly wrote in her notebook, old friends found themselves pulled into her vicinity. The Flagstaff native had moved to sixth street last summer—the heart of the Austin comedy scene. 

There was a lot to catch up on. 

Many hugs and “I love you’s” were shared, and Contreras expresses that the amount of high fiving before her opening set on the round stage of the Celebrity Theatre had left her “winded.” In a black and white sleeveless shirt she felt cold, and wiggled her way into a black “Skankfest” hoodie a friend gave her. “My fat ass can barely fit into it,” she says offhandedly. 

Unwavering honesty is the thirty-two year old’s default. It runs deep—on and off the stage.  

“You guys like dad jokes?” Alright, here’s one: My dad had a really long RAP sheet. Sometimes I’d wrap it around myself and pretend he was hugging me.” 

A mix of awes and laughs trickle in after that line, but she keeps them coming: 

“That’s not even the messed up part. There were a lot of domestic abuse charges on there, but my dad came to this country illegally…shouldn’t they have been imported abuse charges?” 

In the middle of today’s stand-up comedy boom, darker material can be a hard path to traverse for beginning comics. But for Contreras, the territory came naturally. Her descent into comedy was kick-started by some light-hearted hazing from her co-workers at McDonald’s who believed her life would be prime material for a situational comedy, albeit a dark one. Dark comedians often tell one liners but what happens when the material is all too real for a suspension of disbelief to apply?  

It’s a challenging line to walk, and Contreras still manages to conjure laughter whilst recounting some of the darkest moments of her life.

Her story about her own attempted suicide gone wrong, and her envy of an young man’s “easy” death, when she had voluntarily consumed everything but the kitchen sink, will bring a chill down one’s spine. 

It’s uncomfortable. It’s sensitive, it’s a highwire act for many, that she does effortlessly. 

Contreras walks the audience through the stomach turning amount of substances that she hoped would end her dread forever. “Hear me out: I had a bottle of tequila, bottle of vodka, family sized pack of nyquil and dayquil-name brand not the equate shit, 16 prozac on top of 13 from a previous prescription, seven celexa and a 500 count of tylenol.” 

“I woke up the next day and I went to work. Not even the saddest part of that story. I worked at McDonald’s at the time and then a week later, almost if god is mocking me…A teenage boy OD’s on, get this…a McDonald’s cup of coffee and a monster energy drink. He OD’d on caffeine. I was at work when I found out. I was so mad I kicked over a chair…I was like, ‘What the fuck he didn’t even try!’ ” 

Contreras today can’t fully promise that she’ll never get back to that place. She has bipolar disorder, a part of herself she learned after a bad show. It was a conservative crowd that didn’t like her material at all, and Contreras had to perform for 15 minutes or else they wouldn’t pay her. Unbenounced to her, she was experiencing a manic episode. Kicking the stage stool and laying down onstage, was her response to the silence.  

“It wasn’t pretty. After I got up, like a couple people came up to me and we’re like, ‘I didn’t laugh but I appreciate what you did up there,” Contreras says with a chuckle. 

Days later a psychotic episode would take her to the hospital and she won’t spare you the details, they’re funny. 

“I ended up thinking I was Jesus Christ and a killer whale at the same time. Like I thought I had the answers to everything. I’m in a squad car, and they’re taking me to the psych ward and I’m like… ‘This is how you treat the messiah?’”

“It was the two of the most powerful things…” Contreras erupts into laughter halfway through her thought, “I could think of I don’t know.”

She can laugh about it now. But at the time she couldn’t. According to Contreras, in her Catholic family, “mental illness wasn’t a thing.” She would  open up about depression and get shot down. “They were like no you’re not sad. You just need god. Or like you’re being punished for this, or something shitty like that,” Contreras explains. 

So being diagnosed as bipolar was no easy road. 

“I felt like I was marked by it,” Contreras says. But It doesn’t take long for her to find a smile, “So as soon as I meet somebody, it’s like, ‘Hi, I’m Celia. I have bipolar disorder.’ Like I was a pedophile going door to door, It’s like ‘I live in your area,’ ” she chuckles. 

Even though she can find a joke for it all, no joke could belittle what she has endured. She’s been homeless and alone with no one in her corner. 

But as she’d come to learn from her new family in comedy. No one can do it alone. 

Her days of hitchhiking to gigs and couch surfing across Phoenix are over. Well, maybe not couch surfing. She knows full well that her friends would never turn her away. If anything she has to turn them away, for an abundance of offers. 

“It’s weird, because I went from having no money for a while, and not having anywhere to go for holidays. And like, this year and the last couple years, I’ve had to decide it’s all like, “Who am I going to for Thanksgiving?” because I get invited.” 

They don’t mind. She’s a great hang. 

“She’s easy to hang out with,” close friend Ramon Gama says. 

And her success fuels spirits. “She attracts people because she’s a very kind and giving soul,” Gama explains. “People support her and put gas in her tank because she inspires them.” 

“You have no reservations in rooting for her,” Gama says. 

When similar souls meet, sometimes the first encounter can be a blur. For her good friend David Kays, it was somewhere in Flagstaff, but years of drugs impaired the picture. With a now sober sigh, he tried his best, “I think it was either Sedona or Prescott…Celia was like the one standout, because of her jokes. Her material was a lot different, but you could tell that she knew how to write a joke.”

They didn’t really talk that night, but once Contreras got to Phoenix they had an immediate bond. They both smoke American spirit blacks. 

“He gave me a couple and he’s like, ’cause you’re the only badass bitch that smokes the same brand as me,” Contreras says with a chuckle. 

At first Contreras may seem standoffish to the new open mic-er, but with time many have come to understand her on a deeper level. For a community seemingly centered around always getting the laugh—Contreras can still separate the serious from the tongue-in-cheek. It’s a maturity and reservedness that Kays really appreciates, especially when he’s having a bad day. 

When it comes to her childhood and family life one can infer such pain through her setlist. She doesn’t hold back onstage. After that it’s no pity party.  

“Both of my parents are deceased,” she told Tony Hinchcliffe during Kill Tony. To which he responded, “Goddammit!”  

Without hesitation Contreras quipped, “I know, I was mad too.”

The room erupted. 

Despite the immediate validation, Contreras doesn’t always feel performance ready. 

What if she’s having an off day? Take the stage then? Well in her own words, “Comedy is like a drug. When you go up and do bad you feel bad for a little bit, but then you feel good that you went up.”

Her deadpan delivery frolics around friends who throw it right back at her, eventually everyone at the table has a smile and chuckle, but to laugh and your own joke every single time would sour the experience. When reflecting on her experience opening up for Rosanne Barr, and traveling on planes for the first time, she didn’t complain about being a bigger girl when her body spilled over onto the woman in the seat next to her…instead, she had jokes. 

“She was inside of me for two hours. I’ll count that as sex,” she says in between taking hits off of her neon vape. 

Back in Austin, she frequents the famous Shakespeare’s Pub. The lively bar has reaped the benefits of the nearby Kill Tony open mic-er influx, hosting their own mic that naturally turned into a hangout for those anxious to get their names pulled from Hinchcliffe’s bucket. Contreras is a regular there. 

According to bar manager David Fajardo, Contreras doesn’t flinch when the stars are around. 

When rising star Ralph Barbosa entered the pub, she was quite content to quietly sit in her corner and write. Fajardo was like, “Celia! You need to go say hi.” She resisted introducing herself, and Fajardo took it upon himself to help facilitate an introduction.

Humility and hard work may not be such a bad mix. “She’s very humble and focused on her comedy,” says Fajardo. 

Last December, Contreras headlined a show at Hob Nob Sports Grill in Chandler.

It’s typically a tough show, a battle of two crowds: the ones eager to be entertained and the ones who believe they got that covered themselves. The last time she headlined ended in tears behind a nearby dumpster. She’ll tell the story with a smirk, it’s okay to relive the funny-sad of it all. 

But this time she killed for the crowd that matters. New fans had come out to support her. 

After the show, a few had approached her to chat. Contreras sported red lipstick and a colorful floral sleeveless dress revealing a famous Bruce Lee quote she had tattooed on her arm: 

“Defeat is a state of mind. No one can ever be defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality.” 

Her new reality is accepting success. I asked her how it felt to have fans. 

“It’s so fucking weird,” she smiles.