Warren woman trades politics for punchlines

WARREN — A funny thing happened to Diane Young after her political aims fell short. She became a comedian.

A former candidate for Congress and City Council, Young is now soliciting laughs instead of campaign contributions and winning applause as a stand-up comic. She’s done more than 40 shows in the past year and looks to be having more fun telling jokes from a lighted stage than casting votes in some dim subcommittee chamber.

A Warren resident, Young, 61, wasn’t the class clown growing up, but a sharp wit and direct manner coupled with intellect and drive laid a foundation that blossomed into a successful business career and civic leadership role.

“My mother would call me Ms. Bossypants. We call it leadership skills today,” Young said a couple of days after delivering a laugh-filled performance at Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle in Royal Oak. “I’ve exhibited leadership skills ever since I was young.”

 

Funny business
Young’s career path wasn’t exactly a straight line. Her field of study involved human origins and behavior — so it’s no laughing matter she instead became a financial planner. Or is it?

“I have a college degree in anthropology, which is Latin for unemployed,” she joked during her spotlight at the March 4 showcase for graduates of Ridley’s advanced comedy class. “Apparently, knowing the difference between a Homo erectus and a Homo sapien is not a valuable job skill.”

Young’s roots are in Oakland County’s Berkley and the northern Macomb County community of Romeo, where she graduated high school. Her education continued at Oakland University before moving on to Stony Brook University in New York. Her experience working her way through college found her recruited into the financial realm, where she thrived and eventually worked from an office overlooking Times Square.

Young and her husband, Randy, moved back to Michigan in 2000 with their two young children and she became head of financial planning for AXA Advisors in Troy. In 2004 she founded her own company, The Athena Financial Group, in Rochester, which had a focus on female clients. “I started with a folding table and phone book, and I built it into the second-largest woman-owned financial planning business in the state,” she said.

In late 2020, she merged her business with Arrowroot Family Office and now serves as a managing partner, with an eye on a future that includes more comedy than financial forecasting.

Young’s decades in business proved a good training ground for stand-up comedy, sharpening her presentation skills and drawing on countless corporate meetings to mine for laughs, like this bit from a recent performance:

“When a man nods his head, it means I agree with you. Pretty simple. Men are simple creatures,” Young said. “Women, on the other hand, when they nod their head, it means, ‘I hear you, please continue — even though this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’”

 

Laugh track
Young’s later-in-life comedy quest has been boosted by classes taken at Ridley’s Comedy Castle. Conducted by seasoned stand-up professionals, students learn about everything from managing microphones to ruthlessly rewriting material for maximum impact.

“It’s a lot of hard work,” said Joel Fragomeni, who teaches the advanced class at Ridley’s. “Comedy is an art. You’re speaking, you’re writing jokes, but it’s also a trade. It’s a thing you’ve got to learn how to do and learn how to find work for yourself.”

As she’s embarked into the funny business, Young has hustled to hone her skills everywhere from cringeworthy dive bars and tiny service clubs to coveted stages like Ridley’s, One Night Stan’s Comedy Club in Waterford and The Ark in Ann Arbor. She’s also been a quarterfinalist in the Detroit to L.A. Comedy Challenge and performed at out-of-state venues in Canada, Indiana and Florida.

Not too bad for a novice.

“She’s doing really good,” Fragomeni said. “For someone with her level of experience, I think she’s far ahead of other people.”

He said Young’s business history gives her an edge that younger comedians don’t have.

“You meet people and clients. Maybe you make presentations. I think that’s a really good background for doing stand-up comedy,” he said. “A lot of the best students that come through here are salesmen, attorneys, teachers — people that get up and can talk in front of others. That’s definitely a trait that can translate.

“And I think if you’re a financial planner, you’ve got to win people over. They have to trust you with their money, and I think in stand-up, (audiences have to) trust you’re not wasting their time as a performer and you’re giving them what they came to see.”

Bill Bushart, who has been teaching comedy classes at Ridley’s for 20 years, said Young is off to a fine start.

“She has some good skills. She gets out there, she does the job, and she knows the message she’s trying to get across,” he said. “But, you know, she’s a new comic, and there’s always room for development, there’s room for growing, but she seems to be into it. She’s getting her name out there and promoting herself.”

Young’s next public performance is an April 17 World Series of Comedy satellite event at One Night Stan’s.

 

The best medicine
For Young, pursuing comedy wasn’t a big stretch

“It’s just leaning into different parts of who I am,” she said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a completely different person.’ I’ve always been a funny person.”

Friends and colleagues, she said, have long noted her hilarious side.

“People have told me for years, ‘You’re so funny,’” she said with a sly grin. “I mean, I am a bit of a smart-ass. We get invited to a lot of dinners because I’m entertaining.”

Comedy has also helped Young heal from her personal setbacks. Despite winning 13,450 votes in the 2024 District 10 Democratic primary for Congress, she lost the nomination to Carl Marlinga, a former Macomb County prosecutor and judge, who in turn was defeated by Republican John James.

“After I lost the election, you have to process that, right? It’s hard getting rejected by thousands of people,” she said. “I didn’t realize until a few months later that I was kind of sad, and this has completely helped me get over that.”

Young hasn’t totally traded politics for punchlines, however, and civic involvement remains a significant part of her life. She currently chairs the Warren-Sterling Heights Democratic Club, serves on the Warren Land Bank Authority commission and is secretary of the Warren Symphony Orchestra Board of Directors Executive Committee.

“I’m always interested in my community,” said Young, whose other leadership bids include a fourth-place finish for Warren City Council in 2019 and a 2016 loss for a Michigan House of Representatives seat.

“I do have ideas. I do have vision,” Young said about her political forays. Had she been successful in 2024, Young would have been the only financial planner in Congress. In a chamber dominated by lawyers, Young believes she could have been a useful voice.

“I’m very pragmatic,” she said. “I thought my business background would have been a really good thing.”

 

Humor me
Although politics isn’t a big part of her stand-up act — “either way I would have been working with a bunch of jokers,” is a line she uses to connect comedy and Congress — Young does play her own life for laughs.

Regarding her middle-aged, white woman profile, she said on stage at Ridley’s, “I joined a 12-step program for Karens. The tipping point was when I yelled at a self-checkout machine and demanded to see its manager.”

On her scientist husband, she said, “He’s an oceanographer. What’s funny about that is we live in Warren. I didn’t say he was a good scientist. You think Jacques Cousteau? And I’m like, SpongeBob.”

While Young isn’t looking to turn her comedy into a full-time job, she will continue honing her craft at clubs and hopes to land more corporate gigs, where her business experience is an ideal entryway.

“There’s hundreds of financial conferences,” she said. “With my background, getting hired into a conference would be a natural fit for me because I know the language, I know what they’re talking about, I know what’s funny about money. So that’s my goal. And again, it’s just a hobby. … l made $100 last year. I’m not giving up my day job.”

Still, even with her comedy quest well underway, Young isn’t completely ruling out a future political opportunity — or any other interests that may await.

“I’m not a person who wants to ever be done,” she said. “I’m like I-75 — constantly under construction. So for me, it’s been fun to lean into different parts of my life. There’s lots of things I want to do in this world.”

For now, though, there are more open mic nights to join, more connections to make and more humor to share. Diane Young may not have realized her dream of sitting in Congress, but it looks like she’s getting the last laugh after all.