Carrie Snow

Carrie Snow experienced a stroke in 2018. She was released from the hospital and greeted by her dog TJ upon arriving home.

In October 2015 ahead of Snow's show at The Tahoe Improv, commenting on her comedic influences, she, “talks very highly of physical comedic legends such as Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers. But she realized that being funny transcends gender saying, ‘If you are a real comic, man or woman, your act is who you are.’ But, she added, ‘I think women bring a deeper context.’”

Carrie Snow grew up in a Jewish family. Snow was close with her father when he was alive and her mother passed away in 2013. Snow is close with her sister Meri-Ann Lawson.

In the 2000s once Snow returned to performing, she appeared at venues such as The Comedy & Magic Club, The Sharky's Lounge at Paradise Casino, The Ventura Harbor Comedy Club, and The Improv at Harveys in Lake Tahoe.

In the early 2000s Snow was featured in the documentary The Aristocrats (2005). Snow recalls that in her clips she's explaining how she was friends with fellow comedian and actor Bob Saget had explained the joke to her and being let in on it was “like being anointed” into the comic community.

Several excerpts and one liners from Snow's work have been featured in anthologies of funny women and America's funniest women. Author and literary agent Bill Adler's book Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women includes Snow's one liner: “a male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who has never owned a car.” Snow is included in this collection of “words of advice for inspiration” along with comedians such as Mae West, Elayne Boosler, and Whoopi Goldberg. Several of Snow's one liners are also featured in The Penguin Book of Women's Humor by Regina Barreca (1996).

In 1994 while writing for Roseanne, Snow decided to get gastric bypass surgery. Snow, “having been through the stomach surgery experience, Snow has guided a number of women through the procedure.” Including supporting Barr with the same surgery.

Snow developed several bits that she would continue to use and modify over her entire career. One anecdote she often shared was from a visit from her father while she was attending the University of California, Berkeley. In an early variation of this bit from an episode of An Evening at the Improv that originally aired on June 22, 1993, Snow began with her reactions to reading about Sylvia Plath's experience seeing a naked man for the first time in The Bell Jar. Snow was struck by Plath's descriptions of the man and recalls that some areas of his body reminded her of turkey necks and turkey gizzards. Playing off the audience's laughter, Snow launches into the next segment about watching Philip Kaufman's Rising Sun (1992) with her father. She humorously describes her discomfort of seeing people eat sushi off each other's bodies with her father sitting next to her. Snow concludes the joke with playful sound effects and manipulates her pronunciations as she says “And I'm not looking at my fatherrrrr and my father's not looking at meeeee” concluding in a roar of laughter from the crowd.

Snow stepped away from performing in the decade between the late 1990s and early 2000s and went through “the process of reclaiming her old audience and finding a new one.”

Snow traveled around the country to cities such as Las Vegas, Chicago, New York City. Snow drew from personal experiences and observations that she relayed to audiences in an imaginative style. At a show at Caroline's in New York in 1986, Variety’s New Acts section reviews that Snow "nicely creates a warped world where buying becomes “retail grazing” and any eyeliner or lipstick is replaced by a van load of cosmetics. It's when she stretched “normal” American behavior to the absurd that Carrie Snow's routine is at its best."

Entering the San Francisco Comedy Competition again in 1982, she came in 5th at the 7th annual comedy competition. Snow was up against comedians Jim Samuels, Kevin Pollak, Jack Gallagher and Will Durst who placed first, second, third, and forth respectively.

Carrie Snow appeared on A&E Network's An Evening at the Improv in Los Angeles in its early years and through the 1990s. From a 1989 show at The Improv, the Los Angeles Times' Duncan Strauss comments that “Snow is low-key and conversational.” In the same article he calls her show “Pretty close to an ideal synthesis of persona, delivery and material, because while many of her topics are wholly contemporary, much of her chatty style is a throwback to the approach of earlier female comics: self-deprecating, especially about her weight and her troubled dating life.” Snow often implemented a conversational style of stand-up to comment on her family, movies, food, and body image. In one of Snow's early performances on the show from October 9, 1981, she began her performance by announcing “my name's Carrie Snow. I'm fat, but I'm hot.”

Still in the early stages of her career, Snow continued to perform in the Bay Area. At twenty-six years old she had been doing stand-up comedy for three years and was a regular at the Holy City Zoo. It was at this age and stage in her career that Snow saw an improvement in the time slots she received from owner Tony DePaul. Entertainment writer for the Los Angeles Times Marty Olmstead writes in 1980 that “Snow has become the golden-haired kid at the Zoo.”

In the early 1980s Snow moved south to Los Angeles. It was here that she began performing at comedy clubs such as The Improv and The Comedy Store, and The Laff Stop's Newport Beach, California location.

During the 1980s and 1990s Snow knew and worked with fellow comedian Roseanne Barr of Roseanne. Snow met Barr at The Comedy Store when she first came to Los Angeles in the 1980s and the women became closer through Barr's show and when Snow helped her through her gastric bypass surgery.

In 1978, Snow finished 13th in a field of 40 in a local stand-up comedy competition. Snow reflects candidly on this placement as being “close, but no enchilada. The polish takes time,” recognizing that comedy takes practice.

Carrie Snow began performing stand-up in the Bay Area in the late 1970s. She made her first ten dollars while performing at San Francisco's Holy City Zoo in 1978. During this time San Francisco had a robust comedy scene and the Holy City Zoo had been “a fixture on the laugh circuit since 1974.” Comedians such as Robin Williams, Warren Thomas, and Paula Poundstone also frequented this comedy club.

Gilbert asserts that some of Snow's female contemporaries were “Emboldened by second wave—and ultimately, third wave—feminism, and more aggressive than their precursors, notable bawds of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s included the ‘Divine Miss M.,’ Bette Midler, La Wanda Page, Carrie Snow, Angela Scott, Adrienne Tolsch, Caroline Rhea, Stephanie Hodge, and Thea Vidale—all important voices that paved the way for contemporary comics like Silverman, Schumer, and Holly Lorka, who performs bawdy humor from a lesbian perspective.”

Carrie Snow (born July 16, 1953) is an American stand-up comedian, writer, author, and host from Merced, California. She is best known for writing for the television series Roseanne, and acting on the show. Snow was also featured in the documentaries The Aristocrats and Wisecracks.

Snow was born in 1953 in Merced, CA. Born with the name Carrie Snow Peletz, she later shortened it to Carrie Snow because she felt that her given name would “look lousy on a marquee.”