Laughter is best medicine for Grey’s Anatomy writer Jamie

Jewish Telegraph, July 2024

IT’S rare that I impress my daughter Maisie. But the second I mentioned I was interviewing ‘one of the writers of Grey’s Anatomy’, she regaled me with an “iconic” plot that Jamie Denbo had written in one of the recent seasons of the medical drama.
And I became top dad when she found out that Jamie was doing the Zoom interview from the Grey’s compound — giving us an impromptu tour of the show’s set and answering Maisie’s questions on storylines and characters. In fact, I was lucky to be able to get in some questions before Maisie hijacked the Zoom.
While Grey’s Anatomy will obviously dominate any interview with Jamie, she’s actually speaking to me to promote her Edinburgh Fringe Festival show Beverly Live!
She will be appearing in the one-woman show as Beverly Ginsberg — a Jewish woman in her 70s — at The Gilded Balloon: Other Yin in the Scottish capital from July 31-August 12.
“She’s an amalgam of people,” Jamie said. “Because I grew up in Massachusetts in this little New England town, she’s got a lot of those characteristics. She’s got that voice, but she definitely has parts of my grandmother, parts of my mom, parts of my mom’s friends — she’s everybody’s embarrassing aunt.
“I’ve had Chinese people come up to me and say ‘She is my auntie’. The more specific I get, the more universal it is. My Italian friends say, ‘Oh, my God, where did you meet my aunt Rosalia?’ We all can relate to the not-cool aunt who wants to be cool.”
Beverly made her first appearance on the podcast Ronna and Beverly, which ran from 2011 to 2017. Jamie’s comedy partner Jessica Chaffin played Ronna Marlene Glickman.
“We were together for 12 years,” Jamie explained. “I think we wanted to do different things, and we wanted to take a break.
“I actually was transitioning that time into being more of a writer. It just sort of felt like it was the right time to go our own ways.
“What’s funny is I don’t know that I intended to bring my character back at all. In fact, especially during Covid and just during the sort of trauma that the world had been through, I just didn’t feel funny.
“It’s not that there wasn’t a place for comedy; there definitely was. I just wasn’t sure what the comedy was that I wanted to put out and I needed some time to think about that.
“I just kept seeing the world and all of the things that we were going through, whether it was the writers’ strikes in Hollywood, post-Covid life and then, of course, everything that’s going on in the Middle East.
“And I thought now I know what Beverly has to talk about. I know what this character’s point of view is because I had been able to process how I felt about all of those things, and what my point of view was.
“And so I understood that I had to be very clear with that and she just started talking through me again. And then I was like, ‘Oh, s***! Here we go!”
Jamie added: “So now, 14 years later, back to the Fringe, this time without my then three-year-old daughter Nola and 10-month old son Walter.
“It’s a different animal to do Beverly as a one-person show.
“It was definitely a fun and challenging experience to form this character into something substantial, and for her to say something about what is going on now.
“Beverly is a 74-year-old woman from a small town who is trying to reinvent herself in her golden years. She fancies herself as an open-minded, kind and giving human being who is coming up against a world that is changing so fast.
“She wants to be a cool kid. She wants to be the most woke person you have ever met of her age group, but she also has a lot of habits that are hard to break and I felt like that is something we can all laugh at.”
While her name might not be familiar, chances are you would have seen Jamie on TV.
Her list of acting credits is extensive, including appearances in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks & Recreation, Orange is the New Black and GLOW to name a few, and also roles in films such as Spy, The Heat and Ghostbusters.
“I was like a middling mildly-successful guest star on many shows,” she told me. “I tell people one episode of everything good and one episode of everything bad.
“People are like, ‘I saw you on something last night’. I’m like, ‘I have no idea what it could be’. It could be one episode of Sex in the City, one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, one episode of the worst show you’ve never seen and you’ll never see again.
“So that was a nice way to live for a long time.”
Jamie was born and raised in a Conservative Jewish home in suburban Boston, in Swampscott, Massachusetts.
Her mother is from Montreal, and her father is from New Jersey.
“I was raised in a tight-knit Jewish community, where you grow up thinking that Jews are 50 per cent of the world’s population — oh, there’s Christians and there’s Jews and, being Massachusetts, just no one else,” she told me.
“Then you learn, when you leave Massachusetts, that you have got the wrong idea about everything.”
He parents “sort of settled between New Jersey and Montreal, and stayed in Boston, where we had a very small family.
“I was told they met on a vacation island called Nantucket. At the time it was a much much less fancy destination, evidenced by the fact that my young hippie parents were able to find each other on this very exclusive island.
“And then there was a lot of driving for a very short period of time while they courted.”
Being an only child meant that Jamie had to use her imagination.
“A lot of the friends I lived around had much bigger families and so they always had people there . . . and I just had to make them up,” she laughed.
“My family thought I was an extrovert, but not particularly amusing. I don’t think I learned how to craft my strong flavour into comedy until much later.”
Jamie describes the biggest turning point of her life as “graduating from Boston University with no idea what I wanted to do and not with a degree in performance. It was a degree in communications which, at the time, was the biggest bull**** degree you could possibly have, probably still is”.
She explained: “I thought maybe I’ll perform for the summer, even though I wasn’t trained as a performer. I did improv comedy, which was fun because I didn’t have to memorise anything.
“I auditioned for this bunch of theatre companies and I wasn’t good enough to get cast in anything normal.
“So the only job offer I got was for something called the Sterling Renaissance Festival — where people walk around with bad British accents and recreate 1600s in England in the Elizabethan age.
“I truly didn’t know what it was. And because I got this job offer before I had Google, I showed up. I thought I was doing Shakespeare in the Park, but this was something else.
“It made me realise, ‘Oh, you can kind of play for a living. You can be an adult that just wears costumes and plays’.
“I wound up moving to Orlando to work at Disney World and doing some of the improvised atmospheric entertainment in the parks, and then I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m 24, and I live in Orlando. I don’t want to do that’.
“So I moved to New York City just about the same time that (improv comedy group) the Upright Citizens Brigade moved there, and they created this entire world of improv as a very cool art form. I stayed in that world for many, many years.”
She credits her improv training with helping her land the writing role on Grey’s Anatomy.
“When you are in the improv world you’re learning to write and act at the same time,” Jamie said. “So a lot of the people who you see in The American Office or Parks & Recreation came from that school of improv.
“After my comedy double act faded out, I got the opportunity to apply for a job in this world in the one-hour network television world, because they were looking for someone who had writing experience and was a comedic voice.
“And the showrunner took a chance on me, even though I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But I somehow came in and thought I’m supposed to mimic what the other guys were doing.
“Part of my improv training was being a mimic — impressions and characters and coming into a scene, and not knowing what to expect, and then suddenly adapting to whatever that scene is.
“So it actually proved to be a very useful skill in this world. So I kind of came in from the side. And now this is my fourth season on Grey’s Anatomy.”
Of the hospital drama, which starts filming its 21st season in two weeks, she said: “If we’re doing an episode right, it will make you laugh and it will make you cry in the same 45 minutes.
“I was a fan of the show, but stopped watching at about Season five. So when I got the job I was like, ‘Oh, boy, I have about 12 seasons I need to catch up on’.
“I was walking around with my laptop and my headphones and I would fast forward through a lot of things, and watch the most exciting episodes and the most iconic episodes.
“My husband would laugh because I’d walk by once laughing, and walk by another time crying.”
It’s probably a good time to introduce her husband — John Ross Bowie, better known in this country as the iconic Big Bang Theory character Barry Kripke.
“I met him at Amy Poehler’s level two improv class,” Jamie explained. “It was before he was in Big Bang Theory, so I did not marry him for money. He wasn’t a regular on the show.”
She laughed: “He’s the Janice from Friends.”
For anyone attending her Edinburgh show, Jamie joked: “Just follow the protesters. They’ll probably be right out front.”
But she added: “I’m bringing Jewish joy. It is not controversial unless anyone would like to make it controversial.
“If you’d like to debate with Beverly, do your best, do your worst. Beverly will just take off her shirt and force you to breastfeed. ‘I can’t listen to you anymore. I’m going to breastfeed you until you get enough Jewish nutrition in your body that it changes your brain’.
“Beverly will get in there and just be like, ‘Why can’t you just make love to me? Because I’m old or because I’m Jewish? Which one? You’re either an ageist or an antisemite. I can’t tell which is worse’.
“I will deal with it in the most disgusting offensive way possible, and hopefully it will leave people dying laughing.”
And then it seems my time is up — and it’s back to Grey’s Anatomy chat with Maisie.
Beverlylive.com