Jenny Jones

Jenny Jones got to comedy through music, playing drums and singing in bands before she stepped out alone. She started stand-up in the eighties, won the comedy category of the television talent contest Star Search in 1986 as the first woman to take it, and the exposure turned her into a touring act who opened for Jerry Seinfeld and for singers on the casino circuit.

Her own idea was a show billed as Girls Night Out, a no men allowed evening that sold out consecutive dates and carried her routine onto national television. A documentary about women in stand-up placed her among her contemporaries in 1991, the same year her daytime talk show launched. The Jenny Jones Show ran until 2003 and was taped in Chicago; after it finished she moved to cookbooks and a cooking channel rather than back to broadcast television.