Sherri Shepherd learned at a very young age that she had a gift for making people grin. Growing up in Chicago, she’d hold court with a microphone in hand, cracking jokes at the family talent show. And the audience wasn’t just humoring her because she was kin – they had high standards.
“Here's the thing: My family, the Shepherds, they're all funnier than me, and they won’t hesitate to remind me that I'm just the one making money doing it,” she says.
In the decades since those living room laugh-ins, Shepherd, 57, has grown into an entertainment industry powerhouse. Accomplished stand-up comedian, TV and film actor, author, NAACP Image Award winner, and daytime talk show host, she does it all.
These days, she’s busy hosting her nationally syndicated, Emmy-nominated talk show Sherri, which is sailing through its third season with a trail of smiles and accolades in its wake.
“I love when I sit in that host chair and I say, ‘This is coming from Auntie,’” Shepherd says. “It connects not only with young people who love hearing wisdom, but also people of a certain age who have a difficult time being seen. I get them, and they get me. It’s great to make people feel good through laughter.”
Finding the Funny
If there’s one thing Shepherd knows how to do, it’s to create humor in the midst of hardship. When infidelity ended her marriage, she turned the story into a TV sitcom. After learning she had type 2 diabetes – a diagnosis she says saved her life by helping her appreciate her health in an entirely new way – her comedy sets were rife with diabetes-related jokes.
“As a stand-up, you look at things in a very different way than most other people do. I get on stage and talk about it,” Shepherd says.
And now that she’s in perimenopause, new material abounds.
“I feel like getting a period at my age is like eating corn,” says Shepherd. “It has no nutritional value. It is an inconvenience that I still have these damn pads and tampons taking up space in my bathroom. I will get to the 11th month with no period, and then right before that month is over, I look down and I’ve bled through my pants like I'm 16. And then I'm mad all over again. It’s like my body is pranking me.”
Normalizing a New Season
Growing up, all Shepherd heard of her mother’s menopause experience was coded language she couldn’t decipher.
“People used to say things like, ‘Oh, your mama's having her own private summer,’” Shepherd says. “I was like, ‘Well, why is her summer different from my summer? We live in the same house. What's private about it?’ Other times, my mom would just say her nerves were bad.”
Now that she’s going through it herself, she says she understands what it must have been like for all the women who went before her.
“I'll be sitting in my chair on my show and go, ‘I just got to stop talking right now because I'm hot. I can feel it coming through my wig. Who else here is hot?’ And every woman in my audience will start nodding and waving their hands and showing me their fans. It’s so important to talk about it.”
Through this open and honest dialogue, Shepherd is helping to change the script. A friend connected her to a gynecologist who made her feel “not so crazy” by normalizing her hot flashes and mood swings and talking through her treatment options once menopause happens for her.
And in her feel-good way, she is still able to see the positive. Just like her diabetes diagnosis shifted her world view, perimenopause has been a wake-up call to look at things differently.
“As long as you wake up, you get another chance to work this life thing out,” Shepherd says. “I always say to run toward the very thing that you fear because all of the blessings are on that other side.”
