“Did you know ants can carry 50 times their body weight?” asked Delaney Malone.
Sitting in dining room chairs at Malone’s house in Northeast Portland, Rachelle Cochran and Ash Allen exchanged bits with Malone to practice for their upcoming “ROY G. BIV’s Comedy Show,” at the Siren Theater on July 17.
“Have you ever thought maybe they don’t want to do that?” Malone finished with a deadpan stare.
Without skipping a beat, Cochran shook out her messy bleach blonde pixie cut, which she said a kid in the grocery store recently remarked is reminiscent of “Machine Gun Kelly going through a midlife crisis.”
“I really like to partake in psychedelics,” Cochran said. “But I’ll tell you what, the people who do not like them are the passengers in my Uber. They don’t care at all, but I always remind them: ‘You only truly make it to your destination in life after you put in the work on the inside.’”
Allen lamented about her stressful few weeks.
“So I did what you do when you’re stressed out.” she said. “I gave myself micro bangs.”
Motioning to her bang-less forehead, she said, “You’re looking for them, where are they?” She then motioned to the crotch of her pants. “Down there. Yeah, it’s not good. I need everyone to make it a bottom bang summer so I’m not alone.”
Consisting entirely of Queer performers who are based in Portland, “ROY G. BIV’s Comedy Show” highlights local LGBTQIA2S+ comedians.
Malone started the show herself in 2022, added Cochran in 2024, and Allen this year.
“I just wanted to produce a good show that had people show up, with the underlying point being that every performer is LGBTQ,” Malone said. “The most important thing to me was having a show that was very consistent. That you’re getting a good show, a good audience, for both the comedians and the audience. That was my goal. So I kind of put all my eggs in that basket for this show.”
The three of them are especially grateful to have found each other, given the vastly different types of comedy in Portland.
“I’m just so delighted to get to work with these two,” Allen said. “You only want to work with people that you actually really love.”
The venue where the trio previously performed, Crush Bar, closed down last December. That left the show in flux until Malone found the Siren Theater. This show will feature comedy, prizes and a DJ. They hope to get back to a monthly schedule of “ROY G. BIV’s Comedy Show” in the coming months.
Finding their voices
Allen, 40, grew up an only child with a stutter in rural Mississippi with parents who were “pot-smoker people that supported me.” She remembers watching Robin Williams and getting up at 2 a.m. to watch Ellen specials with the sound off, “because I felt like I was watching porn, you know?”
Allen’s main inspiration growing up was her “L-word” grandmother, who wore terry cloth tube tops and rode around in her pickup truck with a sawed off shotgun. As a child, Allen and a friend encountered an explicit sapphic book on her grandmother’s shelf.
When a friend asked why her grandmother had this book, Allen responded, “Well, she’s a lawyer.”
Allen moved 3,000 miles to attend Evergreen College in Olympia, Wash. She remembers always talking about doing comedy. It wasn’t until she moved to Portland four years ago, following a divorce, global pandemic and getting fired from her job, that she started going to open mics up to four nights a week.
“I feel like I’m trying to catch up after not doing it,” said Allen.
Across the country, Malone, 28, and her twin brother were raised in Maryland by her father while her mother worked on Wall Street.
“I had no influence of, like, how to be a lady at all,” Malone said. “I definitely like to take up space. I have a really loud voice.” She played coed soccer and basketball, which was just her playing on the boys team since her dad couldn’t drive her and her brother to two different locations. In high school, she got voted class clown and expressed herself through comedy.
Malone also started comedy in Portland about four years ago. The first time she went to an open mic, she realized how bad everyone was.
“I didn’t know that was an option,” Malone said. “And everyone did really bad, because open mics are practice.”
Two hours from downtown Portland, Cochran, now 35, grew up in Elmira, Ore. She was the oldest of six kids in a big Catholic family.
“I wasn’t the cutest or the smartest, but I like to think I was the funniest,” Cochran said.
When she learned about stand-up comedy, she took all the speech classes she could and wrote jokes that “made people laugh on the inside.” When she was 21, a comedy club opened in Eugene, and she’s been doing comedy on and off since then, taking breaks when she started her tax accounting job, and during the pandemic.
Cochran looks up to comics Maria Bamford, Kathleen Madigan and Kyle Kinane.
She came out to her family at 27.
“Mom brought out a Bible, quoted Leviticus,” she said. “Tale as old as time.”
Since then, her family has welcomed her partner at family functions. The self-proclaimed “gay cousin,” Cochran says, after not being out for so long, the last eight years have “been really fucking liberating.”
City of Stars
Cochran and Malone met at an open mic and started writing together. They did a “seamless” practice show together before teaming up for ROY G. BIV.
Allen joined them later when they “realized they could use even more gay help,” said Malone.
Portland is uniquely set up for Queer comedy, according to the three. Bars sometimes have multiple open mics per night, and they experienced getting a lot of stage time and the freedom to mess up. When putting together a show, Portland has easy access to comics from Bend and Seattle and more rural areas of Oregon.
Combined, the trio have over 50,000 followers on Instagram. Malone said social media is a hot button issue for comics.
“There are a lot of people that got famous through social media and now get to tour that did not follow the protocol of normal comedy steps,” Malone said. “I got lucky and had some videos do really well.”
Less than 20% of the comedy scene in Portland is women, according to Malone. She remembers going to the only two open mics run by women when she was just starting out.
“I didn’t even do that on purpose. It’s like just where I felt most comfortable performing,” said Malone.
Cochran said they can be seen as the “token” woman in a comedy show.
“We call it like being a token, but it’s also like, there’s way less of us, right?” Cochran said.
“I want to lift, especially these two people, up as much as possible,” Malone said. “Because as a team, it only benefits each other for us to all do well. We all need to be doing better so that when someone goes out to see a woman perform, they’re getting a good experience.”
The trio say they are each getting new opportunities every day.
“The things both of these women do, I just love cheering for them,” Allen said. “I’m just a fan of both of them, and so to get to watch them just, like, go is exciting.”
Catch the trio July 17 at the Siren Theater.
Allen hosts a weekly radio show, “Porch Hang,” on Shady Pines Radio. She will also perform on the storytelling stage at this year’s Pickathon Music Festival. Cochran hosts Comedy in the Park every Friday at Laurelhurst Park through Sept. 5. Delaney has upcoming shows in Tigard, Vancouver, Wash. and more. They’re all on Instagram at @roygbiv_comedy, @del.aney.malone, @itsrachellecochran and @ashallencomedy.
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This article appears in July 16, 2025.