Sandra Bernhard is even cooler than you think.

The 64-year-old actor-comedian got her television start on the short-lived Richard Pryor Show in 1977, appeared in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy in 1983, hit the mainstream in the 1990s with a supporting role on Roseanne (during which Bernhard became one of the first openly bisexual people to play a bisexual character), and is currently featured on the groundbreaking FX series Pose. Throughout her 40-plus years in show business, Bernhard has also performed one-woman shows on Broadway and off-Broadway, written three books, and released more than a dozen albums, and since 2015 she’s been recording her own Sirius XM show called Sandyland on Radio Andy, Andy Cohen’s radio channel.

These milestones of fame have helped cement Bernhard as one of the greats, even if she doesn’t quite get the recognition she deserves. In part, she doesn’t want it. She’s not very interested in adulation or the Hollywood machine.

“Maybe I didn’t get all the roles I wanted, because I wasn’t the girl next door or the ingénue or the sex bomb, but so be it,” Bernhard tells the Straight over the phone from her home. “I’ve had my freedom. I’ve been doing this for a long time, I still feel very vital and very relevant, and I’ve never pigeonholed myself. I’ve also never made myself the victim of the business. When you do your own work, and you can go on the road and you can make money, you’re always your own person. And that’s not an easy lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination. But you have the tradeoff between that and being, like, totally harassed and tortured by somebody.”

Bernhard arrived in L.A. in the mid-’70s. She describes it as a “much, much, much different world”, but, in retrospect, she was lucky.

“I never really had any super traumatic experiences of the #MeToo nature,” Bernhard says. “Of course I got hit on and of course people harassed me a little bit, but I always deflected it with my humour.”

Humour was always one of Bernhard’s best assets. It was a means of escape, a place from which she could cultivate freedom, and it came pretty easily to her. But she didn’t actually want to do standup when she started out.

“By the time I actually got to L.A. and got on my feet, I kind of just got sent in the direction of standup comedy, even though it really wasn’t my first love,” Bernhard recalls. “My first love was singing. Then people said, ‘Oh, you’re really funny, you’re a natural, so do that and then you can add singing,’ which is what I did. I kind of did it backwards.”

Bernhard wanted to be like Carol Channing, Barbra Streisand, or Bette Midler—funny, complicated women whose spiky genius, artistry, and ambition established them as the ultimate triple threats: musical-comedy actors.

“Music has always been something to me that’s laid the foundation for all my emotions, and all my writing, and just kind of everything in my life,” Bernhard says. “My taste in music is eclectic, it’s all over the place. But the most important thing for me is that it’s a song that I can tell a story with. And that can be just about anything if the lyrics are right. Even if it’s a trashy song or something you wouldn’t expect me to do, if I can do something different with it and turn it on its ear, that’s what I’ve set out to accomplish.”

Bernhard has been crafting musical-comedy shows since 1985 with her music director, Mitch Kaplan. For the last several years, they’ve put together an annual gig at Joe’s Pub in New York City around Christmas, which they then take out on the road. When Bernhard returns to Vancouver for the Chutzpah Festival, she’ll be joined by Kaplan and her West Coast bandmates. She says this concert will be an amalgamation of the best parts of her annual cabaret acts from the last few years, with plenty of improvised additions reflecting on whatever catches Bernhard’s eyes or ears that day—or even in the moment.

She worries that social media, texting, and emailing have stripped people of their spontaneity. To her, texting is a “very destructive way of communicating, and I think that’s why I’m so verbal.

“I like to be either on the phone or in the room with somebody,” she continues. “Texting and emailing is just a way of conveniently getting my work done. I don’t like talking to my friends like that, so I wouldn’t like talking to my audience that way either. To not try to escape the responsibility of being one-on-one with people—it takes a certain kind of discipline.”

Being present is important to Bernhard, and she prides herself on being able to adapt on the fly.

“Things never get boring for me,” says Bernhard, whose act often strays from her written material. “It doesn’t become rote. If I want to kind of go off the beaten path, I will. I’ll go off on a tangent and come back to the material. That’s how my work has always been, which keeps it very freewheeling and fun—a big difference between doing my own work and doing a TV show or a film, or from a script and there’s other actors, and you kind of have to adhere to what’s in front of you. Which is my least favourite thing to do when it comes to my own work. So I keep it very fluid and always keep it open.”

That openness extends to her own humour. Bernhard doesn’t have much time for those whining about comedy being “too politically correct”.

“Everybody wants somebody to acknowledge them and just give them the room and space to exist,” Bernhard says. “That’s really at the core of what people are looking for, and what I like to honour people with.”

Sandra Bernhard presents Quick Sand at the Vogue Theatre on October 31 as part of the Chutzpah Festival.