If you Have ever seen Felicia Michaels--at a comedy club or on TV--you probably think of her as the comic with that voice: like Minnie Mouse on helium. If she told jokes at a higher pitch, only dogs would be laughing. "I know some of you are looking at me and hoping this isn't my natural speaking voice," Felicia tells audiences in the first moments of her act. Then, with a sweet smile, she squeaks, "Well, this is it!" In an interview in Los Angeles, where the 28-year-old comedian lives when she's not headlining at clubs around the country, Felicia admits that her voice is a great gimmick, but the gimmick was a gift. "I guess this is just God's way of giving me a break," she says. "Over a microphone my voice sounds like a total cartoon. If it gets a laugh right away, I know I'm going to be OK." Once you're tuned to Felicia's frequency, you can sit back and watch the pretty girl onstage turn a few stereotypes inside out. "Some people hear my voice and see my blonde hair and automatically think I'm stupid," Felicia says in her act. "People think blondes are stupid, and lots of blondes get pissed off. Not me. I think it's cool. This way you can make major mistakes and nobody ever gets mad at you. 'Honey, I didn't mean to sleep with your brother. . . . Well, he tricked me!'" A lot of Felicia's material is rooted in her single-woman's travails with boyfriends, dating, love and sex. "It always surprises me how people are offended by sex and talking about sex," she says onstage. "Because sex is the most natural thing. I mean, be safe, be responsible, but what's the big deal? There was a time when men thought that women didn't like sex, and that's not true. We like sex. We even like oral sex. What we don't like are the stupid questions you guys ask afterward. 'What does it taste like?' What are we supposed to say? 'Well, being a connoisseur of fine jizz, I would say that yours is full-bodied, dry and unassuming.'" It was seven years ago, when she was dating a fledgling comic, that Felicia first set foot onstage. In a moment of bravado she told him his job looked easy, and he dared her to try. She debuted at an open mike a week later with her jokes written on a huge piece of paper taped to the floor, a cheat sheet in case she froze. "I killed," she remembers, laughing. "I was queen of the stage for five minutes." Within a year Felicia left her home in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to try her luck at stand-up in L.A. It took her several more years to polish an act that earned regular stage time in the West Coast comedy capital--and steady work on the road. "The road is tough for a woman," she says. "A lot of male comics take their girlfriends. The girlfriends go, 'OK. I won't waitress this week. I'll go with you to New York.' But if you're a woman comic, no guy is going to be the bitch. Can you see this? 'OK. I'll quit my engineering job and go to New York with you, baby. I'll carry the luggage.' And you can't go out with a guy you meet on the road, 'cause you might end up in a ditch. So it gets lonely." Felicia's hard work paid off this year when TV's Star Search awarded her its top comedy honors and $100,000 in prize money. That gave her the boost she needed to take another high-profile assignment: posing for Playboy. "A few girlfriends said, 'How could you do it? Don't you know Playboy stands for everything that's wrong about society's view of women?' I'm like, 'Listen, I've shown more for a lobster dinner. Know what I mean? Get a grip.'"
