Fans hear her: Fraction has so much work on her plate that after years of calling the South Side home, she’ll make the requisite move to Los Angeles next month. It’s been a slow vertical climb, due in large part, according to Fraction, to her look. Women audiences, she says, aren’t able to get on board with someone who looks, shall we say, modelesque. Female fans often come up to her after the show and say they initially didn’t think she’d be all that funny (“What’s so funny about being pretty?”), but that by the end they were sold. Male fans, on the other hand, say things that aren’t complimentary at all, like, “I didn’t even hear anything you said—you so fine.”

That underlying misogyny extends to the people she runs into on tour. And that pisses her off: “I have to be a hard-neck turtle bitch half the time—I have to be that or people will walk all over me. I have to demand my money and respect. I let people know that, yes, I need a separate dressing room and, yes, you’re going to treat me like a lady. I can be raunchy, but you will respect me.”

Even from an early age, Fraction made it clear that she’s the kind of person who makes things happen for herself. At 14, she left behind her parents and her small Missouri town—population 750—to live with her aunt and uncle in Chicago (with her parents’ blessing). Six years ago, she found herself at the now-gone Cotton Club, then on 18th and Michigan, singing backup for a friend at an open mike. Fraction took a shining to the stage, and vowed to return soon; she just didn’t want to sing. When she performed a cobbled-together three minutes of comedy, it just so happened there was a scout in the audience. “Do you do comedy?” he asked. The answer was yes, though the parenthetical “once” was, of course, left out.

He offered her $75 for five minutes of material, and that started her rise through the urban (or chitlin’) circuit. She’s spent the last few years making appearances on Comic View and touring across the country, including participation in the Bay Area Black Comedy Competition and a stint doing shows for members of the armed forces in London and Germany. Fraction continued to track down mainstream comedy work, too, like a role in 2004’s Barbershop 2.

Throughout it all, Fraction maintains her care for the larger community. She runs a program called I Love My Black Brothers, which seeks to counter the media’s portrayal of African-American men as a “menace to society” by providing support and recognition for those who are being good dads and furthering their education. And she continues to push herself into the stand-up sausagefest, knowing that, like it or not, she feels pressure to succeed for the sake of all female stand-ups.

“I wanna be a record-breaking woman—the highest-paid female comic,” she says. “When you’re in a male-dominated field, everyone looks to you and uses you as an example. Roseanne Barr interviewed me once and I was telling her that it seems like you have to be double or triple times better than the guys to get the same recognition. She said, ‘It’s not that hard to do.’”

Do the math with Fraction Friday 25 at Jokes and Notes.