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PORN, PALLBEARERS PUNCHLINES
Photos by Nikki Moriello
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From wiping down 'viewing booths' in a porn shop, to interning at a morgue, to practicing stand-up comedy, Holly Stavarski has had some odd jobs. No joke. EMILY BRINDLEY | STAFF WRITER
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t started out as a joke. Holly Stavarski and a friend drove by the AdultMart on McKnight Road and saw they were hiring. They laughed about how funny it would be to work there — and then Stavarski applied, got hired and began slinging sex toys. From January to September 2015, Stavarski often worked more than 40 hours a week at AdultMart, mostly between midnight and 8 a.m. Sometimes, the work was slow. Sometimes, the work was sticky — one of Stavarski’s duties was to wipe down the private video viewing booths at the back of the store. “That’s when it stopped getting funny,” Stavarski said. “[But] it was still kind of funny because you would find a lot of interesting things. You’d find toys and vegetables and cheese — I found a lot of ‘snacks.’” When the job at AdultMart took strange turns, Stavarski just laughed and shared the stories with her friends — reigning as “the queen of Snapchat” while working at AdultMart.
Stavarski’s sense of humor has led her to and through several jobs, such as her job at AdultMart, but also a summer internship in the morgue of the Allegheny County Medical Examiner. Despite the difference in appearances, comedy was the common thread between the two jobs, as it has been for most of Stavarski’s life. In middle school, Stavarski would come home from school and watch the Comedy Central stand-up specials. Older, but not old enough, one of her friends would take her to comedy shows in high school, usually at bars or clubs where she was too young to perform. Last summer, Stavarski did her first stand-up routine in her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “Growing up, there were just a lot of things you kind of face on your own, and comedy has been a really good defense mechanism and a way for me to cope with some of the issues — like bullying and parents’ divorce and moving,” Stavarski said. In college, she became the co-editor in chief for The Pittiful News in the fall of 2015, where she writes about the smells around Pitt’s campus and erotic Criss Angel fanfiction. She started writing for Pitt