By Jeremy Murphy

At 91 years old, most performers would be content with a lifetime achievement award and a comfortable chair. D’yan Forest prefers a microphone, a spotlight, and a room full of strangers she can turn into fans.

The Guinness World Record holder for “Oldest Working Comedian” is not easing into anything. She is strumming her ukulele, singing original songs, and delivering punchlines with the timing of someone half her age. On her 91st birthday, she took the stage at Joe’s Pub with her one-woman show A Gefilte Fish Out of Water, proving that if anything sharpens with age, it’s her sense of humor.

“I make sure I do some kind of exercise every day,” Forest says. “I walk the golf course, I go swimming. I try to take care of myself, and I never just sit and watch television.” That daily discipline fuels a performance style that’s part stand-up, part cabaret, part autobiographical confession. “I make fun of myself. I never make fun of the people in the audience. People can’t believe that a 91-year-old can be young in the brain.”

Young in the brain and fearless on stage. Forest’s comedy is personal, sometimes risqué, always authentic. In a single set she might riff on aging, dating disasters, antisemitism, golf club gossip, and the absurdities of modern romance. “I do a one-woman show where for an hour and a half I do my songs and then comedy about my life,” she says. “You never know when you see D’yan Forest what the heck she’ll do next.”

That unpredictability is part of her craft. “By my second line, I can tell whether the audience is going to have trouble,” she explains. “Then I start cutting out what I know they won’t understand and put in other stuff that I know they will. No audience is the same, it keeps your brain working.” Unlike comics who repeat the same set for years, Forest rewrites on the fly. “Some comics do joke after joke after joke, the same for years. I change it every show depending on the audience. That’s what makes it exciting.”

Ironically, she never planned to be a comedian. “I was a singer,” she says. “I sang French all over the world pretending I was French.” After a divorce in the early 1960s, the conservative Boston girl decamped to Paris and found herself in a world that shattered her expectations.

In 1962, she returned to the city she had first visited in 1955, staying near Montparnasse and haunting cafés like Café Select. “Paris was a total different world than America,” she recalls. “It really, really was the city of love in that era.” She met men on the street for coffee. Sometimes they showed up for the second date; sometimes they didn’t. Once, a schoolteacher led her through an ornate gate into what she later realized was a swinging party. “I was 28, 29 years old. I’m from Boston. I didn’t even hear the word,” she laughs. “But it turned out to be a great evening.”

The experience was transformative. “It blew my mind,” she says. “When I came back to America, I had a French accent, and I was shocked at what I had done.” That shock evolved into reinvention. She became a French singer, performing in Canada and beyond, building a career on the persona that Paris unlocked.

Eventually, New York called. An uncle connected to the Berklee School of Music advised her to head there in the mid-1960s. She split her time between Manhattan and Paris for years, treating the French capital as her romantic escape. “In New York, I’m a different person,” she says. “Paris became my escape from real, real life.”

Life in New York brought not just career growth but love in unexpected forms. Forest had relationships with men and women and spent 25 years helping raise a partner’s daughter. “I didn’t have any kids,” she says. “So, I brought up my friend’s kid. I have sort of a daughter who keeps in touch. That helps fulfill that part of my life.”

Today, she jokes that romance is “a disaster.” Friends have passed away. Younger men think she’s too old; men her age want someone younger. “The cab drivers call me grandma,” she says, exasperated. “I am young. As far as my brain is concerned, I’m in my 60s.” She has dabbled in dating apps with mixed results. “Once in a while there’ll be an older guy and he’ll be the strangest person I ever met in my life. I get stories out of it!”

What does she want? “Have a wonderful sense of humor,” she says without hesitation. “Know what’s going on. Go to interesting movies or books. Be intelligent. I don’t care what they look like. I don’t care what they did for a living. Let’s just have fun.”

Fun, after all, is her métier. Over the decades, Forest has shared stages with comedy royalty including Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jim Gaffigan. Rivers once dubbed her “the filthy ukulele player.” Forest protested: “No, Joan, I’m just risqué.” The two later chatted regularly after shows. “She was just lovely,” Forest says, crediting Rivers for inspiring her edge and honesty.

She grew up listening to Jack Benny and Bob Hope on the radio, long before she realized she herself was funny. “I never got into a comedy club until I started performing 20 years ago,” she says. “Now, of course, I’m in the middle of it. Hallelujah!”

Her newest one-woman show explores a different theme: antisemitism. Performed annually at Joe’s Pub on her birthday, it traces her life from 1934 onward, detailing encounters with prejudice in high school, college, and beyond. “It’s a good show,” she says. “Not so much sex in it, that’s the only thing that’s different.”

Still, she’s contemplating a return to her wilder tales. A future project may chronicle “D’yan in Paris in the ’60s,” capturing the smoky cafés, artists, and erotic awakenings that reshaped her life. “It changed my life,” she says simply.

Her resilience is perhaps best embodied in her closing number, Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here.” During a recent London performance, she accidentally knocked over a glass of Coke mid-song. “The coke and the glass went all over the stage,” she says. “Everybody laughed and applauded, they thought it was part of the act! When I go to London again, it’s going to be part of the act.”

That is D’yan Forest in a nutshell: nothing wasted, everything usable, even a spill. “It took me only 91 years,” she says, “but I’m getting there. I never thought I’d be a comedian, but now I look at the world funny. Anything that goes on, I think, ‘This is crazy,’ and I make a joke about it.”

Still here. Still fearless. Still rewriting the punchline on what it means to grow old.