Is Hannah Aslesen Golf's Funniest Gal?

Hannah Aslesen, just a normal midwestern girl from Minnesota, has quietly become one of the most influential and beloved figures in golf media just by simply being her (insanely funny) self.

She's quick-witted, cool as hell, responsible for one of the best pieces of golf content on the internet ever—she's basically golf's version of Kristen Wiig.

I've easily watched this five-minute skit over 20 times and it never gets old. Getting five grown men who happen to be some of the best players in the world to smile and talk into ring lights is literally genius.

With her tone and her delivery, she's the star of the show and the glue that holds the video together. It's unserious, it pokes fun at how frivolous content creating may seem, but when building a brand and an audience—the level of production matters. It's a nuanced piece of content that highlights the biggest issue in golf. Golf culture, in every sense of the word, feels void of personality at times. We need to lean in and embrace creativity more. This is what golf needs, I mean she said it herself in the video...golf is boring, golfers are boring and we need her.

Aslesen and her crew at St. André have done what feels like the impossible—making social media skits actually funny. We've all fallen victim to the cringey doom-scrolling on socials. As golfers we see the usual trick shots and highlight reels but the effortlessness of St. André skits feels like the jokes you and your friends make in the group chat consistently but actualized.

But it mainly works because Aslesen alongside Andrew Stanley and Aaron Chewning are actually funny. Is "funny", subjective? Sure. We all have our own types of humor, but generally speaking, this squad is funny. A few passes through their IG will prove it to you.

But what I think I adore the most is, what you see is what you get with Hannah. We had a fun little putz around at the nine hole course at The Ranch in Laguna Beach, where I got to just vibe out with the funniest woman in golf. Here's what I learned.

For starters, Aslesen used to work for Marlboro (yes the cigarettes), where she was responsible for 140 gas stations across the Southeastern region of Minnesota, taking inventory, handling pricing, and product launches. But the monotonous life of working for a cigarette company got old, and for Aslesen she became a version of herself she didn't love.

"Like a lot of millennials, I went to college kind of like not really knowing what I wanted to do and thought I wanted to be a lawyer. Kind of bounced around always kind of intrinsically loving the idea of comedy, but I got a job with Marlboro out of college," Aslesen outlined, because the "I want to be a lawyer" to working for major cigarette manufacturer pipeline is so common.

It was the logical move after she'd interned with the company to continue working there after college. Aslesen pushed down the gnawing feelings that this wasn't the right career placement for her and tried to ignore this version of herself developing as a sad 9-5er feeling stuck. It didn't take long for Aslesen to snap out of it and make the brave (albeit brash) move of quitting and pursuing what she always wanted to do—acting.

"One day I just woke up and I was like, 'What do I actually want to do? Like what do I genuinely love to do?' And it's making people laugh", Aslesen said. "I've always loved comedy. I love the idea of like a shared experience through laughter. It sounds very cheesy, but I was always like my favorite times were with my family or my friends and everyone was like collectively sharing in this thing and that was laughter."

"And so I quit my job that moment I called my boss and I was like I don't think I should be doing this. I moved home, got a job, busting tables, and then dove head first into like uh improv and sketch and standup and just did that all the time."

Going from 9 to 5 life to busting tables at the country club in her hometown (which would be her entry point to golf) and going to improv classes in between was the humble origin story of that chick from St. André.

Aslesen eventually found her way to Atlanta and that's when the pieces started to fall into place. In 2022, Chewning, a long time friend of hers, asked how she felt about golf and potentially creating these golf sketches. So they met up at a little coffee shop to talk through some things and ended up writing a handful of skits that day.

"I do things like...very impulsively. I realized I kind of hit a ceiling in Minnesota and someone said that I should try Atlanta and I did and hit the ground running when I did," Aslesen said. "I've always been someone who's really good in extremes and someone once was like, you have to have 10,000 hours before you're an expert at anything. And so I was like, okay, great. I'm going to put 10,000 hours into this. So usually Monday through Saturday, you could find me on a stage wherever it was. And I just kept like working it out, in trying to find out what my voice was I fell in love with the idea of failure."

What I learned from Aslesen is that comedy is just storytelling but in a different font. And you're going to tell a lot of really unfunny stories before you strike gold. In order to strike gold with St. André, Aslesen recognized that in order to make this work the golf component of her comedy would have to be just as real and authentic.

She's a year and a half into her serious golf journey...and surprise, surprise, she loves it. As we were playing, Aslesen filled me in on her first ever golf lesson she took recently, which she said was a game changer despite the fact that she thinks her swing feels "crazy". We all know that feeling, when you're a bit disjointed with the motion and poor contact feels more familiar than good contact. Despite feeling "weird" Aslesen hits the hell out of the ball.

I had to fall in love with golf to be able to write jokes about golf.

"I think people that write jokes about something that they like hate, it's going to come off like you hate it," Aslesen explains. "When you want to write from the perspective of something, you know, a part of me is like, 'Okay, I have to get to know this game.' And then in doing that, I fell in love with it.”

It was so refreshing to hear her take on golf. Comparatively, as someone who grew up around golf in the very traditional junior golf pipeline where everything mattered and it was so serious all of the time—I grew to despise the game and have a some what cynical disposition on the game. Hearing her journey was a reminder that golf is actually silly as hell and we giggled...a lot during our round.

She makes you funnier. And it's not like I was trying to go toe-to-toe with an actual, trained comedian who has an IMDb page—it happened so naturally. It's like when you play golf with people who are better than you, you pick up on tendencies that inadvertently make you better in the process.

So she's funny, a stick in the making at golf, and the final nail in the coffin is that she's actually like...the nicest human ever. Maybe it's a Minnesota thing? Maybe not. But damn, it's hard not to like the woman. Aslesen cares about golf, and in a really rejuvenating way. It's not just an opportunistic thing for her, she's truly obsessed just like the rest of us and her the comedy will only get better and better as she immerses herself deeper into her journey. The skits are now very much rooted in experiences—and that's bad ass.