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“All of us need to laugh right now more than ever, and that’s what I aim to do,” she says.

While younger audiences may know Walter as the Sicilian school teacher Melissa Schemmenti on ABC’s hit show “Abbott Elementary,” the Maryland native is not a Hollywood newbie. She’s graced both the big and small screen throughout her career. She was Chessy, the housekeeping nanny, in 1998’s “The Parent Trap” remake and Sheryl in “War of the Worlds” alongside Tom Cruise.

She even made a few cameos in other hit shows, like portraying a cancer patient on Season 16 of “Grey’s Anatomy.” In 2023, she won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series alongside the rest of the “Abbott Elementary” cast.

However, for Walter, performing as a stand-up comic creates a different type of funny. She likes the intimacy and shared experience of comedy clubs.

“What’s going on that night, it’s never going to happen exactly that way again,” she says. “That is just for you.”

Although fans fell in love with Walter on stage and screen, the actress says she was funny long before her name was in lights. She was a chubby kid growing up, and was often teased at school. Humor became a way to protect herself at a young age: a comedic shield to keep the bullies at bay.

“I figured a way to be safe was to be funny,” she says. “And that’s how it happened. I came up funny.”

She grew up listening to comedy albums from greats such as George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx. With a mother who was “deeply Catholic,” Walter realized she could get away with saying inappropriate things so long as it made her mom laugh.

Walter says she also recognized the immense pressures that plagued her mother. As a divorced woman raising children on her own, Walter’s mom went through rough patches during a time when divorce was still taboo. Walter tried to soothe her mom’s emotional pain with comedy.

“It was so hard to be at home that I needed to be funny to make her laugh and to make her less sad,” she says.

Although Walter’s mother died before “Abbott Elementary” aired in 2021, Walter credits her with being the inspiration for her character. Her mother worked as a schoolteacher in a predominantly Black school in Washington, D.C., for years, similar to Walter’s character, Melissa.

Walter says show creator and star Quinta Brunson wrote the character with Walter’s mother in mind.

“I wish she could have seen the success of not just me in ‘Abbott,’ but I wish she could have seen ‘Abbott’ because that was her life,” she says.

Long before starring in “Abbott Elementary,” Walter found refuge on the stand-up stage. She got pregnant shortly after college, where she studied acting, and had to ditch the auditions for the comedy club circuit to make sure the bills were paid. She eventually made her way back to acting, but not before shaking up the “boys’ club” comedy scene with observational stories about everything from pregnancy to the frustrations of midday grocery-store runs.

Walter says she loves being on stage. “I get to go into work and do the thing I love more than anything in the world, which is to be funny,” Walter says. And she’s happy to see a wider array of comics, including female ones.

Diversity is needed as women continue to make strides in the comedy space because their experiences resonate differently with audiences. She knows her jokes won’t be the same as Nikki Glaser’s, just as Glaser’s style of funny will differ from Wanda Sykes’. For Walter, all of their voices are necessary.

“The representation is important because it makes for more funny,” she says.