Her characters on screen might be edgy and her stand-up comedy might be a little abrasive, but Janeane Garofalo says her personality differs from that of the sarcasm queens she usually portrays.

“I think people confuse me with Daria sometimes. I’m not Daria,” the 38-year-old actress and comedian said in a phone interview Thursday before her show at Northwestern.

“I’m actually not a chain-smoking, cynical, bitter person,” she said. “I definitely am a person who is a pragmatist, and I definitely am a person who questions the status quo. I think people mistake or confuse cynicism with questioning the status quo.”

Garofalo has appeared on television and in films such as “Mystery Men” and “Wet Hot American Summer.”

While she calls herself a character actor, Garofalo won’t play characters who are stereotypical or demeaning to women. She said society places too much emphasis on “lookism” and needs to stop imposing crippling beauty standards on young men and women.

“Each person has to make a decision to divest themselves of these manufactured standards of beauty that the mainstream media foists upon you,” she said.

Garofalo said although she sticks with acting for “the money” actors get for big jobs, sometimes the lesser-known roles are the most fun. Her favorite parts include roles in independent films such as “The Minus Man” and “Manhood.”

Garofalo attracts a dedicated following but sometimes receives the wrong kind of attention.

Stalker-like fans “turn up frequently in unexpected places,” such one woman who came to Garofalo’s hotel lobby claiming to be her niece. A man in Connecticut has been writing her daily letters for four years, which Garofalo gives to a friend who used to work for the FBI.

Garofalo’s rise to recognition started during the “terrible” years she spent at Providence College, when she began doing stand-up comedy.

“It was the answer to my college dissatisfaction,” she said.

Garofalo said she has enjoyed performing at colleges ever since but now finds she has less in common with her audience.

“It becomes more difficult to connect as the age gap widens, because a lot of the things that I talk about are going to be a lot more resonant to a person in their 30s instead of people in their teens,” she said.

NU marks the last stop on Garofalo’s year-and-a-half-long tour. She said now she has lots of time on her hands, which she spends “reading and trying to stop the war in Iraq.”

Garofalo said she’s not sure whether she’ll continue acting, but she said she hopes to keep doing stand-up.

If she continues performing, Garofalo will always be able to enjoy what she calls the best part of her job: “the cigarette after (a) performance.”