Reagan Ward is one funny girl.

She’ll be modest about it, but in reality she’s gaining the resume to prove it. By day, she works at an advertising agency as a copywriter, producing ads for businesses and products like L.L. Bean. By night, she lights up the stage at the New Movement theater, on Lavaca Street, as one-sixth of the all-female comedy troupe Checkbook.

The theater, which opened a few years ago after two Hurricane Katrina evacuees fled to Austin, helps Ward sharpen her skills at improvisation and sketch comedy and has allowed her to get to know other comedians not just in Austin but in New Orleans as well, where a sister New Movement theater opened in 2010.

“It’s surprising how close you can be with a community so far away,” Ward said about the New Orleans branch of the New Movement.

She and her troupe are also infiltrating the comedy scene — typically male-dominated — in Austin and have performed at venues such as Coldtowne Theater, on Airport Boulevard, and the Hideout Theatre, only a couple of blocks away from the New Movement downtown. The 29th Street Ballroom at Spiderhouse Cafe, off Guadalupe Street, is another place they’ve performed shows.

Ward is a fan of seeing comedy as well, and she said she frequents the Cap City Comedy Club on Research Boulevard to get her fill.

Her day job at advertising firm GSD&M, near Whole Foods Market and BookPeople at Sixth Street and North Lamar Boulevard, is rather different, although she often finds herself flexing the same comedic muscles to produce ad copy for GSD&M clients.

“I’ve found that I often take the comedy I do in the evenings and combine it with the writing I do during the day,” Ward said.

Her latest project, a commercial for shaving cream brand Barbasol, has been the first since starting there in summer 2010 that she’s worked on from start to finish, from crafting the creative concept to editing the filmed result. The commercial will begin airing at the end of January.

She hadn’t expected the copywriting job at GSD&M to fall into her lap the way it did. In college, she worked for Transmission Events, passing out promotional fliers at venues such as Red 7, on East Seventh Street. That gig forged her love affair with the Mohawk, but when her professor let his class know internships were opening up at GSD&M, her career path spun in a different direction.

To be honest, she said, she never intended to stay so long in Austin. For now, she has no plans to leave. She stays busy and happy with her day and night gigs, scarfs all the Mexican food she can get at Curra’s Grill on East Oltorf Street, and enjoys the Austin skyline, the whole of the city lit up around her, at select spots at the Palmer Events Center and Barton Creek Mall.