Amusing advice Comedian riffs on life lessons in new special By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 4:53 PM CDT Thursday, Aug. 22, 2024

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From party goblin to elder millennial, Iliza Shlesinger is always evolving.

She’s also incredibly prolific. The American comedian has six Netflix specials under her belt, including her most recent, 2022’s Hot Forever. She has written two books, All Things Aside: Absolutely Correct Opinions (2022) and Girl Logic: The Genius and the Absurdity (2017). She wrote, executive produced and starred in the 2021 Netflix comedy Good On Paper. She’s a podcaster (AIA: Ask Iliza Anything) and an actor. She coined the phrase “elder millennial,” which serves as the title of her 2018 special.

“As long as I’m creating then I’m still living,” says Shlesinger, 41, who also gave birth to her second child earlier this year.

Now, she’s back on the road with the Get Ready Tour, which stops in Winnipeg on Saturday. The new show will be taped for her seventh special — and first for Prime Video — later this year.

“I think it has all the best parts of my acts — you know, animal noises and sounds and astute observations, with a little bit of reflection about getting older,” she says.

“It’s a raucous tornado of an hour.”

The Free Press caught up with Shlesinger by phone in advance of her date at the Centennial Concert Hall to talk about what’s involved in refining a new hour, Instagram brain rot and millennial nostalgia.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

FREE PRESS: Tell me about the new hour and what audiences can expect on the Get Ready tour.

ILIZA SHLESINGER: I usually put out an hour every year-and-a-half, and I took a little bit of time for myself to have my son and get back to trying to be a semblance of myself, so this one’s coming out a little bit later. So this is a super … I mean, they’re always polished, but I’ve had time to really cherry-pick exactly what I want. It’s a super-energetic, hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners funny hour and it’s my favourite one yet.

I have advice for younger women — which as a younger woman, I can tell you, you never want advice from older women. But especially at the end, I really address what it feels like to age in front of an audience. I talk a little bit about, not so much my kids, but the insanity that is having a baby right up top, and then we kind of move away from the motherhood stuff, and we just get into advice and things I wish I knew when I was younger.

FP: I know you’re taping a new special on this tour in November. How do you know when the hour is locked in? Or is it just constantly evolving? I saw John Mulaney twice on a tour in 2022 — Chicago in July and Winnipeg in October, and couldn’t believe how much it had changed in that space of time, for the better.

IS: I mean, the artistic answer is it’s never finished. It’s always evolving. And I would hope that when you see a comic about six months apart that what you see is different the next time, otherwise they’re not doing their job. So it’s not so much that it’s finished as much as you know when the special is taping so you get it as trim as you can to back it into that date.

But you know, the next week, when I go to do that hour at a new market, I start changing things. So it’s sort of an ever-evolving thing that you just happen to capture in a moment. I hate to say it’s like a bottle of wine, but it is. It just happens to taste that way on the day that you drink it, but next year it will be different.

FP: I imagine doing the hour is a bit different knowing it’s going to be committed to tape.

IS: I run my hour a lot because I genuinely love doing it. It’s always going to be polished, and I’m always going to hit the same mark on the stage. The bad news is, you’re having to sort of crystallize it in amber. But the good news is, if for some reason I flub something, I can go back and be like, “Let me take it again.” And the audience is on your side.

FP: This will be your first special for Prime Video after six specials with Netflix. What prompted that move?

IS: All I ever want is to be exposing more people to my comedy. Exposing is always a weird word — it always sounds lecherous and it always sounds like COVID. But I always want to be reaching different audiences. I did so much great work with Netflix, and that’s not to say I won’t work with them, or Hulu — it really is the Wild West when you talk about digital performances in standup, there’s no hard and fast rules. But I really wanted to see if I can reach a new audience and shake things up.

FP: We have to talk about Instagram, because the GRWM (Get Ready With Me) videos you’ve been doing are hilarious; I love your skewering of them. I feel like Instagram is breaking our brains a bit. It’s almost hard to know what’s parody anymore.

IS: That is actually the heartbreaking part. Like, to me, it is so clear that I’m doing a parody, and so I get sad for the future of my country and of our world when people don’t realize that my four-inch-long eyelashes and barely glued on fake nails with my lips held out is a joke. I’m like, “Oh my god, please don’t vote and please don’t operate a motor vehicle if you think this is real.”

I always run to the comment section because it is only there that you not only run up against the worst part of humanity, but you find the normal people. I always look for people who are like, “You guys, can’t you tell this is a joke?” And I’m like, “Oh, good. Some intelligence still exists.”

FP: As a fellow elder millennial, I also want to talk about our generation’s complicated relationship to nostalgia. I read a quote from you once about how the internet has made it so we have constant access to things we’d ordinarily be nostalgic for, which makes them less special.

IS: I think that there is a commodification of our own nostalgia, and it is not always pervaded by people who are actually missing it as well.

When I log on and I see a video that’s like, “Let’s take a look back at summer vacation in 2002!” and then they show you pictures of things that you would have worn or listened to or done and the person selling that to you could be a 20-year-old guy.

They know that you’ll look, so they’re selling you back your own nostalgia to actually make you a little sad. Because one of the reasons people get nostalgic for things is because where you are now does not feel as good.

It’d be one thing to look back at something and just enjoy it, but it’s ever-ready, so you don’t have a chance to miss it. I do think we are, in real time, as millennials — but probably every generation — mourning the loss of what we thought was a safer world. I think that’s why so many people spend so much time on their phones because we’re all a little unsure of what the f— is going on.

I mean, it’s a really sad thought — I know people are reading this like, “OK, is this a comedy show?” But in that, you can find community with people your own age because you remember not so much when it was better, but when it was different.

I also think part of becoming an adult is becoming cognizant of just how scary the world is, and I definitely see that now, having two kids — you just see things differently. Part of getting older is pulling your head out of the sand and becoming aware of all the insanity that is going on around us, and the internet just makes it feel even closer.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com