Liz Miele is a stand-up comedian and writer from Pennington, New Jersey, who first performed at sixteen at the Comedy Cellar in New York. She has self-produced a run of hour-long specials for YouTube, including Self Help Me, The Ghost of Academic Future, Murder Sheets and her newest, Space Camp. She has appeared on Comedy Central, FOX, AXS TV, Hulu and NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, and her book Why Cats Are A**holes was published in 2021.
At fifteen, Liz Miele sat at the family computer every night after school, looking up the addresses of comedians she admired. She wrote each of them a letter asking for advice. Two answered. One of them was George Carlin, who picked up the phone. That call started an eight-year friendship, and Miele, now 41 and with more than two decades of stand-up behind her, says she still thinks about him every day. We talked to her about Carlin, about learning to let an audience see her temper, and about why she thinks stand-up is still the most open art form there is.
Sixteen, at the Comedy Cellar
Miele grew up in New Jersey and started writing jokes as a teenager. She got on stage for the first time at sixteen, at the Comedy Cellar, and went back and forth to New York until she moved there at eighteen. That was 2002, the year after 9/11. She was taking the train into the city on her own, and lying to her parents about it. When they found out, she had to bring a chaperone.
She was very nervous and ran her set over and over on the day. There were no podcasts or online guides then, just about four books on how to do it and a stack of biographies. She had read enough to set her expectations sensibly.
“I knew enough to know that any laugh was good and that it was gonna take time to grow and get better. And I just remember getting a few laughs and being like, that’s, I’m doing it.”
The set survives on an old VHS tape. It is painful to watch, she says, but at 41 she sees “this girl that did something really brave”. (More stories like hers are in comedians on their first laugh.)
At sixteen she joked about her parents, being a bad gymnast, school, being short, being made to go to therapy, and being sad. “My themes are almost a hundred percent the same,” she says. “Instead of gymnastics, I’m talking about CrossFit.” She still talks about therapy, her cats and her appearance. “The abilities have gotten stronger.”
The letter George Carlin answered
Her parents are both vets. “So I could have easily become a veterinarian and had an easy life of fixing cats,” she says. “But instead I made my life hard telling jokes about cats.” Her father told her that if she wanted to be where other people were, she should find out how they got there, and write to the comedians she looked up to.
So in 2001 she did. Her letters said she was fifteen, wanted to do stand-up, was a huge fan, and asked whether they had any advice. Judd Apatow, who still had his email address on his website, wrote back and told her to stay in school and write. For Carlin she found a postal address, which she thinks was his office in Santa Monica, and sent a letter set out like a business letter, phone number included.
“And he read it and he called me and he was like, hey, I’m George Carlin, I got your letter.”
The advice on that first call was simple: write every day and get on stage as often as possible. But he told her she could keep in touch, and she did until he died, when she was 23: first by post, then email, then phone. He sent her signed copies of his books. When she was written up in The New Yorker, she posted him the magazine, and he rang to say how cool it was.
At nineteen she met him for coffee. She had been doing stand-up for about three years and was struggling to build an hour and connect her jokes. Carlin opened his laptop and showed her how he memorised his longer pieces, how he sometimes read them flatly from his notes on stage, and how he organised a set list. She calls it one of the most important moments of her life.
“I still think of him daily,” she says, in how she treats younger comics and gives advice. She has since got to know his daughter, Kelly Carlin, who, Miele says, had no idea how many people her father had quietly helped until after he died.
Too scared to show the anger
We asked how much she had changed between Emotionally Exhausting, recorded when she was 26 or 27, and Space Camp, recorded at 39. She has become more accepting of who she is. In clips from her early albums, including Mind Over Melee, recorded in London for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016, she sees a performer hiding something.
“My anger is there, but I’m too scared to show it because I’m embarrassed. I’ve always been embarrassed by how angry and what a short fuse I have.”
In those years she tried to describe her anger rather than perform it. There is a joke in Mind Over Melee about yelling at someone on the subway in which she barely raises her voice. By Self Help Me, she was screaming a bit about walking home late at night. Her early self, she says, was “kind of monotone”, writing clever, unemotional jokes because she was scared of her emotions.
Therapy, years of practice and learning to like herself changed that. “I’m okay with people seeing my flaws. And my flaws are what make me special.” Even when she is being self-deprecating, she says, the undertone is: “I’m okay with you seeing this version of myself.” It is a version of the path many comedians describe in turning their worst moments into material.
Laughed at, or laughed with
We put to her a line attributed to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, that she had to make sure she looked funny rather than stupid. Miele agreed, and put it in her own terms.
“I control how you see me and I decide if I look stupid, right? You don’t get to say, so it’s the difference between being laughed at and laughed with.”
If she tells an embarrassing story, she is letting you know she knows it is embarrassing. She has always been a written comic, and when something works she keeps adjusting it until it works every time.
A first draft has no performance in it at all. It might be a tweet, or a message to a friend asking whether something was ridiculous. The cadence, act-outs and facial expressions arrive only when she says it out loud. Writing for a book is the opposite: with no tone to lean on, it has to be as concise and visual as possible. (We compared how other comics approach the page in how 25 comedians write their jokes.)
Her example was a bit set in a queue at CVS. A woman asked to go ahead of her because she was in a rush, then, while still waiting, began telling Miele that her best friend’s mother had died. Inside, Miele was furious. “The favour was letting you cut in front of me,” ran her internal monologue. “You can’t then keep talking to me.” She was writing it down before the woman reached the till. The gap between her inner fury and the situation was the joke. Her rule, she told us, is that “you have to earn the right to tell me sad stories”. A friend, yes. A stranger, no.
Why British audiences took to her
Miele started touring London about twelve years ago and has performed in around 40 countries. She worked out why her angry, personal material landed so well in Britain.
“And I did so well there because I was their internal dialogue. I was the person they wished they could be because society says they can’t express themselves that way.”
British people feel the same things Americans do, she says, but are more bound by the rules. And they have watched enough American television to feel they know her. “I’m an Italian from New York City,” she says. A joke about a particular subway line will not travel, but a breakup will. “Anybody can relate to heartbreak and anger and betrayal.” We have looked at the same question from the other side in British vs American audiences.
A four-minute story in a three-minute world
Miele is a storyteller, and her average bit runs about four minutes. When late-night television was how comics were discovered, bookers wanted tight jokes, not one long story. Now reels and Shorts cap out at three minutes. A story about her boyfriend’s botched vasectomy, she says, has 12 million views on Facebook, where longer videos still do well. She has said more about this in our piece on social media versus the stage, and she will not rewrite herself to suit an algorithm that changes every few months.
She is also open about the money. Her cheapest special, made after the pandemic for YouTube, cost her about $6,000. Her most expensive cost about $18,000. Ticket sales and YouTube advertising pay some of it back. For years, she says, the rest was covered by royalties from her five albums on SiriusXM, which let her take risks like European tours and the Edinburgh Fringe, both of which lost her money.
That is why the recent changes to SiriusXM’s Raw Dog channel hit her hard. She helped organise the response, and we covered her comments in our piece on the Raw Dog changes. Her short version is that the channel was where working comedians, the ones still writing new material, could be heard and paid. “Bob Hope’s not writing new jokes about facial recognition and AI,” she says.
An art form with no gatekeepers
For all that, she believes stand-up is still unusually open. Hollywood, she says, increasingly needs connections, and music needs money for studio time. In stand-up, almost everyone started as a nobody who decided to try it. “You walk in, you have some ideas. You don’t need anything.” Maybe, at some point, a car to get between gigs.
She plays rooms of 100 to 300 people, mostly at $20 to $25 a ticket. She would not turn down an arena, she admits, but there should be room for both: “you have to start out with 100 fans to make millions of fans”. Comedians have no health insurance or paid leave, she points out, and she gives regularly to fundraisers for colleagues who fall ill.
Asked for her own list of great specials, she started with Carlin, then her friend Adrienne Iapalucci, Nathan Macintosh, early Nick Swardson, Greg Giraldo, Ted Alexandro, Wanda Sykes and Kathleen Madigan. When we said we loved long stories that go nowhere, she corrected us. “I have long stories that go somewhere,” she said, and pointed to Murder Sheets and Space Camp. Her aim, she says, is simple: “I want people to know what’s going on and then I want it to be as fun as possible to get there.”
You can find Liz Miele at lizmiele.com, on Instagram at @lizmiele, and on YouTube, where Space Camp is available to watch. For more conversations like this one, see all our comedian interviews.
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