Leah Knauer is a Los Angeles stand-up comedian, impressionist, musical improviser and sketch writer from Philadelphia. She played young Nikki Glaser on Comedy Central’s Not Safe with Nikki Glaser, has opened for Arsenio Hall, writes sketches with Ron Funches, and will be a series regular in And Also With You, executive produced by Margaret Cho.
Leah Knauer moved to Los Angeles to be an actress. She quickly worked out that waiting for auditions was not for her. “I don’t want to just sit around and wait for auditions. I wanted to, like, feel proactive,” she told us. “So I was like, the way that I can perform every night is to start doing stand up.” She was 19. Fifteen years later, she roasts the front row, makes up songs about the audience, and then sells them affirmation cards after the show.
Jump to: 278 days of Kevin Smith · How she started · Roasting the front row · Witchcraft and stand-up · The break · Big rooms and small rooms · What’s next
278 days of tweeting Kevin Smith
Auditions were slow when she was starting out. Then she heard that Kevin Smith, who is from New Jersey, was shooting a film at a mall near where she grew up, a mall she had been caught shoplifting in as a kid. “So I was like, I have to be in this movie.”
Her cousin suggested she tweet at him. It started as a joke, and then people told her she couldn’t stop. “Two hundred and seventy eight consecutive days I tweeted at Kevin Smith and I’m in Jay and Silent Bob, the reboot. It’s crazy.”
How she started
Leah came to stand-up straight out of rehab, and she talks about it openly. “It was the worst, best thing to ever happen to me, truly,” she says. Going through it took away her fear of trying things. “I’m like, sure, I can get on stage and talk to people who cares.”
The moment she knew what she wanted came earlier, watching the Comedy Central roast of Charlie Sheen. She saw Amy Schumer for the first time. “I saw this like cute, bubbly, blonde, young woman. And that was the first time I was like, oh, like pointing at the screen, like, oh, that’s that I feel like that’s me.”
Her first show was a class showcase at the Westside Comedy Theater in Santa Monica, in front of about 80 people. Her teacher put her on first because he thought she could take the bullet. “I felt like I wanted to like shit and throw up at the same time,” she says. Then she got on stage, the laughs came, and “afterwards you feel this adrenaline of like, I have to do that again.” Her first laugh of all, she says, was twerking at a high school assembly. (More stories like that are in comedians on their first laugh.)
Roasting the front row, then singing about them
Her stand-up is not gentle. “When you come to a show, I am roasting you. Like if you’re sitting in the front, I love roast jokes.” Joan Rivers is the reason.
After about eight years of what she calls “quote unquote regular stand up”, she got bored of telling the same jokes. She had been voted most likely to be in High School Musical, had done musical improv, and had always wanted to be a pop star, so she brought music into her sets: parody songs, and songs she makes up on the spot about the crowd.
“You can feel the crowd come alive because they’re like, what’s going to happen?”
Leah Knauer
She runs into the audience, and people notice. “I’ve literally had people tell me that they were sitting on like the end of a row in a theater. And then they saw me coming to the crowd and they moved closer into the middle.” She has also learned who not to hand the microphone to. She once brought an actor on stage who tried to make the show about himself. What she wants is the nervous person who has never been on a stage, who then surprises everyone. “That’s what I want. I don’t want it to be like, oh, you do this all the time.”
Witchcraft, self-care and stand-up
She co-hosted a podcast called Basic Witches, about female empowerment, witchcraft, astrology and self-love. She knows how that sounds next to roast comedy, and she makes fun of it too. But she means it. “Everything in my life has come from self-love, self-care, witchcraft, manifestation,” she says, “because how you view yourself and how you view the world is then how you will behave and act in that world.”
Her definition of witchcraft is simpler than people expect. “Witchcraft to me can be as simple as lighting a candle and saying a prayer.” She journals, writes affirmations, has done The Artist’s Way three times, and has made three decks of affirmation cards, which she sells at her shows. So the same people she has just roasted queue up to buy cards that will make their lives better. “It’s a full dichotomy.”
The positivity takes work. She lives with anxiety and depression, and says Hollywood and comedy can be very toxic. “People always say, oh, my, you’re so positive. I’m like, I am. I love people. I love connecting. But like when I’m by myself, it’s like I do need affirmations and meditation and all these things.” When she wants material, she asks the crowd for their star signs and roasts them. Geminis and Scorpios, she says, are the easiest. She is a Gemini.
The break that saved her stand-up
Leah thinks of her career in two eras. For the first eight or so years, she was trying to fit in. “I was trying to conform to the boys club.” That meant black, jeans, flannels and sneakers, “just trying to not be so feminine to feel safe or to feel accepted”. Stand-up stopped making her happy, so she stopped, for about three years, to look after her mental health.
People kept asking when she would perform again. Eventually she came back on her own terms. “I started wearing pink and sparkles and being super girly. And then I started doing music and impressions and kind of just doing what I wanted to do on stage and being fully Leah.” That is when things started to work.
“It’s not a coincidence that then all the success came and it feels natural. It feels authentic. It feels powerful.”
Leah Knauer
The best compliments, she says, come from women after shows who knew the vibe as soon as she walked out in pink to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”. And if musical comedy is not for someone, that is fine. “You have to just be you and focus on the people that love it and not on the people that don’t.” It is the same thing Larry Charles told us: do what you love, and the people who get it will find you.
Big rooms, small rooms, and the people she has worked with
“I’m a show girl. I love a huge sold out room.” She is high energy, which she says does not always land in hipster rooms in Silver Lake, where the mood can be “okay girl, calm down”. Small rooms have their own value, though. People open up more, and she tells audiences to go and watch comics work things out in tiny rooms. “It’s so cool then when you see them years later and you’re like, oh my God, I remember seeing them in that tiny room.”
Her first TV booking was playing a college-age Nikki Glaser on Not Safe with Nikki Glaser, in a scene with Glaser and Dan Savage. She opened for Arsenio Hall on Thanksgiving weekend after the two hit it off backstage at the Hollywood Improv. “He may be the nicest guy in Hollywood.” She does shows with Sebastian Maniscalco, and says she has never seen him half-ass a set, whether it is 11 pm in a small room at the Comedy Store or a sold-out Hollywood Improv. She interned at Conan in 2012, in the talent and monologue departments, finding news stories for the writers, and says she learned a lot there about joke writing.
She also writes sketches for Ron Funches, in a small sketch group called the Funch Bunch, and her impressions have taken off online. Her video of celebrities stuck in traffic, filmed in her car on the way to an audition, has around 4 million views. Her favourites to do are Jennifer Coolidge and Drew Barrymore. And as Meghan Trainor’s stand-in on Brain Games, she got to sing “I Will Survive” with Jack Black, on her birthday, with her parents on set.
At the end, we asked for her Mount Rushmore of stand-ups. After a lot of agonising, she landed on Joan Rivers, Amy Schumer, Nikki Glaser and Sebastian Maniscalco. “That was really hard. I’m literally sweating. Don’t do that to me again.”
What’s next
Leah will be a series regular in And Also With You, a comedy executive produced by Margaret Cho about a 50-year-old Catholic woman who comes out as bisexual late in life. It is her first series regular role, and it is due to shoot next year in Ohio. “I am not playing the 50 year old. How dare you think that?” She is also working towards a special and, as she puts it, “manifesting a big tour next year”.
Follow Leah on Instagram at @leahknauer. See our Instagram post about this interview, and follow Hop For Pop at @hopforpop and @thecomicsunseen, and see Leah’s press kit.
For more conversations like this, read how comedians survive their worst nights on stage, or browse all our comedian interviews.