Victoria Arnstein is a New York stand-up comedian, sketch comedy writer and performer, and the author of the memoir Impress Yourself. She grew up in a tight-knit Middle Eastern Jewish community, where her grandparents were Lebanese Jews, and was a theatre kid and a singer before she ever told a joke on stage. She has done stand-up since 2011, has produced her own shows in Hawaii and at the Broadway Comedy Club in New York, and makes sketches for more than 100,000 followers on Instagram as @victoriamakesyoulaugh.
Victoria Arnstein knew she wanted to do stand-up long before she did it. She just did not think she could afford to. In her community, she says, nobody had ever done it before, and she had a bigger goal. “That was my number one goal, to get married and have children.” So she waited, for more than a decade, until someone else suggested it.
Jump to: The first in her community · Gotham and Jim Gaffigan · Laughter that heals · Too soon · Making her own shows · The hard way
The first in her community
She found comedy the way a lot of people her age did: on a rented tape. “I remember renting Steven Wright and Howie Mandel HBO special. That HBO special turned me on to comedy because I thought it was so brilliant that someone could get on stage and make people laugh.” The moment she wanted to do it herself came later, watching Wendy Liebman. “She was a woman doing it and I said, ‘Oh, women could do this.’ I didn’t know.”
Nobody in her circle did it. “They’re funny people, but they don’t go up on stage and do this.” And as a single woman, she could see exactly what it might cost her.
“What mother-in-law is going to want their daughter-in-law to be a comedian? It’s already hard.”
Victoria Arnstein
So she put it away. Then, about ten years into her marriage and three children later, her husband, who was not from her community, brought it up himself. “He said out of nowhere, ‘You’re really funny. You should probably be a stand-up comic.’ And I said, ‘What?'” She had never told him she wanted to do it. He still does not like stand-up much, she adds: “He only went to five of my shows in 15 years.”
Gotham and Jim Gaffigan
She took a class, and her first time on stage was in front of about 250 people at Gotham Comedy Club. “They told us to bring people and I only brought my husband.” She had not really written a set until the night before. “I’ll just talk to everybody like I’m at a dinner party.” Right before she went on, her husband got nervous and told her not to do it, and they argued. She went on anyway, and it went well. His first text afterwards: “Well, you didn’t suck.”
Then a tall man she did not recognise from the class asked if it was her first time. “He says, ‘No, you’re very natural. You should keep doing this.'” He went on after her and had the room in pieces. When she asked a classmate who he was, the answer was “That’s Jim Gaffigan.” She did not know. Years later she got to tell him: “You told me I was a natural and I did it ever since.”
She still gets nervous before shows, but says that if she performs often enough it stops feeling like work. “I feel more comfortable on stage than I do offstage.” Gaffigan has turned up in our interviews before. He also took André De Freitas out to dinner after the first time André opened for him.
Laughter that heals
Before she married, she volunteered at a hospital, visiting patients, and found she was the one they kept asking for. “Where you going? You have a butler now,” she would tell them. “You have a nurse 24 hours.” It was the first time she saw what a laugh could do. “You can’t be upset when you’re laughing. It’s impossible. I tried it.”
She saw it again working in a jewellery store, where the customers she made laugh were the ones who bought something. And one customer’s joke changed her life. She had been dating a man for three months and was sad because he was shorter than the men she usually dated. “He goes, ‘What’s the big deal? You want to change a light bulb? Get on a ladder. No big deal.'” She married him.
“Laughter could change anything,” she says. “A joke could make you shift.” It is also the line she is best known for in our interview:
“Everything tastes better if you pour humour on it.”
Victoria Arnstein
She is serious about it. Her memoir lists laughter as one of eight pillars of health, alongside air, sunlight, water and sleep, and it is her favourite. “People overlook laughter.”
Collecting laughs, and jokes that are too soon
These days, she says, her life is good, and the only thing that frustrates her is that she is not doing enough comedy, so that is what she is writing about. “It’s like being a drug addict. We’re collecting laughs.” Her husband does not get it. “You’re going to a bar show two hours away for $3?” She could be at a Broadway show or a five-star restaurant instead. “But no, I decided to go stand on a crate at a bar and talk to drunks.”
She defends “too soon” jokes, and tells them at the worst possible moments. When the owner of a comedy club where she worked passed away, she was asked to speak in front of about 200 people at the funeral. Comedians are always asking for more stage time, so she turned to the coffin: “I asked you for more stage, Sean, but this is not what I meant.” It broke the tension in the room. “I think every funeral should have a comedian.”
She has strong views on how a show should run, too. The opener, she says, is not a warm-up. “People don’t realize the first comedian is the most important.” If the first comic gets laughs, “now the rocket ship is taking off”. If not, they are draining the room for everyone who follows.
She does not get offended, she says, but she does notice lazy writing. Of Shane Gillis’s recent Saturday Night Live monologue, she says she thinks he is an excellent comic and a great sketch performer, but the jokes were beneath him. “It’s low hanging fruit. And I think he’s a bigger comic.” For more on Gillis’s year, see our piece on comedy world records.
Making her own shows
Victoria started producing because people told her no. While she was living in Hawaii, a local producer objected to her politics and wrote to her privately: “You’re an embarrassment. I don’t want you on my shows anymore.” Her answer was simple. “I made my own shows. They were better than her shows.”
When she came to New York from Hawaii, the owner of the Broadway Comedy Club offered her a role. “I’m going to give you four open mics to run.” She learned the business side quickly, and says being a mother helped. “I know how to organize and get things done.” She built her lineups with work exchanges: comics who were good but could not get stage time would bring an audience in return for a spot on a show with an established name such as Mark Normand. A comic who filmed the shows also hosted, so everybody was paid in stage time.
Her goal is not fame. “I just want to be able to get on stage whenever I come to the club and say, ‘I’m coming. Will you put me on?'”
The hard way
Victoria is also a runner, and she says that has made her a better comic. “An ultramarathon is a marathon on crack,” she says. She finished 10th in the country in one. Her husband climbed Mount Everest, and it nearly cost him his life. What she took from both is that nobody sees the work underneath. “It’s like an iceberg.”
That is the idea behind her memoir, Impress Yourself, which she wrote during COVID as something to leave her children. “I wanted them to see that you can get out of a hard situation.” Getting on stage, she says, is the same thing: it is unnatural to stand up and tell jokes, and that is the point.
“You have to climb a mountain to see the view… The reward is much sweeter when it’s hard.”
Victoria Arnstein
Where to see her
Victoria is featuring for Lynne Koplitz, whose Netflix special is Hormonal Beast, at Gotham Comedy Club on 11 November at 9:30 pm, as part of the New York Comedy Festival. She plans to produce more of her own shows next. “I can’t wait for everybody to put me on. I’m going to do it myself.”
Follow Victoria on Instagram at @victoriamakesyoulaugh and find her links at linktr.ee/victoriathecomedian. See our Instagram post about this interview, and follow Hop For Pop at @hopforpop and @thecomicsunseen.
For more conversations like this, read how comedians survive their worst nights on stage, or browse all our comedian interviews.