NYC Comedian Liz Miele: is there comedy when there can be no crowd?

About this episode

Comedian Liz Miele — an 18-year touring standup based in Brooklyn who makes 90% of her income from live shows — describes the collapse of her career and identity under COVID lockdowns. She frames performing as chemically addictive (adrenaline, endorphins) and describes real withdrawal symptoms from losing live audiences overnight. Much of the conversation explores why Zoom comedy fundamentally fails: material takes weeks or months to polish and is meant to be revealed once to a live crowd, but virtual shows expose unfinished jokes to everyone at once and strip away the crowd's collective energy that makes jokes land. She predicts New York's "mom and pop" comedy-club ecosystem will shrink, consolidating attention toward already-famous names (Hasan Minhaj, Nikki Glaser) while mid-tier career comics like herself struggle. She pivots into building alternative income (a "Two Non-Doctors" podcast with a fellow comedian, self-releasing her special on YouTube, pay-what-you-can virtual shows called "Zoom Diner"), learning new self-taught technical skills along the way. A substantial segment covers her dyslexia and self-taught learning philosophy — she describes "chunking" information into small pieces and needing personal motivation to learn anything, contrasting her academic struggles with her natural talent for structuring narrative and jokes (citing her friendship with the authors of "The Dyslexic Advantage"). The episode closes with reflections on New York City's culture of gruff-but-caring mutual aid during the pandemic, and Vance drawing a direct parallel between comedians and public speakers who need audience feedback loops to know if an idea is landing.

Key moments

• **[00:01:56]** Opening framing of standup performance as a genuine chemical addiction with real withdrawal symptoms during lockdown.
• **[00:05:21]** Explanation of why Zoom shows structurally break the comedy business model — jokes take months to polish and can't be "released" once and reused.
• **[00:07:30]** Prediction of consolidation in the NYC comedy-club industry: independently owned clubs may not survive, benefiting only already-famous names.
• **[00:23:37]** Vance connects Miele's associative comedic thinking to a Renee Girard framework on the social role of the comedian in shifting group perception.
• **[00:41:02]** Extended discussion of dyslexia, self-taught "chunking" learning strategy, and how struggling to learn made her a better teacher/storyteller.