Stand-up Student: One attorney's journey from the classroom to the comedy club
“I went to law school because my parents had this mentality that no one could take your education from you,” Liz Glazer jokes. “I’m like, ‘Does anyone want it?’” (Photos by Matt Kallish)
Liz Glazer loves to joke that she took the traditional route to becoming a comedian. First, she received her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. Then, she was off to the University of Chicago for law school. She did a two-year stint at a law firm in New York before becoming a tenured law professor at Hofstra University.
After nine years, teaching more than 25 classes and publishing about a dozen scholarly publications, Glazer finally hit the road to perform at comedy clubs, open mic nights and at law schools.
She knew that she was making the right move because, as she explains it, she felt like she was having a professional orgasm, “which was like a regular orgasm, but I was 100% sure that I was having it.”
“People are like, ‘Why did you go to law school?’ I tell them, ‘I’m setting up a joke that I’m going to tell in 14 years. I’m a planner,’” Glazer adds.
Getting to the punchline
Glazer has short brown hair, she wears a single small earring in her right ear, and she has an affinity for button-down dress shirts that must be ironed. Ironing is a big deal for Glazer, who takes it so seriously that she brings extra clothing on her tours and spends time in her hotel rooms each night ironing.
She’s used all this material—plus bits about her sexuality (she came out as a lesbian during her law school years) in her stand-up routines. But she also loves to riff on her law background, which understandably gets her booked at law schools throughout the country at least once per week.
While some may not see law school as a joking matter, Glazer says she has the authority and the background to be able to jump right in and make lawyers laugh at themselves.
“I went to law school because my parents had this mentality that no one could take your education from you,” she jokes. “I’m like, ‘Does anyone want it?’”
Glazer grew up in New Jersey with her parents and brother, where matzo ball soup was a staple of dinner. Weekends were spent at the mall, scouring the racks for the best sales and skimming through issues of the New York Times and the Jewish Standard.
Law school was a given, and Glazer barely remembers a time when she wasn’t studying toward that ultimate goal.
“When I was 27 and had just started the tenure track, I came out of my classroom, and another tenured professor said, ‘What are you doing in there? It sounds like a comedy club,’” Liz Glazer recalls. “I think back and wonder, ‘What jokes was I telling?’”
“The joke version is because my parents made me,” she says. “The real version is a combination of that—and I was socialized to believe that was the only normal way to have a job if one was adept at writing and speaking,” Glazer says.
So that’s what she did. But after working at a law firm, she began dabbling in stand-up comedy. During the day, Glazer taught Hofstra University students about property law. In the evenings, she told jokes about her day. According to her, she managed to get some laughs in the classroom, as well.
“When I was 27 and had just started the tenure track, I came out of my classroom, and another tenured professor said, ‘What are you doing in there? It sounds like a comedy club,’” Glazer recalls. “I think back and wonder, ‘What jokes was I telling?’”
As soon as Hofstra University offered buyouts for tenured professors because of a perceived budget crisis, Glazer knew that the time had come.
Old habits die hard
With two years of income secured via her buyout, Glazer began her life as a stand-up comedian, which had plenty of overlaps with her legal career.
She loves writing to-do lists and hates staying up late. When asked what she learned from her legal background, Glazer—born with an analytical view of just about everything—quickly retorts that she’d like to divide her response into “substantive and procedural” categories.
Procedurally, she says, having an upcoming taping and thinking of a tour schedule as a study schedule is one link to her former career. When writing, Glazer records and analyzes her jokes to see how her audience could or would react. Then, she goes back to her notes and rewrites until it’s sure to get a belly laugh.
Substantively, she adds, “What are cases, if not stories?” If someone robs a bank with a BB gun, that’s a story, for example.
“The building blocks of comedy are not that different than building blocks for a joke,” she says.
Glazer won the Boston Comedy Festival and the Ladies of Laughter competition in 2020 and says she is booked for every weekend except one in 2024. Additionally, she has an upcoming streaming special that she’ll be taping in May, which will recorded and released as her second album.
She taped her first album, A Very Particular Experience, shortly after she and her wife, Karen, had a stillborn baby named Leo Pearl in 2021. In the album, she openly yet humorously reflects on their loss.
In 2023, she and her wife welcomed a daughter, Eloise, and they settled in Essex County, New Jersey, as a family of three. When Glazer arrives home in the late evenings, she dashes into Eloise’s room to do the night feeding.
“I love logistics, so I take the challenges of raising a kid to be welcomed challenges,” Glazer says.
