Isabel Hagen’s blonde hair was pulled back. She wore a high-neck black sweater with a navy overshirt. It was a rainy Sunday night, and three comedians had opened for the Brooklynite at St. Mark’s Comedy Club. Hagen ate dinner in the back while T.J. Miller performed, and later hovered in the corner as she waited for her time.
She took the stage around 7:45. Instantly, she set the room at ease with her confident stance and her easy smile, while previous sets might have left some members of the Sunday night crowd shifting in their seats.
“I mean, canceling Disney+ was a bigger conversation than our engagement was,” Isabel said of her recent betrothal. Her candor about her relationship is a stock-and-trade to this thirty-two-year-old, who said she feels comfortable talking openly on stage about her soon-to-be-husband.
And talk openly, she does — her set ran the gamut from anal sex to white, straight men being feminists.
Despite her confidence in comedy, Hagen’s roots are actually in music. She grew up in Manhattan, where she started playing the violin at 5, and the viola shortly thereafter at 10. Her father is a jazz musician and her older brother is a classically trained pianist.
“The three of us would be in different rooms, all practicing at once, and my poor mom would have to find a place where she could hide,” she told me, laughing. She credits her father for training “her ear” and being her largest musical influence.
She went on to study the viola at Juilliard as both an undergraduate and master’s student. During her master’s, she began suffering from crippling performance anxiety and hurt her wrist multiple times. At one point, she was forced to take two months away from music.
On a whim, she decided to try her hand at stand-up comedy, trying an open mic when she couldn’t perform music. “It was weird and sad, but I still loved it,” she said.
Her love for comedy originated from childhood, when she would watch George Carlin…
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