Jenny Hagel is Telling the Jokes Seth Meyers Can’t

In today’s unnerving political and social climate, what is funny and what is over the line is up for grabs. Leading by example, we are being told by our leaders that you can pretty much say anything without repercussion. Although it hasn’t been too funny. Leading the fight against stupidity with intelligence and comedy, writer and comedian Jenny Hagel is using her job at Late Night with Seth Meyers to comment on hot topics and promote conversation. As a writer and performer on the show, she is part of the wildly popular segment “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” often touching on issues affecting the queer and minority communities with colleague Amber Ruffin. The recurring segment’s popularity and relevance have made it go viral; she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for addressing LGBTQ topics. The jokes in the segment are oftentimes off-color, and they are damn funny.

Jenny is a six-time Emmy Award nominee and has also written for Impractical Jokers, the Golden Globe Awards, Big Gay Sketch Show, and White Guy Talk Show, among others. She also takes her comedy to the stage with her live show Jenny Hagel Gives Advice. Other than being a mother and comedian, her other true love is giving people advice. In the show, she and a special guest answer queries from the audience, and the results, as you’d expect, are hilarious.

Being funny has always been a part of who she is, even in your youth. Growing up in a mixed household gave her the perfect environment to give her the first taste of comedy.

I was a class clown, and I do feel like I want to issue an official apology in print to any teacher I ever had because I think I was a huge pain in the ass to have in class. I just really come from a very naturally funny family. No one else in my family is in entertainment, but everybody is just very naturally funny. There was a lot of joking around the dinner table, and a lot of joke gifts at Christmas. Just everybody’s very quick and funny. I grew up kind of in that environment on both sides of my family which is funny because the Puerto Rican side of my family is more extroverted, and the personalities are bigger and the other side of my family are white Midwesterners and that can be a much more subdued culture. Dry as a bone, like the driest best delivery you’ve ever heard. So, I think growing up with those two sources of input just kind of led to thinking, oh, this is how you walk through the world, this is how you communicate. You communicate with jokes.

Jenny knew early on that she was different, although not because of her queer identity. The queer sensibility and aesthetic she brings to her work now was not always in place before. Feeling different actually came from being funny.

I think there are two things about me probably that are very atypical. Being queer is something I came to a little later than I think people from the younger generations do now. I think younger generations are exposed to more and are given more language for things earlier. And depending on where they live or what their home life is like, maybe they are exposed to some more open-mindedness and some more accepting cultural influences. So, I think people are able to kind of come out both to themselves and to the world earlier, in some cases. But I grew up in the 80s, barely talked about gay people and if we did, the representation especially of queer women was so narrow. I feel like you would see men on TV, but never in a super flattering light. 99% of the time they were playing a hairdresser, or in the news in a bad way, but I think at least the concept of them was there. But I really feel like there was a kind of almost invisibility and silence around lesbians. And so it just didn’t cross my mind. It wasn’t even like something I was pushing down from an early age. Any representation I’d seen of a lesbian was so cartoonish and then I’d look in the mirror and be like, well, I’m not a cartoon. I’m just a regular boring lady. I was like in my mid to late twenties and I was like, wait a second. Then once it clicked, I was like, oh yeah. It’s like when you see the end of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, all the clues were there.

I think the other thing that felt really different about me was that I like to joke around. That is not a thing that women and girls are encouraged to do in our culture. From an early age, I just really liked to joke around, not even necessarily trying to cut up in class or get attention, I just enjoy jokes. I enjoy hearing jokes. I enjoy having a jokey back-and-forth with a friend. I enjoy an inside joke. I just really love to laugh. I love to try and make people laugh. I got reactions very early on that that was weird. That was not something I should be doing because I was a girl. I was voted Most Humorous in high school, but I really feel like it was because no one else was willing to do it out loud. There aren’t a lot of women who are comfortable making jokes in front of people in a group setting, especially not in a mixed male/female crowd.

She got her MFA in Writing for the Screen and Stage from Northwestern University but it was spending five years at Chicago’s famed The Second City doing improv and sketch shows that really prepared her for her future work.

I would write a sketch, bring it in, and if my director liked it, they’d say, great, let’s try it tonight. Because I got to write and perform the same material, I feel like it helped me learn in my bones what works and what doesn’t. I’m not always a hundred percent right, but it really gave me a very great quick high-stakes education in what jokes work and which ones don’t and why. What was so great about that is that I wasn’t writing a joke for someone else and then they say it and it doesn’t work. If you say it, write a joke and you tell it on stage and it dies, you feel that in your bones.

I feel like that has helped me now as a writer. A lot of my jobs don’t involve performing. So now as a writer, I feel like that has helped me sit down at a keyboard and understand what will work and what won’t. Because I’ve gotten to take stuff out on stage, take stuff out on the road when I was touring with Second City, and perform in all kinds of geographic locations, different venues, big houses, small houses, and learn what works and what doesn’t. Now as a writer, I can take that knowledge and sit down and think, okay, this joke that I’m typing, I think it’ll work best like this.

After Second City, she moved to New York and for six years worked on a variety of TV shows but had always wanted to write for a late night show. As life would have it, she received a text from a friend (and now colleague) Amber Ruffin telling her that Late Night with Seth Myers had a writer opening. In a matter of days, Jenny submitted her packet, and she was hired. She not only joined the show as a writer but has also become a performer. While “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” is quite popular, because of the issues that it brings up, because of the fact that Jenny is queer and Amber is Black, because they are outspoken women, some have called the show and especially their segment “too woke.” Pretty bold for a show on mainstream TV on a major network. How did that wokeness evolve in the writer’s room?

What I really love is that it really came about naturally. It was not a decision of like, hey, now we are going to talk about tough stuff. It all comes from Seth, the tone of that was all set by Seth. I’ve written for other shows where the host is the only person who is talking, and that’s fine, that is a very common structure for a talk show. But what I love about this show is from the beginning, if something happened in the news and there was someone in the writer’s room who was more authorized to speak on it, instead of Seth writing a piece from his point of view, or him saying, “Hey, you write something for me to say,” from the moment I started there, they’d be like, “We’ll make some space on the show for you.” What I really appreciate about the show is that it allows writers to bring their unique points of view.

Not long after she started, she got her first chance. Hurricane Maria had hit Puerto Rico and the president at the time was tweeting nasty things about the situation. Jenny, coming from a Puerto Rican heritage, was the perfect person to comment, and that, she did. Now, many years later, she is dealing with the same government administration inexplicably having to make jokes about a shocking time for the nation once again.

It doesn’t feel great. It feels like when you watch the sequel to a horror movie, and you watch the characters and they’re going to go in the basement again. We all know how this ends. Why are we making the same very bad choice again? So that feels hard. Trying to write about the first Trump administration was so much of just reacting to what was happening and being like, I can’t believe this is happening. But we all saw it for four years. I think it feels different this time. There’s a different kind of heaviness.

I saw how it went. I saw the repercussions. I don’t like it and I can’t believe we have to do it again. A lot of people will say to me, “Boy, this is going make your job really easy” and it’s actually the opposite. Partly because a lot of comedy relies on heightening… you take a situation in the world and then you make it more exaggerated and more ridiculous so that you can make a satirical point, but it’s hard to make a lot of the current news any more ridiculous than it already is. I think that his administration actually makes it harder to write about. Also, there’s the reality that you come to it with the same heavy heart that other Americans have because I’m not just writing about it, I’m also living it just like everybody else is. Believe me, I would much rather be writing from a different time and place.

As far as toning down her segments on Late Night – not going to happen.

I don’t have any interest in building a bridge to the conservative side, that’s not my calling. I have not made any adjustments. I think the best thing I can do as a writer is to write honestly from the place and the moment that I’m in and hope that connects with someone else who feels the same way.

On a lighter note, she is able to share more about what she thinks about life in her continuing live show Jenny Hagel Gives Advice. It is truly a funny night, and you never know what to expect as she takes questions from the audience and answers them on the fly. Giving advice just comes naturally for Jenny, even if it is solicited.

I think I’m just bossy by nature and that’s probably not one of my most fun qualities. I just have always kind of had a thing where if I feel like I have a solution to a problem, I feel like I have to say it out loud. Now, am I arrogant enough to think that those solutions are always right? No, but for some reason, if I feel like, and it can be something big, like if I hear someone saying over and over again that they don’t like their job, at some point I feel compelled to be like, “Hey, I think maybe we have to talk about ways you can leave that job.” But it can be something as small as somebody being like, “Ugh, my suitcase broke.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, I know the best suitcase!” I don’t know what it is, I have this weird compulsion that if I have a piece of information that I think is helpful, I have to get it out of my mouth.

And what advice does Jenny need the most for herself?

I would say time management. I would say clutter management, you can’t see this right now, but by this laptop are a bunch of little piles of things that I have not dealt with. I can be an anxious little dude. I think we kind of live in an anxious world, these are anxious times. So, I probably could use some advice on how to manage that.

As a mother, as a wife, as a queer voice, as a comedian, as a writer, what kind of legacy does she want to create?

There’s so much writing in the world, there’s so much performing in the world. I think at some point it all kind of gets lost in the noise. But I think the only thing I can hope for is to leave behind a body of work that was funny and honest. I hope that if at some point a thousand years from now an archeologist digs up something I wrote they brush the dirt off it and they read it. My hope is that they would think, oh, this is funny and this is honest.

Follow Jenny on IG: @JennyHagel