Mike
Elizabeth Hackett is a writer based out of Los Angeles and a genuinely wonderful human being. If you don’t yet follow her on Twitter (@LizHackett), I highly recommend doing so. She is one of the most consistently funny people on there.
PJ: What particular mental illness made you want to put yourself out there on the internet?
Liz: I think anyone who becomes a writer (or actor or performer or someone whose livelihood depends on other people reading or watching what they do) has an undeniable need to compete for attention. I’m a quieter person; I’m funnier on the page. Twitter (note: comedy Twitter, not general population Twitter) reminds me of my college improv troupe. We’d have lunch together before shows, and you could watch a joke make its way around the table like a stadium wave as everyone kept trying to top it. That was our sport instead of actual sports. There are a lot of brilliant people riffing off each other and constructing truly genius jokes. Jokes that will then be stolen by a T-shirt company.
PJ: What’s the creepiest DM you’ve ever gotten from a fan?
Liz: My DMs are closed to non-mutual follows. I don’t want no scrubs.
PJ: If you could have dinner with anyone in history, alive or dead, who would it be or would you just eat 2 dinners by yourself?
Liz: I would say someone like Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott, but I feel like they’d spend the entire dinner marveling at my modern dental hygiene. I’d want to talk about their novels, but they’d have too many questions about flossing. So I’m going with two dinners.
PJ: Do you think you need to have had a messed up childhood to be funny?
Liz: I had a nice childhood, even though I was very shy. But I do think to be funny, you’re someone who has always seen the dark side of it all. Comedy is about uncomfortable truths. You don’t need a tortured childhood; but even if you haven’t lived inside the abyss, you are someone who looked into it a lot just because you couldn’t help it.
PJ: What was your introduction to comedy?
Liz:My introduction to comedy came from a few places. A friend’s mom wrote a humor column for my hometown paper and that was when I realized, oh wait, you can be funny… in the newspaper? That means it’s legit! Also, comedy albums. Eddie Murphy albums. Steve Martin albums. ’70s and ’80s SNL. I’d watch and listen over and over and over, and I suddenly now feel terrible for the friends who had to listen to me recite them over and over and over. (Sorry, need to go write some long overdue apology texts.)
1.
A child in this grocery store is crying and eating a cookie while she’s riding in a shopping cart, and I want to ask her how she got this job.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) November 17, 2019
2.
Doing a low-budget but equally spiritually fulfilling version of Eat, Pray, Love entitled Gas Station, CVS, Return A Dress To Macy’s.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) September 19, 2019
3.
Do people who get eight hours of sleep every night not know about spending that time staring at a ceiling and imagining worst case scenarios?
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) August 6, 2019
4.
My favorite part of unexpectedly seeing someone I know at the grocery store is waiting twenty minutes until they’re gone to climb out of the freezer case.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) March 6, 2019
5.
The real you is what happens when you walk into a surprise spider web.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) July 25, 2018
6.
Sorry I followed your minivan for thirty miles. I got caught up in the movie your kids were watching and wanted to see how it ends.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) June 6, 2018
7.
My mom and I donated 15 boxes of old books to Goodwill, and in every 100th book I left a note with an urgent spy message.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) August 18, 2015
8.
A pack of coyotes shrieking at 3:12 AM is less unsettling if you instead imagine it’s a bachelorette party that just got a limo upgrade.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) December 17, 2016
9.
Making dinner in a slow cooker involves two of my favorite things: food and panicking that I’ve left an appliance on for seven hours.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) January 30, 2017
10.
If my husband bought me a Peleton, I’d spend a year making selfie videos of me drying my bras on it.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) December 3, 2019
11.
When you didn’t put on a bra to walk the dog but you wave to your neighbor anyway. pic.twitter.com/IF7wN2dDYy
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) November 11, 2017
12.
No member of any family has the same interpretation of the sentence “We need to leave in five minutes.”
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) November 25, 2019
13.
If multiple women sit separately in a food court, each quietly eating a salad, do not interrupt us. We are silently communicating through salads, like whale song.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) August 13, 2018
14.
Give me a tote bag so enormous that I can rummage for something and say “one sec” and climb inside the bag and then you hear me going down a set of stairs.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) November 8, 2019
15.
My husband’s on a work Skype, so every few minutes I silently cross the room behind him dressed as a new character from Wicked.
— Elizabeth Hackett (@LizHackett) November 6, 2019