For New York-based comedian Liz Glazer, finding out she wanted to be a comic was a lot like when she realized she was lesbian. “I don’t know if I would have exactly explored [dating women] if I didn’t have the experience of having had a boyfriend in college,” she tells Eugene Weekly. 

Similarly, “if I didn’t have the security of not only a job — and not only a career — but like a literal tenured post as a faculty” so she couldn’t be fired, then perhaps she wouldn’t have ever decided to drop it all in one fell swoop to be a comic. “It was the most secure job. And I think it took that for me to be like, ‘Well, maybe I want something else.’” 

The story goes that after 14 years of her life dedicated to being a property lawyer (three years of school, two years of practice, and nine years as a professor at Hofstra University in Long Island), she visited Chicago and took an improv class. 

The rest, as they say, is history in the making.

This June, she appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and released her comedy special Do You Know Who I’m Not on YouTube the same day. She has also won both the 2020 Boston Comedy Festival and 2021’s Ladies of Laughter competitions. 

On Sept. 13, she will headline “Queerly Beloved” at the Wildish Theater in Springfield, performing alongside three Portland-based queer comedians, Arlo Weierhauser, Brenden Creecy and Rachelle Cochran. The show markets itself as “group therapy, but funnier and with fewer boundaries.”

Glazer is a first-generation American of Jewish descent. Her dad is from Latvia and her mom was born in a displaced person’s camp in Rome, Italy. “My dad would always be like, ‘You have to have a profession,’” she says, emulating his very thick accent. “And that was a big thing for him.” 

She says that her parents immigrated to America when her dad was 26 with almost nothing. “I think that their mentality is ‘Make sure that you’re OK and you have to have something to eat.’” 

That mentality practically cemented her future to one with an advanced degree, and “I wasn’t going to be a doctor. I faint at the site, or even the thought, of blood.” 

So, lawyering it was.

After graduating from  law school at the University of Chicago in 2004, she practiced transactional real estate in New York City before becoming tenured at Hofstra in 2006, where she remained for almost a decade. There, she published scholarship in Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Gender and Northwestern University Law Review.

In terms of how she performed behind the podium, “I was pretty funny for a law professor,” she says. “But the bar is pretty low in that world.” 

Even though it came easy for her to bring the house down in an otherwise dull setting, she says “It is really impressive, because it’s tough. It’s not like there’s a two drink minimum in a law school.” 

At one point during her career, she did a guest professor spot at Northwestern University in Chicago for a semester. With some newfound free time on her hands, she decided to dip her toes into some new activities while she was away. “When I was at regular work at Hofstra, I would have committees that I would have to do and stuff like that. You don’t have that when you’re at another school,” she says. 

Glazer decided to take an improv class because of nothing more than “a combination of curiosity and time. “I loved it immediately,” she says. “And that’s not to say I was great at it immediately, or anything like that. But I did love it immediately.”

She says it opened her up to the very opposite-of-law idea “that everything is already within you. It’s just about like letting go and not thinking. And I think that was like the real thing is like letting go of any defensiveness. You say yes to everything, you just build on what’s there.”

“I don’t want to say that that’s exactly the opposite of law, but it’s pretty close in the sense that there’s something a little antagonistic within law by design. ”

Before this class, she had never even remotely considered comedy. After she took it, she didn’t see another option. “When I broke up with my college boyfriend, what feels like a million years ago, it wasn’t because I kissed Marissa, who was the first woman I kissed,” she says. 

Kissing Marissa and, by extension, being lesbian “didn’t feel like a decision. It felt like, ‘Oh, my God. Something is like coming over me that I must respond to. And I think similarly, when comedy came into my life, comedy was Marissa, metaphorically.”

In both cases of being gay and a comic, “How could I ignore this force of what feels like nature that’s coming over me and forcing me, from the inside, to do this totally different thing?” 

At that point law “really was like a full whole other life, because I was a tenure track and then tenured professor, and so I was all in,” she says. “And I think psychologically that was necessary for me.” 

She says that to put it in “Northwest” terms, she needed to be able to see the top of the mountain she had hiked for so long to realize she needed to be on a different one.

Except, in the case of comedy, “I don’t think that I was factoring anything in, like how hard it is, how unstable it could be. None of that stuff.”

As she packed up her bags, her briefcase and her tenure, her mother brought forth what Glazer describes as “a very real and reasonable question,” which was, “What are you going to do for money?” Glazer’s response was simple. “Well, I could prostitute.” She didn’t end up doing that. 

The money “didn’t matter to me,” she says. 

Before her improv class, she had never considered stand-up. In fact, she liked law quite a bit. But when she did comedy for the first time, “it was fireworks and the world opened up. It was less about escaping something bad and more running towards something great.” She quit law and performed stand-up for the first time in 2014 and was done doing law by 2015.

Now, she regularly gets on stage telling the world what it’s like to be married to a rabbi named Karen, and letting people speculate on whether or not she is, in reality, Alice from the Brady Bunch. 

In true law firm speak, be sure to catch Glazer, Weierhauser, Creecy and Cochran in the “Queerly Beloved” comedy show at the Wildish Theater this weekend.

Queerly Beloved, headlined by Liz Glazer, is 7:30 pm, Saturday, Sept. 13 at the Richard E. Wildish Community Theater, 630 Main Street, Springfield. Tickets are $25 general admission and are available at WildishTheater.com.