Jenny’s bringing her signature mix of heart and hilarity to Portland on Sunday, November 16 at Curious Comedy Theater. Don’t miss it, Grab Tickets Here!
Opening Scene
In a Brooklyn basement, beneath exposed pipes and a ceiling strung with those immortal Christmas lights, four IKEA buckets sit like a low-budget oracle. Jenny Hagel reaches in, draws a card, reads a question from a stranger, and answers with the steady confidence of someone who has already outlined the happy ending. The room exhales. Laughter comes in ripples, then in a wave. Hagel grins, as if to say: yes, the buckets were eight dollars, and yes, this silly thing matters. In a culture refreshing faster than the page can load, she’s trying something almost radical...something analog. Community. Presence. A joke that lands because it was meant for the bodies in this room.
That live show, born during the writers strike, fed a book with the sort of title that winks while telling the truth: Advice No One Asked For. Hagel is the first to insist she is not wiser than anyone else. What she is, though, is a cartographer of the mess. She has been a working comic, a head writer, a parent, a person whose best ideas sometimes arrive on the walk to school, and she is willing to put a pin in the chaos, then hand you the map.
The Origin Story
Hagel grew up in a jokey family, the kind where Christmas gifts come with punchlines and the group text goes long on bits. In middle school, painfully awkward and fending off bullies, she faced a math assignment that invited students to explain a concept any way they liked. Hagel wrote a story. She read it to a room full of kids who had already decided who she was. It crushed. The laughs were not just oxygen. They were agency. Comedy, she realized, could tilt perception, could pull the camera back and rewrite the frame.
College brought improv, the kind of small campus troupe that was still a minor miracle in the late nineties. After rehearsals she glowed, a roommate noticed. After microeconomics she did not. The Second City National Touring Company came through, and Hagel felt the world rearrange. Months later she was in a campus computer lab, printing out web pages with perforated edges, plotting a move to Chicago. In January 1999 she did it, no connections, no backup plan beyond a stubborn sense that the next right step was enough. Classes led to auditions, auditions to the Second City stage, a dream she had not known to dream until she saw it.
Process As Philosophy
The myth of the five year plan has never interested Hagel. Technology keeps reshuffling the board, and comedy, for all its supposedly timeless rules, is no exception. YouTube explodes, then yields to something else. Blogs crest and break. Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, each platform making and unmaking careers on a schedule no one can predict. Hagel’s strategy is both simpler and harder. Do the next best thing. Do the thing that suits your soul, not the market’s mood.
That ethos birthed her basement advice show. It got her out of the house during the strike. It put her in front of people. It made her laugh. It had no grand plan, only joy and a sale rack of buckets. Then, as these stories sometimes go, joy created its own runway. The show sold out. When a book proposal needed proof of life, there it was, in the room, in the laughter. Follow what gives you a gleam, she says, and if it becomes a career step, fine. But let the glow be the point.
Vulnerability, With Boundaries
Hagel brings her whole self to the work, which is not the same as bringing every secret. The smartphone changed the stage. What you whisper to a crowd can live online forever. That matters when you are a parent, when you are a divorced person, when your kid will one day have a search bar. So she draws the line where health requires it. Authenticity does not mean exhibition. It means you can feel the human presence under the polish, that you can sense the risk she is willing to take and the care she refuses to abandon.
The Queer Angle
Queerness gave Hagel a vantage point early, a way to stand just outside the prescribed narratives and see the mechanisms turning. Comedy loves that distance. It rewards the person who can step back, declare that the emperor is underdressed, then invite the room to see it too. On Late Night, the recurring segment Jokes Seth Can’t Tell became the cleanest expression of this calculus. Material that would clang in the mouth of a straight white host sings when delivered by Hagel and Amber Ruffin. The bit seems inevitable now. At the start, even its creators assumed it would never make air. It did. Then it did again, and again, more than fifty times. That is the lesson too. Follow the thing that looks small and self‑evident to you. The room might follow.
What Makes Her Laugh
In an age of headlines engineered by algorithms, Hagel finds comfort in the stubbornly analog. Consider the Louvre jewel heist: a caper that played like cinema and landed like a prank on screen culture. No hacks, no deepfakes, no biometric outflanking—just a smashed window, a scooter, and a sprint. It was proof that old tricks still shock the system; sometimes the simple answer is the answer. Other moments reveal comedy’s small, human economy: a banana as a phone, a tiny gesture that cuts through the noise. If that doesn’t make you laugh, you might be dead inside.
The Next Chapter
Writing a book is not a new craft for Hagel, but the form is. That is frightening in a different register. With sketch, the earliest drafts vanish quietly. With a book, the first attempt eventually lives in the world, spine out on a shelf, subject to the same merciless light as the second and the third. Hagel had to grant herself permission to be a beginner, to write a rough draft that felt honestly rough, then return to it with care. The practice was humbling and clarifying. First drafts exist to exist. Improvement is a series of small choices. The work teaches you how to do it.
Advice No One Asked For is available for pre‑order now anywhere you buy books, and arrives in physical form on June 2. There are shows, including a stop in Portland, where the buckets will almost certainly make an appearance and a room of strangers will briefly become a chorus.
Quickfire
-
Coffee order
Flat white, whole milk. -
Advice she actually asked for that never left
“No answer is the answer.” If you are waiting for a reply, you already have it. -
Funniest person she has ever met
Her son, closely followed by anyone willing to commit to a banana phone bit. -
Deeply unfunny thing that still kills
A banana used as a phone. Bonus points for a bunch of bananas as a conference call. -
One word for 2025 energy
Trying.
The Last Word
At 48, Jenny Hagel has built a life and career defined by humor, heart, and the courage to follow what feels right—even when there’s no map. She’s proof that you don’t need a five-year plan to find your way, just the curiosity to keep trying, glowing, and making the next right choice.
“I’m not trying to be the smartest or the funniest,” she says. “I just want to make things that feel true—and if they make someone laugh along the way, that’s the best outcome I can imagine.”
Jenny will be performing live in Portland on Sunday, November 16 at Curious Comedy Theater, a chance to experience her signature blend of heart and humor in person. Get Tickets Here!
Follow Jenny Hagel at @jennyhagel
