Catie Lazarus, comedian with a lot of questions, dies
Catie Lazarus, a writer and comedian who probed the minds of celebrities and created her own late-night comedy universe on her long-standing self-produced live New York talk show, “Employee of the Month,” died on Dec. 13 in her apartment in Brooklyn. She was 44.
Her father, Simon Lazarus III, said the cause was breast cancer.
In 2011, as the nation recovered from the Great Recession, Lazarus was just another struggling comic trying to make it in New York. She had dropped out of a doctoral program in clinical psychology at Wesleyan University to move to the city, but as she tried establishing herself on the stand-up circuit, she discovered that stable jobs were hard to find. In light of these circumstances, she started hosting “Employee of the Month,” an interview-based talk show about work and labor at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.
Lazarus asked notable writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals and comedians how they had achieved their enviable careers. She eventually interrogated subjects like Rachel Maddow, Dick Cavett, Greta Gerwig and David Simon. She inquired about disappointment, too — for example, she asked the journalist Kurt Andersen how he felt about getting pushed out of New York magazine.
“I started hosting this show because I couldn’t quite figure out how to break in,” Lazarus told The New York Times in 2015. “I wanted to hear from people who, for the most part, love what they do and have carved out a niche for themselves. It wasn’t just about how they broke in, but what they continue to find worth struggling for, worth the heartache and the rejection and the economic toil and other types of losses that go along with it.”
Her disarmingly intrusive interview style developed a following, and in 2014 Lazarus started hosting the show monthly at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. A live band accompanied her onstage, and nights crackled with the spontaneous energy of late-night television.
Lazarus approached her inquiries from a more philosophical level as well, seemingly trying to answer a bigger question: Why exactly do people do what they do for a living during their relatively brief time on earth? She often steered guests into illuminating revelations and spectacle.
Wallace Shawn reminisced about how he had considered becoming a taxi driver. Billy Crudup whispered something to her when she asked him how much he was paid for voicing Mastercard ads (she looked shocked). Gloria Steinem tap-danced onstage. And Lazarus asked Josh Russ Tupper, a co-owner of Russ & Daughters, to participate in a blind taste test of lox from his competitors Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass.
“They said you can tell the difference in the lox,” she challenged him. “Do you feel there’s a difference in how your lox tastes?” (Tupper largely succeeded in identifying his shop’s salmon.)
Lin-Manuel Miranda, who appeared on the show, was also a frequent guest in her audience. “Catie was the ultimate New York comedy connector,” he said in a phone interview. “Once you did the show, you were in the alumni group.” He added: “It’s unbelievable the level of connections that came through there. People before they blew up. After they blew up.”
“It was,” Miranda said, “sort of a crime she didn’t have her own TV show.”
Catherine Simone Avnet Lazarus was born on April, 26, 1976, in Washington. Her father was a public policy lawyer who had been associate director of the White House domestic policy staff in the Carter administration. Her mother, Rosalind (Avnet) Lazarus, was a federal government lawyer. A great- great- great- grandfather was Simon Lazarus, founder of the Lazarus & Co. department store chain, which later became Macy’s Inc.
She attended the Maret School and Wesleyan University, where she received a B.A. and an M.A. in psychology. She eventually pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology at Wesleyan but dropped out after a semester to try comedy in New York. (Lazarus said that an encouraging chance encounter with Tina Fey, in which they discussed improv, helped galvanize her decision.)
In addition to her father, Lazarus is survived by two brothers, Ned and Benjamin; her mother; and her stepmother, Bonnie Walter.