For comedian Iliza Shlesinger, crafting a special is an intensive and lengthy process with one clear apex: the taping. Everything leads up to those one or two days of shooting. And this, she says, is the hardest part.
“You sort of don’t know” when a joke, or a new hour is done, Shlesinger admits during a sit-down chat for Deadline Studio at Prime Experience. But “you have to tape it at some point. … And then the heartbreaking part is the next week when you go on tour, or continue your tour, you find all of these things you should’ve said. It’s almost like you have to tape an hour to know how much better your hour could be.”
Watch the conversation in the video below, and scroll down for photos from the event.
Continues Shlesinger, “I truly believe that stand-up — and I hate that I’m saying this — is like a bottle of wine. And I think I’m stealing it from Sideways. But it is an ever-evolving thing.”
The veteran comic’s latest hour, A Different Animal, is the culmination of nearly two years of writing, touring, testing and discarding — including 45 minutes of material that never made it to the final cut. “I believe an audience deserves a polished product,” she says, “and people should expect that from stand-up comedy.”
The title isn’t just a nod to her creative evolution; it’s also an acknowledgement of the fact that what she delivers, with both her material and her delivery as a comic, is unique. “I’m a different animal now than when I started [comedy],” Shlesinger reflects. “The material is different, and … I;m a different person than I was when I started writing A Different Animal. So I think it really speaks to the idea that what you get when you watch my stand-up is something completely different than people expect from comedy as a genre, or from me, from what you’ve seen before.”
Iliza Schlesinger at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio at Prime Experience 2025 on May 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Iliza Schlesinger at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio at Prime Experience 2025 on May 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Iliza Schlesinger at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio at Prime Experience 2025 on May 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
Iliza Schlesinger at the Deadline Hollywood Portrait Studio at Prime Experience 2025 on May 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Anthony Avellano for Deadline
For Shlesinger, taping an hour for Amazon (aftrer doing six specials for Netflix) brought fresh stakes — it’s her first with the streamer, and she wanted it to stand out. An initial idea to shoot it all in white (“I will wear all white, I will be white”) was gently vetoed by execs for being “straining on the eyes.” So she instead wound up leaning into a smart bit of branding, putting a huge physical copy of her first name behind her on stage.
Explains Shlesinger, “If the name is back there, if you’re walking by a screen, or you’re at home and somebody has it on, you can read that name, so you have immediate branding. And I think as a woman who has been doing this for a very long time, that is not yet a household name, I look for those types of opportunities to set myself apart.”
As meticulous as the comic is about the visual presentation of her special, including the choreography, she’s equally precise when reading the energy of a room — on the week of taping, and beyond. “It’s very metaphysical, and I think people don’t know that about stand-up. When I’m taping … I’m very aware of everything,” she says. “You have super senses then, and you’re probably more sensitive than you normally are. I think taping the special is actually the hardest part of the whole tour because there’s so much at stake and you have to watch yourself later — which is awful, but also great.”
The great part about a special, Shlesinger says, is that “this is your chance, as a comic, to be as big as you are in your dreams, and hopefully, give people something that is emblematic of the way that you feel.”
But when casting something new out into the world, Shlesinger sees her responsibility to her audience as equally, if not more, important than her responsibility to herself. “You realize that people are spending their time and their money, which there’s no greater thing that you can give to someone,” she says. “Especially with the amount of stand-up comedy and entertainment out there, the fact that somebody spent a couple bucks and time to come and see me get to do my art is something that I take so seriously.”
