Did you hear the one about growing up in Great Neck?
Orthodox comedienne moves seamlessly from the law to erotic fiction to stand-up
Talia Reese logs onto a scheduled Zoom call using her cell phone. She’s walking around what appears to be a humongous colonial, so, not surprisingly, the picture I see at my end is unusually herky-jerky. I soon find out why.
She’s balancing a laundry basket in her other hand.
“I’m just going to throw in one load of laundry in here, because I forgot I have a cleaning crew coming in an hour,” she explained. “And if the linens aren’t done, they won’t make my bed. So, sorry. But this will just take a second.”
She wasn’t joking, which is surprising since Ms. Reese is a comedienne. In fact, that is the very reason for this call. On March 17, she will be showcasing her funny bone headlining a comedy benefit night for the Rockland Jewish Federation.
Detergent poured, water levels set, Ms. Reese turns her attention to matters at hand, outlining her travels from reluctant law school graduate to writer of erotic fiction to comedy clubs. She’s wearing a black T-shirt that reads b’shirt in Hebrew-looking Roman letters, that hints at how she became a religiously observant comic.
“I grew up in Great Neck, and I live here now because I was obsessed with stalking my parents,” she said. “Once I had babies of my own, I’d hoped my mother would raise them for me because she was so good at raising me, so I could do whatever I wanted. But that didn’t pan out.”
Her parents are both the children of Holocaust survivors. “I always had a very strong Jewish identity because of my parents’ backgrounds,” she said. “But we were not very religious. My being Orthodox, that came later.”
Growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, she knew she had the talent and timing to make people laugh. “But I didn’t think it was a big deal. I thought I was just goofy, and instead of thinking up funny stories, I should be more focused on reading and writing serious essays.”
That changed shortly after she entered the University of Pennsylvania. Early in her freshman year, she attended a performing arts event and spied a “troupe of girls performing and doing music. I just felt like I found my people.”
She joined the group, the Bloomers, and eventually was elected its youngest director. After graduation, Ms. Reese got a job as a production assistant at “Saturday Night Live,” a position that held the promise of a staff job in the future.
She saw her future in the stars. But, unfortunately, her parents and boyfriend at the time were looking at a different constellation.
“For some reason, my parents didn’t really like me doing it,” she said. “Also, I was dating a lawyer at the time, and his family was pressuring me to go to law school. My parents were, too.
“So I took the LSATs, and I said if I got in anywhere in New York City I’d go.” The good news is she got into Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School.
The bad news is she got into Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School.
It’s at about this time that she became increasing shomer Shabbat. “My friends at Cardozo were all Orthodox and inviting me for Shabbat,” she said. “And I started going to services and I really liked it.”
As it turned out, “I loved law school. I was always a really good student.” Good enough to get a prestigious clerkship with a federal judge, followed by four years at a prestigious law firm.
Still, comedy beckoned. As a child, “I always felt like a weirdo. I can’t explain it. But there’s something in me that sees the absurdity in everything in life. There’s something funny about everything. If I’m not laughing, then there’s something wrong.”
So about a dozen years ago, she attended a stand-up comedy class. But before she could put what she learned to use, “I was contracted to do something else.” It sounds like she took a job with the CIA, but what she did was actually more exciting.
She wrote erotic novels.
“I was trying to sell a book I wrote,” she said. “I got an agent interested, but she told me, ‘I can’t sell this. But you have a good voice for adult fiction. What’s selling now is erotic romance novels.’”
This was the era of “50 Shades of Grey.” Publishers required graphic sex scenes. Logical question: how did this by-now-married mom conduct her research?
Thankfully, Al Gore had already invented the internet.
After about a year of heavy breathing, she finally returned to comedy and has slowly been building a career, a combination of synagogue and other Jewish groups and secular comedy clubs. Much of the material comes from her own life.
She’s had two failed marriages, she says, and is still in the second. It wasn’t her fault. She was too young when she married the first one. “What do you know at 30?” Her second husband is a Canadian. He asked her if she’d be willing to move. She responded, “Honestly, I’ll probably just lie there.”
That Canadian, Cary, doesn’t mind being the butt of her jokes. “He’s as wacky as I am. His rule is that you can say anything you want about me, as long as it gets a laugh.”
She’s come up with a formula for the perfect Jewish audience, like the one she’ll see in Rockland. One that is about 40 percent observant. “I don’t mean 40 percent of the people are observant. I mean the people are 40 percent observant.”
The Rockland Federation is holding a comedy night Saturday, March 17 at 7 p.m. at a location that for security reasons will be revealed only to ticket holders. It’s a benefit for the Niv Nirel Center for Trauma and Rehabilitation, named for Niv Raviv and Nirel Zini, a young couple slaughtered during the October 7 attack. Buy tickets at jewishfederation.regfox.com/comedy-night.