Liz Zagone

Liz Zagone recounts her own massive mistakes with the bright, eager energy of someone pitching a multi-level marketing scheme. She will detail contracting a geriatric intestinal disease during a four-day Vegas romance, pausing only to make sure the room fully grasps the scale of her bad judgment. She uses no armor on stage. When she admits to dating awful men strictly because they were physically attractive, or breaks down a spectacularly bad hookup, she presents herself as both the casualty and the fully willing architect of the disaster.

She belongs to a wave of comics using self-funded internet hours to bypass traditional gatekeepers. Building an early following online with videos about the daily miseries of bartending, Zagone translated that service-industry audience into reliable club crowds, playing to rooms who arrived for the restaurant complaints and stayed for the dating stories.

Zagone does not simply complain about bad dates. She dissects the exact moment she chose to ignore the warning signs. A story about a younger partner acting aggressively during sex pivots into a complaint about his failure to respect his elders, snapping the tension with an absurd concern for polite etiquette.

When she brings up her background, it is to contrast her family’s stability with her own mess. Growing up around Chicago with a trustworthy father, she explains to the crowd, is exactly what left her completely unprepared to navigate terrible men.