mishpocheh.
Her “Employee of the Month” series of chats at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub in downtown Manhattan featured sassy challenges to celebrity interviewees like the Jewish playwright Wallace Shawn, who in September 2014 languidly claimed to have considered a job as a taxi driver decades earlier.
Lazarus brightly retorted, “I just can’t imagine you driving a cab; you would go so slow!” Then she collapsed with laughter at the mere idea of the lethargic Shawn pitted against the hurly-burly of Manhattan traffic.
Or in September 2015, when the personal shopper and stylist Betty Halbreich of German Jewish origin, profanely dissed the sister of her friend Joan Rivers. Lazarus retorted to Halbreich with an ironic grin, “I can see why you and Joan were good friends.”
Catie Lazarus, Comedian With a Lot of Questions, Dies at 44
On her live show “Employee of the Month,” she got laughs by interrogating writers, artists, politicians, intellectuals and her fellow comics.
The comedian Catie Lazarus in 2015. She began interviewing prominent people about their careers, she said, “because I couldn’t quite figure out how to break in.”Credit.Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Published Dec. 20, 2020Updated Dec. 21, 2020
Catie Lazarus, a writer and comedian who probed the minds of celebrities and created her own late-night comedy universe on her longstanding self-produced live New York talk show, “Employee of the Month,” died on Dec. 13 in her apartment in Brooklyn. She was 44.