Isabel Hagen, on the road with a classical viola and irreverent stand-up

February 8, 2024 Mimi Lamarre

Photo: JT Anderson

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Isabel Hagen’s blonde hair was pulled back. She wore a high-neck black sweater with a navy overshirt. It was a rainy Sunday night, and three comedians had opened for the Brooklynite at St. Mark’s Comedy Club. Hagen ate dinner in the back while T.J. Miller performed, and later hovered in the corner as she waited for her time.

She took the stage around 7:45. Instantly, she set the room at ease with her confident stance and her easy smile, while previous sets might have left some members of the Sunday night crowd shifting in their seats.

“I mean, canceling Disney+ was a bigger conversation than our engagement was,” Isabel said of her recent betrothal. Her candor about her relationship is a stock-and-trade to this thirty-two-year-old, who said she feels comfortable talking openly on stage about her soon-to-be-husband.

And talk openly, she does — her set ran the gamut from anal sex to white, straight men being feminists.

Despite her confidence in comedy, Hagen’s roots are actually in music. She grew up in Manhattan, where she started playing the violin at 5, and the viola shortly thereafter at 10. Her father is a jazz musician and her older brother is a classically trained pianist.

“The three of us would be in different rooms, all practicing at once, and my poor mom would have to find a place where she could hide,” she told me, laughing. She credits her father for training “her ear” and being her largest musical influence.

She went on to study the viola at Juilliard as both an undergraduate and master’s student. During her master’s, she began suffering from crippling performance anxiety and hurt her wrist multiple times. At one point, she was forced to take two months away from music.

On a whim, she decided to try her hand at stand-up comedy, trying an open mic when she couldn’t perform music. “It was weird and sad, but I still loved it,” she said.

Her love for comedy originated from childhood, when she would watch George Carlin over her older brother’s shoulder. Other comedians like Mitch Hedberg taught her about one-liners and how to create a unique influence as a comedian.

And her unique brand, she hopes, is continuing to develop. “One thing that characterizes my comedy is that people don’t expect me to be so dirty sometimes,” she laughed.

This was definitely characteristic of the show on that Sunday night in late January, where sex-riddled one-liners like “the dirtier the act, the safer” were dotted throughout.

When she graduated from Juilliard in 2015, she became a freelance violist, performing with artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Ed Sheeran. She kept on doing stand-up on the side, and eventually landed a set on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in 2020.

Four years into her comedy, she created a particularly unique brand for herself: integrating her viola into her comedy. Her idiosyncratic integration of one-liners with the melodic gravitas of the viola make for something that many fans have never heard before.

Today, she’s developing a feature film, “On A String,” based on her web series, “Is A Violist,” about her experiences as a musician. The film just finished production and post-production and will be completed within the year.

Clearly, Hagen is a Renaissance woman of sorts — from music to film to comedy, and back.

For her, though, comedy will always be her favorite. As she put it: “When stand-up is good, it’s the best.”

Currently performing on the road, moving from Bohemia, NY to Hartford, CT, then to Ann Arbor, MI and Alameda, CA, she clearly has a hardworking agent. She returns to NY on March 25 to appear in Brooklyn at a place called Old Man Hustle on Bedford Avenue.