Comedian and Teacher Liz Blanc Wants Toner–Not a Gun

Standup comedian Liz Blanc wasn’t a stranger talking to crowds when she started performing. In fact, she did it daily for her primary vocation—high school English teacher. A good deal of Blanc’s material deals with teaching her Gen Z students. Her 11-minute set for Don’t Tell Comedy from late 2022 recounts some of the highlights, including a polarizing bit about arming teachers in the classroom as a countermeasure for school shootings.

Blanc was kind enough to catch up with me and discuss the feelings behind the joke and what it’s like being a teacher—and comedian—in this charged moment around gun violence in schools.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Paste Magazine: I wanted to start with how you got started in stand-up. Because I know you’re originally from Cleveland, and then decided to come out to California to pursue stand-up further…and then also started teaching in Los Angeles? 

Liz Blanc: I taught in Ohio for 11 years total. I taught in a kind of a more rural suburb for two years, right out of college, and then I moved up to the Cleveland area and worked for a large urban high school for nine years. I started [stand-up] in 2015—I had been teaching since 2008. And I was just like, “You know what, I have some stuff to say.” And I started going to open mics, and people were very receptive, and I just kept going with it. I never thought this would truly turn into anything.

Paste: Obviously a lot of your comedy is very much grounded in teaching and your interactions with the students—which are very funny.

Blanc: Oh, well, thank you. They just won’t quit giving me material so… (laughs)

Paste: It seems like in a lot of your jokes, you poke fun at Gen Z, but it comes from a place of respect—and you care about your students. It’s like you almost have a collaborative process with your students, unbeknownst to them.

Blanc: Yeah, I mean, I think they’re hilarious—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, depending on the student and the situation. But I do thoroughly enjoy them. I think they’re very funny. I think they are one of the most accepting generations—the most accepting generation thus far. And I love that about them. I love how open they are. They’re very warm, but it’s true, like if I tell them to put their phone away, I’m getting roasted. Sometimes I’m getting threatened. That joke is true—the joke about the student threatening to kill me. That’s true.

Paste: Oh yeah, with the punchline about owning a house in LA?

Blanc: Yeah—it’s not where I currently work that that happened. I ended up kind of flipping the joke to make it feel like it’s more present—present time. I say all my jokes in the present tense just because it feels more authentic. But this is, you know, 14 years of teacher frustration that’s been built into this story.

Paste: I’ve noticed with most stand-up that it’s immediate, present tense—and it comes from a place of truth but a lot of it’s fictionalized and heightened, obviously. 

Blanc: Right, right. Yeah. I think their ability to kind of roast me and make me feel like garbage one second—it makes the compliments that much more amazing. Like, I had a student call my shoes fresh the other day, and I was like, “Oh my god…am I Beyonce?” Walked around all day hoping more students would notice my shoes. They didn’t. 

Paste: Almost like an abusive relationship. 

Blanc: Just waiting to get our finances together, and we’re out.

Paste: I did want to talk specifically about your gun control joke, with the recent shootings—which is something I can really say any time since school shootings are always ongoing—that joke really hits the nail on the head of the situation. Can you talk about your process putting that joke together and  dealing with the stress that comes in this climate?

Blanc: Right? It’s really frustrating because it’s such a reality of our job, right? They happen so frequently. And I feel like in education in general, there’s this trend to not truly fix things but to just throw band-aids on every problem. And I can empathize with people who feel like giving a teacher a gun would protect a classroom….I can’t favor that solution. Just from my teaching experience, I feel like there’s so much more that could go wrong than right in that situation. 

And I remember I wrote that joke, I believe, in 2017. I wrote it after—I’m trying to think of what shooting there’s been so many. I’m not going to try to pinpoint which one because I don’t know if it’ll be factual or not. But I was traveling to more rural parts of Ohio talking to people doing shows at different places that weren’t Cleveland. And people would say things to me like, “Oh, you should be armed. You should get your CCW. You should carry at work if they do end up allowing it.” 

And I’m like, “I can’t even get toner—what do you mean?” That’s hyperbolic—we could get toner. But you know what I mean? I was spending all this money on my own supplies, and then I just—I don’t know, I felt kind of frustrated and helpless that that’s the solution people would favor.

Paste: Yeah, that’s not even considering you’d have to undergo all this training, learn how to use it, and then buy it yourself—in addition to your teaching duties. And even people who’ve been properly trained make mistakes. 

Blanc: And I empathize because I know that people are just desperate. They’re grasping for solutions. And when you see something one way, you imagine the best case scenario. But we just had a superintendent in Texas fired in February—he resigned because he left a firearm unattended in a restroom. And a third grader found it.

I’m sure he’s a good person. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do that. But schools are escalated. They can be very stressful environments. And you know, one absent minded moment, doing something normal like going to the restroom, and you can really put your school at risk.

Paste: Just think about all the times you’ve left your coffee in one room and went into another. 

Blanc: A whole stack of copies. I’m like, “Where are the 150 quizzes I printed? Oh.” We make thousands of decisions a day. And I think people outside of teaching don’t know how many decisions you’re making and how quickly you’re making them throughout the day.

Paste: You mentioned that you got some kind of backlash to this bit in particular. Could you speak a little about that? 

Blanc: Yeah, I try to just delete and get rid of the comments as I see them. And I try not to read the Don’t Tell comments too much. I mean, people have been really unkind regarding that joke. And I don’t know—you can be passionate about guns and we can still be friends. We can have different opinions on this, and you can still be a kind person—I’ll be kind to you if you have a different opinion on it.

Paste: I imagine people who were very against that joke probably weren’t coming to it from a good-faith place. Plus, if I had to carry in a classroom and teach, I would be so distracted thinking about it—I don’t feel like I would personally be able to do my best teaching.

Blanc: I would think about it the whole time. And then I’d think about the students who have, maybe, experienced gun violence in their neighborhood—maybe have lost a family member and have some sort of PTSD or trauma. How are they supposed to focus and feel in a classroom with a gun? Like, we’re supposed to be their safe space, a place where they can decompress, do their best, be around their friends, maybe escape some horrible things going on in their life. How is that supposed to make them feel?

That’s one thing that really bothers me. Like, we were talking about no money for supplies, but mental health, too. We have dysregulated students. There are a lot of them that aren’t okay, and we really need mental health services for them. But those keep getting cut.

Paste: Let’s shift directions—you’ve gone viral on Don’t Tell Comedy, you’re very popular on TikTok, and performing around the LA area. So what’s next for Liz Blanc?

Blanc: Don’t Tell did open some doors for me as far as getting more bookings. I’m not repped by anybody—I don’t have an agent or a manager or anything like that. But the bookings seem to be increasing. So I’m just kind of rolling with that. Maybe I’ll be able to get some out of town gigs here and there, and just kind of build up more of a rapport with the different clubs and venues. Hopefully just keep expanding my career.

Follow Liz Blanc TikTok and check out her Instagram for information about her upcoming shows.

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