I Am A Recovering Phone Addict, and Liza Treyger Speaks for Me
“It is really wild to, like, think that people are gonna be watching this at home while also watching, like, videos on their phone of rugs getting power-washed,” says Liza Treyger early in her first hour-long stand-up special. Night Owl dropped on Netflix today, just weeks after a widely reblogged n+1 report on the platform deliberately structuring its programming to accommodate viewers who will have it on in the background as they look at their phones. This is bad news for such visually sumptuous, emotionally engaging Netflix titles as The Power of the Dog or One Hundred Years of Solitude, but Treyger cheerfully speaks directly to those members of her audience who don’t feel they need to keep their eyes trained, 100 percent of the time, on a woman talking while mostly standing still — members of her audience like Treyger herself, who goes on to describe having given herself tennis elbow from overuse of her own phone.
I won’t disclose which shows I personally have on while I’m flipping through fashion magazines, catching up on Instagram or doing light mending. I’m not on trial here. But I will say that in Night Owl, Treyger has written not just what she knows but, through a lot of it, what we all know, resulting in a remarkably assured début.
Treyger, a 2014 Just for Laughs New Faces pick who went on to make Variety’s Top 10 Comics to Watch list three years later, co-hosts her own podcast That’s Messed Up (about Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) and is a hilarious guest on comedy podcasts like Stavros Halkias’ Stavvy’s World and So True with Caleb Hearon. From those conversations, I already knew that she’s an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, and Night Owl fleshes out that picture with an extensive chunk about her dad.
Don't Miss
Generously, Treyger says she can’t know what it was like for her dad to grow up under Stalin and end up at his daughter’s softball game, in a “Buttweiser” parody T-shirt. (When he blames her for not telling him it was inappropriate: “I’m six, and those are butts.”) What she does know is that he’s stolen fruit from a botanical garden and other items from every lost and found he’s ever seen. (“If you are missing goggles, they are in our basement.”) Treyger’s role as the family’s English speaker required her to translate menus and mail for her dad, so she can’t understand how he ever arranged, entirely behind her back, to ruin her life by having the library at her elementary school create a whole exhibition of “Liza’s Wonderful and Wise Owl Collection.”
Treyger’s just as good when she addresses the universal. Since she taped this in the 2020s, there is a considerable amount of material about phone use beyond rug cleaning, as when she says she’s more up-to-date on the animals she follows online — like Teddy the Shetland pony — than she is on her own family: “What is my nephew up to? I’m not sure. Teddy? He got a new saddle today.” We also learn Treyger’s reaction to an April Fools’ Day joke about ending Taylor Swift rides got her banned from commenting on SoulCycle’s Instagram posts, and that she’s ready to go to war on behalf of tradwives whose trifling husbands don’t fill their Christmas stockings. Treyger trenchantly elucidates her inner conflict between wanting to find love with “a big Black dude” but not wanting to end up like her married female friends, of whom she does a savage impression: “‘(gasp) I have to renew his passport tomorrow!!!’ Okay, that’s it.”
Treyger comments that she didn’t appreciate how much work parenting is until her friends started having kids: “You could just never stop cutting fruit.” But as a single, childless person in her friend group, she details the no-win situation she’s in, when her peers who are mothers both complain endlessly about how exhausted they are and also act like Treyger’s life is pointless. “‘Oh, must be nice to nap and shower,’” she quotes. “Yeah, I don’t have love. I think I can be well-rested and clean. And if you’re jealous of my shower, then admit your baby sucks!”
The divide between women who do have kids and women who don’t is a perennial topic for female comics, but Treyger’s chunk is the best-constructed and economical I’ve seen since Nikki Glaser’s HBO special Someday You’ll Die; the feeling of being childless and accidentally telling a mother you’re tired really is perfectly captured in “get a helmet.”
My biggest knock on the special is something relatively small. Treyger’s parents were 42 and 50 when she was born, near post-meltdown Chernobyl: “I would never, ever say this, but my friends say I’m lucky I’m not retarded.” This is a different context than when, four minutes into Dr. Phil Unleashed, Adam Ray as Dr. Phil asks an audience member who’s just said he gets Go-GURT from Staples, “Eric, are you retarded?” Ray’s usage is clearly offensive slang, but Treyger shouldn’t get a pass for acknowledging in her setup that she’d never say the thing she then says, into a microphone, on camera. At nearly 40 years old, Treyger presumably grew up being told that the term is a hateful slur in a medical context, too. A report that Donald Trump had used it against Kamala Harris at a donors’ event preceded a spate of coverage about its resurgence last fall, but some commentators had noticed its return even before that. I can think of one depressingly influential person who tends to scream it into his digital megaphone, but he’s not the only one. Hearing Treyger say it in the special definitely stopped me short, and I have to think there’s a not-inconsiderable percentage of viewers who will also remember the dismay they felt — yes, even in the middle of a set that also includes “What number on the Kinsey scale is a cum-hungry lesbian?”
I’m not suggesting Treyger should be canceled over literally one word in an hour-long set. But she does say later on that she wants to stay connected to youth culture and keep evolving in her ideas. I hope that’s true, and that a Zoomer in her acquaintance gently gives her the feedback that she could have written that joke a different way. One anecdote from Treyger’s personal history — that she had a good time in jail reading a book, heating up cookies in the microwave and watching The Simpsons — is tossed off as a complete aside. I hope that full story can come out in a future special I will eagerly watch, and I hope her sensibilities will be slightly but crucially different by then.
