Isa Moon plays the part
The root of comedy is what, again?
Getting together with Isa is a treat, partially because it’s nearly impossible to make plans with her. When we speak, her schedule is already booked solid with improv on Thursday and sketch shows on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
But we find time. We’re on the couch in Isa’s Hollywood apartment after I let myself in with coffee and her little dog Gigi at my feet, finding Isa shelving groceries in the kitchen. Her apartment is airy and bright, her living room clean and sparse. The french doors to her bougainvillea-cloaked balcony are shut but the warmth of November in L.A. ebbs through the glass.
Despite attending the same college, Isa Moon and I didn’t cross paths during our four concurrent years in Boston. The first time I saw her, she was pulling into the lush driveway of a house perched on the Oregon Coast, nine hundred miles from our homes in L.A. where we lived two miles apart. We spent the better part of a long spring weekend two years ago making ourselves known on frigid beaches, in the dappled light cutting through dense forests, in a group becoming acquainted.
Over our early days, I didn’t see Isa as a comedian nor actor. I learned her earnestness first, her immediate honesty and depth oozing through her warm features and easy smile whether we were scouting the Pacific Northwest shoreline or meeting for drinks in East Hollywood. At her shows with indie sketch groups or L.A.’s famed Upright Citizens Brigade, I came to see the glow of her inner-child performer, at ease in front of expectant critic crowds, bound to the stage since she began acting at age six in New York.
I won’t make some banal statement about how comedians wear their humor like a mask, shrouding their features in a grin, only eyes peeking through. The old maxim “the root of comedy is truth” has been repeated ad nauseam to the point of cliche. But Isa doesn’t render it as laughably trite. She deems it accurate, and whether intentional or not, she channels it in her art.
“Even the wackiest, weirdest comedy has some truth in it,” Isa says, curled on her couch, the light from the french doors reflecting off her bare freckled knees. Gigi sits next to her, sphinx-like, golden. “Laughing is like a sneeze. That's why I think the least funny thing is trying really hard to make some pun, because that's not a real moment. It's trying to manufacture something that’s funny.”
Humor is involuntary, and Isa’s comes from innately childlike sensibilities. What made her laugh as a kid is the essence of what cracks her up now, whilst performing or watching someone else on stage. She broadly categorizes her characters as “confident weirdos.” At her shows — since 2023 she’s primarily performed with sketch group Same Great Taste, and more recently as a comedy duo with friend and collaborator Lauren Raff — she takes on roles embodying a 1950s husband, a concerned wife, a perturbed actor, a patient with a rash, all ranging in oddity but never shy about it.
“In improv spaces, sketch spaces, performance spaces, you're kind of back to the same environment as when you were a kid, because you're playing,” Isa says.
When I pose whether comedy at its core is inherently vulnerable, she ruminates on it. She runs a hand through strands of brown hair, recently dyed from an icy bleach blonde, gazing absently out the window opposite her.
“I don't know if playing a 1950s husband pantsing my wife who has a gun is vulnerable,” she says, referencing a sketch she wrote with Lauren. “The me that feels vulnerable in those moments is wondering, ‘do these people like me?’ You're putting yourself out there to be either viewed as good or bad. That’s vulnerable.”
At a Same Great Taste show mid-November, Isa shapeshifted again and again, supporting the sketch or leading the plot. Once, she nearly broke character, her serious gaze crumbling into a grin, then a tight smile, laughter leaking through as another actor played the fool.
The show was solid. Not surprising, unless you factor in that Isa had been released from the hospital hours earlier, after a sudden full-body allergic reaction sent her to the emergency room the night before. Dedicated to the craft (comedic arts), she rallied, and the audience was none the wiser.
After the pandemic, Isa didn't perform for more than a year. She was coming back to herself, taking time to regain her footing as a performer as she confronted the fear of failure that kept her from black box theaters and the flare of stagelights.
Isa credits performers with “blind confidence” and “a tad bit of narcissism.” Even when self doubt looms, artists tout the dogma that their work is worthy of attention, or as Isa says, “there's something in me that knows that this matters, and I matter enough to try to do this.”
At a low point, she didn’t feel that way.
What brought her back was the hedonism of performance, both indulgent and meditative. She’s fed by her love of watching people flourish on stage and her own desire to follow what makes her feel good.
“We have to do so much shit that we hate doing all the time. To be in a space where you worked to be there because you really love to do it, and people paid to be there because they really want to watch something — that's an awesome space to be in,” Isa says. “That's an hour of a night where everyone is happy to be there.”
Isa herself embodies “confident weirdo,” playing into both ends of the spectrum depending on her environment. Her confidence makes her a slight enigma, especially when paired with her perceptive instincts and penchant for giving clear-eyed advice. Still, the open-heart vulnerability of performance can feed into a desire for external approval, literally playing to a crowd’s favor, but Isa nullifies the need as best she can. Or at least she tries.
“Every single day of my life, I wake up and I'm like, ‘hope everyone loves me!’“ Isa says. We laugh as if this isn’t immensely, exhaustingly real.
At work, where Isa serves as a writers’ assistant for a television show, she seeks the validation of being seen as a writer first, assistant second. When comedy writers laugh at her pitches, that validation manifests as calmness washing over her, evaporating the tension of hopeful recognition.
For the first time, she’s living alone after the dissolution of a long-term relationship, and the solitude is both a virtue and a test of her self-sufficiency. Enduring the breakup has also meant a substantial portion of Isa’s external validation has been cut off. Now, she says, she depends on herself to exude grounding self-love.
She references the relationship a handful of times. We don’t dwell on it.
Whether performers can ever alleviate the craving for validation isn’t a question for us to answer. What Isa does offer is that those feelings can be worked into the creative process, and life in general, in a healthier way. She compares it to grief.
“What's that saying?” she asks, her green eyes pensive. “It's like, ‘it's not about filling the hole, it's about working around it.’ That's how I feel about validation.”
We come to this idea about forcing ego to shrink by wading beyond your comfort zone. If ego arises from thinking you already know everything, then placing yourself in spaces where you're free to be the novice, accepting you still have boundless room to learn outside of self-deluded omniscience, is easiest outside of cushioned comfort. That desire to learn is inherently egoless, Isa says.
At the inception of the nine-person group Same Great Taste, Isa found herself outside her comfort zone, despite her sketch background. Through SGT, Isa found a collaborator in Lauren Raff. The pair shared a sense of humor, but their lives intertwined further when they serendipitously wound up in the same improv class at Upright Citizens Brigade. From there, the chemistry was palpable. They started writing together.
After every sketch idea they brought to SGT was rejected, the pair sought other stages. Performing as Pound Cakes, the duo has more than ten shows under their belt, including one at the Elysian Theater with friend and comedian headliner EJ Marcus popping into their sketches.
Outside the group, Isa and Lauren garnered more flexibility to mold undeveloped ideas, stretching their comedy like children with clay.
“When you're in a group of nine, everyone has different tastes,” Lauren says. “With me and Isa, it doesn't have to be fully fledged out. In a larger group, we might believe in the idea, but I do think it needs to be a bit more polished.”
Lauren and Isa have the same energetic cadence in compatible yet opposing ways, exuberant and dramatic, expressive and bright.
“We're writing all the time. We're very different people, and I feel like we have really different ways of processing life, but our comedy specifically is so aligned, and we both think the other is the funniest person,” Isa says; days later, Lauren tells me the same, nearly verbatim.
It’s rare, both feel, to find that connection.
“Isa can see something in one bit and make it fuller,” Lauren says. “She doesn't dismiss anything. It's key that both of us hear each other out through to the end of our thought, even if it's not going to get written or it's not that funny. I think that comes out of respect for each other as friends more than as creatives, because I do think we're friends first.”
Isa doesn’t deny that working with friends, as she often does, threatens to strain a relationship, even with Lauren. But in giving the other space to fail as much as the opportunity to succeed, they surpass the tension. The sweet spot, Isa’s found, is to come into a space both confident in one’s ideas but also excited by what an idea can become through a differing perspective.
At sixteen, Isa studied in Italy for a year. As she immersed in Italian, phrases holding one meaning in Italian and another in English stood out to her. In her creative process, she feels monolingual. It isn’t until another voice interprets her idea that it can be translated, a new perspective magnifying a hidden detail.
She again acknowledges ego, others’ and her own.
Her ego was flung from its comfort zone when she started her latest project, a short film called “Mail.” Set to release early next year, the short is Isa’s first, filmed by a crew of eleven over a weekend.
“I used to write in my journal over and over again, ‘I’ll just never be the type of person that makes a finished product,’” Isa says. “I don't know why, but I really thought I didn't have the ability to make that happen for myself. And then I did.”
During a stint living in Vermont, Isa scribbled the premise on the back of an Annie's mac and cheese box: girl, lost in life, wants to be a mail carrier. The protagonist, played by Isa, is a girl post-breakup, post-job loss, post-college, who goes on a date and via semantic miscommunication tells her companion she’s a mail carrier, then spends the rest of the runtime manically playing the part.
“Mail” is the first project Isa has brought from pen to film, and the first project she’s worked on post-breakup, without someone there to offer support at all hours, reading every draft or advising on tone or just bringing her a cup of coffee. It progressed fully from Isa’s momentum.
The process felt egoless, Isa says, straight-faced, confidently disillusioned.
“I really felt like I had no idea what I'm doing. I was scared it's not good, and I’m forcing all these people to be here,” she says. “Then it really was this awesome thing where everyone really wanted to be there, and was happy to spend their weekend doing a fun, creative project. We'd get to the end of a scene and people would be laughing or saying ‘that was a great scene.’ I'd be like, ‘it was,’ and then ‘oh, I wrote that!’”
As the lead, on set for twelve hours a day repeating scenes, she came to realize on-screen acting was an unanticipated beast. Her critical review of her own performance remains: “I’m fine in it.”
The short brought out a more vulnerable voice, she says, writing about a character that comes from her, seeking validation, versus a confident fool. The voice was more grounded, true to what's been on her mind lately.
This month, a musical that Isa starred in as a child, “It’s All Your Fault, Tyler Price!” by Ben Decter and Kristen Hanggi, graces the stage with an L.A. revival. Watching the show as an adult, Isa sat in the crowd and silently sang along with every lyric in her head. It was a real “time has passed moment,” she says, especially when talking backstage with the girl who assumed her role.
Hanggi is a mutual friend of Isa’s mom; Decter is the father of a childhood friend of mine. For two weeks in 2010, Isa left New York to star in the musical and live with the Decters, a couple miles from where I lived at the time. Twelve years later, we would meet in Oregon. Small world, invisible thread, et cetera.
In one of the first photos I have of Isa, we’re smiling in Oregon, arms thrown around each other. Her hair is lighter, mine shorter. We look small and sweet, a little shy.
After the last Same Great Taste show, Isa walked out of the theater with me. Melrose Avenue was quiet save for the crowd flooding the street after the show, abuzz with Saturday night energy. Off to the side, leaning against the theater’s brick facade, Isa asked me about a recent trip I took, her mind not on the show, not on the crowd of people waiting to embrace her.
Find Isa Moon at @isamoonhaha, @poundcakescomedy, and @samegreatcomedy
First Name Basis is Izzy Sami’s bridge between journalistic integrity and personal relationships, pushing the definition of “conflict of interest.” Profiles of people she meets out in the world are published once a month, twice a month if she gets a grip on her time management skills, and not at all if her subject ghosts her.