Marisa Hirschfield is a musical comedy writer. She can easily make you cry, but would rather make you laugh. She hates self-definitions, still, she describes herself as a ‘character.’ “I hate thinking of who I am…but I love to narrativize my life.”
“She is effortlessly funny, and a great writing partner,” Mira Ho-Chen, Marisa’s co-head writer for the Princeton Triangle Club, a 135-year old musical comedy club at Princeton University, describes her. “She’s good in a room and good at making people feel thoughtful and valued. When she talks to people, it can look like she knows for years, but she had in reality just met them one minute prior.”
India Brown, one of Hirschfield’s closest friends, described Hirschfield endearingly. “She has a lot of intelligence and sophistication, is funny and down to earth, and is stupid in a good way, in an unpretentious way. She’s somebody you’d want to experience things with.”
Hirschfield illustrates her personality through a story about swimming in the ocean with a friend. Despite rough water and red-flag conditions, she was a strong swimmer. A lifeguard checked on her, and she waved him off, signaling she could swim fine. He misinterpreted the gesture, concluding that she was drowning despite her nonchalance.
“Two lifeguards on either arm began to non-consensually rescue me while everyone on the beach was applauding.” She insists she didn’t need the help and the entire time was so confused. The moment was humiliating, but Hirschfield believes it summarizes who she is, or at least how she views herself. “I love describing my life as funny and dramatic, it makes it more manageable and fun.”
Brown laughs when recounting Hirschfield’s unneeded rescue. “Marisa is a character, she is singular and unique and on her own plane of being. But that story with the lifeguards, I just laugh, because there are paradoxes to Marisa. She is very mature, but is also very fresh to the world. I think she’s very self aware of that fact, too. She aims to be so aware of the world, that there’s many things she’s completely unaware of. She’s aware on a cerebral level of so much, but not so much in her actions. With the lifeguards, how does that happen? There’s a certain passivity to her.”
Beyond her verbal wit and humor, Hirschfield brings physical comedy along the lines of a sitcom to daily life, largely through her obliviousness to routine chores. “She is very motivated to pursue her own ambitions and is unconcerned about small things that get in the way of that. She’s actually really terrible at menial tasks.” Brown recalls a dinner party at a friend’s house where they had to clean up afterward “as is was our duty”, and Hirschfield struggled with the basics. She would grab a single knife and placing it on the counter instead of in the sink instead of multiple plates. It stemmed from genuine confusion rather than a lack of willingness. “She excels at so many things, but simple chores…not so much.”
Still, Hirschfield is hardly detached from reality, approaching life and social justice with serious care. Growing up in a Jewish home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and attending a K-12 private school focused on ethical culture in the Bronx, she developed an acute awareness of her sheltered upbringing and a boundless curiosity about people from different backgrounds. “Since I was five years old, I have always believed one should work in the public interest.”
As a comedy writer, she harbors doubts about whether humor is an inherent force for good. “Comedy is helpful for a purpose of levity when the world feels serious. But in comedy, you can also be restricted to preaching to the choir. I don’t want to just tell feminist jokes in a room of feminists,” she explains.
In practice, however, Hirschfield does tell feminist jokes to feminist audiences and beyond since she founded a campus club called ‘Women Aren’t Funny.’ According to Ho-Chen, traditional writers’ rooms, including the Princeton Triangle Club, can sometimes skew male, leading to situations where men decide what is funny on their own. “The bigger comedy organizations skew more normative, so when Marisa pitched a really funny joke about Gloria Steinem, the women loved it, but the guys wouldn’t get it and would shut it down” Ho-Chen explained. “‘Women Aren’t Funny’ helps carve out space for women and other marginalized voices in comedy to produce headlines, stand-up shows, and short films.”
Ho-Chen reflects on her co-writer’s approach: “Jokes just come to her, and she is very dedicated to getting jokes right.” Hirschfield is indeed committed to the craft of comedy and is equally dedicated to creating space for others. She may struggle with washing knives, but Hirschfield is sharp enough to carve out a whole new space for comedy on her own terms.