I’m an opera singer doing stand-up comedy. Here’s why.

Loudly merging the highest and lowest forms of art...

Jan 27, 2025

Hi! Thank you for reading You’re Invited to Laugh: a weekly look at work as an American stand-up comedian based in Berlin, Germany. I moved to Europe as an opera singer in 2019 and you can read the full story here. This publication is free right now, but you are welcome to pledge support for the future!

Last week, a friend of mine who’s an opera singer texted me to ask what I’m up to. We ended up discussing the State of the Game for opera. “No one is finding auditions anywhere,” she told me. “Everyone is holding onto their fest jobs.”

A “fest job” is shorthand for a Festvertrag, a salaried position at an opera house. The opera performer pipeline usually goes from “festing” to “guesting,” as singers leave salaried positions to freelance for bigger bucks as a “guest artist” (with less security). But when no one is giving up fest positions, it’s hard for other singers to get the experience that comes with doing 43 weeks of shows a year.

I wrote a comedy cabaret show about what it’s like to be an opera singer, how we train, why opera houses are built a certain way, and what auditions are like. It was the first show I took to EdFringe. It’s heavy on the educational aspect but it was well received and reviewed. Most people have no idea how many years opera singers train (10+), how many degrees are generally required (2-3), and how much money we make (not a lot!).

The friend I was texting has made her “A House” debut (theaters in Germany are ranked A-C), singing a solo role at one of the most famous opera houses in the world. She’s phenomenally talented and has won multiple competitions. And she’s still looking for work.

I started doing stand-up comedy in earnest during the pandemic. I dabbled when I lived in LA, and did the requisite training for any aspiring actor at The Groundlings School and Upright Citizens Brigade. I did the Monday open mic at the Haha Cafe on Lankershim, next to Universal Studios, where I was a tour guide. It was fun, but not my focus, especially once I started grad school for opera at UCLA and had to turn down a spot when it conflicted with rehearsal.

I’m on the left as Dorothee in *Cendrillon*, a French opera by Massenet with Opera UCLA (2017).

It was when was living in Vienna from 2019-2021 that comedy emerged as a refuge for me to get on stage and sing. Operas were fully shuttered from March 2020, but open mics were abundant. I went into a practice room for an hour every day and no one heard me, but then I’d get up at Charlie P’s and do a bit with singing and twelve people heard me. Twelve is more than zero!

Last week I started telling this story a bit more explicitly in my set. I used to just fly past the reason I’m an opera singer doing stand-up comedy, going straight into the opera bits. This past week I did long sets (25 min) in three cities in western Germany and I noticed that outright saying, “I started doing stand-up comedy a lot because I could not sing opera publically for 18 months during the pandemic” adds a layer to my set that draws people in. I didn’t expect this.

An unemployed opera singer burning gas during the pandemic at Charlie P’s in Vienna (2020).

Explaining “why I’m doing comedy” on stage feels hacky, to me. Why is anyone doing it? We’re egomaniacs who hate ourselves! We chase the high of the most authentic form of self-gift! We are delusional! We are the jesters the world yearns to hear! We’re doing it because we WANT to! But telling audiences explicitly why I’m standing on stage pumping a highly trained, non-sequitur skill set for laughs really works.

The first thing people ask after a show is if I’m “still singing.” The answer is OF COURSE, if you can find me a place to sing. I was offered a small contract to cover a role in London this February that I turned down for a few reasons, the largest one being the fee was not enough to cover what it would have cost me to be there.

The machinery it takes to get such offers is extremely demanding. I desperately need to update the recordings one sends out to casting directors (like this). I have repertoire in the pipeline I need to coach (in a 1:1 session with a language, interpretation, and music coach who plays piano and works with singers). I haven’t had a voice lesson in months. There is significant time and money required of singers to learn (time), coach (money), perfect (time), record (money), and send out videos in hopes of getting an audition (time and money).

Want to know how much? Lessons are 60-125€ an hour, and there’s often a pianist fee on top of it. Coaching is similar in cost. Recordings can be anywhere from 300€ to 1,000€, and then the fee for the pianist, and usually a fee for an hour to work with the pianist before the recording. Oh, and you have to pay to rent the space for the recording! I was once reimbursed for audition travel, but usually those are on the singer’s dime, too.

But then you get a gig! A nice gig! We’re talking 10-15k€ over a few months, wow! But after taxes, agent fees, housing in a different city, and the thousands of euros spent to actually get that gig, it’s not much. Is it worth it? Yes. I think so. Within reason. But one has to decide where that line is for themselves.

There is nothing like singing opera on stage. Nothing in the world. It’s like fucking flying. It’s the greatest high you can get in this lifetime. This was my first post-pandemic, public performance in August of 2021. I lost money because I had to get to, and then live in, Las Vegas for three weeks. There’s, like, nobody in this audience. (Kidding, my future sister-in-law was there!) But let me tell you – IT FELT LIKE FLYING.

Das Rheingold, Miami Music Festival (2022)

So, yes, I am still singing. But I’m under no illusion about the precarious nature of it. Comedy has allowed me the opportunity to get on stage and perform for people with significantly more frequency than opera. That means something to me.

The difference in audiences matters, too. In opera, there is a higher barrier to entry and a lot of required “pre-knowledge” to end up sitting in that audience, before even considering the economics. This is why comedy is so attractive to me. Zero barrier to entry. You just show up.

Because opera is such a high-investment, low-return career, most (all) singers have a parallel career. This is usually teaching voice lessons (which I offer at a rate that’s about half of what I should be charging, because most of my students are comedians). Many singers end up in arts administration or education, doing amazing things. Dan Crupi, an undergrad classmate of mine from Notre Dame, is the Executive Director of the Asheville Symphony. Michelle Siemens (in the center of the picture of Cendrillon) was a colleague of mine when she was doing the YAP at the LA Opera and I was a UCLA. Now she’s the Theater General Manager at Wagner College. Both Dan and Michelle have phenomenal voices that brought me to tears when I sang with them.

The list of professional singers who pivot is longer than the list of singers who stay in the game, and for those who do spend their careers singing, it’s usually done with a side hustle. My favorite parallel career is that of Teddy Siegel, who was a freshman at UCLA during my final year of grad school. She’s built a political platform fighting for public restrooms in NYC, because she needed to pee on her way to an audition and couldn’t find a bathroom.

Comedy, like opera, relies on making your own luck. You have to put in the work, show up, be nice to people, and also be good. The only way to be a better comic is to put in the time – just like singing. There’s a lot of travel involved. You have to look out for yourself and your career because no one else will. Sometimes stupid people are successful and the most talented people are ignored. It’s the same in both worlds.

But I don’t mind where my chips have fallen. “I can have so much joy and space to sing as a comedian, which makes no sense, but it’s what I’m doing,” I told my friend in a voice note during our conversation. “I get to sing ‘O mio babbino caro’ and ‘Quando m’en vo’ and it’s all bullshit low-hanging fruit and people are shocked and they love it and they’ve never heard opera before and I’m like, this is not a bad life. I am singing. I’m discussing opera every night. And I get to do it within the context of my own terms. I love it.”

Last week I had an amazing trio of shows hosted by Mari Volar and Bailey Hollender. Mari is an Estonian comic who does fantastic work to promote women in comedy. She runs Clit Comedy Club as well as a women-centric comedy festival in Luxembourg called Festrogen. Bailey and Lee Turner Kodak have recently taken over Comedy In Your Eye Germany, based in Duesseldorf. I shared the stage in Cologne and Bonn with Rachel Morton Young, who is doing amazing things for comedy in Utrecht, NL.