AHS grad recounts experiences in New York, Chicago, L.A.
Claire (Meyer) Linic, raised in Aurora, has flown out to and lived in three major cultural hubs -- Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles -- gathering her skills and knowledge for comedy writing as a bee gathers pollen from various flowers.
Despite her growth as an author, researcher and comedian, Linic shared that she is still the same person she was in high school.
“I guess, maybe, the main thing is just I’m the same weird kid in Aurora, I’m just a little taller now,” Linic said, reflecting the comic wit that defines her life’s work.
Some of the origins of being “weird” came from sneaking Saturday Night Live tapes and watching other variety shows from the 70s and 80s as a kid.
“When I was younger, I found some of my parents’ Saturday Night Live tapes that I don’t think they meant for me to stumble upon,” she recalled. “And I was very into like The Muppet Show and…The Carol Burnett Show, the kind of stuff that actually, probably, my parents were into growing up was kind of ‘the age’ of comedy stuff I got into.”
While attending high school in Aurora, Linic participated in a lot of activities, including golf, cross country, theater and speech.
“I did everything and was bad at everything,” she commented. “It was fun to do a little bit of everything.”
Linic also credited her high school teachers in nurturing her interests and developing her creative passions.
While comedy became her major passion, Linic stated that coming out of high school she chose to major in theater at Nebraska Wesleyan University.
“I didn’t really know comedy writer existed, okay, or anything like that,” she remembered. “So in my mind, the closest thing I could equate it to was theater, so I went to Nebraska Wesleyan.”
She described her four-year college experience on the stage as formative to the rest of her career with the help of professors Jay Chipman and Patty Hawk.
“It was great; I always loved theater,” Linic stated. “All of my life stories are going to be me saying that a teacher kind of gave me a push in the right direction, but that’s very much how it was. I’ve had a couple professors give me a push towards comedy and The Second City. One of them, a professor, helped me write my resume when my computer had crashed the night before to help me get into Second City classes.”
The Second City, an improv troupe and training center, is located in Chicago. The comedy training school has many notable alumni with names like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Chris Farley getting their start there.
“The day after graduation, (I) got in the car and headed to Chicago to go take Second City classes,” she said. “Chicago was very overwhelming. I remember the first week I landed there, just promising myself to stay there one year and then I could go back to Nebraska. I remember openly crying on the bus and train system, more than once, trying to find my way back home at night and just completely lost in the bus system. But it was probably about a month or two and it started to feel like home, but it was a really big change.”
Finding work to schedule around her comedy classes came easier to Linic, with taking a job as a security guard at the Jewish Community Center, a sanitation worker in waste management and a job at the Museum of Science and Industry.
“I have a knack for finding, especially within my early 20s, for finding whatever job was going to fuel (my expenses and) that I could still do comedy at night,” she remarked.
At Second City, she was able to learn and make connections in classes for comedy writing and improv.
“It was very fast paced,” she recollected. “I remember, like after my first few classes and everything, I just had to go home and lay down. It was so much information, but I really felt like it clicked with the way my brain had always kind of worked in a way that theater, even though I loved it, like really hadn’t. It was a dream to get there. And when you get to Second City, every classmate is the weird kid from their hometown.”
The biggest connection would be her now-husband Alan Linic at a comedy club.
“We met at a comedy show,” she said. “Now, listen. We were both in the audience and I did a little heckling. Okay, I did. And he turned around and laughed and we talked after the show. I don’t recommend heckling at a comedy show, but you might meet your husband.”
Both would soon be working on their improv together in Chicago as well as dating and marry in 2015 at what she described as a “raucous party at Indianapolis Children’s Museum.”
“We both had the midnight slot at the iO theatre, his team played for the first half hour so 12-to-12:30 a.m. and mine played from 12:30-to-1 a.m.,” she stated. “We did that for a year, or so, together when we were first dating, that was so fun.”
At the same time, Linic was discovering yet another facet to her career that she would dedicate more of her time to: writing.
“And just wanting to create, create, create, and in any way that we could, I started writing a lot well, in that time, because one of the best people to write for you is yourself, is what they always kind of taught us and that’s what we were doing,” she described of her thoughts at the time. “I pivoted after about five years really hard into the writing film, the writing side of everything, so I don’t perform as much anymore.”
“I just think there’s only so many years of your life that you can perform at a bar every night at like midnight,” she added. “So some people kept doing it, and could do it, but I just wasn’t built for it and (writing) was something that I enjoyed so much and continue to enjoy doing.”
A year in NYC
After so many years in the Windy City, receiving her comedy education, playing all the clubs she wanted to perform at, and beginning her career as a teacher at Second City and as an author, the couple felt it was time to move on.
“We hit the goals we wanted to hit in Chicago, and we were talking about moving to L.A. and then as we were packing for that and started to look at stuff, Alan got the call that he was going to be going to SNL,” Claire said.
Alan would go to on to be part of the writer’s room at SNL for one year from 2018-2019 in the Big Apple, which was a chaotic and fun time as described by Claire.
“Yes, it was just a wonderful thing, and I had some experiences I never thought I would have, but it was the most chaotic schedule,” she remembered. “I basically didn’t see Alan for a year because he would have to leave for the office at 11 a.m. and come home at 3 a.m., but I would go to the show every Saturday. You get to like stand next to Steve Martin at a party or Amy Poehler, everyone you’ve kind of always wanted to see growing up. So it was a really cool experience.”
“And we were very grateful when we got the call (saying) he’s doing SNL and very grateful when they said it was done,” she added.
However, the year did also bring Claire some highlights as well. She got an online teaching position at Second City and starting work on her first novel.
She had published two books before that point, “The Awkward Phase,” a collection of stories of awkward teenage stories from comedians, written with Tyler Gillespie, and “Our Perfect Marriage,” a workbook written with her husband that allows couples to fill in answers based on variety of prompts.
“(The Awkward Phase) was created because I had a Tumblr (a blogging website) about it with my co-worker, Tyler Gillespie, at the Museum of Science and Industry,” she recalled about the origins of her first book. “We created the Tumblr over our lunch hours at the Museum of Science and Industry. Okay, the museum caught wind and I thought they might be mad at us, but they’re selling the book.”
“And I wrote (“Our Perfect Marriage”) with Alan and it’s a book for new couples to fill out together,” she commented on her second book. “Especially newly-engaged and married couples.”
A diversified writer
That isn’t the only writing work that Linic has done. She has written for the podcast “Work in Progress with Sophia Bush,” which features hours-long interviews with celebrity guests broken up into multiple parts. She and Alan would research and compile a document for making questions.
“We got to just research the most fascinating people like Anita Hill and Jane Goodall,” she said about the experience. “And so we would read their books, read their interviews, watch their interviews and compile it down to a two-to-three page document for Sophia to read and then we would write out the questions to be asking the guests. I like to think in my own way, I got to ask these people the questions you’d always want to ask them.”
Behind the scenes work on the weekly podcast could get quite hectic working around the shifting schedules of guests.
“It was just me and Alan, we were the research team, but it could be chaos because like as you know, people cancel all the time,” she said. “The first week that we started, (they said) ‘Don’t worry, you have like four weeks, do whatever.’ And then they’re like, ‘Nevermind, they just canceled, Chelsea Handler is recording in two days.’ So I didn’t have time to read a book, but I watched all of her specials. I listened to her podcast, her interviews and I, luckily, already had read some of her books back in the day, but not the newest stuff. It was madness. But in the best of times you had a week or two to research the person.”
Researcher has become a fairly frequent title to add to her list with some work for Spotify podcasts in general and an upcoming podcast about the life of Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
More work would come after a move at the end of 2019 to Los Angeles, with Alan tackling TV and movie projects Claire was not at liberty to discuss as of this writing, she has her own work as well.
She continues to teach at The Second City and also has a job writing for the website BarkBox, a subscription for dog toys, which is helped along by her mutt Oboe.
“I am doing full time at BarkBox and writing dog puns and jokes for them every day,” she stated. “I get free toys and dog treats all the time, so (Oboe is) having a good life.”
She is also in the final edits of her upcoming novel which is about a young girl breaking into an all-male comedy club.
“Sounds a bit autobiographical, but I actually connected more with the grandmother character in it,” she said about the book. “I’m not so much that 13 year old than the 80 year old in the book.”
Just this past week, Claire has been back in Aurora and other places in Nebraska and had this to say about coming back time and again after staying in three of the largest cities in the nation.
“I don’t want to say ‘Nothing’s changed!’ because obviously that’s not true,” she concluded. “But I feel like, even as I change and the town changes, I always feel welcome back…and I always feel at home here.”