Iliza Shlesinger Talks Parenting With An Audience & Why She Shares So Little Of Her Kids Online

Iliza Shlesinger’s very first Netflix special, War Paint, was the first stand-up set that made me, a young millennial woman, feel like I was in on the joke. Shlesinger’s comedy centers women’s thoughts and experiences with a unique incisiveness I’d never witnessed before (or since, for that matter). The fact that our personal timelines have very closely aligned — from dating and going out with friends to getting engaged, wedding planning, and having kids — means that her comedy has always felt incredibly relevant to my life. She’s usually delivering precisely the punchlines I need to hear, right when I need to hear them most.

Scary Mommy sat down with Shlesinger for the first time since we profiled her in 2022, when her daughter Sierra was just months old. Now she’s a mom of two: 4-year-old Sierra and 2-year-old Ethan. She’s also the face of a new Pampers campaign, lending their latest launch her signature comedic stylings. And much to my delight (but not my surprise), she is every bit as hysterical and insightful in conversation as she is on stage.

Scary Mommy: Let’s talk about your recent partnership with Pampers. They’ve relaunched their wipe packaging with a new opening that actually dispenses just one wipe, instead of a chain of like, six at a time. And they did it because enough moms cited it as a daily frustration.

Iliza Shlesinger: Part of why I wanted to do this Pampers campaign was because I've actually experienced the thing where you grab the wipe and there's multiple wipes just connected to each other. And when they pitched it to me, I was like, "Oh, I am that mom." And they're like, "We fixed it.”

Life isn't supposed to be hard. In a world where everything is met with an AI chatbot and you cannot get someone on the phone, the fact that a whole corporation listened and they were like, "We're going to make it easier," because it does feel like a lot of time the whole objective is to make parenting as hard as possible and to make life for women as hard as possible. So I think as a woman, I'm just like, "The fact that someone listened meant everything."

Now, if only children's furniture companies would also listen to us because I cannot read these Dutch instructions and use an Allen wrench one more time. I cannot do it anymore.

SM: What are some other unexpected little frustrations about parenting that have irked you along the way?

IS: Oh my God, little? I think there's this weird pull of wanting your child more than anything, thinking about them, of being obsessed with them, being so in love with them, and yet really not wanting to be around them. Parenting is having your heart broken and split open and being in love with someone and being like, "I just need someone to take you every 15 minutes from me." So it is this really strange push-pull of the second I'm with them, I'm like, "Can you just go watch TV because I need to check my phone?" Yeah, I've never been so deeply obsessed.

SM: And I'm going to look at pictures of you while I do it, but go over there.

IS: That's exactly right. I'm going to look at a picture of you when you were younger and you didn't have an opinion on something random.

SM: I was going back through some of your recent clips from Ask Iliza, and I love the one where your kids bust in on you filming and you’re having to parent on camera and help them make amends. You went on to say nothing makes you feel like a bigger loser than filming and having your kids come in. Why do you think parenting in front of people or on camera feels so… bad?

IS: Anytime you're trying to do something other than parent and then the parenting world comes sledding right in, you're like, no, I bought this nice camera. I'm trying to present myself as a professional who's funny and got all the answers. And then your kid's like, "I want a snack."

Parenting is unprofessional and it's unsexy. Nobody wants to see you ever take a naked selfie and your kid's toys are in the background. It's like, oh, that's a bummer. There should not be anything sexy about kids. It really is two separate worlds, and you have to keep those separate also for deep legal and moral reasons. But I think our kids show, in a weirdly beautiful way, the ugly, imperfect parts about us because we also, and I hate that I got this from Instagram, but we also have never done this before.

SM: Probably my favorite part of parenting is the funny shit my kid says. He will just roast you on the spot without even really meaning to. What are some of the funniest things your kids have said lately?

IS: People can eat me alive for this: My child does not have a phone. She does not have an iPad. But she sees Mommy has a phone addiction, so therefore she wants one. She'll hold her hand up and she'll press the buttons in her hand. And I said, “Sierra, please go clean your room.” And she says, “I can't find my room. I have to look it up on Google Maps.” And I was like, that's so painfully beautiful and awful and brilliant at the same time.

I remember wanting to have a deep connection with her when she was 2 and like, you kind of hope that your daughter has just come from a spiritual realm? I was like, “Do you remember anything from before you were born?” Just seeing if there was something there. And she just looked at me and I was like, oh my God, here it comes. She just went, “Nope, I have to poop.”

SM: I love that. OK, one more parenting question: You do some of the best riffs on cultural topics, like your HomeGoods and Costco shopping videos. What niche or trend in the parenting internet space is deserving of satire?

IS: That is a great question, and the answer is all of it. Oh my gosh, this is going to upset so many people, but I do not share my children's faces. I think the promotion of your child, constantly sharing everything about your child — not a choice I would make. There is this millennial urge to be like, warts and all, here's how imperfect it is. But even in doing that, you are still trying to show off a type of perfection. I guess I've been studying online culture long enough to not really want to do that anymore.

There is this part of me, even though I'm a comedian, that thinks motherhood and my children and this time in their lives is so sacred, I kind of want to share less of it because when you offer it up, you cast in amber what people think of your parenting and you and your children. And frankly, it's none of these lunatics’ business, so I do it quite sparingly.

There's also this one type of video where women will be like, "Let's see if my husband can outrun me," and then she'll take off running, and she's like six months postpartum and her husband who's a Navy SEAL is like, "Watch this." And I'm like, "You'd better be able to run down someone half your size and a quarter of your weight." My taxes go to that. Are you kidding me? And my whole thing is you don't see these videos being made in places like LA. “Let's see if my husband, who runs the writers' room for Ghosts, can run me down. We met at a coffee house.”

I just think we are trying to parse out as millennials wanting to feel desired and sexy and young, but also balancing parenthood. So everyone's figuring it out, but you will not be watching me run at a very slow pace away from my husband who's three times bigger than me anytime soon. I think it's so weird.

SM: What projects are coming up for you, and can I count on another special coming to a streaming platform near me?

IS: I plan to shoot an hour. I cannot give a ton of details about it because we haven't announced it yet, but it will be in 2027 and my Free Nights & Weekends tour kicks off in January. So I took a little break, very excited about that. I'm going to go entertain the troops with the USO — because that's a cause that's near and dear to me — here in a few weeks. I created a movie called Chasing Summer that went to Sundance this year and we just got our release date, so that is going to be a whole separate thing.

And then of course we have Ask Iliza Anything, the podcast, and we have Slow Sunday. As a creative person, I deeply believe in constantly creating art and letting all the beautiful things in life, frustrating or not, affect and inform the art that I make.

SM: My last question before I let you go is this: Our readers (and me too soon) are squarely in perimenopause territory right now. Can we expect any perimenopause jokes or bits from you in the future?

IS: God, every fiber of my being wants to be like, "I'm not in perimenopause. I'm just really juicy and I'm thinking about having five more kids." For me, it's less about the perimenopause of it and more about the middle ages, as I call it. A lot of my standup now is about deeply exploring the thoughts and feelings that I thought were unique to me at this age. But the more I speak to women my age, I'm realizing we are all in this together. So I do want to shine a light on that.

I am working on a joke right now about how I don't like talking about perimenopause, not because it's embarrassing, but because I can't get a word out without some woman named Barbara who's actually in menopause kicking the door down and being like, "Just you wait, it gets worse." And I'm like, "Let us elder millennials just experience some mood swings and light night sweats without you telling me how you cracked your pelvic girdle sneezing, Susan.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.