Zach Schiffman: New York’s Leading Taylor Swift Scholar

Thanks to the coronavirus, comedians are now trapped at home like the rest of us, so we decided that while we’re all self-isolating, we’d do something a little different from our usual “Follow Friday� column. Instead of interviewing up-and-coming comedians we love on Twitter, we’re going live on Instagram every week to check in with some of our favorite people in comedy to get a firsthand look at how they’re handling the pandemic. So welcome to our new version of the column, now titled “Follow (From a Safe Distance) Friday.�

This week, after a brief late-summer hiatus, I dusted off my living-room throne for a virtual chat with the porcelain-skinned Zach Schiffman (Tooning Out the News, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, invited to over 100 bar and bat mitzvahs between sixth and eighth grade) about how he’s holding up during the late pandemic. He expressed his confusion over mentally healthy people, detailed for us the moment when he knew that he would be a comedian (during his middle school’s production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), and explained the internal economy he had going on with Verizon as a child. He also got optimistic about the silver lining of his recent breakup: “It has given me so much. Like, I only got into Taylor Swift a year ago, and now I’ve become New York’s leading scholar. The universe knew my breakup was coming, and it gave me this to cope. Now I’ve tapped into the Taylor Swift community, and it has been just a fountain of tweets and information and scary, scary people.�

You can find Zach on Twitter at @schlife and on Instagram at @zachschiffman.