Bad Dates with Jameela Jamil - Speed Dates: A Miss Piggy Lifestyle (w/ Julie Klausner)

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

On this Speed Dates bonus episode, host Joel Kim Booster welcomes actor/writer/comedian/podcaster Julie Klausner to talk about a few of the pop culture moments that make her believe in love, from sharing corner office success with your best friend to falling in love again even though your mind’s been wiped. Big takeaways from this episode: check in with a friend this week, and watch more early Shirley MacLaine movies. Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for video clips.Merch available at SiriusXMStore.com/BadDates. Joel Kim Booster: Psychosexual, Fire Island, Loot Season 2Julie Klausner: How Was Your Week? the podcast returns! Also check out Double Threat with Julie Klausner and Tom Scharpling Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes.

Hello, hello, hello. My name is Joel Kimbooster and this is another episode of Speed Date, the Bad Dates mini episode where we sit down with just one other person and really dig in to how they feel about love and their relationship to it. This week it is our special Valentine's Day edition of Speed Day. And because it is such a special occasion, we brought in a legendary guest for you all today, someone I have admired for so, so long,

huge inspiration to me. She's a writer, comedian, actress, podcaster, and best known for a little show you might know, Difficult People, and the podcast How Is Your Week, and Double Threat with Tom Sharpling. It is Julie Klausner, everybody. Hi, Joel. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here with you today. This is very exciting. We've been trying, I know, to get you for a while. So you are our great white white dog.

I am nailed down. Nailed to the floor. I'm all yours, Joel. Be gentle. How are you doing, Julie? Yeah. I'm good. I'm good. I'm delighted to see you. Happy Valentine's Day. Yeah. Happy Valentine's Day to you too. Now, what is your relationship to Valentine's Day? When you've been in relationships or not? Is it something that you will recognize? Is it something, do you do a Galentine's Day, which I almost think is worse than celebrating Valentine's Day in some situations? What do you, what's your attitude? I go to church the morning of, you know,

I know I like, I'll say this, I like all of the chintz and the iconography and the merch. I love red and pink together. Um, but as far as the actual sentiment, I'm, um, really grossed out by anything that would celebrate winners in general. Like, you already won by being in a relationship. I think there needs to be holidays for people

that, you know, come in second, third, last, whatever it is. So I always thought of the notion of Valentine's Day as like kind of an arrogant victory lap. So conceptually I'm against it, but I do like this, like, you know, the car, the has a ride, I guess. I love love, but it does give me the same feeling as when I'm at a gay bar and I see a straight couple

making out where it's like, everything is for you. You already have everything. Everything. Why do you need this now too? Exactly, the gloating, the like, you know, also like, they're just so tacky, like roses. There is something very cheeseball about it in a straight camp way, which I'm against. No, exactly. It's a cultural appropriation. And my parents sent me to straight

camp, but I didn't do well there. No, no, no, no. And again, I'm very happily partner and engaged, et cetera. And we don't do the Valentine's Day thing because guess what? We're in love every day. And we don't need a day to tell us. We don't need a day to tell us to get each other a fun gift. If we see something, if I see something that I get a mochi every week, you know what? And so he gets nothing on Valentine's Day.

And he likes it. And he loves it. He'll get nothing and like it. And he'll get nothing. And trust me And he loves it. He'll get nothing and like it. And he'll get nothing. And trust me, he loves it when I give nothing. He really, really does. I think that's really beautiful and very anti-consumerist. Exactly.

Yes. No, I mean, we're huge leftists and that's the real reason we don't celebrate Valentine's Day. I love that. Southpaws. Yeah. I also just want to normalize getting yourself a thing of chocolates and eating them in a bubble bath.

I feel like a Miss Piggy lifestyle is what we should all be aspiring towards, which is to say the chocolate and the clothes, the romance and the glamour. That should be a part of the self and not connected to some rando. Well, and we're dancing around the term and it is something that I think got a bad rap because certain people took it too far.

But no self-care. I think self-care is like as long as you voted, you go ahead and self-care. But there are a lot of people who were in the bubble bath and couldn't be by is like as long as you voted, you go ahead and self care. But there are a lot of people who were in the bubble bath and couldn't be bothered. As long as you voted for one particular person. But yes, I agree. As long as you did your civic duty.

Yeah. Exactly. Then you're allowed to go to a spa. Yeah. But what is something in pop culture, you are a pop culture queen, I noticed for a fact. I'm a pop culture fanatic. Deep well of knowledge.

Joel, I'm a real pop culture vulture. Yeah, you know, both of us, Billy on the Street alums, you know, we know all about every C-list Hollywood actress that could tickle a gay man's fancy. So we are both well versed. But what specifically is a relationship or a love story or something, some aspect about love from a movie or a television show or pop culture in general that really stands out as like your

favorite sort of your model for what it should look like or what you wish it could look like. I love this question. I mean, I'm going to give a couple of examples and some are of friendship love, which I think is so beautiful. I think that's happened before. Yeah. I'm getting to be the age where I just appreciate friend love so much deeper than I used to. So I'm going to give a couple examples of that as well as romantic love. So the friend love I'm going to do is Working Girl, which is the end of Working Girl. When she calls Joan Cusack and she says,

Sin, guess where I am? And then we're going to bring up the Carly Simon music and we just see Joan Cusack announcing to the Secretariat pool and everyone cheers for her. But the idea that you call your, I'm like getting choked up thinking about it. The idea that you call your best friend once you've landed that corner office.

And we both know that we have these friends. Where if something good happens to us, you actually can't call them because you know it'll actually ruin it or make you feel worse or somehow that person will be jealous or something like that. And to have a friend that you can unequivocally go to with your own success and know they're going to root for you and tell the rest of the secretary pool.

Like that is the older you get, the more special you realize that is. Because when you're young, you think that's a given. My friends will be happy for me. And then, you know, sometimes that's not always the case. Absolutely. And it's complicated as we get older, because some of us have kids and some of us don't, or some of us have careers and some of us don't, and there's a certain amount of like,

oh, that's the path that I didn't travel. And you're right, like to have... And also that she's the first person she calls really, really... Telling. Blows me away. Like, it's not her mom, it's not her, you know, it's her bestie. And I also just, and romantically too, that movie really does it for me

because you have a character, like the romantic lead in that, Harrison Ford, who loves her for her and is rooting for her to succeed in a way that, you know, there's not a lot of representations of that that are intelligent in pop culture that really, you know, hit that spot of like a partner who is comfortable enough in his non-toxic masculinity to say like,

my partner is, you know, the best and I want her to succeed and when she does, I'm gonna pack her a sandwich and I'm gonna be so excited for her. And I think he does such a beautiful job in that movie of being that. And unfortunately, what is it, like 30, 40 years later, that is still, that makes Working Girl science fiction in a lot of ways because we're still not there yet

as a culture where that is so, like, that that's just not as like you'd hope that we'd watch working girl and be like that's that of course that's a given but such as not there's good men out there there's just a good man is hard to find joel yeah no uh and a hard man is good to find. I find. OK, what's what's another example, Julie? OK, so I'm going to say the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, like, I cannot watch that without crying, when they decide to make the same mistake again. Um, not to spoil anything for those of you who haven't seen it, but it is one of the most, like, I just feel like it's such a...

It's a valentine to the nature of love, which is that it doesn't make sense and it doesn't have to, and maybe we will keep repeating ourselves until, you know, we learn and maybe we'll never learn. But the idea that you want to be with someone and that sort of defies all reason and kind of it defies science because it is sort of like a science fiction premise is just so powerful and so beautiful to me.

It goes back to something that I've often said, which is that like falling in love is not necessarily a choice. Like that is almost in many cases accidental. And it is the work of staying in love with someone where things get tricky and things get dicey. And that is like sort of a perfect encapsulation of that experience where it's like they meet again, it happened again, they couldn't control it,

there's just something there. And it's the question is, is if this time around, are they gonna be willing to do the work to maintain that? And, or will it just be this cycle that they keep going through? And I, one of my favorite movies of all time, such a beautiful example of what we're talking about today. So thank you for that, Julie.

Okay, so we've got two. Why don't you round us out with a third example if you've got one. Okay, so I'm a sucker for women running in a movie, a rom-com in particular, because when you're running towards something, you're the protagonist. You're the person who's taking the action.

10,000 times. I never got into the, I had somebody take me to the second Twilight movie, and I remember thinking, what's the appeal of this besides these two beautiful androgynous leads who you have to be attracted to no matter what your gender or sexual identity is? We're saving it for marriage. They're literally these andro- perfection, like pale beauties.

But at the end, I remember seeing Kristen Stewart like running toward the, and I was like, oh, this is the appeal. Cause girls like the idea of being the active protagonist who's going out there and getting what she wants. So the end of the apartment was Shirley MacLean and Jack Lemmon, which is one of, it's not my favorite movie ever. And this is why I'm so glad you're on because I got to tell you,

some of these fucking Gen Z TikTok comedians I've interviewed, they're not talking about The Apartment, Julie. No. Let me tell you. They're sharing an apartment with an old guy right here in the latest New York magazine piece about how they're sharing apartments with old people now. If it happened twice, it's a trend, Joel. Don't forget that. It's in the New Yorker for sure.

So the apartment is a wonderful movie. It's Billy Wilder and Shirley MacLaine is unbelievably amazing in it. And at the end it's New Year's Eve and Nora Ephron used this, but I think it's Billy Crystal who's doing the running at the end of When Harry Met Sally, but someone running on New Year's Eve is a trope, right?

Like to get to the person they realize they're meant to be with. So she does that at the end of the apartment. Shirley MacLaine is running on the street, having realized something. I don't want to ruin it for people because I really, really want your listeners, at least one of them, to see the apartment.

Then I'll feel like I've made my mark. Because it's so, so beautiful. And then once she arrives to where she is headed, you have this incredibly unsentimental final line that I don't want to ruin, but it's so good! Because she's decided to be with someone who actually likes her back for the first time in her life. And as he's professing his love to her,

you know, how much I adore you, she just kind of cuts him off at the knees, and the movie's over, but there's like a smile, and you know that they're gonna be okay But there's not you know This like sentimentality that it's right choking on and just to watch Shirley MacLaine running at night on New Year's Eve is Something that I will always try very such a beautiful moment Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up too because I do feel with Shirley Shirley, we talk so much about her later career and by later career, I mean like eighties

and beyond. Yeah, postcards, et cetera. But it's like, let's watch. Let's go back to young Shirley. Let's watch. Oh my God. Let's watch. Charity. Let's watch. You know, like so charming. I mean, oh my God, like there's there's like, I would even go so far as to watch a fucking Wes. I would watch, what is it?

Two Sisters for Sarah, whatever that movie is. Two Sisters for Sarah. Yeah, Two Sisters for Sarah. I would watch it all, I would watch it all. If you take one thing home from this listener, it's go back to the filmography of Shirley MacLaine because she is a treasure. Yeah, and start with the apartment.

And deserves it. Yeah, and start with the apartment. She's great, she's great. That's an early one too. Is that 60s or 70s? So that is 1960 and then Sweet Charity is, I wanna say like 68, something, yeah. Something like, oh boy.

This is humiliating. I don't know how that ended up in my tongue. But yeah, young Shirley MacLaine. Holy cow, holy cow, she's incredible. And obviously stunningly beautiful. Before we leave though, Julie, one last thing. Is there something that you can share with us that is making you believe in love

that has happened recently this week? It could be something you saw in real life or on television, a song you heard, a thought you had. Is there anything that is bringing you to a place of, hey, I think love could exist and this is why? I got a text this morning from a friend that said, hello friend, how are you doing? At eight in the morning. Wow.

And it made me feel so good just to wake up to that. Sometimes that's all it takes. And I want to encourage people to do that more with their friends. Just, hi pal, how are you doing? Waking up to that specifically, because you know that, like, I don't know, there's that morning hour where we're all kind of like, you know, like the soft spot in a baby's skull. We're all sort of forming our day. To have that, like, fortify you while you're starting out and... Set the tone.

...remember that, yeah, people are, like, rooting for you or thinking about you or care about you. And I just feel like right now, especially in the world, feels so insurmountably catastrophic that these are small acts that remind us that we're in this together. And so, I know that's a small thing, but it really helped me this morning. So I want to share that as an inspiration to just check in with a friend as simply as

the text like that. And not as a preamble for a favor, not waiting until something bad has happened to them and you're checking in on them because of that, but like a truly pure, how are you doing? Like I do think that there's two things that keep people from doing this. And one is that like, I think like we for some reason have been socialized, at least my generation and below that like you don't send a text message just because, you know, you don't check a text message just because, you know, you don't, you don't check in just because.

And I also think that from the other side of it, there is this reaction sometimes when I have checked in on friends just out of the blue that they're like, why did you hear something? Am I giving off some reason? Why, you know, and it's like, we're so broken that we can't even receive that kind of care if we're not in the right head space for it. So I encourage everyone to just do their best to normalize this kind of behavior, start doing it with your own friends,

don't wait for something tragic to happen to them before you check in with them, that's all. And I love the idea of checking in, not because you're asking for anything, because that was another thing for me was like, when I would either reach out to someone, it would be like to make plans, or to get to like point B or whatever it was.

And I'm also like, I'm older than you, I'm a phone person, like I love chat. I love a chat, I love a gab on the phone, but sometimes, you know, people do like audio text messages and that'll be like a check-in. And I just think that the more kind of like outreach that you can do on a smaller, more frequent scale maybe to start thinking about that will make people feel more connected and more cared for because like I said, starting my day with that was

really, really meaningful. And that's why we've got you on your A game on the pod today, Julie. Exactly. really meaningful. And that's why we've got you on your A game on the pod today, Julie. Exactly, I would have been a mess if I had not gotten that text message. Friendship, love is not to be under appreciated during Valentine's Day or any other time of year. So we must treasure our friends, we must hold them close, we must value them and treat them like the jewels they are.

10,000% co-sign. Oh my God, Julie Klausner, everybody. Julie, tell the people what you're working on, where they can find you, if they're interested. What's going on with Julie Klausner these days? I have relaunched my podcast, How Is Your Week? It has risen again like a phoenix and I am dicking around. And hey. In general, otherwise.

I love to hear that. So find How Is Your Week? And I do a show called Double Threat and I have a bunch of things on the burners. So hopefully they will come to a simmer and a boil. Keep your eyes on Deadline. I'm talking about Ask Jeeves. I want you to check Buzzfeed.

It's not AI. I want you to check, what else do we want? Gizmodo. Gizmodo, huge. You never know when Gizmodo is going to come out with boingboing.net also. Check all of the websites you like. Jump on the boingo hotspot at the airport

and get to Google and people. Use that free Wi-Fi. Well, Julie, thank you so much for joining me. This has been such a fucking pleasure from start to finish. This has been an episode of Speed Date. Again, this is our mini episode, a regular episode of Bad Dates will be out later next week, and I cannot wait to talk to you more. That's been our show. Goodbye.

Likewise. It was always a pleasure. See you soon. Bad Dates is a production of Smartless Media created by Robert Cohen, executive producers are Richard Corson and Bernie Kaminsky. We will be back for more. And gates