Good Life Project - Ophira Eisenberg | A Well-Storied Life

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Ophira Eisenberg hosts NPR’s nationally syndicated comedy, trivia show Ask Me Another where she interviews and plays silly games with the show's famous guests. She is a regular host and teller on The Moth Radio Hour. Ophira’s own comedic memoir, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy was optioned for a feature film. Her comedy special Inside Joke is available on Amazon and iTunes.You can find Ophira Eisenberg at: Instagram | Website | Twitter-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today, Ophira Eisenberg, hosts NPR's nationally syndicated comedy trivia show, Ask Me Another, where she interviews and plays silly games with all sorts of people like Sir Patrick Stewart, Awkwafina, Roxane Gay, Terry Crews, Tony Hawk, George Takei, Julia Stiles, so many other awesome human beings. She is also a regular host and teller on The Moth Radio Hour. Her stories have been included in two of The Moth's best-selling collections. And Ophira's own comedic memoir, Screw Everyone, Sleeping My Way to Monogamy, was optioned for a feature film. She has appeared on Comedy Central this week at the Comedy Cellar, New Yorker Festival, so many other places. Amazing story-driven stand-up. And her comedy special,

Inside Joke, is available on Amazon and iTunes. And today, we dive into her remarkable journey. So many of the moving, deeply personal stories, stumbles, and awakenings that have brought her to this point in her life. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. So you hail from the wilds of up north, which I have been to once in my life and absolutely fell in love with. Well, actually, Calgary, the city. And then we jumped up to Banff for like three days. And I was like, do I have to leave here? It was mind-blowingly gorgeous. Yeah. All right.

So you're growing up in Calgary. Yep. A dance person as a kid. Yes. Yes, that's right. You said it so hesitantly. Well, you know, because I did ballet growing up, classical ballet, for years. You know, I think I was pretty good at it.

I think I never was in line to be a prima ballerina. Although some of the people I studied with did become that because I did go to a very serious school. But I worked as is with everything in my life. Not that good at it, but I'll work harder than everybody. That's how I did it. But a little bit of trivia, I danced in the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Okay, so I've heard you say this before. Yes.

And I've also heard you say that to your knowledge, there's no video or any footage or anything of you doing that available. This is what I remember from it. I remember thinking when I was a, I can work out the actual date. I was, yeah, I was 15 turning 60. I was part of a large contingent. We were wearing big beige dresses that had red and blue ribbons and we had red earmuffs and I believe sort of like a pedophore, like a red apron-like thing on top of our beige outfit.

So that outfit is definitely somewhere safe. Oh, I've recently seen it. Framed somewhere. I've really recently. It's very big. It's big. And, you know, they gave us these amazing, you know, technology for the time because it was cold outside and you're dancing outside.

But it was a very, very thin, you know, probably now what was like thin slate, undergarment, full body unitard kind of thing to keep us warm. And at the time, the only, like you went skiing, you wore this very bulky thermal stuff. I remember. And this was space age as far as we were concerned, but it was probably what they, you know, had developed at the time for all of the athletes. That's pretty amazing. So you were kind of famous when you were 15 or 16. Pretty much couldn't walk down the street. I couldn't walk down the street. That was such a big deal, Calgary getting the Olympics. I think for my age range, it was huge.

And everybody in Calgary in my age range, it was huge. Because you were just starting to appreciate that there was an art culture all over the world that came to Calgary in my age range, it was huge because you were just starting to appreciate that there was an art culture all over the world that came to Calgary. Lots of different people came to Calgary that had never been there. You know, they were visiting for the first time, kind of put Calgary on the map. And I feel like it opened up just a lot of people I know to, wow, there's a whole world out there. Yeah. They just happened to come here. Because I think people thought, I think a lot of people think, well, there's Vancouver, there's Toronto, there's Montreal.

Although the Stampede has been around forever in Calgary. Forever. Which is like, was always the giant sort of jam where everyone comes together. Yep. The greatest outdoor show on earth. That's how it's advertised. That's nice. I like it.

The greatest outdoor show on earth. So you had bragging rights before that. But nobody cared. Nobody cared. I mean, I guess they cared on a certain line of, because if you just follow the map all the way down, every state you hit there is also kind of around the Rocky Mountain range. It also has sort of a ranching feel. And of course, horses and people who deal with rodeos all through the states, Texas, obviously, Colorado, they would all come up. Some Idaho, lots of Montana. Growing up also, your parents, your mom was from Holland? That's right. Your dad, Israel? Israel, kind of before it was Israel.

Okay. Basically. What's the backstory there? How did they meet? Yeah. So he decided to join the army. He lied about his age and joined when he was young. But this is fighting for the British in World War II.

And he came to Holland during the Nijmegen, Holland, which is just on the German border. He was part of the liberation movement that came near the end of the war. And the way I understood it from my mother is that the, well, actually, the Germans, obviously, they confiscated everything they didn't, and they had rations, and life was definitely hard. And she was, and actually, the Americans bombed their town because it wasn't very accurate back then. So they bombed their town because it wasn't very accurate back then. So they bombed their town. And so their town, Nijmegen, was decimated. They bombed her school, everything, bombed.

But life went on as it does. And as the liberation movement, all these soldiers came in, they also, they would give the people living in Nijmegen their coffee and their sugar and stuff from their mess tents in a radio. And one of these men happened to be who would be my father. I think he took a shine to my mother. I assume she took a shine to him, but he would show up every day at their house with goods, goods for her family. And her mother said, you're going to marry that man. You're going to marry that man.

So she did. And they moved to, you know, Israel. They moved to Sfat. Yeah, let's see. At the time, that was not an artist colony like it is now. It was just a small place. And my father's family ran a bakery. So they lived a very modest life. So how did they go from there to Calgary? Around the wars of independence, my mother said to my father, they had two kids, and she said,

I just want to live somewhere where there are no wars. I don't want to ever hear bombing and shots fired again. And her father, who was an engineer on the trains, was obsessed with Canada because Canada had the longest, you know, the first long train track in history, the CNN. So he always talked about Canada, how it was this wonderful place. So my mother said to my father, what do you think about Canada? And somehow she convinced them. They got on a boat, a ship, and they came to the first place that you come to basically when you're going across the ocean, which is Newfoundland. Gander is kind of well known as the place where all the planes go to refuel. In this case, the ship goes to St. John's, Newfoundland.

And they settled there for a little while. And my father started teaching bar mitzvah classes because there was a few Jews there. And they needed someone, they needed a teacher. And they heard about this brand new city, Calgary. It was just starting out. And they, you know, and it was talking about... Getting on the ground floor. it on the ground floor. Get it on the ground floor.

And they thought maybe they could make a go of it there. And they went there and my father became the, he helped build the Hebrew school and became the principal of the Hebrew school. Was there much of a Jewish population in California? There was a bit of a Jewish population, yeah. I mean, I've said before that, you know, to my feeling growing up, there was not. Yeah. I mean, I've said before that, you know, to my feeling growing up, there was not, you know, in comparison, in comparison to, well, New York, there's no comparison. But even other Toronto, Montreal, it just felt very small to me. But people have corrected me and said, no, it was fine. So it's bigger now. It's so much bigger now. But at the time for me even growing up, and I'm the youngest of six, it felt very small. So youngest of six, does that mean that essentially you just had the run of everything at that point? You're like, whatever. Sort of.

I mean, yes, there was a lot of that. Not so much when I was a little child. Of course, did I notice that? I mean, everyone was like, you're spoiled, you're spoiled lot of that. Not so much when I was a little child. Of course, did I notice that? I mean, everyone was like, you're spoiled, you're spoiled, of course. But when I was a teenager, although different circumstances, because my father passed away when I was young, and my mother was older and went back to work for the first time, which she actually, as hard as that was, she really enjoyed. She always wanted to have a job.

I don't think she got the job that she wanted, but she always wanted to have a job. I don't think she got the job that she wanted, but she always wanted a job. And then I had total freedom because she was basically saying to me, get good grades and like, don't get out of line. Yeah. It's like you're the bottom of six and then kind of a latchkey kid at that point too. Yeah. So I had great free, I had more freedom than any of my friends. Did I abuse it? Yes. Yes. You can't just leave that hanging out there. No. You got to find the boundaries. You got to push against the edges. Any good memories that pop into your head? Ways you might have sort of wandered? Yeah. I mean, I just would stay out late. I would go wherever I wanted to go. Yeah.

I would hang out. I know you shared also, I guess a couple of years back on the moth, something that you called the accident. Yes. Eight, eight-ish years old. Yeah. Share a bit of that. Oh yeah. When I was, I share a bit of this every day of my life as I continue to work through it. That's the way life works. When I was eight years old, I was in a car accident. My mother was driving and I was in the car with my brother and my friend and actually her brother, which anyways, her brother in a little Honda Civic. And we were driving home from swimming, like just fun swimming, doing something. My mother trying to get the kids to do something. And a guy, young guy ran a red light. And as we were making a left turn and bashed into the side of the car.

So I was the worst off survivor. My mother survived, of course, I say that because the person that didn't survive was my friend. We were both in the back seat me myself and my friend my mother and my brother were in the front two seats my mother driving she broke her wrist but otherwise she was fine my brother hit his head he was unconscious his knees went into the dash and were cut up. You know, the brother, this is such a different time. So this is 85. Honda Civic had a hatchback. And this is back when the young kid, like as a young kid, he was in the hatchback. That's how we were traveling.

And he walked away without a scratch. So it's just someone who was very adept at physics could probably explain to me how this all happened. Because in this tiny car, everyone had a different level of injury. So I was obviously rushed to the hospital. So was my friend. I have a huge scar in my stomach. It's called a trauma scar because I was dying. So they basically ripped me open and I had broken ribs that collapsed my lung and ruptured my spleen and lacerated my liver. And I was just generally in rough shape, but mostly it was a, you know, could I breathe? That was the real worry at the time. The spleen is something they don't sew back up, right? Once you rupture a spleen, it's pretty small, that's it. And the liver is something that

not only you can sew up, but does obviously have some regeneration properties. So it was really about the, and then just general, you know, your body's been through tons of trauma, can you make it through? Yeah. I mean, were you, because you're young at that age, and I guess you weren't aware of what happened with your friend right away. No. Because that was something that was kept from you until you were at a point where you're like, I guess the adults thought that you could in some way handle it. Yeah. I think too. I mean, I was in the hospital for a while and they certainly didn't tell me while I was in the ICU. And matter of fact, I kept asking for my friend Adrian. And it's not like they lied to me. They just, I guess, misdirection, switched the subject.

And for whatever reason, I didn't press on it. But as I got stronger, as I got more cognizant, as I was moving to the children's ward, and then the idea of going home was coming closer and closer, I also was just more forthright about asking. And one day her mother and my mother, they were together and I asked her mother, her mother would also come visit me. So of course, when I saw her mother, I'd say, why, why can't I see Adrian? Did you have a sense? I don't think I did. I don't think I did until that one day. And I just saw this look come over their face

that told me something was wrong. Yeah. I know people often say that they have moments also for all sorts of different reasons where like in the blink of an eye, things change for them. Very often that happens and we report it when we're older in life and we're sort of at a moment where we've got more of the cognitive and emotional capacity to actually have it in some way to grapple with it, to work through it, maybe people helping us through. And a lot of people have shared they are from that moment changed. They exist some way differently in the world. You were so young when this happened. Do you have any sense of being different in the world after that in any way?

Well, I have a sense in terms of feedback I got as a young kid. So the first thing that I think in hindsight really did shape things was how I was treated. Everyone around me. And it was both positive and kind of negative. One was, of course, everybody around you starts grappling for reasons. Reasons. We all like to have things for reasons. So all of a sudden I was really hit with the, you are here for a reason. You survived for a reason. As an eight-year-old. As an eight-year-old. At any year, that's pretty trippy, but as an eight-year-old. As an eight-year-old. At any year, that's pretty trippy, but as an eight-year-old. It's intense.

Yeah, very, very intense. The other thing, weirdly, is that, and I don't know what to say about this. A couple of my teachers would say to my mother, she looks different. She has a light in her eyes. You know, what? So, yeah, I think that sort of set me up. I mean, trust me, I didn't take it and become this like, I'm here for getting in conversations with my friends' parents a lot more often than my friends. I did feel like some things were, I just felt like I was in a different sphere than a lot of what was going on around me. And I didn't really know how to negotiate the two places.

Yeah, I don't know how anyone would. No. And recently, I had the situation where I was going back through all of the stuff in my mother's house, and I was going through boxes and boxes of old school work that I cannot believe was kept. And let me tell you something. From grade three, so this would be grade four, the summer was between the summer of grade three and grade four. So grade four, grade five, grade six, those are big elementary years of writing. And I guess we did a lot of writing of stories. And there was a whole, I guess there was a whole section on poetry. I wrote so much about death, so much about death, so much about darkness, so much about this stuff. And I'm just surprised no one said anything.

Right. I'm like, where are the adults here? No one said anything. No one pointed at, I mean, maybe that's great. I have no idea if that was really a wonder. I mean, not only that, but some of it didn't even get good grades. It's not like it all was like five out of five, A plus. It was like careless spelling problems. I mean, you wonder if you're like the teachers and you're like, okay, so how do, especially, you know, we're talking, this was, you know, this was not today. I think today there's a lot more context and a lot more instruction on what to look for and the resources.

Oh, yeah. Like, here are the steps you take. But back then it was still kind of the wild, wild west with a lot of, like, and a lot of things you just didn't talk about. You just didn't talk about. I mean, I felt the mentality at the time even was very strongly like, we are moving on. We are moving forward. And what the past is the past. And now we're moving forward.

Yeah. So how do you go from this place? Moving through this really, really tough time. Clearly you're processing it for years after that through your writing and your brain to starting to say, you know, this thing called comedy. It's a big pendulum swing, or maybe it's not. I don't know. Maybe it's actually a really logical pendulum swing. So, you know, and I've thought about this a lot and I do not have a clear answer, but

I feel like there are so many things that have impacted where I end up going. I want to do comedy. If comedy is a circle in the middle, you know, it's just all the different points go to it. One is being youngster six, pretty classic situation there, which I am. You've got to find a way to get it. Yeah, I'm still the wallflower when I hang out with my brothers and sisters. They are such larger, louder voices than I am. Also, getting people to laugh in my family is a really big deal. That is what everyone aspires to and is rewarded with. So that pretty much sets up the

stage. Then the need to feel, I think this is huge, in an out-of-control world where things like tragic accidents can happen. You look for places that you can control the narrative where you can be the person with the power of the microphone and the attention and the, you know, you're in a dialogue with the audience, but one of you is only supposed to be talking. And that is very powerful. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, on the one hand also, it's sort of like you control the narrative. So you do have this sense of, of agency for this fixed window of time. Right.

And I've heard so many times people talk about in the standup world and in the comedy world, it's a lot, a lot of people processing their own stuff. So it's like there's a therapeutic aspect to it, which is, okay, so this is my way of figuring it out and talking through it and getting out. But at the same time, it feels like there are equal, if not more parts of, this is also my way to create a persona to hide behind. Yeah. I mean, that is so true, even with the writing I've done on this experience and the writing I've done on other experiences, you learn very quickly as a writer that you cannot tell all of the story. You have to pick a lens to tell the story through. And sometimes that ends up being how you remember story. Because if you are writing and very committed to this particular lens and really drawing it out, you get a lot of the story in

there, but there's always so much more. There's always so much more. So even I've like talked about the car accident in that moth story and that through a very specific point of view. But there's little things that sometimes I'm reminded of, or sometimes someone else reminds me of that. I'm like, Oh, what? That whole side of the story. I forgot all about that. I mean, and there were some things I wasn't even aware of. One of my favorite things that I wasn't aware of is that supposedly my father, when he got to the hospital, was told, you know, that I was in critical condition and they didn't know if I was going to make it. And he was very unhappy with that information, obviously, and started, he wanted more answers and he wanted to talk to a surgeon and he wanted to talk to a specialist and he wanted to talk to someone

and whoever was like, no, that's, you know, no. And he started walking around the hospital, like pounding on doors, demanding to speak to people until someone spoke to him and said, here's the deal. She's got a 50-50 chance. And supposedly when he heard that, he started screaming in the hospital, 50%, did you hear that? She's gonna live. 50%, she's gonna live.

So if there was ever a literal example of a glass half full. Yeah. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

I know you've also shared your mom. One of the things that happened is this was largely about your experience of that experience. Yeah. Until down the road when you realized, oh, I wasn't the only one experiencing it. I know. Like you just shared that story about your dad and also I guess your mom, you know, how it affected her and also the other family involved and kind of a remarkable lens on how.

Yeah. You know, the, right. The other family involved recently, the father of the other family got in touch with me again. We have been a little bit of touch over the years. And he remarried. Her, Adrienne's mother passed away many years ago now. And he remarried and has a stepdaughter who actually lives in New York. And there is like a loose plan currently for us to get together. And who knows, maybe she'll stumble across this podcast. But I mean to do it, but I'm a little afraid. And I shouldn't be, this is a totally different person,

but it's just, it's, yeah, these things, these things can, all of these things continue in life. Yeah. Yeah. You end up heading out to McGill. Harvard of the North. I always joke that. You don't even have to say that. Of course everybody knows.

Except for that it's pointed out to me that Harvard does not refer to itself as McGill of the South. I went to Binghamton University in New York, which used to be called back then SUNY Binghamton. And we used to call it the Harvard of, like the Harvard of the state university system. Oh, yeah, there you go. You end up there. And I guess that's when the Comedy Jones really certainly goes to the next level. You end up ushering, volunteering to usher at a festival. And it sounds like light bulbs really start to go on. Yeah, I actually, so it was right.

I finished my college degree in cultural anthropology and theater. Which is the absolute perfect lead up for, actually in interesting ways, it really is. And it wasn't even theater, by the way. It was basically theory of theater. I was reading plays and writing about trends in theater historically. Anyways, and culturally. So yeah, exactly. I couldn't, I was obviously just so painfully afraid of putting myself out there in some way. But always getting so close. and this is when I had no plans. This is when I did not know what I was doing at all because was I just going to get a master's? I guess so. Was I going to get a job? And that's when I volunteered to usher at the Vancouver Comedy Festival, a great festival, by the way, and met

all the other ushers, weirdly were aspiring and up and coming comedians and they convinced me to go to a workshop and i you know what comedy classes are very common now i feel back then it was suspicious i mean some of comedy classes are suspicious too i'm not saying they're all all perfect but you know because it is such a strange is it a skill skill? Is it an art? You know, do you have to have something beforehand to go into it? I really can't answer these questions. But at the time, I think no one was didn't have any other way to get in. I didn't know how to get in. So I went to the workshop. $300, too expensive, frankly. Straight out of money, but I did have, I had $325 in my bank account, I believe. And so my- And access to like a lot of flyers when you start gigging. That's true. I had access to a color printer.

Print, print, print. Some people, actually, I remember, you know, everyone would do flyers in the beginning. And I remember when I moved here, some, a show, a friend of a show that I was part of, they called that person Toner because they would print off all their flyers. It's like, go ask Toner. Go ask Toner. That's awesome. Yeah. So I did go to this workshop. I thought I was going to, I had this grand plan where I was going to go to a bit of the workshop and then go to the bathroom and run off before they asked me for the money.

Not understanding that clearly they ran a better business model than that, that you walked in, you gave the money and then you got the workshop. So does the light switch just automatically go on there or is it more of a slow burn type of thing? Or are you completely freaked out or is it just yes to everything? a bit. So they had, you know, the first, it wasn't like a sit down lecture or anything. I didn't know what to expect. I mean, it was just a weekend workshop of Saturday and Sunday kind of thing. But everyone just went on stage one at a time and did their three to five minute act that they were working on. I didn't have anything. So what do you do? So, I mean, because of my family, I told the kinds of things that I told before at the dinner table. Little anecdotes, funny ways that we used to make, like we made fun of my mom, you know, just dumb things. And the guy running it said, he said, do you see that everybody? That's something you can't learn stage presence so i knew i had and i was like what

and he was like yeah you want i everybody wants to see you on stage and he goes you know you got to work on the writing but everyone wants to see you on stage so that was really exciting and he said that was he you know he was like that's a talent that's a talent and no one had ever said to me before you have talent or that's a talent so i was a talent. And no one had ever said to me before, you have talent or that's a talent. So I was like, wow, this is amazing. And then the next night was the showcase. We were going to do another run of our sets with feedback. And then the next night was a show. So that's what you have people coming in to watch. Yeah. Real people coming in to watch, you know, invite your friends and family kind of thing. And I hadn't planned for that.

I didn't know about that. I had a shift at Kinko's. So I called in sick for my shift. First of all, I was just like, I'm sorry, I can't do it. I have a shift at Kinko's. And he was like, yeah, you're going to do it. I was like, oh, okay. So I called in sick for my shift at Kiko's. They all knew, really. And then I did the showcase. And I was terrified. I really thought I was shaking so hard that maybe my arms and my hands would fall off. I was shaking so hard, so scared, just beyond any level of terror that I thankfully have ever had to experience. And then I got on stage and I said

the things that we had prepared. And, you know, in the context of an amateur night, a new comic night, some of it got laughs, maybe just because I was a brave idiot or whatever, but it was intoxicating. And it also felt like this thing that I thought about somewhere in the back of my head for years and years and wondered happened and was happening. And it was the highest I think I'd ever felt in my entire life. And I just thought, I have to figure out how to do this again. Was there at that time a prescribed path? Well, there's never been a prescribed path. Right.

I mean, because, I mean. And there continues not to be. I mean, right. There is. I mean, I guess it's like you go to a big city. Yeah. Like the shows where you bring the audience along with you. Right.

Right. Yeah. No, Vancouver didn't have that or like a bringer show. Yeah. They had amateur night. And actually, you know, back then that club, long gone, called Punchlines, just like the movie that had comics who had lockers in the basement. There were no lockers. But it had an audience. It had a pretty loyal audience. So you didn't have to

bring people. It always was nice if you brought people, but it was absolutely not expected. And it was a scene. And I just started hanging out there every single night. These people became my friends. I saw they had a rotating cast of locals. And then obviously they'd bring in other people from out of town. And they had an amateur night that you would call in. I can't remember what it was, but you had to call in Tuesday by three and the booker would sort through the names and

maybe you would get on the amateur night the next Thursday. And let me tell you, I was so scared about doing this. I sabotaged myself at every turn. I called in at four. I called the wrong day. For some reason, my little brain would not let me take in the simple information of how to get on that stage. And then I finally just, you know, I would go to the club and be like, well, why didn't you get on? And I'd be like, oh, I called the wrong time. And, you know, people would just look at you like, what's wrong with you? I was like, what is wrong with me? So then I finally started calling at the right time and I got some stage time and it was far and few between, but it was something. And from that, I just, I just kept trying to do it. And there was a pretty healthy

amateur scene. So there was a lot of us that were hanging out and writing together and just trying to concoct shows and sketches and create. Yeah. I mean, when you find that community and the culture around it, it's sort of like, I would imagine that becomes maybe not as intoxicating as that moment on stage where, you know, like enough goes right that you're just like, oh, my, what just happened? What just happened? But also just being a part of that. I mean, it's interesting also. So you come up with a family, your dad passes young, you've got one of six. So you kind of have that community. You have like your family is a community to a certain extent. Then you land in another city and it's

like one of the first things that people try and do is they find their people. Yeah. And for a lot of people, it takes years. Right. And sometimes your people change. Yeah. Like you have a bunch of people. I mean, stand-up can be kind of like that, especially in the beginning, because not everyone keeps going. Yeah.

But for these, I think like a couple of years, that was really, yeah, that was a sense of belonging that I had not experienced at that point in my life. Yeah. At all. When does it, when, when does for you, was it at the very beginning where you're thinking, oh, if, if this is the thing that I can actually do to earn my living, like this is what I want to do. Or, or were you just kind of like, I don't know where this is leading, but I just have

to keep doing it as much as I can. Yeah. I didn't know where it was leading and I didn't have to keep doing it as much as I can. Yeah, I didn't know where it was leading. And I didn't not, you know, I was, my father was like most, I think, I guess, immigrant fathers or people that come over with no money to a new country. What are their expectations of their kids? My daughter, the comedian. You know, and my sister, it's like a story that she always plays back to me, I guess, in a certain way. Or I remember growing up is that she had a beautiful, and still does, a beautiful singing voice.

And she even had some teachers say to my parents, she has an amazing singing voice. You should try to cultivate that. Put her in singing lessons. See, you know, what she can do with that. And my father was dead set against it. He was like, no, no, no, no, no. And there was a very common feeling, because everyone in my family is artistic, some visual artists and what have you, that, you know, no, you need to support yourself and that is certainly not the way. So I think I had in my head that comedy was never good at, like, how would that

ever support me? Insane. But I just kept doing it because I loved every aspect of it. And I seemed to be doing it. I'd often just think, well, if I have another show to do, I guess I'll just do that show and then see what happens after that. Yeah. This is how it kind of becomes like the thing you can't not do. Right. And everyone tells you that all the time when you start. Every veteran comic is like, can you do this? I mean, I was asked this a zillion times. Can you do anything else?

Is there anything else you like doing? Anything else? Like, do you like cooking? Or do you like painting? Or do you like thinking about things academically? Maybe you like law. Can you do anything else? Because if you can't, just do that.

Because this is just too hard. And I think in hindsight, you know, and I know you've talked about this, if I would have known how hard it would be, I'm not sure if I would have done it. Yeah, I think so many people, I think, feel that way. It's funny because there's one side of creating the grand vision and mapping it out and really trying to identify everything that's going to go right and everything that could go wrong, preparing against it. And there's interesting research that shows that that even works. But there's other research that I've stumbled upon in the world of entrepreneurship, actually, which is this place where the vast majority of people and ideas fail. And they went out and they interviewed a whole bunch of people who had done really well and did big things.

And they're like, if you knew, like in hindsight now, looking back, if you knew what this would have taken from you personally, like relationally, like money, suffering wise, would you have said yes to it back then? And a lot of people are like, oh, hell no. No, but you also cannot gauge your reaction to these scenarios that you don't even know what you're up against. I didn't know that I would have an emotional reaction to not getting on a fundraiser or something so simple and insignificant. If someone said to you, okay, you know, when you start out, you're not going to be very good at it. You're going to work really

hard. You're going to get on some, you're not going to get on some shows. So try to, you know, get yourself in the mindset of that. That seems very simple. And then you're there and you're like, well, what happened? But I'm doing, you know, it's not, it's, things aren't fair. Things aren't one plus one equals two in entertainment. There's, there's fleeting ideas. Some people are rewarded in, for ways that have nothing to do with merit. Sometimes you're in the right place at the right time. There is an element of luck. I mean, it's so many different things. Yeah. I mean, talking about a fairness and the idea of fairness in, in a lot of worlds, but, and then in entertainment and then in sort of like the sub-genre of comedy.

I guess there's a longstanding commentary on inequity between representation, gender representation in the space, which I would imagine was so much more pronounced when you got into it. Is it in a meaningful way, even different now? It is different now. I feel like it is different now. However, I feel like, I mean, well, I really want to see where we are in five years because there's so much that is different now. And some of it is good. I would say there's the, especially in New York, the variety and diversity of voices on any one show in in my mind, is the best that it's

ever been in where I stand from, my standpoint. When I came to New York, it was still the feeling, I liked all these other female comics, we wanted to hang out, and we never did because we were never on the same show, because there would never be more than one woman on a show. So it was like this hilarious joke that you couldn't even hang out with the other female comics unless you made a special date. Because you'd never just be like, oh, because we're on the same bill at a club. That has totally changed, which is great. Weirdly, when I started off in Vancouver, there was a lot of women. There was a lot of people of different

ages, like some people, it was their, they'd sort of finished their career, and they wanted to try something else, or they had a career, and they thought they might be good at this. And definitely there was, you know, there was all kinds of different things going on. So that was such a warm, fuzzy, interesting bubble to be part of that was not at all representative of what was going on in the mainstream. What made you the jump then from West Coast? And I guess next was Toronto before you went down to New York. Yeah. Was it just trying to move to sort of like bigger cities with more possibility?

Yeah. You know, it was also just chasing the real game, I guess. Toronto has and had a great comedy scene, and there was tons of stuff going on there. And I did support myself doing comedy. And I did do a bunch of television work. And it was really all just working fine. And that would be the time I leave. It's like, this feels awesome. I'm out. But you know, everyone, there was such this fascination with New York and LA, New York because it's closer. And I think Toronto sees itself as, you know, in the shadows or a better version of New York or what have you. It's a comparison that is often thrown about. And I just wanted to see how I would do. Yeah, I always romanticized New York as a child. I

honestly believe from watching Sesame Street. I romanticized, I was like, apartments, like just all these things about it. Apartments and garbage, like just even like Oscar the Grouch, but I was like, garbage on the street? What is that about? Clearly grew up in just such a suburban situation. And you end up in Brooklyn, which is about the closest to what the actual blocks look like. That's right.

I was like, I did it. It's like, yes, winning. Yeah, so no, I just wanted to move to New York to see how I would do. And I moved here secretly because so many comics from Toronto would come to New York or LA and they would throw these big parties basically being like, goodbye, Canada. I'm going to make it in the big time. See you later. And then they would be back within the year because it was hard and nobody knew them. And, you know, you really do start from, you don't start from zero, you start from negative five. And it was, and they would come back because it was too hard.

Or it didn't work out, just whatever reason. I mean, in that world, is there, are there turning point moments? Are there sort of like the tipping point type of thing where thing where like i mean i guess back in the day it used to be like when there were you know like six channels and three night shows like if you got one of those it's like boom off and running yeah is is that i mean from the outside looking in it looked like that does that even exist anymore i don't think so i think that uh while everyone progressed there's, there's just so much out there now. Yeah. And I think it's such a niche market that there are some people that are selling out stadiums right now that you and I have never even heard of. Because they have made their name through the digital world. Right.

Or they've made their name through just a certain niche market that doesn't particularly come into our spheres. Which is sort of great that there is room for all of this. And, you know, the talk shows, right, there used to be a thing about like, oh, you got on this late night show and then your career opened up. I think you get on those things, but there's tons of people that do well who haven't been on any of those things. And there's certain clubs that are, well, you have to be part of this club or else you mean nothing. There's plenty of people on television and have made their way who never did any of those clubs. So I feel like we're in a moment right now where every rule is being broken.

Yeah. And I guess not just in comedy. I mean. In everything. Yeah. And pretty much everywhere you look. Which is super exciting. If you're on the disruptor side. If you're on the disruptor side. Yeah. And I guess not just in comedy. I mean. In everything. Yeah. And pretty much everywhere you look. Which is super exciting. If you're on the disruptor side.

If you're on the disruptor side. Yeah. Right. And terrifying if you're not, if you're holding onto the old paradigm. So terrifying. Although there's, I mean, I just also feel like there's this, the old paradigm exists. So if you just want to do it the classic way, I think there's still room there too. Yeah. That's interesting. Because so I write, you know, you write as well. And I remember a dozen years ago in the publishing industry, people were like, oh, like paper

books are over, bookstores are over. Yes. And everyone was mourning that because I love paper books and I love bookstores. And here we are, you know, a dozen years later, and sure, things have shifted, but the old paradigm still exists and is still a massive industry. So it is interesting to see. And bookstores are opening up. They're not closing. They're opening up.

And independent bookstores. But I also think that's a little bit because people do love paper books. I think we're still looking for common spaces to exist with each other. And those are kind of going away. But bookstores sort of have that. Often a little cafe. You can browse at a slow pace. And which is a great segue into your work as a storyteller and with the moth and also hosting, you know, because that is one of those common spaces where it's the old campfire, you know, like where it knew.

It's everyone comes together and everyone, maybe not everyone who shows up there, but a lot of people put their name in a hat hoping to be drawn on that particular evening to stand up and, you know, like spin their yarn in front of a room full of complete strangers. Yeah. How does that drop into your world? I am so grateful for being part of that world or like finding that world when it was just starting. Because now storytelling as a, yeah as a thing as a genre it's like a cultural phenomenon it's a cultural phenomenon yeah and i remember someone basically telling me you should check out this thing called the moth and at the time you know it wasn't a podcast because that didn't exist it was about to exist and it wasn't a radio show it was it was a

live event and it was popular it did did do some touring. But the story slams, which were those sort of open mics, right, where you could put your name in the hat and get picked, that happened at a small venue in the Lower East Side called the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe. And I would go. And, you know, at that time, too, it felt so different from stand-up because this crowd, stand-up now is having its heyday and comedy is having its heyday. But when I moved here in the early 2000s, it was, it was a little, there was an alt scene and the clubs were the clubs and it was very kind of divided and, and it was hard to get people to a show. I would say in general, people, people were struggling to get people to

a show. Storytelling. Oh my God. I went to the Moth and it was just packed to the, I mean, they were telling people, turning people away for an open mic, basically. The audience was writers and like intellectual, like all these artistic, cool people that I had not any interaction with in New York because comedy clubs, they may have been there, but I didn't have them all in the room like that. This super smart, really cool, interesting crowd. And there was just a feeling of electricity. Like this was something. And I did put my name in the hat and I did get picked. And just to make everyone feel good, I failed. I failed. I went up a tall story, hadn't really put it together, didn't really understand what it was about. You know, I had

some sense of what a story was, but I, you know, a lot of other people there really knew what they were doing. And some people were just telling something cool from their life. But, you know, I wasn't out of the gate like, oh, this is, I'm so good at this. I was okay. Did you expect that you would be because of what you were bringing to it? I think so. Right? It's like, I am going to go up there and show them how this is done. Yeah.

I was also terrified, though, because, again, it was a totally different muscle that I was used to. I'd written lots of personal stories, and I didn't know what to do with them. So I knew I had the material out there somewhere, but did I have it together in five minutes and, you know, ready to perform? But I wanted to be part of this. So I kept going back, and I found that community. And these people are still, are huge friends of mine still in my life. And a lot of them, you know, there's, there's no money per se in storytelling like that. You do it for the passion or you create something else out of it. Yeah. We'll be right back. Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch

ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I mean, it's interesting also because I'm curious whether this is right or wrong. When I think about the two audiences,

the stand-up audience and then the storytelling audience, my initial thing is like, oh, probably a lot of crossover, really similar. And then I'm like, no, it's probably the exact opposite. Felt very opposite. Yeah. And at the time, the stand-ups looked at the storytelling as,

oh, so it's like all the same thing, but just not funny. So it's like stand-up, but not funny. Right, so think if you can't make it in stand-up. Exactly. Go do storytelling. It's like what we do with no laughs. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. It's totally, it's just a different thing. It's beginning, middle, and end. or people who think if you can't make it exactly go do storytelling we do with no laughs and i was like no no no it's totally it's just a different thing it's beginning middle and end yet you have

to be vulnerable like you should be vulnerable i think a good story is about being vulnerable enough to have the audience connect with you emotionally which is a very different feeling than stand-up and funny is great but also doesn't have to be funny. Some of the stuff is tragic, but it always, you know, at the stand-up set too, you don't have to change as a person through your material by the end of a set. You know, but as a storyteller, you should express how you changed, how this impacted you in some way that you're different at the end. Something happened. Yeah, I mean, it also seems like a stand-up audience is almost more adversarial. We're just like a moth on a storytelling audience is like, we want you to succeed. Yeah.

Like, yes, let's do this together. Oh, they're rooting for you. And not only that, but when they get on your side for your story, they're rooting for you to win in your story, even though that might not be the truth of what happened. So they're devastated when you were devastated and they're elated when you win. You know, they really do follow you through, which is great. It was such a, what I kind of understood what it was. It was just also just so intoxicating. And for me, I think I was still figuring out my voice in standup. I didn't feel confident with who I was as a standup. I didn't feel confident with who I was

as a standup. I kept dabbling and wondering, is this right? Is this right? Will they like me like this? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I should do it this way. And in storytelling, you really cannot hide behind anything. Well, I mean, if you, I think, want to be the most effective. You shouldn't hide behind anything. And having to just throw it out there, my voice, my story, no messing around and getting rewarded for that really changed things. Yeah. It seems like you drew those two worlds together because your standup now, it feels like, especially over the last few years, has really drawn from a longer form of storytelling. I mean, it used to be, it's like, if I have to wait more than 30 seconds for the punchline, like, this better be a really good thing. Right, better be amazing.

Because anything that was longer than that, it was just set up. Like, it was all about the payoff. Yeah, and you better edit that down. And it feels like comedy in general, and also you in particular, it's changed. There is this not truly long form, but longer form, more nuanced element of storytelling that is really being brought into the art and the craft of stand-up. I totally agree. And it's so nice. I've even gone to some smaller shows recently and listened to some people that are just getting their feet wet

in the stand-up world. And they are telling longer stories. And sometimes I'm like, wow, you know, we're a minute in and I haven't heard a laugh, but it's super interesting and I bet it's going to pay off. And I'm actually, you know, some people might hear this and go, well, that's terrible. But no, it's fantastic because it's like people are really cracking their heads open on that stage and offering it out in a way that when I moved here, the trend was very jokey. It was very set, like one-liner, set a punch, very, very jokey. Yeah. And I mean, if you think about, you know, you shared the idea of the storytelling, both the teller and the audience, you want a sense of transformation at the end of it. And I feel like people don't normally go to stand-up because they're looking for that.

They're just looking to laugh. But if you can deliver both. That's the best. There's nothing better than that. There's nothing. Yeah. Especially, well, it's harder to do it in a stand-up venue. And I've tried.

Sometimes I'm like, all right, we're going to segue to a longer story. But you are asking them to really listen in a different way. I mean, that's another thing, just how you listen to a person in a stand-up venue versus a storytelling venue. A storytelling, I mean, storytelling, people are really listening because they are taking in a story. A stand-up venue, you have to really fight for them to listen to you of that length. And you better be economical even with the words in your story because there is just a different vibe.

So, you know, you have to sell it more as a performer, you can sell it more. But the payoff often is a little, it can be a little higher because it's unexpected. Yeah. And I guess there is this kind of third place that it feels like it is emerging in the world of standup also, which is like back in the day, there used to be the hour long comedy specials. Yeah. And it was always HBO. That is amazing how that's changed.

But now it's like a whole different world. And we're talking about like, you know, people are making their own opportunities here, but there's so many people out there doing long-form shows now where I guess like you get to create the container and take people on that ride with them. And no, you're going to laugh a lot, but also, so it's like you have this opportunity to

now hold people in this space for a longer period. You know, and I think this, the, on an international scale, the kinds of shows that are at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival every year, Comedy Festival, were more like these, I mean, really solo shows of, I think, I think of like the 90s or something like that, where you were taking the audience on a journey. And it wasn't just like joke, joke, joke, joke, joke about a subject. It was a story and very descriptive. And there was a lot of laughs. But even Nanette, which of course caused Hannahannah gatsby's nanette which of course

you know made everyone melt a lot of people's brains yeah it melts a lot of people's brains and i've had a lot of people in the standard community were like that's not a comedy special and they were all mad but you know that that is the kind of show that was at edinburgh festival and did extremely well uh and is one of the best shows, I would say, that comes out of there. But you go to that festival, a county festival, and you're going to see people from all over the world do shows like that for a month. Oh, and there's a hundred to choose from. So the fact that we're now just getting them or viewing them and being all like, well, I don't know about that. I didn't hear one thing about drinking or whatever you want the subject matter to be that you would expect from someone's comedy special.

You know, I think it's like, yeah, let's open our minds a little bit, people. what you need from it as the performer versus what the audience gets to embrace and feels walking away from it, which maybe sometimes aligns really well, maybe other times not at all. Yeah, right. Right. I mean, and that's, it is right. There's an expectation like, and what do you do with those expectations of your audience? Do you, I mean, sometimes I go on stage and I'll, this is more like in a club setting and I'll look at the audience and I'll view what is happening before me and I'll say to myself, okay, we've got to make a choice. Do we, do I want to just make sure that I get as many laughs as I want or do I want to do the stuff that I really want to do?

Because sometimes that is going to be a risk and it might not pay off. Or do I want to do the stuff that I really want to do? Because sometimes that is going to be a risk and might not pay off. Or do I just need to do whatever it takes to make these people laugh for whatever time I have on stage? You know, and that becomes a choice. Yeah. Along the way, you end up writing a book also a couple of years back, which is sort of this memoir about your very sex positive youth. Yeah, I guess so. But the timing of that is kind of interesting, right? Because also shortly before that, you end up connecting with NPR and you're hosting

the show, Ask Me Another, which is edgy, which is funny, especially in the context of NPR. That's right. But so you're doing that. And I don't know what the conversations are with you and sort of like the powers that be, like while you're sort of like pushing the edge on the show. Giant audience, people love it, people love you. And then you come up with a book with it, which makes the show look very tame. Yes. Matter of fact, when I did interviews, well, a lot of NPR just wouldn't touch it.

But anytime they would, they'd be like, I can't believe I could say the title on the radio. They get all sort of like giddy about it, even though the title of the book is a lot more salacious, I would say, than the content. Yeah, no, agreed. One of my curiosities was when you're developing content for the stage, classically, you get so many opportunities to workshop this, right? It's like the final thing. If you do a special, like a one hours, whatever it is, you've been workshopping that stuff and refining it for a long, long, long, long, long time to have that set just nailed. And when you write a book, totally different. I mean, the experience

of doing that, it's like, okay, so maybe you have a handful of readers, you've got your editor, but you pour your heart out and then you put it out into the world. You haven't workshopped it. You don't know what's working and what's not working. And it's just like... Although I did workshop a lot of my book because a lot of those stories, not all of them, because it would be impossible. I would do it storytelling shows and I would, however, I w you know, delivery delivering and how you deliver a joke and how you write a joke can be two different, very, very different things because the rhythm of performing versus pacing on a page is very different. And sometimes you can't compensate with punctuation to make certain tonal shifts. Right. I mean, so it's like, even if you have told this story 10 times on a

stage and gotten the response you wanted to get, you don't know when you're going to write in the book, was that going all the way back to what you were told in that first workshop? Was that mostly about your presence on stage or was it about like the actual story that you told? Because people aren't going to get the presence when they're reading the book. No, that was, I think the biggest hurdle for me as a writer was figuring out like some of the stuff I just wrote. And so it only existed in a written form and other other stories I you know workshop quite a lot on stage and I knew the beats of it so now it was putting it in the framework of the page and making sure it it fell into the uh the journey of the entire story and it was yeah it was really hard it really hard. And I did have a few people read it and just ask them, like, did you find the joke there? And there are some dashes. I used some dashes here and there to try to replicate a pause or a little bit of a breath.

Right. Bring some physicality into the reading experience. Yeah, it's really hard. That is a hard thing to do. For me, it found it very challenging. Right, and also you're not, like you're working with a team. The final product is, yes, it's you fundamentally, but you're working with a team of editors

and copywriter who very often goes back and sweeps an entire manuscript for punctuation and all of this stuff, which also, if you're somebody who really is focused on spoken word rhythm and cadence, can completely destroy the sense of that when you're reading it. Oh, absolutely. I would say the editor I had was so positive and really about just like keep it going to the point where I was like, is this bad? And she just is afraid to tell me. It was just almost too positive. Anyways, that was her role. And I'm very appreciative of it

in hindsight. The copy editor really went in there and just tore it apart. And it worried me greatly. And to the point where I believe I had a mini breakdown at one point. I remember being on the phone with her just saying, I can't do it. I had lost my strength in the project because it was a year later and, you know, deadlines are deadlines. And I was trying to believe what everyone told me that, oh, I love it. What's the quote? Like, oh, deadlines. I love the sound they make when they wish by. I was like, oh, of course, deadlines are just arbitrary. There's these

little vague benchmarks. And then I found out, no, no, they are very serious. There is a print date and a whole marketing team that is pretty much going to make sure you stick to that date. But the copy, you know, now once I got over it, the copy editor was, well, they were right. Honestly, I fought here and there for a bit of wording or, but when they said something wasn't clear, it's because it wasn't clear. So it was a lot of work on my part to find better word choices to try to express funny ideas. Did the process of shaping the stories for the book that you then went back out and told on stage change what you told them on stage? Well, then I would do a reading. I would

go to a bookstore to do a reading where the idea is that I'm going to open the book and read from the book. And I would start doing that and just think, no. And so even though, yeah, I mean, it would work, but it was a very different tone. If you do read this book, you will say that it does sound like me, which is a compliment I have now taken in that people have given me. I'm very thankful for that. But I know how to tell these stories. And I also know, actually, for the most part, when you go to a book reading, the bar is very low because a lot of people who are fantastic writers are not the greatest public speakers. I think more and more it's getting better and better and better. But I remember going to some book readings where I felt nervous while

the person was reading because I could tell they were just so uncomfortable. They just wanted to be a writer. Yeah, different crafts for sure. Yeah. So I started just going, you know what? I am going to, I'm not going to read from the book. You're going to read the book when you get home. I am going to give you like four snippets of stories as I want to tell them right here. Yeah, and that works. Yeah. And it works for everybody.

You feel good. They get the experience that they came for. Yeah, they liked it. They liked it. Everything's awesome. But you're right. It's such a different animal. Along the way, you also, so the book, which title is Screw Everyone.

It's called Screw Everyone, Sleeping My Way to Monogamy. Right. You end up actually sort of leaving that window of time, finding the person that you would say, huh, it's true. Monogamy actually might be my jam. Married, having a kid. That happened way later, to be fair. Right, right, right. Way later. I mean, 10 years of saying I'd never have a child while in a marriage.

Which is, I mean, so when, for somebody who, a lot of what you share both in stories and in stand-up comes from real life, I guess for pretty much everybody, grappling with the idea of spending 10 years saying, I'm not going to have a kid and saying, hmm, I'm having a kid. Yeah. thought process and also that like the public side of it and how does this affect not just like how am i going to do my job now but also because the content of your job is this yeah oh yeah no and just talking again you know the expectations and maybe how the industry comedic industry and with the expectations of a woman on stage to an audience. And I've talked about this with other female comics. So it's not just my idea. There is still this feeling that when you get up there, you know, as a woman, what audiences want to consume from you or what's going to do well is you talking about sex, relationships. It's a little better if you are single and dating and talking about what that's

about rather than married and mothering and talking about what that, even though it's getting better. But it is a lot easier if I were just to get up there and tell more funny stories about sleeping around. That's it. Everyone's happy in that scenario. The audience is getting what they were hoping for. You're able to still tell the true stories from your life because that's what you're focused on. It's all good. Now, this next level where I'm talking about being a parent, it's, yeah, sometimes I feel like they don't want to hear that. That's too bad. That's what I'm doing. I wonder why not, because it's all part of the human experience. There's as much quirkiness, you know, like mess, funniness, massive split between expectation and reality.

Well, on the full spectrum, I wonder if it's in part at least, I mean, maybe comic stand-up audiences skew younger so it's not as relevant, but it doesn't feel that way. Yeah, I think it's getting better. I just think there's this expectation. I think they're looking at dynamics fit for you know to be really gross about it for the average man in the audience to look up at you and go oh so you would in my life you would be my mother or my wife it's not particularly for a lot that's not very titillating much better when like oh i'm going to hear about you tell funny, like you could be my girlfriend. You could be, you know, this whatever, hot girl and whatever.

That's a much more interesting situation. And I think it is changing. And I think there's a lot of great voices out there that do it well. But in general, parenting comedy has only kind of gotten cool, quote unquote, recently. Yeah. I mean, I saw Birbiglia on stage. Yeah, right. Exactly.

Right. Does an hour, largely about what an awful parent he thinks he's going to be, right? But then again, also male, female. There's a gender difference there. There's a gender difference there. There's a gender difference there. And, you know, there used to be a show on Nickelodeon, I think, and it was called, it was like some funny mom's thing. I can't even remember, but it didn't have a very sexy name. It was basically like, Mom's Night Out or whatever. But that's the general tone of it. It's sort of like wine in the sippy cup and you know, we're all strung out because we have toddlers that we can't control and now we're all going to come together and talk about it.

But, you know, it wasn't a bunch of cool, sophisticated people making fun of things. It felt very kind of, yeah, cheesy, I guess. Cheesy. Which makes me wonder about we had Martin Hinkle in here who plays Rose on Christmas Basil. And the success of that show has been tremendous.

Yeah, that's helping. It's helping in many ways. It's helping women picture themselves as stand-ups. So, I mean, and there are so many great female stand-ups out there. And there's so many more women who are so many great female stand-ups out there and there's so many more women who are hopping on stage constantly and I'm even there's so many female bookers now which actually really helps too because then you know I was even marveling that I was on a show recently at New York Comedy Club which is booked by a woman who is fantastic. And there was another woman on the show

who people have even said, our voices sound the same. And she put us on back to back and we were just laughing about like what a great world this is. That not only do they put two women on back to back and not even blink an eye, uh-oh, what if they're covering the same material?

But we even sound, we actually do sound quite similar for whatever reason, and no one even cared about that. Usually these would be all barriers. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, we got to separate them by for months on either side. We can't even book them in the same state. So that felt great. But so Miss Maisel, I think, is making a lot of women interested. It's actually just depicting a strong woman where, you know, whether I think this is the part of the show where I'm like, oh, if only that was true. But all the guys around her find it pretty funny. I mean, there's a couple that don't. But for the most part, they're very encouraging.

So it's like, well, let's use this as a model. I know this is supposed to take place in the past. It's the aspiration. Let's pretend it takes place, like like in the future, near future. Let's all work towards this. Exactly. Let's all work towards the 50s. Your life is incredibly full right now.

You've got stand-up, you've got storytelling, writing, radio show, all the personal life, parenting, marriage. A lot of things. You're also, there's, you've developed a fascination with scars and the relationship between sort of like being scarred and healing. Oh, yeah. I've been working on a show recently about scars. I have a lot of scars from the car accident, clearly. I also had early stage breast cancer and I have a scar from that and from other little things through life.

But I just have a great body of scars. To look at me, you wouldn't tell, potentially. Maybe the tracheotomy scar in my neck you would see, potentially. But you just wouldn't see them. And so I started writing about scars because they really have shaped my identity. Just even the huge one on my stomach, I started thinking about, you know, these stories that I told in the book about being sex positive as a teenager, as you put it, which is perfect. I was always wondering how that would fit in. I mean, that was just an

extra detail in this world that was obsessed with a certain kind of flawless female beauty and how I fit in and just how it made me see myself and maybe even some of the choices I made in partners. And as I started developing this, I realized that these scars, they really are almost, they are significant in so many ways. In some ways, they remind you that something happened to you. I think it would be almost terrifying not to have them. Remind you something has happened to you. They're real signifiers. And sometimes they represent being healed. And sometimes they represent trauma. Really like a mood ring. It's depending on where you are. And as I started doing the show, just a little bit, little workshops here, little bits of it there, a very interesting thing happened where afterwards people would almost line up to tell me about their scars. Whether it was surgery or some sort of weird random thing happened to them, you know, nobody did not have a story about their scar.

No one had something that they were like, no idea how this happened. It was always, I remember I wasn't allowed to stay. I wasn't allowed to play late after school. And I did it anyways. And then I saw my mom and I jumped over a fence and my jacket got caught on and I ripped my, you know, my arm got caught on the chain link fence, but I just kept running. And now I have the scar. Or, you know, from lots of nature, nature attacking people, depending on where you grew up or lived. It's just made me think that there is so many people have scars, large or small. They're rarely talked about. Clearly, they really affect people and the story of themselves.

And they see them every day. Although, if you have scars, the more you live with them, the less you see them, which is interesting. They really disappear and then reappear depending on where you are at. And also, I think that most people feel even the really kind of gratuitous scars they have, they wouldn't get rid of them. If they could, there's actually no way. There's like some things that help a little bit. There's no way to get rid of them. So with all, I think there's another side where people are like, oh, you can probably get a laser or something. It's like, well, not really. No, you have to have them. And then there's the whole other side of it, which is thanks to medical innovation, so many more of us are surviving. And so first show that we aired was actually Dan Ariely,

who's this Israeli researcher, now professor, wrote, he's written a bunch of books. He grew up in Israel. And when he was 18, through some sort of graduation ceremony, he was mixing a vat of oil that exploded on his whole body, burned like 70 or 80% of his body. And he was in the hospital for three years.

That actually, that, He has his career now because in the burn ward, he became deeply fascinated about how people were processing this experience and pain in particular. And he started tracking everybody's morphine allocations and realizing that people were asking for morphine. And he knew that somebody's allocation was done for the day and the nurse would come over and squeeze the button. And he knew that there was nothing coming out, it was saline, but the person was okay after that. And that led him into this incredible career researching why people do what they do. And now has this astonishing life. He's got a family and loves his work. We talked about a lot of this and the idea that the fact that he,

to this day in his middle years, sits there and his body is heavily scarred and that he sees it and he feels it and every day of his life, it's sort of this perpetual reminder of the worst place that things can go for him. And it's, you know, it's not like an intentional reset, like, oh yeah, I see, I remember. But it's just this sort of like perpetual thing, which is a trigger, you know, that sort of like says, it's almost like a gratitude trigger. You didn't use that language. But yeah, I think we all, it's such an interesting observation you made also that as people are surviving a lot more, you're like, there's some level of scar that very often goes along with that. Yeah. What does that do to us and for us? Or maybe how do we navigate the dance between the two and the four? And there is, you know, there's this sort of dual thing that is happening with our Instagrammed lives, which people are putting out, lot of models out there that are scarred and they've

had you know thanks to makeup and photoshop what have you can have that taken out and they don't want that anymore so we're in this weird thing you know where both things are happening which people are able to put out the most pristine images and and versions of their self and other people want to put out the most realistic. And somewhere in between that is, you know, I think where we all are living on a day-to-day life, on our day-to-day life. The one thing that I find really interesting is, yeah, so I have not come across, I am someone who I always think, would I get rid of these scars? What would it be like to not have them? What would it be like to not have any of them? But it's, you know, I don't want to get

rid of the scars. It would be great to go back, I guess, and get rid of the event that led to the scars. But if I'm going to get rid of the event that led to the scars, then who am I going to be? Because the event has impacted who I am so much. And I don't want the event to happen without a scar, because then when you have to grapple with the event and not having this external, you know, talisman of healing or finite, like a period at the end of the sentence to kind of keep you grounded, I think would be very hard. So it continues to be this ongoing project that I'm exploring. And I was recently introduced to this Japanese ceramic art called Kintsugi. Yeah.

Yeah, where, you know, basically broken ceramics are put back together with gold resin because the breaks are supposed to be highlighted and accentuated because that shows that this piece of pottery or ceramic had a significant event in its history and that makes it more beautiful. And I love that idea. I love the idea of trying to think of these things like that. I love that idea too. I think it's hard. Get older and more scarred. Yeah, it's hard. It's not the easiest because... I feel like part of like, I mean, that art you just described is, you know, it's very old. This is not like a new introduction thing. But I feel like so much of what's going on in the world today and the ability to shiny, happy size everything that we are. There is this deep yearning that's bubbling up.

Can we be real? Like for a hot moment? Yeah. Because I'm yearning for that. Can I just show you my truth visually? And I kind of want to see yours because shiny happy, it takes vulnerability off the table. And when you take vulnerability off the table, you take the opportunity for genuine connection off the table. Yeah, I agree.

And that's the whole, for me, it's the whole point of it, right? The whole point, what's the point of doing stand-up? Sure, it's great to have laughs. You know, I know you talk about this, like, what's the point of writing these books or doing this podcast? And for me, it's that connection, right? That connection is what drives everything. And so, I mean, I remember when I was pregnant and I was doing a lot of standup and I was doing a lot of standup about being pregnant and joking about it, which, you know, being pregnant is almost like a prop in itself as you

get up there. But one of the things that reminded me of, and it harkened back to the storytelling and harkened back to all these things, you know, you need to remind yourself of all of these lessons, is that I was getting up there and I was just telling the truth, which is so hard. It is so hard to tell the truth. You think it's easy. It's like someone says, be yourself. It's super hard to do that. That's the hardest thing, telling the truth and being yourself. If you think that's easy, man, let me take your workshop, because that is the hardest. But when you're able to really hook into it, it's when you cannot fail. You cannot fail because no one can look at the truth and you being yourself and just deny that or punish it in an entertainment sense. I think sometimes telling your truth in a relationship can hurt someone or whatever, but you know, on stage, you know, in a constructive way, that's right. That's right.

That land that resonates so much with me. This feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out in this container with the good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up. I think to live a good life is to be surprised by life every day. I mean that positive and negative. I mean that because I think once you believe that you've seen all of this before, or you've been through all of this before, is when you end up in a kind of a rut. But if you allow good and bad routine or what have you to be surprised by just one tiny thing every day, good or bad, you can be like, I'm surprised that was so horrible. Or I'm surprised that person was so consistent like

this. You can also do it like that. But I feel that maybe it's mixed with curiosity. That's what I try to look for every day instead of, yeah, I think, you know, we talked about happiness, but I don't think that's the goal. I think that's a hard goal to reach, happiness. I think that it's, that's a byproduct of a lot of other things, which is, are things like curiosity and ability to be surprised. And, you know, love is good too. Sneak that in. Yeah, sneak that in there. Okay.

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