The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Margalit Fox and Danny Cohen

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Author Margalit Fox is considered one the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists in American journalism. She was a senior writer at The New York Times for the newspaper’s celebrated Obituary Department. She has written the front-page public sendoffs of some of the leading cultural figures of our age. Danny Cohen is a stand up comedian and regular at the Comedy Cellar. He is also the creator of Danny Cohen Ties.

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. Hi, everybody. I am standing or sitting in for Dan Natterman, who is in Aruba. Welcome to Live from the Table, the official podcast for the comedy cellar on Sirius Radio. We have two very exciting guests tonight. First of all, the host, Noam Dwarman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar, an all-around just lovely, charming fellow. Hi, everybody.

And I'm not one of the guests, but go ahead. I said the host. I know. And then we also have Margalit Fox. Woo! host. I know. And then we also have Margalit Fox, who is considered one of the foremost explanatory writers and literary stylists and American journalists. She was trained as a linguist and was a senior writer at the New York Times. As a former member of the newspaper celebrated obituary news department, she wrote the front page public send-offs of some

of the leading cultural figures of our age. She's also the author of three books. And I'm so excited to ask you so many questions. And we also have one of my all-time favorite people and comics danny cohen who is a regular at the comedy cellar and um renaissance man and irregular most other places and he has a beautiful line of ties called danny cohen ties that we will share with you you can watch us on YouTube and you can also listen, but if you're listening, then you already know that. Welcome everyone to the show. It's okay. We can redo that intro. Anyway, go ahead. It was her first time doing it. It was pretty good.

So, Ms. Fox, should I call you Ms. Fox? You can call me anything you want. My friends call me Margo. You can call me Margo if you want. Well, actually, I know the name Margalit because I don't know if you ever heard of an Israeli singer named Margalit Ankori. You've ever heard that name? Sure. It's a very common name there.

Not at all here. I was born and raised on Long Island and could never get a licensed place for my bicycle with my name on it. Were your parents, are your parents Israeli? No, but they lived in Haifa for four years in the 50s. They had a one-way ticket courtesy of the then junior senator from Wisconsin, a name that then as now has a lot of bad residents. I was born after things had blown over enough for them to come back, but for better or worse, I got the souvenir. So you came on my radar because Stephen Pinker tweeted out that actually you had written an obituary about the famous Randy or James

Randy. The amazing Randy, the famous Egyptian debunker and skeptic. He's the guy who had that standing $100,000, anybody who could stump him or something like that. Right. Anybody who could demonstrate empirically the actual existence of claimed paranormal phenomena. Needless to say, the prize, surprise, surprise, was never claimed. So he had tweeted that, he says, Marguerite Fox is by far our most stylish obituary writer.

Now, and I had recently read his book on writing, and he's kind of a hero of mine. And then Tyler Cowen also is one of your admirers. And I said, my goodness, I need to have this woman on my podcast if I can get her because you don't get any higher praise than Steven Pinker and Tyler Cowen. I would pinch myself if those two guys were crazy about me. So anyway. Well, I'll pinch myself. And my training is in linguistics, so I always like people named Noam. Are you a Chomsky fan? He revolutionized the field.

I know the linguistics Chomsky better than the political Chomsky, although I have little to no argument with his politics. How could one these days? And I just want to no argument with his politics, how could one these days? And I just want to put this out there to your viewers slash listeners. I have a scenario. On January 21st, 46 is going to have to get 45 out of there by shooting him with a tranquilizer dart from an elephant gun. Don't you agree? I think this is an

actually plausible scenario. Perrielle agrees with you. Actually, let's start there. How would you separate your feelings? What if you had to write, what if Donald Trump dropped dead tomorrow and you had to write his obituary? Could you do it in a disinterested way? Well, needless to say, for any sitting president, we'd be a fool not to have an advance obit in the can because we have probably 2,000 of them. I still say we, even though I retired early from the paper two years ago, but it's like leaving the church or a shul, you know, it's always we, even if you've left the fold. But let's say one had to write him on deadline. I've written about, this is a very

extreme claim, I've written actually about even worse people than that, which is hard to believe. I wrote the page one news obit of Charles Manson. No way! Arguably ever so slightly worse. Ever so slightly. But I would argue that Charles Manson is an easier task because he's uncontroversially evil. Well, but here's the thing. And this is something that members of the public,

our subjects, families, and above all, journalists have to remember is what major papers do in the way of news obits are not eulogies. A small town paper, which has a different constituency, different mandate, and an even more retrenched staff than a big city daily paper. Of course, they have the resources only to take what the family or the funeral parlor sends them, put it in the paper, maybe under a byline, maybe not, and run it as news. And isn't it a coincidence that everyone in these towns who died was a saint? Everyone died surrounded by his or her adoring family and dogs. And a lot of them died doing what they loved.

What are the chances? For us, the mandate is different. These are news articles straight down the line. They're profiles. The only salient difference is they're profiles of someone who can't call you up screaming the next day. Although God knows their families can and do. But they have to be done warts and all. And so, yes, we've done the uncontroversially evil Charles Manson, yet there were things in his story,

not to make a sob story out of it, but things that I found while going through the clips in my research that were devastatingly poignant. Do you know what his name at birth was? No. Close, weirdly close. No name Maddox. And that tells you all you need to know about how wanted he was. He was the child of a 16-year-old unwed prostitute mother. And so that's a really, really crappy start in life. It doesn't excuse anything, but it has a certain explanatory value for us as journalists.

Wow. And Trump's dad was apparently very hard on him too. Right. So says his niece, Mary. And we have no, who is of, a trained clinical psychologist. So she really has a profoundly interesting double take on what he's like psychologically. So, okay, you said that there's a lot of stuff in the can, as it were, but are those dry recitations of facts? Or how close to a publishable obituary already exists for Donald Trump? I can't speak to Trump. I didn't work on it. And we, we at the times are not allowed to comment on the content of any forthcoming news article.

And of course, an advance obit is kind of the ultimate forthcoming news article. So I can't even tell you for whom we have advance obits on file. I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you. But you can pretty much bet that if you're the president or the king or queen of something, an old time silver screen star, you know, Nobel laureate, Pulitzer laureate. You can pretty much expect that we have you. And ideally, they are all written, but the top, the who, what, where, and when, because obviously the who, what, where, and when haven't happened yet. So, for instance, I try to remember, for the amazing Randy, you had some line in there of which you said, he was an illusionist, but he was more of a disillusionist or something like that, which I thought was a great line.

Thank you. That would have been written, presuming you had done his obituary in the past, which maybe you didn't, but just for the sake of argument. Even those clever lines and jokes would be written maybe sometimes years before the person dies. All clever lines are mine and mine alone. Now, for all of us, I retired from the paper in 2018. My last two years there, I negotiated a contract where I just wrote advanced obits. So I was spared the onus of breaking news daily deadlines, which is otherwise about 90% of the job. And it's thrilling, but it

appropriately takes the life out of you. So after I'd done that 1400 times, I thought no more, I'm doing advances. So trading the intense pressure of dailies for the gentle swell of advances where you have the luxury of taking a couple of days or even a week to research someone instead of writing him or her on deadline. And so Randy, I probably wrote in 2017, 2018. And again, everything that you saw in the paper or on the website under my byline had been written. The only thing I didn't have to do because I was no longer there and some nice young news assistant probably did it or any one of the colleagues can do it was call whoever the source is for the death I think in this case it was the James Randi Foundation and get you know where he died confirm his age

what the cause was etc and then list any survivors because that has to be done at the last minute. Otherwise, occasionally a survivor, a putative survivor can pre-decease the subject. So those are the only two things ideally that have to be done on the day with an advanced obit. I have one more question. I'll turn it over to other people who want to ask questions. Why, or maybe this is something you thought of. Why do you have to do this for a newspaper? Wouldn't it be awesome to just, you're such a great writer and you're so funny, to write a book of obituaries for people who've already died, just as a fun, as kind of a way of teaching history in a way. Well, my pal Mo Rocca just did that. Give him a nice little plug. He has a book out with the wonderful name Mo Bitchuaries that is based on his Mo Bitchuaries podcast.

He and I did two live sessions of the podcast. I think the summer before this one, the last summer when people were allowed to go out and have fun. And it was a tremendous time. And very shortly after that, he came out with a book. And they are, just as you say, for everything from these wonderful, you know, sitcom stars of the 70s that we all remember, you know,

child stars that wound up pumping gas to non-human subjects. I think there's one in there for a tree or something like that. He casts a broader net than we can and does the death of institutions more generally. I got to get that book. My kids might enjoy that. So go ahead, Ariel.

Danny, go ahead. No, Moe Bictionary is a great name for Moe. No, I got out, my father died when I was five, so I got out of that one. Now I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, wow, you know, do I need to start writing something for my mom who's 85 and she's doing great. She's not going anywhere, but I'm wondering, should I start writing something now?

Ken O'Hara. We know what that means. I, I would. I mean, look, I'm listening to you. I would say not. On one hand, I'm listening to you and I'm like, wow, I guess it really is important. You want to write something beautiful. It'll take time and I can always polish it. On the other hand, as a comic, as a writer that writes from the heart, I know that when the time comes and she goes, I'm going to be flooded with so many emotions that I think a beautiful eulogy is going to come out naturally. So I don't know. I'm asking. And it may or may not, because of course, and I've been through this with both my parents, you're going to be exhausted.

The phone's going to ring every 10 seconds. So one is not at one's best at this time. And I've been on both sides of the process. My own father was a scientist. He had a news obit in the Times. And it was very valuable for me. It's like shrinks in training have to log a certain number of hours in analysis themselves to know what it's like. As for your mother, Danny, I would say, don't even think about source material for a future obit, but get out the notebook,

get out the tape recorder, get her life down, get her stories. It's that Foxfire kind of thing that we were all doing in the 70s. People my age were all doing in the 70s where you go around and interview your elders because they're treasures

just do that that's great that's a good piece you know you remind me i i did that actually with my grandmother who had an amazing life story as a stowaway from israel to palestine i mean from the russia to palestine and all these things and there was a flood in my house and it was all destroyed it was all destroyed. It was all destroyed, including everything I ever did in college and everything. But that there are a few recordings that it breaks my heart. It was old recordings of me and my father when I was a little boy, but the,

my grandmother telling her whole life story on an audio cassette is destroyed. Anyway. Actually what then I will amend that, get everything digitized and put it in the cloud and this i'm showing my age now what i was going to say you could also do this a la suspenders and a belt put the original tapes in a safety deposit box in the bank i know you know the the flood was such a fluke you remember those you know in the 70s they would take those big spools like those con edison spools people use them as coffee tables absolutely it was this sort of um it's what academic families did to show how au courant they were so somebody somebody threw one of those

big con edison spools down the gutter on the street corner that my father lived in and completely stopped up the sewage for the entire street and the entire basement, like an eight foot ceiling or seven foot ceiling, basically filled all the way such that when my father was going downstairs, he, he stepped into his basement, went to turn the lights on and then was submerged in water.

He could have drowned to death. Amazing story. But everything was destroyed. He could have drowned to death. Amazing story. But everything was destroyed. It was such a fluke. Anyway. That's kind of the ultimate Dothka moment, drowning to death. I'll say redundantly, drowning to death while looking for source materials for your own obituary.

And what a great obituary that would have made, right? Doing what he loved. Actually, my father had an obit in the times, but he wasn't important enough for you to write. Was it Stephen Holden? Was that the guy's name? Sure. Yeah, he wrote my father's obituary. It was very dry, just the facts. Well, listen, it's not a question of importance.

I'm a slightly later cohort than Stephen Holden. So he was doing it long before, probably long before I ever joined the paper. I joined the paper in 94 and didn't join Obitz until 2004. So my father died in 2003. So it'd been right when you started. You missed me by one year. Yeah, that would have been awesome.

I have a quote here from you. It says, you know what, I'm gonna admit, I'm not sure how to pronounce this word. And so it's the Friesan makers, history's backstage players, whom we writers love best of all. The unsung heroes and heroines are rarely household names, yet in ways large and small, they have changed history. They are people who, for good or ill, have put a wrinkle in the social fabric. Tell us about some of those, your favorite obituaries, people like that. Right. What we say is forget the presidents and kings and queens.

They're important, but it's kind of required reading. It's like taking your vitamins. Everyone pretty much knows what to expect. And it's sort of like reading a history book. The people Obit writers love best and people the Times does, I think, better than anyone are these unsung men and women. No man or woman on the street would know their names, but they've had an idea, written a book, invented something, you know, all because they took a different route to work one day in 1942 that changed the world. One of my favorites, and it's totally appropriate for this season,

is a humble home economist from Indiana named Ruth Seams. Her name is spelled S-I-E-M-S. Now, why would we do a humble home economist from Indiana? Not to sound like a snobbish city slicker, but normally that wouldn't rise to the level of newsworthiness, except that while she was employed for one of the big food companies, it was either General Foods or General Mills, Ruth Seams invented a dehydrated bread cube product to which one could add water in a pot on the stove stovetop stuffing god bless her she died in november and we were able to run her obit on the wednesday of thanksgiving week and just that little bit of reporting you have to do to show what a cultural totem something is i

called the food company and said so how many boxes of the stuff do you normally sell thanksgiving week would anyone care to guess danny 400 million people in this country have around. So let's just say, I'm going to guess, I'm going to say 200 million. You're way high, actually, but it's a lot. It was something like 30 million. Oh, 30 million, okay. Right. I'm sorry. Danny, that went from, the bubble over my head went from thinking,

wow, he's so smart to what an idiot. That is so on point. He's counting the math. 300 million people, he's calculating it, and he says two-thirds of them. Can I tell you that I swear to God, the second I heard you say 400 million people in this country, I go definitely 200 million. But you're not stupid. Only one person at a time can be stupid. We'll let the boy be stupid.

That's a lot of stuffing. It's a lot of stuffing. And again, all because some sweet lady that one has never heard of worked something out, you know, at her desk at a company one day, you know, 40, 50 years ago. So those are the people we absolutely love. Another one, and the Times put him on page one, was a man with the wonderfully perfect name of Don Featherstone. He was a sculptor. He trained as a sculptor. Well, you can't make a living as a sculptor. So heeding the advice from the graduate, he went into plastics. He worked for a plastics company in Massachusetts. And in the late 1950s, he designed a pink flamingo made out of plastic that you could stick in the ground. And as we said in the obit,

he literally changed the landscape of mid-century America, the inventor of the lawn flamingo. Who would have thought that? Now, did these people, I mean, did he, for example, become very wealthy and successful during the course of his life? Like, did he live to see the success of the pink flamingo or well he certainly lived to see it and his own yard was a literally an ocean of flamingos you can look up the obit on nytimes.com and there is the most wonderful photo full color which we ran in color on a1 that day

and it's on the website of him in his own yard, surrounded by an ocean of pink flamingos. It's absolutely great. Ta-da! Oh, wow! Wonderful screen share. Yeah. And wearing a Hawaiian shirt of pink flamingo fabric, no less. That's amazing.

Yeah, it's so great and um so he certainly lived because he died only a few years ago so he lived to see 50 years worth of his product flying around the world but when you work for a company he and the stovetop stuffing lady it's work for hire uh so you don't get you get gratified but you don't generally get rich oh that is criminal that's the way the american capitalist system works my dear feel free to overthrow it i give you thank you there's that chomsky there's that chomsky again um uh some of the other people i'm looking up now you wrote about the man or i presume it's a man because i'm a sexist the man who invented the frisbeeist, the man who invented the Frisbee? Yes, the man who invented the Frisbee, which started life as one of his mother's tin pie plates,

which he threw around until it got too battered for her to use to make pies with. I don't think she was pleased. And again, it's this very mid-century ideal, plastics. So eventually he found somebody who could manufacture it in plastic. It started life with the rather infelicitous name of the Pluto platter. And you sort of can't say, see somebody saying to their kids, let's go out and play Pluto platter. It's hard to say. And again, presto, the Frisbee. He changed the world. Let's see. I'm taking this from an article here. The Pet Rock. Oh, the Pet Rock. One of the things we love about doing obits is that you really can use an individual's life, if you're lucky, as a kind of lens on the wider culture.

And here was this lens on this 70s kind of suburban culture where people were prosperous. Maybe they were a little bored, too. And someone who was a marketing genius could literally take a stone out of the ground, put a little fuzzy nest around it, put it in a box, and people paid money for this thing. So that to me is echt 1970s. So it was a really, really interesting way to be able to use this one man's obit to talk about that whole period. I ask a question when you were told, or I'm not sure exactly how it works, that you were going to write Charles Manson's obituary. I would imagine that part of it's very

exciting to do something like that. And I listened or I read something that you said, or maybe it was on the mobituaries that I watched that you sent me, that your first job or that you said, or maybe it was on the Mobituaries that I watched that you sent me, that your first job or that you have to approach these as being agnostic. Right. You have to be straight down the line. Manson is probably the most purely evil person I've written about.

Another one, Sheriff Jim Clark, the great club-wielding enforcer of segregation in the Jim Crow South, batterer of heads. He was a person. How did he get to be where he is? Was it purely that he was a product of his time and place? Were there, so the whole, the whole issue of causation, what, how does someone get from A to B to C in his life? How much is free will? How much is just pure blind fate? That, those things are absolutely fascinating to explore. And Ob obits although they were stigmatized for years i think because of people's primal fear of death they're the best beat in journalism because they're the most purely narrative you're taking someone from cradle to grave and that gives you this built-in narrative arc so you're paid paid to tell stories. Who doesn't love to be told stories?

Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's so fascinating that job has to be just one of the most interesting ways to write and learn about people. Is there anything sort of, I mean, macabre about it? Or were you attracted to... Was this something that always fascinated you while you were a college student? Or did you read a lot of obituaries? Or is it one of those stories like a lot of us have that you just sort of fell into it?

I just sort of fell into it. And in fact, I just sort of fell into daily journalism because I've always been a long form writer. I'm convinced that writers come out of the womb wired for short form or long form. And the short form people go into newspapers. And in my day, long form people write books. But just through a series of accidents, when I got out of journalism school, which I went back to when I was 30, I wound up working for two New York papers, the late lamented New York Newsday of Blessed Memory, and then I went to the Times. I spent my first 10 years at the Times cleaning up other people's work.

I was an editor at the Times Sunday Book Review, and it's a great job, but I started to get increasingly depressed. And as I've written, I was afraid that all they would put on my tombstone was she changed 50,000 commas into semicolons. And it wasn't enough. So I wrote my way onto to obits, which was historically the job nobody wants in the newsroom, in any newsroom. So when I was there, I would have to update it every six months, every time he wrote a book or did something else. You know, the best Netflix series are always the before, from what happened before, and then you watch how they became what they were. Exactly. So let me ask you.

So I don't know if you're just being very gracious. This Mo Rocca book, he's kind of a comedian, right? His book probably leans on being funny. Yeah. But what you're describing has much more depth than that. Death than that. Much more depth and pathos and and psychological studies. And as you said, free will. And so it seems to me that somebody still interesting to see a book of short obituaries of famous people written with your point of view and your expertise. I would really enjoy a book like that.

It's interesting. I'm sort of out of the game now, although I miss my colleagues tremendously. And I miss being affiliated with a great newspaper. I don't miss the onus of daily deadlines and I very deliberately worked full time at the paper and wrote each of my first three books. Basically it was like having two demanding full-time jobs at the same time for 15 years to get to the point where I could just write books which is what I'm doing now uh that said because when I retired I left about 80 advancements in the

can wow uh I still have buy-ons from time to time you know when when I have one is of course in the lap of the gods but as you've been seeing with james randy i had a one of a remarkable woman earlier this year uh named katherine johnson who was one of the black mathematicians who worked for nasa her story was told in the wonderful movie hidden figures and the book on which that was based by margot shatterley so um they come up maybe a half a dozen, a dozen a year. And what's wonderful is I don't have to do anything. I have the sense that I've left enough milk out for the elves and they put a fully reported and written story in the paper under my byline. It's like magic. I wish I had done it 20 years ago. So I have some more questions. Actually, I don't know where, I keep jumping around in my head.

All right, first of all, how has PC affected the obituary business? For instance, I saw one thing somewhere that you kind of, you wrote about somebody having been a lesbian when it was, I think I read, against the wishes of the person who died. But that led me to thinking, especially now with the trans issue so hot and the issue of

dead naming and all that, how would you handle a trans obituary? What if the, like Bruce Jenner, let's say, or Caitlyn Jenner, how do do you handle i'm not running the department but i think any journalist worth his or her salt and um the headline would be caitlin jenner uh that well actually we have been telling the story about bruce jenner how would you you know well listen uh of course i think the um the ethic now is to call this person Caitlin, even during the Olympic years, but to explain. We have a case in point that ran just a week or two ago. The great writer, Jan Morris, who was born James Morris, and was one of the very first and wrote the beautiful, this is a British writer, wrote the beautiful memoir, Conundrum, that came out, I think, in the 70s. She was one of the very first people to have

gender reassignment and one of the even more very first to write a memoir about it. It's a beautiful memoir. And I wasn't involved in this op-ed, but I believe the writer, the headline, of course, said Jan Morris. The lead paragraph said Jan Morris, who wrote about X, Y, and Z. The gender reassignment wasn't even mentioned till lower down because what transcends everything in importance is the number of books she wrote, her importance a writer a traveler a thinker and the gender reassignment had its place because of course we have to explain to people why in the minds of some readers there may be confusion about is it jan or is it james so it has to be explained but you can do that in a sentence in a clause yeah i Yeah. I just feel like there's so many landmines now, the least of which would be what name to use, but it just seems like people always find themselves getting in trouble when they talk about this stuff, people who never thought they would get in trouble. Well, being a journalist of any kind in the age of social media, and, you know, particularly since the Twitter explosion, is like, you know, working stark naked in Macy's window at high noon in the days when Herald Square would have been thrown with people.

And to be honest, there are some journalists who are very thick-skinned and have developed a comfort level with that. I may be a little less thick-skinned than one needs to be in this day and age. Because when something like that happens and there's just a tsunami of invective about you, it's very primal and you literally even though you know you're highly trained you have a violin and a major paper all you want to do is run home throw yourself you know face downward on your bed pound your little fists and say everybody's saying really mean things about me and guess what they are yeah danny danny understands that um so here it was it was uh debbie friedman and said I think this is from Wikipedia. I cut and paste without reminding myself where I took it from.

Oh, dangerous. I know. The Jewish singer-songwriter helped create beautiful, folky melodies with traditional players. Fox's obituary highlighted these creations. It also brought to light the fact that Friedman was a lesbian, a fact known to some that Friedman had preferred to keep private during her lifetime. So that's the kind of thing. And apparently it says here, it ignited a debate

about whether she had been right to keep it a secret or something like that. Yeah, that I literally wasn't aware of, because that was probably, what, 10 years ago. So I have to tell you, when I started the Obitz job in 2014, I literally thought naively that I would be like one of these major league ballplayers that claims they remember every single at-bat they had in a 20-year career in the majors. And instead, the reverse is true, because you have this intense communion with someone. You inhale their life. Sometimes you only have an hour if it's a late-breaking daily story. You exhale it onto the page. You're totally exhausted. And if I had nickel for every time I came home and said to my husband, I wrote about the most fascinating person

today, and he'd say, who was it? And I'd say, I can't remember. I could have retired long ago. So I'm afraid it's very difficult for me to comment on a story that's one of, you know, 14 or 15 hundred obits I wrote 10 years ago to boot. I am so happy to hear you say that because I'm moving up on 60 and I have trouble remembering names now from time to time. And this entire interview interview i've been thinking to myself this woman's memory is amazing like she's looking up names like so just to hear you admit to having the same human problems that i do is i'm gonna make you feel really bad i'm the exact

same age as you so what your memory is uh you did make me feel bad i know that was my plan all along well how is you how well let's let's talk about it um 58 year old to approximately 58 year old what uh i'm 59 and a half so that's how fucking good my memory is how is your memory day to day i can't remember um how is my memory day to day? I think that like everyone, you know, I have lockdown brain, COVID brain a little bit. I was, my husband and I were ill all spring and summer, probably with a mild version of the virus. Mild, thank God. I say probably because we, thank goodness, were not sick enough to be hospitalized.

And at that time, you couldn't get a test unless you were, of course. It had to be reserved for those people. So we'll never really know. We're fine now. But I think just even not being sick, just the onerous conditions of lockdown, you know, can make one a little stupid and forgetful. But I also think that spending a decade as a deadline writer for a daily paper means you sort of have to keep yourself razor sharp. And I think it's, you know, there's probably something going on neurologically that doing that reinforces memory because that said, you can't depend on

memory. When I teach young journalism students, I will say, do not rely on your memory for anything because if you put something in the paper without checking it because you think, oh, I know that, it will inevitably be wrong. And I tell them, you have to look up everything above the level of George Washington was the first president, and if you're tired, you should look up that. I mean, I can remember a Mary Tyler Moore show I saw in 1976, but and have trouble remembering a movie I saw yesterday. It's really- But that's the classic difference between long-term memory and short-term memory. And people our age uh you know i'm no neurologist but anecdotally it's pretty clear it's the short-term memory that most of us

are having difficulty with the long-term stuff sticks around that that's in the cloud it's frustrating as hell it really it really obsessed me i used to fancy myself someone who could hold his own maybe even on jeopardy maybe not not win, but definitely could be in the, if I got the questions the right way, maybe. And now I don't think- Who's going to be the host now? Oh, I know. That's a whole other question.

Did you write his obituary? No, no. No, I was long gone by then. Do you have your own obituary? Is your obituary in the can somewhere in the New York Times vault? I very much doubt it because we're very often asked, is there an age at which you start looking at potential subjects for advances? And there's no, it's case by case.

But because our staff is small, you know, we would very rarely look at someone under the age of 80. You know, people, middle class, upper middle class people live fairly long. We would very rarely look at someone under the age of 80. Middle class, upper middle class people live fairly long these days, unless we heard someone had a dread disease or they were a rocker, because then they'll OD or die in a plane crash at 27. It's always 27. Okay.

Any more questions about obituaries, by the way? Because I have some linguistic questions um also as well i was waiting to get back to chomsky oh go ahead well this is my this is my question i noticed i read a lot on the kindle now and it's changed me when i was younger because i guess i was a little like, I don't know if it's ADD, but just without patience, I very seldom looked up words that I didn't know when I was reading. I would read through them. I would get a gist for them, but I really didn't know what they were. I mean, I guess I did pretty well on my scores and stuff. I picked up a lot of them, but now with the Kindle, you can just hold the word down and it gives you the definition. And this has been a tremendous, almost a life changer for me.

I mean, because I'm really enjoying and learning new words now. And also the Kindle has a feature where it'll test you. It keeps track of all the words that you've looked up and then you can take flashcards and it'll test you to reinforce what you've learned. But your vocabulary. That sounds horrible. No, no, it's awesome. It sounds absolutely horrible and draconian and a way to destroy the pleasure of reading by turning it into an exam. But that's just me.

Well, but that's what I want to ask you. Your vocabulary is amazing. What is it? Somebody called you a lexical supermaven. And I'm just reading every single one of your obituaries the vocabulary is wonderful how did you how did you develop that vocabulary uh being of my generation did you take the time to look up words you or was it just they just you just knew what they meant in context in a better way than other people did how did Well, I'd love to say I just knew, but of course, that would be a complete lie. I had the, I was both lucky, let's say lucky enough for the purposes of this discussion

to grow up in an academic family. My father was a college professor, my mother taught writing. So that kind of discourse was in the air. And when I lectured undergraduates, I'm sort of very, very conscious of being, you know, we're the tail end of the baby boom, you and I. So people spoke differently. Our parents spoke differently. So I grew up with pretty erudite speech, you know, that was sort of in the air from my parents and their academic friends. And of course, in a fix, there's rogers.com. So the source is online. My original training, even before I was a linguist, was as a cellist. And so without even being conscious of it, I think I'm still very, very passionate about having a piece, even an obit in a daily

paper, read as though it were through composed, like a piece of art song. So I'm very conscious of the weight and not only the meaning, but the weight and the meter and the cadence of each word. And then from that each sentence, from that each paragraph paragraph and so if you're in a fix and you have a word that works semantically but maybe doesn't give you a good meter rogers to the rescue you just plug in that word and see which of the synonyms give you better poetry and i've done that many a time on deadline so that's my dirty little secret I'm afraid there's nothing to it more than that we had the geneticist Robert Plowman uh on and he would he would say that uh you that it wasn't your environment with your parents that you just inherited your parents

gift for for a language but who knows right it's it's got to be both I mean it's clearly both because of course, you know, the language instinct, as your pal Pinker calls it, is hardwired in. But we know from the so-called forbidden experiment that Herodotus wrote about, that's not enough. You have to have exposure too. And if, God forbid, you took a pre-baby and put him, you know, in a room with, and fed him, but put him in a room with no speech, he'd never acquire language. And occasionally there are these terrible natural experiments with these isolated, deprived children. And even when they're rescued, they don't develop language if they're over their niche. They don't imprint. Who is a better cell uh pablo casals or yo-yo ma they can't be compared

because they're really from different generations and different eras of playing uh the cellist i really loved he was sort of the one whose recordings i grew up with was the great french cellist pierre fournier who's very cool very elegant there's, very elegant. There's not a lot of schmaltz in his playing. He's of that Casals generation. But I think the whole approach to playing is very different in our generation than the one after. I know this, you know, Perry, I was going to say this because I know it's just interesting to me, but if you feel that our listeners won't stomach it we can take it out but um i i grew up with i had this great record of pablo casals conducting beethoven's seventh symphony and you know the set the second movement is a cello movement it's all it's all you know it's that and i thought and i listened to maybe 20 other versions of it after

that to compare and i thought his was by far the best conducting of, best rendering of that movement. And I guess because he, the cell, he was a cellist, you know. It's interesting. I think also there's that. And also we're so profoundly swayed by what we grow up with. You know, if it's the first instance of something we've heard. Only yesterday, I had on QXR, and they played Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals. It was perfectly fine, but I thought, I'm not enjoying this. And the reason I wasn't is it wasn't the recording I

grew up with that had, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, that had a young person's guide to the orchestra on the flip side. And that's the only reason. Yeah. I just bought, I just bought the whole DVD set of it. Leonard Bernstein's young people concerts, you know, the TV show he did to teach young people music. I know I have to strap my kids into to watch something at that pace, given what they're used to on YouTube now. Anyway. And, and the final thing, what is them? When do you change a comma into a semicolon? at that pace, given what they're used to on YouTube now. Anyway, and the final thing,

what is them? When do you change a comma into a semicolon? A semicolon is a very peculiar piece of punctuation. I use it just by gut instinct, but I'm never quite sure if it's right. Well, now that I'm not doing that for a living, I can tell you me too, and pretty much everyone. There are rules for it. One of my colleagues on the Times Book Review copy desk, Patricia T. O'Connor, actually wrote a wonderful grammar book called Woe Is I, and she has a whole chapter on punctuation. And she was actually, on the success of that book, was actually able to leave the paper and write books full time. I got to get that. I'm into that stuff. I think somehow with age and slowing down, I'm beginning to enjoy things that I just didn't have the patience for when I was younger, like vocabulary and grammar and even reading fiction. I never had the patience to read fiction.

And now I actually really enjoy reading fiction. It's changing with age. All right. Anything else? Go ahead. I don't know you very well, but if you're enjoying thinking about semicolons, your life is very sad indeed. That's what lockdown does. It's come to this. It is. Listen, you're saying that, but I know I don't believe you because you probably love that stuff.

Oh, no, I couldn't give a rat's ass about the semicolon. Really? Well, OK. Fair enough. Not anymore. They're not paying me to think about it. Not anymore. All right. Gentlemen, any other questions you'd like to ask Margalit before we allow her? Before we leave her from our clutches?

Yeah, before we release her. I love this conversation. This is great. Oh, well, it's been so much fun for me, too. When Periel contacted me, as you know, I said, live from the company seller i'm not i'm not a comic i'm not funny are you sure i was absolutely convinced you had the wrong person so thank you for bearing with me no you actually said to me yeah you told me that um

some people who had reached out to you sort of had some idea that they were rude or they thought... I was so horrified by what you said, actually. I was very reassured by your answer. We journalists have learned to be careful in this age of kind of online quote-unquote journalism, I mean, there's real journalism there, but of course, with social media and blogs, anyone can hang out a shingle and call themselves a journalist.

And so we have to be very careful with requests to interview us. And I've been burned by a couple of so-called hipster publications, both with really famous names, which I will not reveal, that pretty much set up obit writers as punching bags to be made fun of.

So I've just learned to be wary of requests from people I don't know. So apologies, because this was really great. No, not at all. I actually- Hold on, this is interesting. Why would they, why would they, like what would they come at you for as an old bit writer?

What was their angle? I think just because I'm a boomer and they're, you know, whatever, they're millennials. And so, because they can because I'm old enough to be their mother because I trained in print journalism. because I know who Edward R. Murrow was, you know, any of that stuff. And because they're trying to make a name for themselves in this very, very crowded field of so-called hipster, edgy journalism. And they feel that the way to be edgy is to twist the knife. And historically, you know, it's very easy to make fun of someone

who you imagine does nothing but think about death and write about death. And the point I will make until I'm blue in the face and that we've all made tacitly here is maybe one sentence in an obit of a thousand words is about someone's dying and the other, you know, however many hundreds and a thousand words is about someone's dying and the other, you know, however many hundreds and hundreds of words are about the life. So that, that was my, I wanted to ask you about that. This is actually maybe ties it all together. Gilbert Gottfried and I had worked for a while on this idea that he had, which was to take his famous comedian friends and sort of plan their funerals together. And so it was an idea for this show where he would

essentially be celebrating their lives in a way that most people generally only experience or don't experience after they've passed away. And so it seems that, you know, people say all these beautiful things about you after you die. The eulogy is more than obituaries, right? Sure. I mean, Marguerite made that distinction very early on, right? Although if it's Gilbert Gottfried, what you're describing sounds closer to a roast than a eulogy. And of course, you know, the most brilliant word on this subject was by the greatest humorist of them all, Mark Twain. He had Huck and Tom go to their own funerals because he absolutely had his finger on the pulse of the human psyche, which is we all want to know what's going to be said about us. And ironically, most of us are not there to see it. You should be on television. You should have an ad hoc, whatever it is,

like on 60 Minutes or something, doing on-camera obituaries for people. You'd be fantastic. You'd speak so well. I think you'd be a great broadcaster. From your mouth to God's ears. Wouldn't that be great? Like a little segment, you know, like Andy Rooney type thing or something.

I don't know. Here's who croaked this week. I guess we have to call it something slightly classier than that right no it would be great it would be great oh my friend steve is here and he's he thought that if you write a book it should be called um wake-a-pedia uh yeah that my my great-grandfather the rabbi would be spinning in his grave for me to be writing about wakes but indeed but you know i'm really out of the game now except for the few advances that the gods of advanced obits decide to put in the paper

of mine uh i just write books now uh my uh narrative non-fiction book conan doyle for the defense about a real life wrongful conviction for murder that Arthur Conan Doyle solved by turning detective himself. That came out in paperback last summer. I just finished another narrative nonfiction book that's coming out in June and I'm starting the one after that. So I'm a busy girl. That should be a movie. Well, since it's been announced in the trades, I can tell you that the Conan Doyle book has indeed been optioned. They have a terrific young screenwriter. They've been kind enough to let me vet the screenplay since I'm the EP on the

movie and it's going along great. Of course, COVID has pretty much shut down the industry but god willing you know that's all going to come back in 2021 that's amazing that story is done all right um i guess we should let margaret go like if you were um maybe after covid you can come down to the olive tree or comedy cellar we get to meet you in person because i feel like i can speak to you for hours it's so interesting i would love that back at you Back at you, all of you. That would be so, you know, well, we would say next year in Jerusalem. So let's say next year at the Comedy Cellar. Oh, that'd be wonderful. All right. Are we going to continue without her for a few minutes?

We can, yeah. Okay. So I guess we can allow her to sign off. I will sign off. Thank you so much. This was great fun. Thank you so much. My was great fun. Thank you so much. My pleasure, too. We meet again. The fantastic Margalit Fox. Thank you.

Very nice to meet you. Danny, you didn't say much. Well, it was great. I mean, I loved it. I was listening and it was amazing. I never heard you that quiet. I think she's awesome. It was a lot of intellectual talk.

So I was like, jump in. But I'm like, you know what? I think she's awesome. It was a lot of intellectual talk. So I was like, jump in. But I'm like, you know what? I can only sound stupid once in a box. Once, you know. I don't want to. I didn't think you sounded stupid at all. I was right there with you.

I don't know if that says more about me or more about you. She's great. She's very likable and really smart. So smart, right? Yeah. Yeah. You should read some of her obituaries. They're so good.

Yeah, I bet they are. I bet. I guess so paranoid. I'm just looking it up now. Like I said, you can have an ad hoc segment. And I say, well, did I use that ad hoc wrong? But I didn't. It means when necessary or needed, which is exactly precisely what I meant to say.

But it's scary when you talk to somebody that you know is just more knowledgeable than you are. Is that how you feel when you talk to me? No, strangely, I feel very confident when I speak to you. It's very fluid, you know? But when I speak to somebody like her, I was like, oh, fuck, don't use the wrong word wrong word yeah you know i feel very comfortable in in that kind of company and i don't think of myself as someone who's very smart or an intellectual but i like sitting in

on intellectual talk i enjoy it a lot you would think i you know i i would be bored but i don't get bored i love it but i'm really not that small. I think it's most, most of all intimidating when it's somebody who is an expert at language that, that really gets me a little nervous. I don't know. Who knows? I had too much coffee, but anyway, I don't feel nervous. I know that. Steve, he's watching the whole thing off camera. He's just like nodding his head. She didn't answer my question, though. And I didn't want to answer for you. What was the question? I didn't want to push it because I didn't know if she just, you know, just didn't want to answer it, which is there is something macabre about doing that, right? And I am curious if there is, I mean, there's a fascination in this culture with that too, right?

I don't think so, because it's not macabre. It's about, you're really talking more about their entire life than the death and the lead up to the death and how they died. That would be macabre. Right, right. Okay, fair enough. Right. I'm just wrong. It was a dumb question. It was just a stupid question.

She was being kind. Right. She was just being gracious to me she's a cello and she's a cello player yeah yeah i'm not even sure you use macabre right what what do you think it means barrielle it's an attraction to um things that are dark but i love i love the take on that i love an obituary like that would be macabre and not talk about their life, but only talk about their death, how they suffered. Right.

That would be a crazy kind of obituary. I mean, that's funny. That's amazing. Right? Uh-huh. Because it would be like, oh, boy. Like, there's no hope. There's nothing like, you don't really,

you don't know anything about the person except how much they suffered and how they died, how they were tortured and all that. And you're like, oh, boy, that's really sad. You know, there's nothing, you know. And then there's just like the one line at the very end. And he invented the pink flamingo. Yeah. invented the pink flamingo yeah i would love to have a list of the people who are important enough to have a an obituary in the can like that's that's that's a prestigious group to be in well she told you basically if you're like a world leader or royalty or like a hollywood you know screen star well i'm sure'm sure Paul McCartney has one.

Right. I bet you like Watson or Crick or whichever one of those guys is still alive has one. You know, like there's various people who are important enough that they have one. I guess old enough also. You have to get a guess. I mean, what?

Do you even start thinking of someone like when they're 50 55 No you probably wait until they're 65 70 no I think like Putin Probably has one Yeah Nancy Pelosi better have one

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Probably had one Oh we should have asked about her We should have asked about Ruth Bader Ginsburg I was taken by the fact that she Peter Ginsburg probably had one. Oh, we should have asked about her. We should have asked about Peter Ginsburg. I was taken by the fact that she hinted that she had far-left politics. I don't want to ask her. I mean, she didn't hint at it.

She flat out said it. Yeah. All right. I love how tolerant you are of her far-left wing politics, but me, you'll just, like, eviscerate. Well, we didn't bring her on here to talk about her politics. But how does it make you feel that somebody who you think is so intelligent and so interesting agrees with me politically? I don't know how to answer that.

Yeah. I would like to, I hope that. I would like to, I hope we do get to meet her again. I'm curious to know. She's probably not as far left as you think she is. But in any case. All right, I guess that's it.

Ask Perrielle what she thought of my title. Steve wants to know what she thought of his title, Wake-a-pedia. Very clever. All right, Perrielle has a new weekly comedy show she does on Zoom. It's called We're Not Okay. Go ahead. It features her, Jessica Kirsten, and Rachel Feinstein.

Yes. And it's a real, like, waiting to exhale for white girls type thing but uh i don't know what that means it's like it's like a you know how would you explain what i'm saying danny waiting to exhale so um what is it like uh it's not a not a not a guy bashing but you know there's a bunch of white girls talking about their problem, you know, talking to each other. It's white. It's from white girls for white girls. Things like a fucking just ringing endorsement, huh? But no, but I have to say, I watched one episode of it and it was really good. It was really, really good. I didn't get to see the second episode, but it was really good.

So I would encourage everybody. How can they find it, Perrielle? They can go to We're Not Okay Comedy Show on Instagram, or they can just come to Perrielle Ashton Brand on Instagram and find it. And I'll say this. First of all, that's very kind of you. I take it as a big compliment when you like anything just because you hate everything. And you know I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. No, I do know that. I didn't mean it. It's, I mean, I'm only- Even just the fact that I was obviously so surprised.

I couldn't even hide it. I'm like, you know what? It was really good. I gotta admit. Hilarious. He said you should call it My Three Yentas. It's really, you know, it's like this show in a way that, I mean, it sounds cheesy, but I'm being really genuine when I say it. It's that I can't believe how lucky I am to get to do that because it's such a thrill and they're so brilliant and hilarious.

And it's especially during quarantine. This show, which everybody knows how much I love the podcast. And also now that it's really, you know, something to keep you sane during this, you know, really difficult time. I'll stop with that. Serious. And seeing Danny's beautiful, sweet face also. Wait, Danny. So Christmas and Hanukkah are coming up.

And I do have to say this. I mean, everybody knows that Danny is a brilliant and hysterical comedian, but I don't know how much they know about all of your other talents. Yeah. I mean, it's remarkable. You know his stenciling, that he does these paintings and stencils

on walls and... You know we're trying to hold an audience here, right? Shit! The fuck are you going... What are you doing now? I make ties. This is also going to become like a phone conversation here. We're doing a show, you idiots. This is not for us.

You want to plug something to Danny's? Do it quick. Yeah, DannyCohenTies.com. Great for Christmas, Hanukkah. They're made in New York, and you're going to love them. Danny Cohen ties. Oh, you know, in this really terrible time. It's very tough.

Hanukkah. You know the holidays are coming. You spent 40 minutes talking about a semi-Cohen. Show your fucking tie. Show us a tie, Danny. Show us a tie. Okay. Danny Cohen ties.

No, the other one. This is one of them. Got a little. I embroider on all of my ties,. Show us the tie. Okay. Danny Cohen's ties. No, the other one. This is one of them. Got a little, I embroider on all of my ties. So this is the frog. All right. That is it. Oh, there's another tie that you had too that you showed a couple months ago

that I really like. Danny Cohen ties. I make them in New York, made in New York. They're $66. And they're fun. They're great. They're $66. And they're fun. They're great. They're really unique. They're all embroidered.

And so they're beautiful. And, you know, I know nobody's wearing pants these days. It's like a ridiculous time to sell a necktie. No one's going to the office anymore. No one cares about neckties. But I'm selling neckties. So, we're in a pitch. My kids had

parent-teacher conference today. And apparently I'm a very good writer. And I'm very good at math. Because they complimented the work that the kids are handing in. But I think I'm probably a little too heavy handed about correcting it.

But anyway. Okay. We're done here. Nobody mentioned my new microphone. Oh, my God. What about your new microphone? It's amazing. Noam got me a microphone. I bought her a microphone. Save it for my three yentas.

Goodbye, everybody. You can follow us at Live From The Table. You can send your questions comments what's the email noam podcast at comedyseller.com podcast the college comedyseller.com danny where can everybody find you danny cone comedy instagram you know danny you should get a mic too now that now that i'm hearing how much better Perriel sounds with a mic. I'll get one. I think you should get one. They're not expensive. Maybe you can barter a couple of ties at PC Richards.

That's what I can do. It was great seeing you too. Miss you. Bye everybody. No, actually, and you should check, if you really want a dose of Danny Cohen, you should follow him on Facebook because he goes live. How many times a week do you go live? You know,

like three times a day. Three times a day and he's hysterical. I'm telling you, you think three answers is funny. I mean, this is,

Danny Cohen's Facebook live is gold. I hope you're recording all of them because this should be, they should all be on YouTube. I delete all of them. Why?

Because they're live. You catch them or they're gone. That's it. He does it on Instagram too. They're wonderful. Wait, can you get Steve in this frame for a second? I'll have to zoom it out a little bit for his big head. Go ahead.

No, because before COVID, wait, no, come back. There's not room for both of us. Yes, there is. He can sit on your lap. Okay, go ahead. No, because before COVID... Wait, Noam, come back. Is that room for both of us? Go ahead. Yes, there is. He can sit on your lap. Okay, go ahead. We were talking about doing... Hi, Steve.

We've captured Steve. We're keeping him in Westchester. Called Stupid, remember? Oh, Stoop. Noam, remember? No Oh, Stoop. Know him, remember? No. Talk Stoop. We were going to hang out.

Danny and I were going to hang out on the Stoop with Steve and do like five-minute segments of what was going on outside the cellar. I love that idea. I think it's great. All right, get on it. All right, I think we should go now. Fine, goodbye. My three yentas.

Stay with that. Yeah, you guys should play like matchmakers. I'm really dewy. Fiddler on the Roof music before you start. You're welcome to contribute your musical talents. Okay, hang up. Hi, Dan. Bye. Bye Hang up. Bye, Dan. Bye.

Bye, everybody. Bye, guys. Thank you.