The Moth - 25 Years of Stories: Funny Ha Ha

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

This week, we hear standup and a story from Meg Ferrill. Plus, we examine the links between comedy and storytelling. If you want to learn more about storytelling, pick up our book “How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth.” This episode is hosted by Kate Tellers. Storytellers: Meg Ferrill Interviewed Comedians: Meg Ferrill Ophira Eisenberg Hari Kondabolu Mike Birbiglia

Attention Houston! You have listened to our podcast and our radio hour, but did you know the Moth has live storytelling events at Wearhouse Live? The Moth has opened Mike's storytelling competitions called Story Slams that are open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night's theme. Upcoming themes include love hurts, stakes, clean, and pride. GoodLamoth.org forward slashon to experience a live show near you. That's theMoth.org-FordslashHuston. Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Kate Tellers, your host for this episode. Every week in 2022, the Moth has been celebrating its 25th anniversary by revisiting our history, counting down year by year. In this episode, we're bringing you back to 2003, when we made our first appearance

at the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen. It's here that we met comedians like Jeanine Garofalo, Mike D'Stefano, Anthony Griffith, and Mike Bribiglia. You'll hear from him later. Who would become beloved members of our math storytelling community? In honor of that, we're doing something a little different today. And to kick us off, let's listen to some stand-up from our storyteller for this episode, Meg Farrell.

So let's just give this out there, goes far. I look like Phil and Jenner's had a baby. Ah! Ah! Ah! We have a baby. Ah! Ah! I'm aware of it. Y'all are thinking it is fun. I came here to laugh, so my soul bring that up first. In fact, I was getting off stage the other night, and the MC said, it's good to see that

the kid from Jeremy Quiett was doing something. Ah! Ah! Ah! You're just thinking, guys, I do look young. I'm just going to give you a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a She was like, hi. They found the front desk says, oh Jen, is this your son? You're supposed to laugh. I'm sorry. It's OK.

I do my part. You guys do your part, right? Are we not the walls, right? You're supposed to be up here chufflin' all night to my son. I'm doing shit. I'm going to die right now. Shit. Stand-up comedy and storytelling can look very similar. all night myself. Standup comedy and storytelling can look very similar.

In both settings, one person stands on stage with a microphone and speaks to an audience from their own point of view. But as we've seen so many times at the moth, what might lift the roof on one stage, bombs on another. But this is the moth podcast, so let's get back to Mick Farrell and that incident at her girlfriend's work. This time as a story that she told at a New York City Story slam where the theme of the night was childlike. Here's Mick. There are two things about me that my entire life have caused most people massive points of confusion.

That would be my age, and until I grew my hair out, my gender, two minor things. Now, with my age, I'm 36, and I am forever being IDD, which I don't mind, because I'm someone who follows rules. I freaking hate people who cut lines. So I don't mind because I'm someone who follows rules. I freaking hate people who cut lines. So I don't mind. It's your job, right? But the thing I know is the question when people are like, what's your trick? And I'm like, I mean, I can tell you guys, it's like really simple. It's a, it's DNA. Yeah. And it's not like I was 12 and I was like,

you know what, I really like this look. So I'm just gonna sit in like a salt bath every day for the next quarter century. It's not that. But gender is kind of my own fault because I've always kind of like walked the line, like Johnny Cash did. Like there's this infamous picture in my family's house of me and my four siblings and the three boys

are wearing button-ups and a Minnesota Vikings journey, Jersey, we're not from Minnesota. And my sister's wearing a unicorn sweatshirt, and then I'm just in the corner wearing full head-to-toe camouflage. So I'll totally take credit for the gender thing. Now, I think that pretty much catches us up So I'll totally take credit for the gender thing. Now, I think that pretty much catches us up to present day in this story.

I am 29 at the time and I'm living in San Francisco and I've been dating my girlfriend for a year and we're living together. That was an applause break. That was like a major achievement at the time, guys. I know we just met and you know where I live, but that was a big deal. And so my girlfriend, she's a do-go-to-by profession.

Like, I have a job and she like saves the world and I save money for the bank account. And that's how it works. And I'm like, who with that? And at the time she's working for this like nonprofit environmental organization that basically goes into impoverished communities and tells them about all the problems

that major corporations are causing in their area and helps them fight them. It's a very like a very laid back chill job. And so, you can probably imagine that like, Earth Day is like the day. Like forget about whatever you experienced in middle school. This is the day for them, right? We're talking like non-toxic face

paints, recycling exhibits. I mean because like let's be serious like how much can you have fun without destroying the earth? Like just between us. Think about it like boats, airplanes, like yeah they're sex but think about sex on boats and sex on airplanes. We don't have telling you one about this, but I'm right, you know? And I don't bring it up often to her either, but I'm right. But anyways, so she was like, babe,

you totally have to come to Earth Day. It's like a major deal, and I was like, babe, I'm totally there. And we don't talk like Valley girls, but that's just to protect our privacy, even though you all know where I live. Trapman and Central, I'll just kidding. No, actually that's true.

I'm not a very good liar. So I was like, yeah, I'm gonna support you. I am there. This is your community, like all of your co-'m gonna support you. I am there. This is your community. Like all of your coworkers will be there. I'm there. And so she like left to, I don't know, prepare the face paints or whatever you do in this situation. And I was like getting ready.

And I should tell you guys later after her Earth Day, we were planning to attend a pool party. And like, I like to dress for occasions. Like, I call my particular style, Cherub Sheik. And so she was like, we're going to this pool party. And I was like, I got to be able to look good inside. I picked out these short, short, short red shorts. They were like, just felt like right above the knee. And like a tank top. And like some flip flops. And this little like red diesel backpack that I bought at $10 at the outlet and

I'm not like I want you guys to get the wrong impression. I'm not someone who likes miniature items like I don't have like pug figurines on my bookcase. In fact if you commented like ill on my backpack I would maybe punch you in the face. That's not something someone who likes miniatures does okay, so I just want to set that straight. I don't want you thinking the face. That's not something someone who likes miniatures does, okay? So I just want to set that straight. I don't want you thinking the wrong thing about me. So I get the outfit on and I'm feeling like really good and I'm sorry to get a little nervous because it's going to be like all of Jen's co-workers,

all of her community she works for. So I show up to that gay and I've got my hands latched in my backpack and I'm like, I'm going to kill gay and I've got my hands latched in my backpack and I'm like I'm gonna kill them with my smile You know like I'm gonna prove that I'm worthy to date this doodoo Or even though I have a job and I like money a lot So I show up to the gay and I'm very I'm like smiling and I'm putting out there And there's like this beautiful woman just probably like 65 and she's like, welcome to Earth Day and I'm like,

thank you for having me at Earth Day because sometimes I say awkward things when I'm a little nervous. And so then I look over her shoulder and Jen starts approaching and I'm like, hey, and she's like, hey, and the woman looks at me and she smiles and she looks at Jen and she smiles more and then she looks back at me and she smiles more

and she's like, oh Jen, is this your son? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's one thing to be told you look like a child. It's another thing to be told you look like your lover's child. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's another thing to be told you look like your lover's child. And it's another thing to be told you look like your lover's son. Wrong in so many, many ways. But it must have been right in some way because I, you know,

how most girls grow up in my other dads, I grew up in my mother. Thank you. That was Meg Farrell. So what's the difference between stand-up and storytelling? We decided to ask Meg, but we didn't stop there. We also reached out to some of our favorite comic-slash storytellers to hear what they had to say. Here's Meg, Harry Kahnabolo, and Noffira Eisenberg. I came to the moth because I was like kind of actually really frustrated in my stand-up. I kind of sucked in and I felt like I was like kind of

flailing around the stage in terms of the material I wrote. When I think about stand-up, I think of it as like a gladiator sport, like, you know, especially when you're starting out. People are getting tricked to come to a show to see you with drink tickets that they're handed out in time square. Some want to be there, some don't want to be there. You know, they all want, you know, like 60 laughs per second. So the expectations are high. Stand up was just like a hard place for me to figure out me on stage. And then there was a moth, which is like a totally different experience. You know, the audience is, most people know it's very loving and supportive. You know, they don't know if you're funny and they're also not expecting it.

They don't really care. They're just here to hear like a really good story. And I think it was, took some pressure off of me to sit in that environment and try it. Oftentimes in stand-up, they tell you to cut the fat, right? Meaning that just try to get to that punchline as quickly as efficiently as possible. Make sure there's enough information for the joke to work. The fat oftentimes is the tastiest stuff. It's the most interesting stuff,

but it's unnecessary for the goal of stand-up comedy. But when I'm telling a story, all of a sudden, I get to put that stuff in, and I think that my stories are much more three-dimensional when I'm telling them in a story storytelling format with a different set of expectations. The thing I love about stand-up, of course, is just the immediacy. You get up there, you've crafted jokes, you've written out ideas, you have takes on the way we live, on your own experience, that you've put into a joke form and you're in front of this audience and you

throw it out there and you get an immediate response. What I love about storytelling, I say these are kind of different muscles in the same muscle group. So storytelling allows vulnerability and I don't think stand-up allows vulnerability in the same way that storytelling does. Stand-up, we fudge the truth a lot because again, the goal is laughter. And I do believe in this idea of, with stand up, this is something my friend, NATO Green, said once, we skew truth to bring out greater truths.

And I think I'm paraphrasing that, but the idea being that like even if you play with details, you do so because there's something bigger to say there. With storytelling, the goal I think is to be honest, to actually share your life with people and don't worry about laughing. It's about truth and it's really admirable and to have an audience that has that expectation for truth as opposed to simply where it's not to insult standup, but to have an audience that has the goal to hear truth and not have the expectation to just laugh. It changes the thing altogether. It changes what the performance is, and I really appreciate that.

I guess I consider myself a stand-up comic first, just because I've been doing that for so long, but I often say storyteller now, that you can say storyteller and people understand what you mean. I don't know if there's one that I prefer. I think I would like to say insurance salesman when I'm at a cocktail party because sometimes you don't feel like

getting into the next part of the conversation when you say, I'm a comedian or storyteller, you kind of just want to talk about other things. I think I thought I was a comedian and then I thought maybe that I was a comedic storyteller and now I'm just, I may be confused or I'm more of a storyteller who tells some funny bits. I don't know, but I do think that doing storytelling has definitely made me a better comedian. Material-wise, I figured out that even in stand-up, I need to point a theme or something to like carry the audience through my set. It really helped me

understand how to, you know, build my set differently. I think before I was kind of failing around knowing what I was talking about or switching topics and there was no like higher, greater denominator, that's not really where, higher, there's no higher goal, I guess. That was Meg Farrell, Hurri Kandabolu, and Ophira Eisenberg. We wanted to dive a little deeper into laughing at the moth. To do that, our artistic director, Catherine Burns, talked a bit with one of our longtime storytellers. Here's Catherine in conversation with Mike Bricley at.

So, let's talk about how we first met, which is your very first moth all the way back in 2003. The moth was making our debut at the Aspen comedy festival, which I think was called the US Comedy Arts Festival, officially. And if I'm right, this is your first time actually telling a story versus stand-up, and you didn't know it at the time, this is your first time actually telling a story versus stand up. And you didn't know at the time. It was my first time directing a story. Yes. And you taught me how to tell a story.

And it ended up being a story that I told as part of my solo show, which is now a Netflix special called my girlfriend's boyfriend. And you, you coaxed me into telling this story. And I always tell young storytellers tell the story that you're uncomfortable telling. And you convinced me of that. Are there things that you love about storytelling? This is when you're up, you're on the Lee considers, you know, Broadway stage, doing a show versus when you're, and you sometimes you run around practicing chunks of it over years and years and years

and comedy clubs. It's like, there's there's something. I like both of them. They're both for development. They're both really interesting. And I find like, the math I find, the math audiences over the years I found to be a mixture of those two things. Like, I think there's a conviviality to the moth and a supportiveness that you almost don't find anywhere else on the planet. As seminal as the storytellers are to the moth community, I think that the moth audiences are equally seminal. A-men, I believe it's Bliss Royard, he's a longtime storyteller and founding board member. She said that she feels, it's like at every single month,

it feels like everybody's holding hands under the table. Yes, exactly. No, it couldn't be more true. I mean, it's like the more that an audience indulges like going there with you on something that's challenging for you to tell, the more the looser you get as a storyteller and the more you open up to them. So it's this kind of mutually helpful experience between storytelling and audience.

I think this story telling audiences were warned you for being vulnerable. Yes. In such a huge way that comedy-club audiences don't always. No, no, no. Especially the other ones you're doing. No, and it's funny because even when I told, I did the cemetery show a couple of years ago with you, the outdoor cemetery moth show.

Yeah. And it was really interesting because like, I was telling a story that I'd worked on, you know, in clubs and theaters and things like that, about the YMCA pool, it's actually a story that's in my new show. And you had actually, when you were working with me,

you were like, you might wanna pull back that joke or pull back that joke. And at the time, I remember thinking, you know, I'll do it, but I don't know if that's exactly right. And then sure enough, I did the show and I was like, no, Catherine's absolutely right. That ultimately, the Moth audience is willing to laugh,

but I feel like the Moth audience is really interested in what's next. Yeah. I think that's true. I actually recently identified a new storytelling problem. There were some people who approached storytelling as, here is a string of jokes I want to make, and then I'm going to choose a narrative to let me hit every joke. Whereas the funny people who are really successful at the mock, you're just the opposite.

They're like, this is a story that I want to tell, and I'm going to include the jokes that actually support it in a very organic and just float into it. But if there's a joke that takes me out of it, actually the jokes are there to support the story and not the reverse. And so when I realized that, I was like, yeah, I have to go back in and see if I can get someone to work. But yeah, it was interesting.

No, it's funny because in the math story, I feel like the mark of a successful comedic math story is that there's three or four jokes that land as opposed to a stand-up act where it's like you better have a joke every 30 seconds. Totally. And the big laugh or else you're just, it's over. Totally. It's very true. Do you find one genre or the other to be more honest? true. Do you find one genre genre or the other to be more honest? You know, that's a great question. I've actually never, I've never really thought about that. I think like, I think there's something about the math audience where they, they crave confessions, you know, like there's something about confessing

something to the audience. In my case, like with that first story, it's like my first girlfriend in high school told me not to tell anyone that she had another boyfriend. And like that's embarrassing, you know. And it's like, and literally I had never set that to anybody before, like or had told close, close friends. And in the case of like the sleepwalking story

that I told years later, like, I jumped through a second story window and it's like, that's a confession. It was I sleepwalked through a second story window. It was like, it nearly killed me. I was really embarrassed that people would judge me as having this thing that was like a terribly wrong with me. And I think that I find that the moth environment kind

of fosters that kind of a confessional format. Yeah. You can find stories from every comedian we spoke to for this episode on our website. Now, I'll tell you a little more about each of them. Meg Farrell is a Portland Oregon-based storyteller, comedian and writer. Meg was selected to perform at Upright Citizens Brigade's stand-up Smackdown, Mordified, and Amateur Night at the Apollo. She is a five-time winner of the Moth Story Slam and holds two Grand Slam titles.

Meg has nabbed a mention in The New York Times and even cut the attention of documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who cast Meg in his web-enominated series Failure Club, a year long online documentary featuring seven people pursuing lifelong dreams and conquering the fear of failure in the process. Hurry Kahnabalu is a comedian, writer, and podcaster based in Brooklyn, New York. The New York Times described him as one of the most exciting political comics and stand-up today.

In 2017, he released his critically acclaimed documentary, The Problem with a Pooh, which helped spark a global conversation about race and representation. His stand-up special, Warn Your Relatives, is available on Netflix. If you want to see him live, he'll be performing live on October 9th in Des Moines, October 13th through 15th in Denver, Colorado, and on October 27th in Ithaca, New York. More information at hurraykundabolu.com.

Ophira Eisenberg is a stand-up comedian and writer. She hosted NPRs, asked me another for nine years, and is a frequent host of the Moss story slams in New York City. Her new podcast, Parenting is a joke, launches October 18th, and is co-produced by I Heart Radio and Pretty Good Friends. Writer and comedian, Mike Breglia, is best known for his one-man show Sleepwalk with me, called Simply Perfect by the New York Times. You can also see his new Broadway show, Old Man and the Pool. Previews begin October 25th, and you can learn more about it at MikeProbigliaBroadway.com. Mike has been a part of the Moth community since 2003 and also contributes to this American

life. If you'd like to learn more about storytelling, humor, and so much, check out our latest book, How to Tell a Story, available wherever you get your books. Just go to the moth.org slash books and we'll have all the links. We couldn't close out this moth episode on comedy without a moth joke. So here are my kids. Why did the moth... Um... Neblehoh, me Carbett. Neblehoh, me Carbett.

He wanted to see a floor show. Very good kiddos. From all of us here at the moth, have a story worthy of you. Kate Tellers is a storyteller, host, senior director at the month, and co-author of their fourth book, How to Tell a Story. Her story, but also bring cheese, is featured in the most all these wonders, true stories about facing the unknown, and her writing has appeared in mixed whinies in the New Yorker. This episode of the month podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Junez, Sarah Jane Johnson,

Catherine Burns, and me, Mark Salinger. The rest of The Mouth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bulls, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klucche, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Leanne Gully, Inge Glodowski, and Aldi Kaza. All Mouth Stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at

perex.org. Purex.org.