Well, folks, I caught the COVID. And not just any type of COVID, mind you. The really scary kind. The kind that kills people. But somehow, after 99 days in a medically induced coma in ICU on a mechanical ventilator, I lived to tell uncomfortable jokes about it. Luckily, dark humor is kind of my thing. Let’s rewind the tape to when this grease fire of a year kicked off. It was late February, and I was a 31-year-old comedian struggling to pay rent on my shoebox Manhattan apartment. While visiting my parents in Massachusetts, I developed flu-like symptoms and ended […]
Stand-up comedy
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“Not enough alcohol in the world right now,” Lewis Black tweeted Tuesday night during the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Like the rest of the country, the comedian was horrified by what he was watching. He just happens to be better than most Americans at putting that horror into words. “What happened last night was unconscionable on so many levels,” Black tells me during our taping for this coming week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast. “Every so often in my life, I’ve regretted not having children,” he adds. “But basically I feel like I made that […]
“I like you so much, you’re the only interview I’ve done in the last few days where I’m not playing video games at the same time,” Ron Funches tells me on this bonus episode of The Last Laugh podcast, letting out one of his signature belly laughs. The exceptional stand-up comedian was our third guest on the podcast all the way back in April of last year when he was promoting his first big hour-long special for Comedy Central called Giggle Fit, in which he talked about how losing 140 pounds transformed both his body and his comedy mind. In the […]
After years of doubling down on racist jokes and choosing to “opt out” of critical conversations about her portrayals of people of color, Tina Fey’s work has finally caught up with her. Last Tuesday, the Saturday Night Live alum joined a chorus of Hollywood comedians and showrunners trying to rectify acts of racism and racial miscasting by requesting the removal of certain 30 Rock episodes containing blackface—four, to be exact—from Hulu and other digital platforms. While the internet didn’t seem all that interested in interrogating limp statements by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Jenny Slate and others about their past (but fairly […]
About six months before anyone had heard of the novel coronavirus, J-L Cauvin made the difficult decision to move out of New York City, where he had spent years trying to make it as a stand-up comic. “I was super depressed about getting a full-time job again and moving to New Jersey,” he tells me on today’s bonus episode of The Last Laugh podcast. “A job fell into my lap and I just said, you know what, I’ve been doing part-time legal work and road comedy for 16 years, I have to seize this opportunity at stability. I said, OK, comedy […]
Dave Chappelle released an unannounced Netflix special in the early hours of Friday that tears into the media and calls on America to listen to the protest movement that has risen up to demand an end to more than a century of oppression. The comedian said he couldn’t bring himself to watch the killing of George Floyd for a week, but as soon as he did, he understood why the U.S was witnessing one of the most widespread protest movements in 50 years. “This kid thought he was going to die, he knew he was going to die. He called for […]
When we connected with Yvonne Orji to talk about her role as Molly on HBO’s Insecure and her first hour-long stand-up special Momma, I Made It!, airing Saturday night on the cable network, it was two days after George Floyd had been killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. Interviews in recent weeks had already been starting with awkward pleasantries owed to the shutdown, and this added another layer. “I was doing OK, and then the events of the last couple of days came about,” she said. “Even in the middle of a global pandemic, somehow black men and women are […]
If Nanette was Hannah Gadsby’s attempt to, as the Tasmanain comedian put it in the show itself, “tell her story properly,” her new set, Douglas, finds her processing its aftereffects—and expanding it even further. It’s also, perhaps, her best troll yet. In the special, which premiered on Netflix Tuesday, Gadsby wonders aloud why her audience is there—and what they’re expecting after she purged herself of some of her darkest experiences in Nanette. “Because I’m sorry, if it’s more trauma, I am fresh out!” She rails against (mostly male) comedians who spent months after Nanette’s release arguing that her show was not, […]