Mike Bridenstine appeared on this podcast three years ago in Episode 417. Since then, he has written and published his second book about comedy, “Kansas City Comedy: The Unbelievable True Story of Stanford & Sons, Its Outlaw Owners and the Most Infamous Stand-Up Sets of All Time.” Brido also has begun working behind the scenes as general manager of a cherished Los Angeles comedy venue, the Lyric Hyperion in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood, where he and his team also have launched their own production arm, Spesh!, filming and distributing comedy specials. Brido directed the first Spesh! special, Emily Browning: Temporary, Beautiful, which came out in September. On the weekend before Thanksgiving, I sat in on the Lyric’s taping of a new hour from Ahmed Bharoocha, then met up with Brido the following day in Lyric’s green room to talk about where his own path in comedy has taken him, and what he has learned about talking with other comedians and working with them more closely. Brido — who appeared this year on an episode of High Potential — he has come a long way from Iowa and iCarly. Which means there’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland met in high school in Maryland and have been making magical two-handed theater shows ever since. Now based in New York City, they have taken three shows to the Edinburgh Fringe since 2022, winning The Scotsman’s Fringe First Awards for writing for each of them: And Then The Rodeo Burned Down; What if They Ate the Baby?; and A Letter To Lyndon B. Johnson or God, Whoever Reads This First. At the end of 2025, they also began debuting their latest work-in-progress, The Doctor Was His Mother, which ditches their usual narrative arcs and sociopolitical commentary for some simply silly and laugh-out-loud physical comedy. Their work always blends absurdist clown work, modern dance and satire in a way that separates them from most of their peers working onstage today. In December 2025, they’re enjoying an encore run of What If They Ate The Baby? at the SoHo Playhouse in Manhattan, and joined me over Zoom from their dressing room backstage to talk about their writing process, how they had to gamble on themselves in Edinburgh before gaining any real exposure in the States, and what sets them apart from the rest of the clowns currently influencing the comedy scene in the mid-2020s. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Jono Zalay began his standup career in Boston while simultaneously earning his Doctorate in Neuroscience, where his research work included giving cocaine to rats. Since dropping his science hobby to pursue comedy full-time, Jono has done standup for The Late Late Show on CBS, Netflix is a Joke, and LMAOF on OnlyFansTV. He also has worked behind the scenes as a story producer or consulting producer on Peacock’s Stormy Daniels series, CNN’s The United States of Scandal, and Amazon Prime Video’s This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy. Jono sat down with me over Zoom to talk about all of that, how he has pranked the DMV, and what made his latest comedy album so special. On Beat Life to Death, he jokes about reaching his midlife years and tells stories about his dad — which makes this extra special, since he recorded this, his third album, just days before his father had quintuple bypass surgery. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Jamie Linn Watson is an NYC-based actor and comedian. You may have seen her as Joanna Roscoe in season 5 of What We Do in the Shadows, a judgy church girl in Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, or as the Sprintern in many national commercials for the company formerly known as Sprint. Watson performs with the Upright Citizens Brigade on one of their house character teams, with former SNL cast member Chloe Troast on the improv team A Crazy Amazing Friendship, with the sketch group LISA, and goes on tour with the Story Pirates. She’s also the star of a new movie about the early days of online content creators — SKIT debuts November 14, 2025, on Tubi. Watson sat down with me over Zoom to talk about her own experience with YouTube and social media over the years, what she has learned from watching her peers succeed, and what kind of characters she loves to portray the most. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Saaniya Abbas grew up in New Delhi, attended an all-girls Catholic school in the Himalayas, and only discovered herself once she found herself divorced in Dubai and starting a new life as a stand-up comedian. She amassed a half-million followers on Instagram hosting live videos in the pandemic, and as a comedian has toured the UK and India, and took her first one-woman-show, Hellarious, to the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe. Abbas and her furry cat ears have come to America in November 2025 for the New York Comedy Festival, but first she took some time out over Zoom to tell me about what she has learned from cosplay, social media and experiencing different environments around the world. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Lou Wall is an Australian comedian whose two most recent shows were both nominated for Most Outstanding Show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.  Wall has appeared on Australian TV panel shows, and also appeared in the ABC Australia and Netflix series, Fisk. I’ve seen and reviewed all three shows Wall has taken thus far to the Edinburgh Fringe, from their breakneck breakthrough performance about their best frenemy in Lou Wall vs. The Internet, to 2024’s The Bisexual’s Lament – an hour of deranged PowerPoints, gay (derogatory) musical comedy and mentally ill hot takes. One of their bits from that show went viral, prompting them to write this year’s show, Breaking the Fifth Wall, which sold out its Fringe run and has brought Wall to New York City to perform for the first time in an Off-Broadway run at SoHo Playhouse. Wall eventually found a wall-free space where they could connect with me to talk about their life, career and how truth fits or doesn’t fit when it comes to great comedy. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Chanel Ali is a stand-up comedian, writer, and actress based in New York City. You may have seen her on MTV’s Girl Code, TruTV’s Laff Mobb’s Laff Tracks, Starz’s Night Train with Wyatt Cenac, or two showcases she did for Comedy Central in partnership with Refinery29. She also released a full special for Unprotected Sets, available on MGM+. Deadline named her as one of their 15 Comedians to Watch in 2025, based on the success of her debut one-woman show, Relative Stranger, which she took to the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe and the 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. In her show, she recounts bouncing around the foster care system, and how a DNA test for a 23andMe commercial revealed a brother she never knew about and how she ultimately found her biological father. Ali spoke to me on Zoom just before her off-Broadway run at SoHo Playhouse, produced by Sarah Cooper. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

A San Fransisco native who’s based in both New York City and Los Angeles, Dylan Adler is a musical comedian who performed and wrote for The Late Late Show with James Corden. Before that gig, Adler was named a Comic to Watch by the New York Comedy Festival and a Comedian You Should and Will Know by Vulture. He took his solo hour, Haus of Dy-lan, to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025, and sat down with me between shows in Scotland to talk about how he differentiates himself from his identical twin who also wants to be a comedian, working through trauma onstage by writing the album and show, Rape Victims are Horny Too with Kelly Bachman, and what he has learned from touring the world with Atsuko Okatsuka. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Britt Migs is a stand-up and sketch comedian based in New York City who was named a Creator to Watch at the 2024 New York Comedy Festival for characters such as her Italian publicist for the Pope. Migs manages Cracked magazine’s social media and runs the Cracked Comedy Club showcases. In addition, she also has written for Reductress, co-hosts Sunday Sauce monthly at Union Hall with her Meat Cats collaborators, and has previous experience behind-the-camera as a producer on TV shows such as Dr. Oz and Deal or No Deal. In 2025, Migs brought her debut solo show, Dolphin Mode, to the Edinburgh Fringe, where she is reliving how she emerged out of her flop era of divorce to embrace a happier, hornier life. Migs sat down with me to talk about the emotional healing in her show, attending a prestigious performing arts camp in her middle-school summers, how to work in the clip economy without succumbing to the algorithm, and what her relationship with a trans man means to her as a comedian and as an American in 2025. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Grace Helbig is a legendary YouTuber, etched officially into the VidCon Hall of Fame earlier in 2025. The comedian and actress who began documenting her daily life in 2007 through solo videos, two-hander sketches with her college bestie and Brooklyn roomie Michelle, and then DailyGrace on MyDamnChannel, eventually went on to write two New York Times best-selling books, and hosted her own talk show on E!. Helbig provides the voice of Cindy Bear in the HBO Max series, Jellystone, and before that, made and co-starred in two films — Camp Takota and Dirty 30 — with her good friend, Mamrie Hart. Grace and Mamrie continue to produce regular episodes of their podcast together, This Might Get Weird. But for the first time, in 2025, Helbig finds herself onstage by herself, recounting her bout with breast cancer in a one-woman show, “Let Me Get This Off My Chest.” I caught up with Helbig at the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe festival, where she spoke with me about finding value outside of subscriber and view counts online, overcoming burnout and criticism from all sorts of media, and what her life is like now after almost two decades of content creation. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Ismael Loutfi is a comedian and TV writer currently working on the animated series Mating Season from the makers of Big Mouth. His previous credits include writing for After Midnight, Ramy Youssef’s #1 Happy Family USA, and Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. As a stand-up, he has a half-hour on Comedy Central to his credit, along with appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live and Bill Burr’s The Ringers showcase. His new one-hander, Heavenly Baba, documents his life growing up in central Florida with a Muslim father so devout he fully decorated the outside of the family car with Islamic messaging. Loutfi sat down with me at the start of the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe to talk about what his early comedy days and nights were like in Orlando and then Atlanta, what he has learned from the older Muslim-American comedians who came before him, and how he wants to use his voice comedically as part of our society’s current conversation. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Tamara Yajia’s family immigrated to America from Argentina twice before she became a teenager, and the second time prevented her from becoming potentially Argentina’s version of Britney Spears, for better or for worse. Yajia documents it all in her new memoir, CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA: My Life as a Failed Child Star, and she sat down with me to talk about how she dealt with the pangs of life not meeting the expectations her family had given her growing up, how she strayed from performing for more than a decade and what drew her back to show business, where she has worked in the writers rooms of Apple TV’s Acapulco, Hulu’s This Fool, and Netflix’s upcoming show Strip Low. Her own script was picked up for development by an actual former child star in Selena Gomez, but I’ll let Tam tell you all about the importance of having celebrity mentors and surviving mishaps and family embarrassments. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, Veronica Osorio moved to New York City after spending her teen years clowning and acting in South America. Once in America, she joined the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where she performed on house sketch teams with Kate McKinnon, Nicole Byer, and Natasha Rothwell, among others. In New York and Los Angeles, she has started and/or hosted all-Spanish and all-female shows, and co-hosted a Star Trek podcast, Treks and The City. Her screen credits include film roles working with the Coen Brothers in Hail, Caesar! and with Steven Soderbergh in The Laundromat. And she has two different stage babies: Medicine Woman, where she puts her certified healer work to test with live audiences at Fringe festivals from Hollywood to Edinburgh to Brighton to Adelaide; Cherry Baby: Lover Girl, a clown where she tries to find a spouse before the show is over. But as we caught up over Zoom, she’s also about to deliver a real-life baby. She shared her journey with me, talking about the dangers she faced in Venezuela, the difficulties in her path trying to find acceptance with her American comedy teammates, and how what’s happening now to her loved ones and other Venezuelan refugees in America, along with her impending motherhood, has impacted her work onstage. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

I spoke with comedian Nimesh Patel when he thought he had licensed his new hour, Instant Karma to Netflix. Shortly after our chat, Netflix decided to film a brand-new hour with Patel instead later in 2025. So our chat found him at a crossroads — Patel had just filmed an episode of CNN’s Have I Got News For You, and subsequently performed a second time on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Our conversation spanned from his earliest video sketches and emails with me back in 2010, and tracing his time with Michael Che as part of the Monday night Broken Comedy showcase in Greenpoint, where Chris Rock saw him and hired him to write for Rock’s stint hosting the Academy Awards in 2016. Patel told me how he felt inspired  watching his peers find fast success, how he handled free-speech backlash at Columbia University well before Columbia made nationwide news for it in recent years, and how Patel’s approach to crowd work has changed since it has become the trendiest thing to see on TikTok. Patel released his previous specials on YouTube, and filmed a short set for Netflix’s Verified Stand Up showcase in 2023. As he preps his new Netflix hour, he is embarking on a live theater tour that extends through the end of 2025. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Go see Nimesh live on his theatre tour which is happening now through the end of the year. For show and ticket info go to www.FindingNimesh.com

The comedian James Tom now jokes about having told they/them pronoun jokes as far back as 2013 quote-unquote “before most non-binary people were born.”

Back then, Tom felt alone in the world and in the comedy community. But now, living and performing as a gay trans man, Tom told me over Zoom that he feels more like “the estranged father of the non-binary transmasc comedy community.” We also spoke about Tom’s unique experience getting Just For Laughs New Faces in 2021 when the pandemic forced the festival out of Montreal to Los Angeles, writing for the queer pirate comedy, Our Flag Means Death,  on Max, what to make of Dave Chappelle and JK Rowling’s obsession with trans people, and what it has felt like to watch other comedians such as Molly Kearney and Mae Martin successfully navigate similar spaces in show business. Tom’s credits also include appearances on Life & Beth, Tuca & Bertie, an Off-Broadway run in 2023 of one-person-show, Less Lonely, and the 2024 Netflix stand-up showcase, Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda. We spoke about all that and more just before hitting the road for a West Coast tour. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Rory Rosegarten started his career as a comedy manager by the time he was 20 with a whopper of a first client: the already legendary Robert Klein. More than four decades later, as founder and still president of The Conversation Company, Rosegarten manages a small but highly successful comedy clientele — his longtime roster includes both Brian Regan and Ray Romano, his newer client Tom Green recently premiered a documentary, a stand-up special and a docu-series all this year on Amazon Prime Video, and he’s currently working with comedian Gary Valentine on a TV series based on golfer John Daly. Rosegarten sat down with me over Zoom to talk about his teenage years interviewing celebrities first for his high-school and then for Playboy magazine, how he recruited other comics to work with a manager younger than them during the 1980s comedy boom, and how some things change and some things never do in the comedy business — including the fact that Rory has done it all while always living in Long Island. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Mike Drucker is an Emmy-nominated and WGA-winning writer and comedian living in New York. Drucker’s comedy career really began with an internship at Saturday Night Live, where he later contributed to SNL’s Weekend Update as well as The Onion before leaving the city and the East Coast for a gig writing for video games with Nintendo of America. So it makes sense that his memoir, Good Game, No Rematch, would share his love letters to video games and their place in his life and comedy. Drucker sat down with me to talk about how he kept his comedy career humming in the background while he worked for Nintendo and later IGN, before returning to NYC, where he eventually found himself at Full frontal with Samantha Bee, rising to the level of executive producer and head writer by the end of that late-night talker on TBS. He also has written for The President Show, Adam Ruins Everything, Bill Nye Saves The World, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and has enjoyed two stints back in 30 Rock writing for Jimmy Fallon on both Late Night and The Tonight Show. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Fooling media outlets into thinking she created the Netflix series Emily in Paris may have won the comedian and Fordham grad Abby Govindan plenty of new followers on Twitter in 2021, but it didn’t go a long way in making her the pride of her Indian American family back home in Houston. It’s just one of the stories Govindan shares in her debut Off Broadway one-hander, “How to Embarrass Your Immigrant Parents,”produced by the comedians Hasan Minhaj and Daniel Sloss.

In the show, she reveals how she struggled with her mental health before finding therapy and stand-up comedy, and learns how to love or at least understand her father’s responses in the family’s group chat. Just 24 hours before her opening night at New York City’s SoHo Playhouse, Abby sat down with me over Zoom to talk about how much has changed for her in the past five years.  She explains what she has learned from social media and working with and for more famous comedians, and how Jungle Cat, the stand-up showcase she co-hosts with Mohanad Elshieky, has helped her both mentally and professionally. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Brad Alexander composes music for television and musical theater, whose notable works include the music for  See Rock City & Other Destinations, which won the 2011 Drama Desk Award, Richard Rodgers Award and BMI Foundation’s Jerry Bock Award, and more recently served as lead composer for the PBS/Amazon animated series, Clifford The Big Red Dog. I remember seeing and hearing Brad as a piano whiz as early as the second grade, as we were elementary-school classmates and friends growing up in small-town Connecticut. We had a great time catching up on how his career went from the Berkshire Theatre Festival to ad agency music producing, working in piano bars both as a soloist and as a dueling pianist — eventually owning his own business, The Flying Ivories . His other staged works and collaborations include Click, Clack, Moo, We The People: America Rocks!, the Emmy-winning PBS series, Peg + Cat, and he wrote the music for Dog Man: The Musical, which is currently on tour across North America. We spoke about all of that, plus the work he’s currently engaged in adapting the film Bread & Roses, into a stage musical with his wife, actress/singer/writer Jill Abramovitz, who’s on standby for the cast of the new all-star Broadway production, All In. There’s definitely a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

What’s in a name? Since its launch in 2016 by comedy managers Ryan Bitzer and Damion Greiman, along with founding members Ian Adkins and Anthony Leo, 800 Pound Gorilla Media has grown from a small record label into a king kong of comedy distribution, working with everyone from Kevin Hart’s LOL Network to Bill Burr and Al Madrigal’s All Things Comedy, and releasing a cool 100 comedy specials on their YouTube channel in the year 2024. 800 Pound Gorilla Media also celebrated a new licensing deal with Hulu in 2024 that sees at least one of their specials premiering exclusive there once a month, and in this weekend’s Grammy Awards, they’re not only the record label for nominee Nikki Glaser’s Someday You’ll Die, but also the record distribution partner for Netflix’s nominees, too. I sat down with Anthony and Damion at the end of April 2024 to talk about how the comedy business has changed in recent years, and how 800 Pound Gorilla Media has adapted to change with the times. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

We did it, comedy fans. We withstood another year of craziness, hundreds upon hundreds of comedy specials, and have gotten my friend and colleague in comedy criticism, Jason Zinoman from The New York Times, to join me for another December to Remember and try to make sense of it all. 2024, a year that started with a fake AI George Carlin and a captivating Katt Williams performance on Club Shay Shay, that saw the relaunch of @Midnight as After Midnight on CBS, that saw Just For Laughs go bankrupt and cancel their Montreal bash only to promise a revival in 2025, that saw the major presidential candidates sit down with so many comedians for election-season podcasts, can we make sense of all of that? It was a year when Netflix went live in a big way, but were their specials funnier than the hundreds of offerings on YouTube, and can upstarts at Hulu, Veeps and Dropout provide some much-needed competition? What does it say about comedy that a comedy D&D show, Dropout’s Dimension 20, as well as a glorified Gong Show in Tony Hinchcliffe’s Kill Tony, both sold out Madison Square Garden? And who were our Comedy MVPs for 2024? It was obviously a big year for Nikki Glaser, who will host the Golden Globes to kick off 2025, and another banner year for Nate Bargatze. It was also a breakout year for Cole Escola and Alex Edelman, each of whom won over Broadway. Josh Johnson and Conner O’Malley won the internet, or showed us how to defeat the algorithms. Whom else did we give shoutouts to? What made us worry about comedy trends? There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Kelly McCaughan is an actor, writer, comedian and clown whose show, Catholic Guilt, was nominated for Best Newcomer by the 2023 ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and then brought back the following Fringe, where her show received a Best Show nomination from the 2024 ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Originally from outside of Pittsburgh, McCaughan went to college with fellow renowned clown Natalie Palamides where she studied theater, learned improv through the Upright Citizens Brigade, and Bouffon from Red Bastard. Her TV credits include roles on HBO’s Crashing and Apple TV+’s Servant, and she has taken her Catholic Guilt show across America. I caught up with her during her SoHo Playhouse run in New York City in November, which took place the weekend after Election Day. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Chad Daniels is a Minnesota stand-up comedian with more than a billion streams to his credit, and in July 2024 released his 10th comedy special and first for Netflix, Empty Nester, marking his freedom from raising two kids as a single dad in small-town Minnesota. Daniels sat down with me over Zoom to talk about how he balanced it all in his early years as a stand-up, what he learned from working with Mitch Hedberg as a young comic, why he resisted the pull of Los Angeles and New York City, and how landing his 2017 album on Pandora gave him both a new set of fans and placed a new set of expectations upon himself. Since that 2017 album, “Footprints on the Moon,” Daniels has put five hourlong specials across YouTube, EPIX, MGM+ and Netflix — and that’s not even counting another hour he has in the can for Netflix already. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Kyle Ayers is a comedian from Missouri currently based in Los Angeles who hosts the popular podcast and live show, Never Seen It, where comedians rewrite famous movies and TV shows they’ve never seen. You may have seen Ayers perform his stand-up on Conan or on the OnlyFans comedy showcase, LMAOF. Ayers also created and hosted the live comedy show, Boast Rattle, which as it name suggests is the opposite of Roast Battle, and which he adapted for the aborted streamer Quibi as Nice One! Ayers met up with me during the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe, where Ayers has debuted a new hour, Hard To Say, in which he describes his ordeals with chronic pain since 2017, when he discovered he was suffering from Trigeminal Neuralgia, a condition also sometimes referred to as Suicide Disease. Because of the subject matter, I also want you to know that if you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available by calling or texting 988.

Kyle Ayers may seem like he’s more than OK joking about it on the outside, but how is he holding up on the inside? I asked him. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

The state of the comedy industry, like most everything else in 2024, feels very much in flux. Danny Frenkel and Alex Dajani have seen firsthand how technology and social media have changed the relationships between performers and fans in the 21st century, and have set about finding a better way for them to connect today. Danny worked at Facebook since 2010 in various aspects of marketing and data strategies, while Alex was a software engineer at Apple and Meta — until they partnered up to launch PunchUp Live in 2023. Their platform, which had about 200,000 monthly active users when I spoke to them earlier this year, aims to serve up data for comedians to better grow their fan bases, while providing those fans with ad-free viewing experiences, bonus content and a better ability to know when their favorite comedians are performing near them. Steve Byrne was the first comedian to visibly promote PunchUp in 2023, but the ranks have grown to include Sam Morril, Mark Normand, Michelle Wolf, Liz Miele, Joe List and more. Danny and Alex sat down with me over Zoom to explain how they got into the comedy business and what they hope to prove with PunchUp Live. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!