Episode #278: Matt Besser

Matt Besser is known as one of the co-founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade, which began as a sketch comedy group in Chicago, moved to New York City, got a TV series on Comedy Central, and opened up theaters and schools teaching improv and sketch co…

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Episode #277: Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe

Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe are an award-winning writing and directing team based in Los Angeles. They became friends and collaborators while performing together in New York City on an Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre sketch team called Onassis. The…

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Episode #276: Josh Gondelman

Josh Gondelman is a writer and comedian who currently writes and produces comedy for Desus and Mero on Showtime. Before that, Gondelman spent five years at HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, earning multiple Emmys and other awards for his work o…

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Episode #275: Jim and Jeannie Gaffigan

Jim and Jeannie Gaffigan have survived and thrived in ways they couldn’t have imagined when they pulled the plug on their TV Land series in the summer of 2016. Within months, Jeannie was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor, and the couple, wh…

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Episode #274: Evan Shapiro

Evan Shapiro had run cable TV stations IFC, Sundance Channel, and Pivot before he launched Seeso, a streaming comedy service owned by Comcast and NBCUniversal in 2016. Shapiro went independent for a couple of years after that, but in May 2019, he took …

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Episode #273: Quinta Brunson

Quinta Brunson took classes at The Second City in Chicago and Los Angeles and was performing with iOWest when she first found success not onstage but online, thanks to a 2013 Tumblr video, followed by a series of shorts she made for Instagram known as …

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Episode #272: Julio Torres

Julio Torres described himself as a Space Prince before casting himself as a Chocolate Prince in the surreal bilingual TV series, Los Espookys, which he co-created, co-wrote and co-stars in for HBO. Originally from El Salvador, Torres first moved to Ne…

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Episode #271: Jacqueline Novak

After performing a half-hour stand-up special on Comedy Central and writing a book on depression (How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression from One Who Knows), what came next for comedian Jacqueline Novak would bring her to her knees. So t…

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Episode #270: Brent Weinbach

Brent Weinbach is an innovative and weird stand-up comedian, befitting of someone who won the Andy Kaufman Award in 2007. Since then, he has masterminded hit YouTube videos such as “Gangster Party Line,” “Man Gives Birth” and “Ultimate Drumming Techniq…

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Episode #269: Marina Franklin

Marina Franklin is a Chicago native who has called Harlem home long enough to see her New York City neighborhood gentrify around her. She also has traveled the world as a comedian, performing in festivals from Melbourne to Montreal, from Kilkenny to Bo…

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