Parenting is a Joke

Jena Friedman talks with Ophira Eisenberg about the strange collision of grief, motherhood, politics, and the practical business of being a working comedian as she brings her solo show Motherf*cker from Edinburgh to New York. She explains why the missing “you” on the show poster is intentional—a visual representation of the hole grief leaves behind—and how a painting she made of her mother in high school ultimately became the poster after Jacqueline Novak suggested it during a FaceTime call. Jena also recounts the spectacularly dysfunctional Edinburgh venue where she performed: puddles of water around electrical cords, filthy fans, unreliable Wi-Fi, a separate box office that left audience members unable to get into the show, and Jena eventually standing outside with a bucket collecting ticket money. On one particularly brutal night, grief overwhelmed her during the final five minutes of the performance and she ugly-cried while continuing to deliver jokes she had memorized, then had to go outside and collect cash and loose change from the audience. That experience becomes part of a larger conversation about performing grief without turning it into acting, finding the right level of emotional control onstage, and what happens when audiences come backstage carrying their own losses; in Edinburgh, as many as ten people from a 120-seat audience might approach her after a show to tell her about someone they loved who had died. Jena talks about how her mother’s death while she was pregnant continues to surface in unexpected ways, including seeing her mother in her young son when he suddenly says “let me finish” over Vietnamese food, or hearing herself say the exact little phrase her mother used to say at night: “Kitchen is closed.” The parenting conversation then widens into Jena’s complicated hopefulness about raising a child in the age of AI and social media, her belief that despair can become a form of complacency, and her affection for the idea of “Fuck You Joy” as a way of staying engaged with life when the world feels bleak. By the end, the conversation has moved from the mechanics of collecting ticket money after crying onstage to the much quieter realization that Jena will never get to know her mother as a grandmother, a loss that surfaces in the simple thought that her son will never have the kind of elementary-school photo with grandparents that other families take for granted 📍October Shows are in Watertown, SD, Pennsylvania, Niagra Falls, Canada, Washington, DC, Catskill, and NYC Follow Jena Friedman : https://www.instagram.com/jenafriedman Get tickets to her Off-Broadway Show Motherf*cker: https://www.sohoplayhouse.com/see-a-show/jena-friedman-motherfucker See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon Primehttps://www.ophiraeisenberg.com Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jena Friedman returns to Parenting Is a Joke with a now four-year-old, a new solo show called Motherf*cker, and a lot to say about what happens when motherhood, grief, politics, and a creative career start occupying the same space. She and host Ophira Eisenberg talk about the strange economics of being a working comedian—including Jena’s son looking at her $40 stand-up paycheck and asking, essentially, “That’s all you make?”—as well as the practical reality of getting to Edinburgh for 17 performances while trying not to be away from her child for too long. Jena explains how losing her mother to pancreatic cancer while she was 34 weeks pregnant changed the way she talks to her son about death, including the decision to make mortality less mysterious through conversations, The Lion King, Coco, and Día de los Muertos. She remembers being devastated while her eight-month-old son gently tucked her hair behind her ear, and later records a conversation in which her three-year-old tells her he doesn’t want her to die, listens to her explanation about death, and then immediately announces that he has farted on her knee. The conversation also turns toward the complicated guilt of considering another child, the fact that Jena froze her eggs, and the larger anxiety of raising a kid while worrying about climate change, artificial intelligence, regulation, and a future involving drones and locked bank accounts. That political anxiety feeds directly into Motherf*cker, which Jena describes as using the political comedy she knows how to do as a way to approach the grief she doesn’t know how to do; she also argues that comedy can become more interesting with age because perspective accumulates, illustrated by the brutally specific joke she delivered to younger colleagues grieving Trump’s 2024 election victory: wait until your mom dies. The episode keeps finding that same uneasy intersection of the personal and the political, ending with a shared desire for a mug that simply says, “Don’t talk to me until your mom has also died.” 📍October Shows are in Watertown, SD, Pennsylvania, Niagra Falls, Canada, Washington, DC, Catskill, and NYC Follow Jena Friedman : https://www.instagram.com/jenafriedman Get tickets to her Off-Broadway Show Motherf*cker: https://www.sohoplayhouse.com/see-a-show/jena-friedman-motherfucker See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon Primehttps://www.ophiraeisenberg.com Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this snack-sized follow-up with host Ophira Eisenberg, comedian and author Marc Kaye digs into the split between fitting in and belonging that gives his essay collection its spine, admitting he's spent a lifetime chasing the former while quietly resenting how much it costs him, a distinction he says reframed the whole book once he stopped blaming other people for his own discomfort. The conversation turns most vivid around "Chance of Showers," the essay Mark almost cut from the manuscript because writing it forced him to relive the five-hour drive dropping his son Elliot off at college in Pittsburgh, where he realized the grief wasn't really about the empty bedroom. It was about his own unlived dreams, the ones he'd been shoving, as his girlfriend puts it, under "the lumpy rug." He walks through the advice he actually gave Elliot before move-in (make the kind of mistakes that become funny stories at 40, not the kind you carry as regret) and his own unfulfilled curiosity about a guided psilocybin retreat, name-checking Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind" and the documentary "Fantastic Fungi" while making clear he wants a real facilitator, not "somebody hanging on South Street." He also traces the origin of his comedy album title, "I'm a Good Dad," back to a running joke with his kids after his own less-than-proud parenting moments, including the story he tells to close the episode, about buying his son a bulk box of Costco condoms before college, only to find it ripped open "like a monkey" on a closet shelf a year later while his own unsuspecting father stood right next to him. 📍September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC Follow Marc Kaye : https://www.instagram.com/awkwardlymarc Buy his book: A Is For Awkward https://www.marckayetoday.com/a-is-for-awkward See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon, Google Play and Apple!https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Comedian and debut essayist Marc Kaye joins host Ophira Eisenberg mid-vacation, sweat-soaked from a Yellowstone-to-Badlands road trip, to talk about the strange math of raising kids you can't actually engineer — a fitting theme from a guy with a mechanical engineering-turned-raver son and a musical-theater daughter now working inside the Bureau of Prisons at Fort Dix. Mark, who spent a year teaching biology in Camden through Teach for America, walks through the genetics lesson that quietly reordered his whole parenting philosophy: two parents, 23 chromosome pairs each, roughly eight million possible combinations before you even get to eye color, proof, he argues, that most of what parents take credit for was never in their hands to begin with. That idea threads into two very different formative stories: his post-college stint as a Big Brother paired with a kid with "violent tendencies" (a 138-pound psychology grad's crash course in letting go of outcomes), and the moment his son, mid-meltdown, declared the family dog-attacked stuffed animal "Bob is blind" — a small domestic crisis Mark still can't quite explain his own panic over. He and Ophira also dig into growing up with older, more rigid parents shaped by World War II, DIY households versus outsourced adulthood, and Mark's theory, half joke, half warning, that couples should have to do a Catholic-style pre-Cana before marriage, since nothing prepares you for becoming "a different person" alongside another one under exhaustion and diapers. Mark's new essay collection, "A Is for Awkward and Other Reflections on Belonging," and his comedy album "I'm a Good Dad" both hover in the background of a conversation that keeps circling back to one blunt, useful phrase he uses often with his now-grown kids: you get what you get, and you don't get upset. 📍September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC Follow Marc Kaye : https://www.instagram.com/awkwardlymarc Buy his book: A Is For Awkward https://www.marckayetoday.com/a-is-for-awkward See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon, Google Play and Apple!https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg talks with Sona Movsesian, author of The World’s Worst Mom and The World’s Worst Assistant and co-host of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, about the strange overlap between parenting, creative work, anxiety, and the relentless business of keeping two five-year-old boys alive. Sona explains why she and her husband gave their twins the reassuringly ordinary names Charles and Michael—despite her Armenian family background and the guilt she still feels about not choosing more traditional names—and how giving them Armenian middle names became her compromise with her ancestors. She also describes writing The World’s Worst Mom while her sons were growing from three to five, which meant the book itself changed as the children did; one chapter, in which her subconscious addresses her, was so aggressively self-critical that her friend Nora told her to be nicer to herself, while Sona’s husband illustrated the transformation from her pre-kids “flower child” subconscious into something resembling the blob from The Substance. The conversation takes a much heavier turn when Sona recounts losing her Altadena home in a wildfire when the twins were three and a half, choosing not to tell them that their house had burned because she wanted home to feel permanent and safe, even as the adults dealt with their own trauma and the long process of rebuilding. There is dark comedy amid the loss—Sona is genuinely relieved that the fire eliminated their old diaper genie and some terrible shirts—but the things that mattered most to her children survived: the stuffed animals they had slept with since infancy. That instinct to protect children from adult fear runs through the episode, including Sona’s description of fertility treatment and pregnancy with twins, when she refused to “celebrate before you win the game” and kept baby preparations deliberately minimal until her sons were safely in her arms. Parenting then becomes an exercise in sleep-deprived consumerism as she recalls ordering every vibrating toy, pillow, sound machine, and supposed sleep solution she could find online when one twin would not sleep, including a $50 weighted suit that made the baby look like a gingerbread cookie and that he absolutely hated. The twins’ radically different personalities also shape the comedy: one stays relatively close while the other is a self-described nomad who wanders off, including at Disneyland and at a botanical garden, where Sona eventually received a call from a security guard after her son used the phone number she had taught him. As the boys prepare for school, Sona admits that having twins gives her a built-in advantage because each child has the other as a familiar face, even though one of them has melted down at virtually every camp or first day of school, dramatically reaching a hand toward her and yelling “Mama” while she has to walk away. The episode ultimately connects Sona’s creative career to the same instinct that drives her parenting: anticipating needs, managing logistics, and accepting that perfection is not the assignment, a lesson perfectly embodied by her fantasy for a third book, The World’s Worst Beach House Owner, followed by her modest new standard for success—buying another house that simply doesn’t burn down. 📍September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC Follow Sona Movsesian : https://www.instagram.com/sonamov Buy her book: The World’s Worst Mom: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/785801/the-worlds-worst-mom-by-sona-movsesian/ See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” as an ALBUM is available now https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices