Month: October 2026

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Featured: Bill Burr, Pete Davidson, Taylor Tomlinson, Stavros Halkias

What’s in This Episode

• Bill Burr discusses bombing in Vegas and emotional growth in Rolling Stone interview
• Bill Burr on parenting philosophy and avoiding toxic masculinity with his children
• Bill Burr’s Broadway experience in Glengarry Glen Ross and newfound appreciation for theater
• Pete Davidson co-owns ferry with college comedy shows, daughter Scotty will inherit
• Taylor Tomlinson leaves After Midnight hosting job due to health struggles
• Taylor Tomlinson on mental health crisis during late night show filming
• Stavros Halkias discusses comedy snobbery and achieving career goals

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Hello, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Bill Burr, who’s the subject of the deep dive on this very feed tomorrow, told Rolling Stone, I know a lot of angry people that like my comedy. I want to tell them, look, if I get on the other side of it, anybody can, because I was a first ballot lunatic. I didn’t want to be the angry guy. My whole career was like, oh, you’re the angry comic.

It was always embarrassing to me. They asked Bill when he last bombed. He said, oh, recently I was in Vegas and I opened with that Luigi stuff. Oh my God, that ate it. I’m paraphrasing here.

He’s a little more vulgar than I like to have the show.

And then what’s good about getting on the other side of my emotions, it didn’…

I went, all right, I get it. You came to Vegas, you blown off some steam. I get it. I was wrong. I came out too hard.

So how’s everybody doing?

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And then they were all laughing because I did come out guns a blazing.

Bombing never goes away. If you’re going to continue to try new jokes and push yourself, it’s all part of it. It’s like boxing. You’re going to get punched. It’s going to hurt.

And even if you win, you take the hit and you get back up. We learned about Bill Burr the parent. Bill has a daughter and a son. And Rolling Stone was curious how Bill Burr helps his son avoid the men can’t cry vibe. Burr said, I just let him be who he is.

I let my daughter be who she is, and then I just go, hey, a little too much of this or that. Guys, ease up. I expose them to all different kinds of music and sports and stuff, and I see what they gravitate towards. My wife’s amazing with that. I learn a lot by watching her.

It helps that I remember what it was like to be a kid, to be scared, not be listened to, and all that awful stuff. I learned how to be a really good father by not doing what I saw. I remember the first time it felt like I was working with my daughter. It was probably two at the time. There was something that was upsetting her.

I was sitting on the stairs, and I said, well, come over here and talk to me about it. She walked over, and both of us just held each other’s hands.

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And then at that point in the clip, Bill Burr started crying.

They segued to Bill getting into acting. He explained, I like hearing other actors say a line and thinking, wow, I would have never thought to do it that way. I’ve gotten better just watching the choices and see somebody fearless as an actor. The way I gravitated towards a fearless comedian to be like, okay, what is being fearless as an actor?

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And then seeing that, it’s the same thing.

It’s like, oh, that’s like some David Tell stuff, but in the acting world. Bill did four months in Glen Gary, Glen Ross on Broadway. Bill explained, it combines stand-up and acting. In stand-up, I say the thing, you guys react positively and negatively, I get immediate feedback, and silence is bad. On a set, silence is a good thing.

If somebody doesn’t come up to you after a take, that means you did a good job. With theater, there’s feedback. And when you’re with the other actors, you’re seeing how everyone else does it and how it changes every night. It made me love theater. I was a typical sports guy.

I thought theater was cats. It’s like, I don’t want a bunch of people dressed like felines. I never had plays growing up. That was for the kids that got beat up. I was trying not to get beat up in high school, so I went back and I read a bunch when we were doing Glengarry.

Great stuff. Made me want to do more of it. They pointed out there’s a revival of Cats. Bill, do you want to do Cats? No.

Again, Bill Burr is tomorrow’s Deep Dive episode, the weekly Saturday Deep Dives.

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And then in eight days from now, Norm MacDonald.

Bill Burr played the Riyadh Comedy Festival. So did Pete Davidson, who co-owns a ferry with college shows to be joked. Scotty, his daughter, will inherit this one day. I’m very lucky and excited to be a dad. It’s been a real joy and it’s awesome.

I can’t wait for her to come and see wacky stuff like the ferry show. That’s going to be so cool. Taylor Tomlinson spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about her new book, in which she talked about After Midnight and said, The truth is, I took the job because I was lonely. She explains, I do remember when I was deciding whether or not to take the job. If somebody offers you a national television show, a late night show, say yes.

I do remember when I was deciding whether or not to take the job. I was like, it’d be great to have a reason to be in L.A. And it did anchor me to L.A. In a way that I hadn’t been, because if you keep adding shows on the road, you’ll stay out there forever, and then you come home just to drive your car so the battery doesn’t die. They were curious how she started to realize how unwell she was.

She said, I didn’t know what’s going on. I just kept thinking if I keep pushing, I’m going to get better. It’s going to be fine.

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And then for months and months and months, it didn’t get better.

And it was one of those things where if you don’t have a life-threatening illness, you keep pushing. That’s showbiz, baby.

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Also, everybody was meeting me for the first time and everybody met me very s…

It was tough because I was trying to make a good impression. I was trying to do a good job in an altered state and telling myself this will resolve itself. Because that’s what you do. I’ve been doing that on the road for years, where I go, just push through this, it’ll be fine, you can crash for a few days. When you’re doing a late night show, there wasn’t enough time to crash and recover.

So for the first five months of the show, I wasn’t doing stand-up, I wasn’t touring, I was just doing the show for three days, then I’d be in bed for four. Everyone who worked with me on set from day to day was lovely, and I wish I had said more about that in the book. They saw me every day. They had the best understanding of where my health was. They were like, hey, what can we do?

Do you want to do the table read from home? Do you want to sleep in? Maybe we could put your dressing room somewhere that’s less crowded so you’re not worried about germs. As for walking away from the show, she said, it wasn’t a thing where I just woke up one day and was like, yeah, I’m done. It was months of me thinking about it.

I had this tour and I was like, I don’t know if I’m going to make it through the tour. And because I owed Netflix another special, I moved up the Netflix special, got through that, then canceled the rest of my tour, which was so much time and so much money. That was another wave of disappointing people. And that one was super hard because I disappointed a lot of my fans who had followed me on the road for a long time and my personal team had known me for 10 years. Going back on tour now, but it took 10 months off, which is insane.

But After Midnight was objectively a dream job. And it’s why I was so devastated that I left the job and disappeared. It was such a special group of people. And for someone to be able to go in and host four episodes three days a week in L.A. What an amazing job for so many comedians.

And there were so many who would have been amazing at it. So it was hard for me because I was like, I’m so unbelievably lucky to have these opportunities. How can I not rise to the occasion? But I’ve been rising to the occasion for 10 years and I pushed it too hard for too long. Stavros Algeas, he’s having a moment.

And I feel like, justifiably, everybody likes him right now, which is just great to see somebody like that. He’s funny, he’s personable, everything he’s in is really good. Anyway, he spoke to CBS about being a bit of a comedy snob. I started set up when I was 19. And all you want is to make it happen.

All you want is to get specials. You know, like Tires is a dream. To get to do bit parts in movies was like.. You know, the utmost dream, but you get that stuff and you’re like, well, what is it? What does any of this mean?

And I’m tired of hearing it from baby boomers, right? Like their lives were so easy. You could just win a house at a carnival back then. You know what I mean? People now, you know, they interact with stand-up at like 45 seconds at a time or a minute at a time.

And to me, I am kind of a purist. I’m kind of a comedy nerd. Yeah. Where I love the idea of like, you know, I mean, you talk about early stand-up, they never change their act. They did the same hour their entire lives and maybe every year the worst 10 minutes would come out and they would bring in a new 10 minutes.

They would keep it fresh that way. The stand-up special started because There were these huge titans in comedy, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and most people didn’t ever get to see them. They heard about them. They maybe listened to an album. To the albums.

Right? Albums were huge. That’s what it used to be, right? Almost no one got a special. Trevor Noah and Jimmy Carr had a fun discussion about speaking English.

Have you seen what non-English speakers do to the English language? They give it.. You guys don’t have that at all. I’m not. No, I don’t.

I mean, technically.. You guys. Say things like bang, which is terrible. I don’t even have. I don’t even have an accent.

This is just how things sound when they’re pronounced properly. That’s what I’m saying. You are, you are like literally the, have you heard the, like, like if you were to tell a story of, um, someone threw something at your head and it just narrowly missed you, how would. You tell the story? I would say those words in that order.

Ah, you see now. Yeah. Whereas with us, we’d be like, yo, Eugene Mfana, let me tell you what happened to me the other day. So I’m walking, busy walking. Next thing I see, this guy pops out.

This guy’s there, throws the thing at me. You don’t have that in language. Yeah, I mean. You know that shwaba is a sound of a thing. It has a meaning.

It has a meaning. Shwaba. Shwaba. Joe Coy recalled meeting Robin Williams. They were there at a show many moons ago.

Robin Williams was scheduled to go on stage. Joe Coy said other comedians started arriving after hearing Robin was performing. Initially, Joe Coy was supposed to be the one to introduce Robin Williams, but Bob Saget showed up saying he had a routine he usually did with Robin Williams. Joe Coy tried to persuade Saget to let him have the honor. Saget said no and introduced Williams himself.

But then Robin Williams noticed Joe Coy and asked why Joe Coy didn’t bring him on stage, because that was the plan. Joe Coy explained Saget, blah, blah, blah. Robin Williams said, introduce me again. Joe Coy said that was genius. So Jokoy goes to the mic and introduces Robin Williams for the second time, telling the audience the next comedian was somebody they wouldn’t believe.

It’s Robin Williams. The crowd erupted when Williams walked back on stage. The two performers spent several minutes improv-ing. Jokoy said for like three, four, five minutes, it was just him and Robin Williams improvising on stage. Now, if you’re like, who’s Jokoy, John?

The name’s familiar. That’s the guy at one time on the Golden Globes. He told this horrible, mean joke about Taylor Swift. Here, let me remind you. As you know, we came on after a football doubleheader.

The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL, on the Golden. Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift. Robin’s daughter, Zelda, would like you to cut it out with the AI crap, please. In September, there was a clip of not Robin Williams saying that he had been in this industry a long time and seen things before adding, The real elite, the ones at the very top, they don’t just play power games. They worship something much darker.

Zelda Williams said that supposedly private video of Dad talking about conspiracies is clearly AI and not even particularly convincing AI. Anyone who claims to be a fan who believes it, clearly listen to his movies on mute because that voice is robotic and terrible. Comedy stock market. Every week on the Comedy Stock Market, I give you some recommendations on if comedians were stocks, who should we buy? Who should we sell?

Where’s the value? How would we make money off all this? You know what a stock market is. It’s just a gimmick bit. Do I have to really explain it?

It’s the comedy stock market. Here’s what we’re doing this week. We’re going to buy some Norm MacDonald. Here’s why. The Netflix documentary about Norm is coming out in a few weeks, and I mentioned it to college students.

Now, usually college students, anything I mention in popular culture, they have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m such an old man. Even if I’ll be like, do you guys know who Bill Burr is? And some of them will stare at me like I’ve never heard of this person. They all lit up when I said Norm MacDonald.

Very, very interesting. So let’s buy Norm MacDonald. Let’s also load up on Nathan Fielder. All the cool kids are raving about You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary. I don’t know if this has quite hit the mainstream yet.

Anybody who has seen this doc says it’s amazing. So let’s get in front of that. Nathan Fielder, he’s on a roll. People in the know know how great he is, but we should load up on Nathan Fielder and load up on Norm MacDonald. And that is your comedy stock market for this week.

Don’t forget, on Sunday, it is that new podcast, Is Late Night Dead? In which Johnny Mac waxes poetically about various late night shows. It’s not the history of late night, so your favorite host might not make the podcast. And I’m writing it as we go. It’s not like I’ve already banked 15 episodes, but episode one for this week.

Is about 1230 Late Night with David Letterman, back when 1230 was truly great. Not what Seth Meyers is doing. Make 1230 great again. But Dave, Dave was great, and we’ll talk about that on Sunday. That is its own feed, Is Late Night Dead?

Wherever you found this show, you’ll find that show. And I will eventually repurpose the episodes in this feed, but not yet. So go check out Is Late Night Dead? That’ll be out Sunday. Courtney O’Donnell is one of Vulture’s comedians you should know and watch, or whatever it’s called, alongside comedian Chelsea Morgan.

Vulture tells us O’Donnell posts clip frame videos from a fake podcast called Yep, She Went There with her pseudoscientific chatter is like Connor O’Malley for a maha susceptible girly population. Girly population is a great word. Well done, VultureWriter. All of those elements are at work in her one-woman live show, Planet Courtney, where she plays a resident of the titular planet, where the hospital is run by Chipotle, the Air Force is controlled by Aritzia, and the Sprinkles Cupcake ATM downtown is now taking ancient Sumerian shekels. It’s Barbie’s World from Barbie if Barbie’s World was completely taken over by GLP-1-friendly slop balls and VC-backed DTC brands.

It’s exhausting. Yeah, it was exhausting to explain it to you, but it sounds funny. But breathtaking to witness the amount of world-building and referential jokes O’Donnell packs in when she’s just doing a 15-minute shred of her full act. Two questions for Courtney. One, if you taught a comedy class, et cetera, et cetera.

Courtney says, do things that feel fun to you, not what you think is going to be funny. A friend of mine recently gave me such a nice compliment. She said, you have so much joy for the things you make, and I’ve never stopped to think about how important that is. This is not an easy career, so if doing comedy doesn’t make you feel like you’re 10 years old laughing on the playground with your best friends, you should go into tech sales. And second question, what’s the most earnest goal you have?

The answer, I want to play Mary in Oh Mary, and I want to act in a dramatic role. I would like an herb garden. And that is your comedy news for today. All right, tomorrow, Bill Burr deep dive. Sunday, I should have promoted this all week.

The New York Times did an article about the top 100 TV shows of the 21st century, and I reacted to it on the fly. And let’s just say Johnny Mac didn’t like the list, okay? Bill Burr deep dive tomorrow, Times 100 on Sunday. See you then.

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Featured: Dane Cook, Michael Che, Maria Bamford, Chris Hardwick, Colin Jost, Scarlett Johansson

What’s in This Episode

• Dane Cook porch pirate theft – dog treats stolen from doorstep
• Dane Cook documentary on Netflix – career retrospective and personal story
• Michael Che new Netflix special releasing October 13th
• Maria Bamford documentary ‘Paralyzed by Hope’ on Netflix October 23rd
• Chris Hardwick special ‘The Middle Ages’ on Guerrilla Comedy Plus October 5th

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Caloroga Shark Media. Jam-packed one today. Hi, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Dean Cook is asking the public to help identify a woman who Dean Cook says stole a delivery from his doorstep. Dane posted a video on social media captured from his home surveillance system.

One angle appears to be from his doorbell camera. The other looks out to a street. The video footage shows a woman wearing a baggy, sleeveless tank top that says, I love L.A. And she’s wearing flip-flops. She walks up to Dane Cook’s front door.

She shuffles off, holding a large brown bag in her right hand. The other angle shows her running to her SUV, a white SUV, and driving off. Dean Cook says, this haggard porch pirate got away with our dog treats. I mean, not funny. Don’t rob Dean Cook.

What are you doing? But anyway, we’re on the lookout for a woman in a white SUV, that narrows it down, wearing a baggy sleeveless tank top that says, I love LA. She was wearing flip-flops. At six in the morning, when she stole Dane Cook’s dog treats, Dane posted on Instagram, she says I love L.A. As indicated on her unwashed loose top, but what this action really says is I don’t love myself and want to be caught before I get into my angel white Range Rover and dash to the next porch.

Let’s find her L.A. And give my dogs the treats they’ve earned from sit, stay, and don’t bark at strangers unless it’s a sea hag taking your delights. Now, what’s really strange is that Dane Cook’s dog treats were stolen on a day where he was promoting a new video on demand movie. Isn’t that a weird coincidence? You don’t hear from Dane Cook for months.

And then on the day he’s promoting his new movie, somebody steals his dog treats. Wow. What a coincidence. Dane spoke to Deadline and said, when I was approached by the producers that I made the film with, I knew the moment was finally coming to light. Where I was like, I feel like I can own this moment as a creative person.

I feel like I can tell an incredible story that also includes the highs and lows of the career. And I really looked at this, I love this line because this is the money line, and I really looked at this like the Empire Strikes Back story and the greatest story of my career. Does that mean there’s a third act in Dane Cook’s career? Huh. Deadline was like, why tell the story now?

And they weren’t talking about the suspicious dog biscuit robbery on the day Dane was promoting a new movie. No, no. They were curious about the documentary itself. And of course, he was already saying, well, I wouldn’t do it the other way anyway. When I sat in the chair, I said, I’m going to give you everything I have in this moment.

So if you ask the question, there’ll be no barrier. I’m really ready to put everything I have into this moment. And he asked everything that I think you’d want to understand and even beyond that. So ready for it. Strong enough to share the story, but also in a place in my life where I was a better person from this.

I was happier, healthier. It was more in my faith. I was in an incredible relationship that would turn into a marriage with my best friend, and so why wouldn’t I now want to own our darkest capsizing moment when I’m at the happiest, most fulfilling moment? There is a lot of this. We’ll picket it over the next week or so, but I don’t want to roadblock the show with nothing but Dane Cook because we have so much to get to, including the Michael Che trailer.

He’s got a new special out on October 13th on Netflix, and I’ve made a slight edit for language. Here’s Che. You know what really bothers me about Colin being married to Scarlett Johansson? Is that he acts like it’s normal. That’s annoying.

He acts like it’s. Not a miracle. Because we don’t live that far from each other. We live like five minutes away from each other. Sometimes he’ll like call me and be like, hey man, we’re having dinner at the house.

It’s just me and Scarlett. Why don’t you bring a date? We could do a double date thing. I’m like, I can’t bring the women that I date. To Scarlett Johansson’s house.

I don’t need her calling my phone like, hey, I think your date stole our silverware. I’m like, yeah, she do that sometimes. She gets nervous. I thought I heard her jingling in the Uber. I’ll keep an eye out for you, Scar.

Can I call you Scar? Good stuff there, but what’s an even better trailer, and that’s not a backhanded compliment to Che, I just love this trailer for the Maria Bamford documentary, and I’m not a Bamford stan. I know the comedians love her, and I find her okay, but this trailer is fantastic. Oh, hello. Hi, Maria.

We don’t know if you want to take part in making a documentary, but regardless, you wanted money for today. Yes! I don’t know if that’s how it works, but maybe we have no ethics here. When I first. Moved out to Los Angeles, I wanted to be rich and famous.

But then I found out about clerical work. The first time I saw her, I didn’t get what she was doing. What do they all say when you start a new job? We do things a little differently around here. What am I watching?

So hold on to your hats. It’s gonna be a wild ride. But it never is. Sometimes it feels like you’re talking to a lobster whose shell has been removed, and it’s just feeling every single molecule in the room. Mom told me recently, hey, when you don’t.

Wear makeup, you look mentally ill. Now I’m sure to wear thick green eyeshadow and a line of lipstick around my lips. Baby, look pretty now, mommy. When I was around 9 or 10, I remember just feeling like there is something desperately wrong with me. I was a bit of a dark kid growing up.

Occasionally, I’d stage my own death for fun. My mom would say, sometimes I just couldn’t find. You in the house. And I just thought, we’re just going to have to drag the lake. I’d always known I had depression, and there was bipolar in my family.

But at a certain point, I started feeling extremely depressed. Marie was on this very, very risky adventure of becoming a comedian. It did give me some relief being on stage. There’s a lot of memes out there for health that are sort of like, hey, tell someone about it. Hey, you okay?

Feels emotionally honest. Think of all the people for whom her experience is real. It’s all funny and heartbreaking at the same time. She’s my favorite comedian. I am not a good time.

I am an assignment from a therapist. I am something comics go to see to go, huh. Maria is just a true net positive in this world. Old MacDonald had a pterodactyl E-I-E-I-O with a. Paralyzed by Hope will see Maria Bamford unpack the mental health journey behind her Fuhler’s comedy.

That documentary is out October 23rd on Netflix. Chris Hardwick has a new special. It is called The Middle Ages. It’ll be out on the 5th on Guerrilla Comedy Plus.

And then it’ll be on the regular 800-pound Guerrilla YouTube channel, 7 o’clo…

In the Middle Ages, Chris Hardwick takes on middle age, marriage, fatherhood, and a rapidly changing world. Now in his 50s, welcome to the club, he finds comedy in the indignities of aging, from growing pill collections and questionable digestive choices to prostate exams and realizing Gen Z are time millionaires. Here’s Chris Hardwick. We appreciate immature humor, say aye! Aye!

Speaking of butt stuff, poca poca. Poca poca, look who brought a knife to a tickle fight. If you’re 25 years old, you can just get out of bed in the morning and. Leave. I do feel for Gen Z, you will never know the absolute satisfaction of slamming down.

A telephone in anger. We didn’t have TikTok. In those days. How did you know which relatives were racist? We called that Thanksgiving.

And now let’s play the quiet game. Oh, you’re already lost. Let all the kittens sing.. Chris says the foundation of the set came from his tour back in 2019-2020 with the intent to shoot the special in 21, but the pandemic had other plans. In January of 2022, we had a baby.

I paused work stuff for what ultimately became a three-year hiatus. But in that time, I learned piano, became a parent, and got even more middle-aged than I was before. So in a weird way, the delay actually kind of helped the set. I’m super excited it’s finally happening. Huge thanks to the 800-pound gorilla, etc.

Etc. Zaynab Johnson has her second comedy special, this one called Toxically Optimistic. This, co-produced with the Obamas. Yeah, Obama’s Higher Ground have a production credit on this. Toxically Optimistic will premiere on Netflix on October 27th.

The special’s based on a show that she performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, which was nominated for Best Comedy Show at the List Festival Awards. In Toxically Optimistic, Johnson said, I gave myself permission to be silly by inviting the audience to focus on the good during a time when the chaos and fear are at an all-time high. I encourage everyone to find a little whimsy in the most unexpected situations. I was planning on watching Sam Morrell’s comedy special, plus or minus the travel that I have this week, and plus or minus baseball playoffs. But Jason Zinnemann, friend of the show, and Jason from the New York Times, wrote about it.

He seemed to like it. He wrote, Sam likes a dirty joke, but not as much as a precisely awkward phrase. Morrell follows the seedier and overlooked corners of show business, small-time agents, trash-talking magicians, and especially that much-mythologized brand of stand-up, the hard-living road comics. The debauched loner, traveling from town to town, making drunks laugh. Some versions, like, say, Doug Stanhope, adopt a renegade philosopher streak.

Others pander for cheap chuckles or wallow in the muck. Then there are the joke merchants. Muriel is one of the best and most prolific today. He’s the kind of technician who responds to groans over dark material while asking the crowd to at least admire the structure. And he usually has a point.

Zidman writes, When a disappointed woman he just slept with asks, Is this a joke? He responds, No. My humor is much more layered and complex. Love that. The New York Times, not Jason Zinneman, to be clear, but the New York Times once had the headline, Andrew Schultz might be America’s foremost political journalist.

Let’s just sit that with a minute. Okay. Andrew Schultz might be America’s foremost political journalist. The New York Times printed that sentence, released online. I don’t know if it was actually in print.

It’s not like I have a framed copy of that issue of the New York Times, although I probably wish I did. But it’s definitely online because I checked the exact phrasing before I recorded today. Andrew Schultz might be America’s foremost political journalist. He’s also going to be one of the stars of Miami Vice 85, starring Michael B. Jordan and Austin Butler as Tubbs and Crockett.

Are you kidding me? Michael B. Jordan as Ricardo Tubbs? I’m less excited about Austin Butler as James Sonny Crockett in the movie that will explore the glamour and corruption of mid-1980s Miami as it follows two detectives who work undercover. Hear me out.

I think they should flip them. Because Tubbs always does like that BS Jamaican accent and sounds ridiculous. What if I told you Michael B. Jordan played a cool ex-football player who lives on a boat and has a crocodile and his name is James Sonny Crockett? That would work.

And then make Austin Butler a guy named Ricardo Tubbs who does a BS Jamaican accent. I mean, let’s flip the casting there. Miami Vice 85 is said to be inspired by the pilot episode of Miami Vice. You know the one with Phil Collins in the air tonight.

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And also the first season of the landmark TV series.

Want to talk about something that is right in my wheelhouse? Miami Vice 85, dudes. It’ll be out in IMAX May 19th, 2028. No, not 2027. 2028. We’ll be talking about this one for a year and a half, apparently.

Controversial mega comedian Nate Bergenzi. He’s out there. He’s all about the cars. And he wrote for website fromtheroad.ford.com. It’s almost as if he were paid to write this.

But who knows? Maybe in his heart, He just wanted to write about cars. The controversial MAGA comedian wrote a while back, I got a call from Ford asking if I’d help get the word out about the real pros working at their dealerships every day to keep all our cars and tracks running. They also helped me to host Ford’s Accelerate the Essential Economy conference. The controversial MAGA comedian said, I was excited to be asked, but also worried they might have called the wrong person.

I don’t know much about cars. Time out. Money has a way of making you do things, Nate. Just saying. Time in.

When I first got my used car in high school, the stick shift was sticky to the touch, so I put a tennis ball over the knob to keep my hand less gross. That’s the first and last time I tried to fix a car. But seriously, I was honored to be asked, and quite possibly paid. I was always dreaming of working with Ford and loved my Bronco. Nate Bregazzi is telling us he always dreamed of working with Ford.

Now, I’ve read a lot of interviews with Nate over the years. I’ve never heard that as one of his career goals. But OK, I accept your premise, Nate said. I often talk about Ford as the type of comedy I want to build. Their work is quality and it’s a family owned business that people not only want to work at, they want their children and grandchildren to work there, too.

But could I, controversial mega-comedian Nate Borghese, be the spokesperson for real parts, real pros, real easy with this little knowledge about cars? And what’s the essential economy anyway? When I met with Ford for the first time, they made it really straightforward. I didn’t need to know about the real parts or be one of the real pros. They already have people for that.

I’m the real easy, which is a position I feel very qualified for. This campaign isn’t about me knowing things. It’s about me getting paid. No, sorry, I misread that sentence. He said, it’s about me not knowing things and that being totally okay.

That’s because Ford has the parts needed to fix your Ford. The people in the service department are pros that know what they’re doing, and they can even come to you, saving you a bunch of time. The new TV season is underway. Jimmy Kimmel Live won the premiere week in late night in both total viewers and adults 18 to 49 for the week of September 21st. Kimmel averaged 2.29 million viewers and a. 21 rating in the 18 to 49s.

The number two show is The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon with 1.3 million viewers. And Byron Allen thing on CBS, 704,000 people in the first half hour, 521,000 in the second half hour, all at 1130. Audible’s got a new thing called The Moons of L.A. An Audible comedy series. Ken Jeong, Randall Park, and Daniel Dae Kim star.

The Moons of L.A. Premieres October 8th. In the coming-of-age comedy, we follow Chloe Moon, a precocious middle schooler obsessed with true crime podcasts. Who dreams of becoming an investigative journalist when she discovers her parents’ marriage is on the rocks. Oh no, Chloe does what any aspiring detective would do.

She launches an investigation. Okay, good job there. Vulture has their comedians you should know and will know. Did I get the title right today? I think I did.

I could check, but that’s not fun. One of them is Janet McNamara, and Vulture tells us in Janet McNamara’s 2026 YouTube special Not Smart Enough, She describes the experience of trying to get an autism diagnosis, it’s a defining part of her story, in an episode of This American Life. McNamara details years of wondering why she can’t perform the social niceties other people handle with ease, which has made her day job as an accountant increasingly difficult. Her first experience with fame was in 2010, when she filmed a deliberately cringe-inducing audition for American Idol that went mega-viral 16 years later. That performance of a woman clueless about her own awkwardness has morphed into McNamara’s more settled, self-possessed stage persona.

Two quick questions with Janet from Vulture. Question number one. What non-comedy skill do you possess that you’re most proud of? She says, I had a full-time job as an accountant up until a few months ago. I didn’t BS my day job as an accountant.

I was good at it, and I worked hard. Audits are fun, at least when they don’t find anything. Question number two. What is the most earnest goal you have? McNamara said, I’d like to be able to complete a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle in less than an hour.

Right now, it takes me about four hours. But I’ve been studying professional puzzlers on YouTube, and I think with the right focus, I can make it happen by 2030. That’s your comedy news for today. Don’t forget, out this weekend on Sunday, Is Late Night Dead? Johnny Mac’s new sister series about late night.

This week’s topic, 1230 David Letterman. That is its own feed. The show is called Is Late Night Dead? Where have you found this? You’ll find that.

Hit the follow button. I will eventually use those on this feed, but not yet. On this feed this weekend, Saturday is a deep dive about Bill Burr. Sunday is a look at the New York Times horrible list of what they said are the top 100 TV shows of the 21st century. And my goodness, are they wrong.

So check that out and I will see you tomorrow.

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