This week on the Dads Spotlight podcast we are bringing you Justin Bechtold, Australian father of two, comedian and writer of the 40 year old dad website.

Justin Bechtold started being a comedian when he was in high school and as he said, when you start getting people laughing you just want more of it. After high school he did stand up for a few years before stepping out of the stand up limelight for about 10 years. When he was doing stand up he moved to Melbourne, away form the small town that he grew up in. He found some success in his stand up. Unfortunately he had a closed head injury that caused him short term memory loss and it made him have to step away from stand up for about 10 years as mentioned before. As Justin Bechtold stated during this time he lost his courage to get up on stage and perform. A friend of Justin’s wanted to get into comedy so they decided to do a comedy duo routine. As he started doing this he submitted to be a part of a comedy competition and as a part of this was asked to work with the tour to actually tour with them and to liven up the audience but this made him ineligible to win the competition. When he got to the area around his home town he found that he would have won the competition based on the audience response but because he was working with the company he was not eligible to win. Participating in this competition and on this tour gave him the courage to do stand up again.

In 2005 he came to the USA and did a stand up class with Gerry Katzman ( StandUpComedyClass.com ) . Justin Bechtold wanted to take this class because he wanted to take his stand-up to the USA but he knew that there had not been many Australians that had been successful with comedy in the USA. For the first 5.5 weeks he struggled because as he said, people did not understand his humor or sarcasm and it was not until he figured out that in the USA audiences expect you to not only speak humor but show you humor too that he was able to turn a corner and people started to enjoy his comedy. Due to his success during the week he was asked to open for Chris Rock and Andrew Dice Clay at the comics lounge at the end of the week which was a huge honor and not something that he ever expected to be able to do.

After this he moved back to Australia and he and his wife settled into life. They attempted to have kids for many years without success. It was not until they moved to Bali for about 6 months and they stopped trying to have kids that they got pregnant naturally with their first child. As a part of becoming a father for the first time he started to talk to his own parents about his own childhood, and he was surprised at how much his parents did not remember about his childhood. At the same time his wife told him about the growing number of Daddy Bloggers that were out there, and he felt that this was a great combination of wanting to capture his experiences to share with his kids as they got older. This allowed him to combine his comedy with his experiences in fatherhood on his blog 40 year old dad.

Chris asked him about his experiences in going through nine rounds of IVF. Justin Bechtold said that going through this process is hard but that they found that having a sense of humor about the situation really helped them get through this. Justin also said that finding a help group can help you through this too. In the end sometimes by just letting go and de-stressing can help to make your dreams of becoming a parent a reality.

Seeing that Justin Bechtold is a comedian, Chris asked him about the most humorous experiences as a father. He stated that the most humorous experience was the birth of his son. It was funny because of the comedy of errors that led up to the actual birth and he shares this experience with us in the interview today.