While an episode of Hasan Minhaj’s political comedy talk show “Patriot Act” usually takes weeks, if not months, of research and writing, after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police on May 25th, Hasan felt he couldn’t wait -- he needed to speak out right away. The result was “We Cannot Stay Silent About George Floyd,” a powerful digital short released on Wednesday, June 3rd, which would eventually be uploaded on Netflix as a regular episode. Though there is comedy throughout the 12-minute address, often Hasan eschews laughs to convey the gravity of his words. 

In this episode, host Jesse David Fox talks to the former “Daily Show” correspondent about when comedy is most effective to raise difficult issues and when it’s not, how his show differs from other late night talk shows, and whether Hasan should have become a civil rights lawyer instead of a comedian.

You can watch all six seasons of “Patriot Act” on Netflix. You can follow Hasan on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

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This week, host Jesse David Fox calls up comedian and actor Yvonne Orji. Yvonne appears on the HBO series Insecure as Molly, Issa Dee’s best friend, but this week Yvonne is on to talk about her new hour special, “Momma, I Made It!”

Born in Nigeria and raised in Maryland, Yvonne took an unusual path to comedy. She was attending graduate school in Washington, D.C. for a master’s degree in public health when she decided to compete in a local beauty pageant. When it came to the talent portion of the competition, she couldn’t think of a talent, so she decided to try telling jokes. That led to a career change and years on the comedy club circuit, culminating in Yvonne opening for Chris Rock on his 2017 Total Blackout tour. 

With her new special, Yvonne is ready to show people who she really is. Beyond her standup, which is so good - joyous and filled with hyper-specific, richly drawn characters - the special includes documentary footage of Yvonne returning to Nigeria to visit her family. Yvonne’s impressions of her family members are so funny, but it’s another level to meet those people and see how spot on she is.

The clip of Yvonne’s joke from “Momma, I Made It!” courtesy HBO. You can follow Yvonne on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

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This week, host Jesse David Fox talks to comedian and prankster extraordinaire Eric Andre. You may know Eric from his Adult Swim show, The Eric Andre Show, but this week he’s on Good One to talk about his first hour stand-up special, Legalize Everything.

This interview was recorded during the first week in June, a time which saw the issues of police brutality, institutional racism and flat out bigotry towards black people in America boil over, as countless Americans broke quarantine to protest the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others at the hands of police in this country every year. During this time, Eric joined in the widespread protests and called for the Los Angeles police chief to be fired. 

In that vein, Eric and Jesse discuss a joke from his special about “Cops,” the TV show that for over 30 years served essentially as propaganda for police departments across the world. Eric wrote the joke over a decade ago; the fact that it’s still relevant today says everything.

Days after this interview was conducted, the Paramount Network canceled Cops.

You can watch Legalize Everything on Netflix starting June 23rd. You can follow Eric on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

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This week, host Jesse David Fox calls up legendary comedy writer/director/producer Judd Apatow. You know, Anchorman, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers, Bridesmaids, Girls, Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday, Popstar, The Big Sick, Love -- any of these ring a bell? 

In this episode, Jesse talks to Judd about his return to the director’s chair. Judd got his start as a director in 1998 on The Larry Sanders Show and went on to direct episodes of Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. His feature film debut came in 2005, when he made The 40-Year-Old Virgin with Steve Carell, quickly followed by Knocked Up in 2007, the 2009 Adam Sandler film about comedy, Funny People, and 2012’s This Is 40. Eventually, after spending years working with Amy Schumer developing Trainwreck, he decided to direct it. Now, five years after Trainwreck, Judd has his latest offering: The King of Staten Island. A fictionalized version of star Pete Davidson’s life, it’s a bit of a departure for Judd in terms of the world it depicts, the themes it explores, and the balance of drama and comedy.

You can watch The King of Staten Island on Video on Demand on June 12th. You can follow Judd on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

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This week, host Jesse David Fox goes global, calling comedian Hannah Gadsby all the way in Melbourne, Australia. Hannah began her career in comedy in 2006, but found international success in 2018 when her special Nanette debuted on Netflix. Nanette won the top prizes at the Melbourne Comedy Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017, and its Netflix release won Hannah an Emmy and a Peabody Award.

While Nanette tackled weighty issues and questioned the very meaning of comedy, in her newest special, Douglas, Hannah mostly just tries to be really funny. It has a ton of jokes, some structural inventiveness, and more. It’s hard to say the special is about one thing, but as Hannah and Jesse discuss, it’s largely about showing us how she thinks the way she does and then trying to explain why, as she tells the story of how she was diagnosed with autism. As she puts it, it’s meant to be a romantic comedy.

You can watch Hannah’s new special “Douglas” now on Netflix. You can follow Hannah on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

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This week, Jesse David Fox welcomes Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland to the show! Gil and George are two 70-year-old jerks slash roommates slash Alan Alda fans, living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, best known for their fish-themed prank show “Too Much Tuna.” After a successful “Oh, Hello” Broadway run and subsequent Netflix special, the guys decided to try their hand at the hottest new trend, launching a murder mystery podcast called “Oh, Hello: the P’dcast, The Life and Death of Lady Di.” 

In this free-flowing interview, Gil and George speak about their co-collaborators, Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, and which of their projects they were keeping up with and which they reckon you could skip. They also dive into their podcast-making process, and tell us about all the great people they got to work with, like Ira Glass and Sarah Koenig.

Note: We used a site called Squadcast to record the conversation, and Jesse gets dropped from the interview a couple of times. The plus side is that this results in a makeshift song performed by Gil and George that makes it all worth it.

You can listen to their podcast “Oh, Hello: The P’dcast” wherever you listen to podcasts. You can follow Gil and George on Twitter. You can follow Nick Kroll on Twitter and Instagram, and you can find John Mulaney on Twitter and Instagram, too. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

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This week on Good One we have a sequel! That’s right. We’re joined again by Patton Oswalt, nearly two whole years since his Good One debut in May 2018. In that episode we discussed his special Annihilation, which we touch on again today. 

But this episode is mainly about the evolution of a joke about breakfast cereal from his new special, I Love Everything. When preparing, we found him doing a version of the joke on Conan in August 2018. The joke stays structurally the same, but it clearly changed quite a bit over the next year, leading up to its recording in September 2019. Jesse David Fox dives deep into why Patton made the changes he made, and how his approach to standup has changed, now that he’s turned 50 (!).

You can watch Patton’s latest special “I Love Everything” now on Netflix. You can follow Patton on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

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This week, Jesse revisits his interview with comedian Aparna Nancherla of Comedy Central's Corporate and Netflix’s The Standups. The joke is from her debut album, Just Putting It Out There, which came out in 2016. Aparna first started doing this joke when she moved to New York from L.A. in late 2012 to work on Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. Around then, Jesse would see her perform her deeply silly act around Brooklyn. And then, he distinctly remembers when her material shifted. The silliness was still there, but now Aparna was also talking about her struggles with depression and anxiety. This episode is about that breakthrough, how her career in comedy is connected to her history with mental illness, and how her comedy isn't as much about anxiety and depression as people think. And, you know, writing very good jokes.

You can follow Aparna on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

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This episode, Jesse talks to stand-up comedian and TV writer Sara Schaefer. Back in 2013, Sara and fellow comedian Nikki Glaser adapted their podcast “You Had to Be There” into the MTV late night show Nikki & Sara Live, which ran for two seasons. Since then, Sara has written for numerous TV programs, including The Fake News with Ted Nelms, The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, and Problematic with Moshe Kasher.

Sara started working on the joke discussed here in early 2017, before performing it as part of her Edinburgh Fringe Festival show that summer; however, the version you’ll hear is from her 2019 album LIVE LAUGH LOVE. It’s a sixteen-and-a-half-minute magnum opus about her first trip to Hobby Lobby—you know, the arts & crafts chain store that won a Supreme Court case allowing them to not cover contraceptives in their employees’ health insurance plans? Yeah, that one. In the joke Sara tries to reconcile her views on the company with her desperate need to get a basket for her crafts nook. It’s an epic journey. 

You can listen to LIVE LAUGH LOVE wherever you buy or stream music. You can pre-order a copy of her memoir Grand, which comes out August 11, wherever books are sold. Follow Sara on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

NOTE: In the interview, Sara misidentified a radio host who was fired for making racist tweets. It was not Opie, but Opie's former co-host, Anthony Cumia.

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This episode, Jesse talks to Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss, who made a name for himself at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which he started performing at as a teen and has since done 10 full shows. Daniel’s joke started as a tweet in 2012, was workshopped at multiple Edinburgh shows, evolving as he continued to have new experiences with it, including an eye-opening trip to America in 2014, finally ending as part of his 2015 show, titled Dark. But the filmed version of Dark wouldn’t come out on Netflix until 2018, which meant Daniel worked on and performed multiple shows in between. 

For Daniel, this joke marked a turning point in his comedic development, where he began talking about topics that were meaningful to him as opposed to generic observational comedy. Since then, his specials have tackled difficult subject matter such as toxic masculinity and early childhood tragedy. NOTE: This episode contains a discussion of sexual assault and a significant amount of profanity. 

You can stream Daniel’s specials Dark and Jigsaw on Netflix and his special X on HBO Go or HBO Now. Follow Daniel on Twitter and Instagram. Follow Jesse David Fox on Twitter and Instagram.

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