Joel Kim Booster, comedian, actor and writer of the just-released Pride and Prejudice-inspired gay romantic comedy Fire Island, joins Matt and Elizabeth this week for Daddy Issues! Joel, who also stars in the film alongside Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang, tells us about what Jane Austen and Regency-era England has in common with the impenetrable wealth and whiteness of Fire Island, portraying gay culture and sex for a mass audience via a Fox Searchlight production, and casting Conrad Ricamora as a perfectly dickish yet lovable Darcy. Joel also talks about losing his father to Covid last year and the unrelenting writer’s block and depression that settled in as he grieved. His perspective on the importance of creating a family of choice with supportive friends will resonate with anyone whose bio-families are disinterested or ambivalent about their careers, as Joel’s were, despite his success. Later in the episode, it's on to discussing daddy issues in the news, including Johnny Depp's terrifying fans, Hunter Biden's sugar brother, Travis and Kourtney's homophobic wedding priest, Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson's new movie, and a celebration of a new kind of fish dad. 

This week, Matt is joined by writer Michele Dawson Haber, to discuss their shared experiences of losing their fathers as young children. Both Matt, who was three when his father died, and Michelle, who was three months old, have few or no memories of their dads but were left with audio recordings of their voices.  Last year, Michele wrote a Modern Love column in the New York Times about discovering a connection to her late father Eliahu, decades after his death by suicide, through tapes of his voice and, in this episode, Matt and Michele interview each other about the experience of trying to uncover who their biological fathers were through audio clips and asking family and friends what they remember. Normally, our interview episodes focus on the guest subject, but this time Matt and Michele share the episode as they compare what it’s like to piece together what happened when their fathers died, the importance of knowing your whole origin story,  and how to move forward after experiencing the sudden death of a parent.

On this episode of Tell Me About Your Father’s pop culture and news review show Daddy Issues!, Erin and Elizabeth are joined by comedian Youngmi Mayer, host of must-listen podcasts "Feeling Asian" and "Hairy Butthole." We talk to Youngmi about comedy being the best way to talk about the worst things, her young adulthood in Korea and why she left to move to the US at age 20, as well as her white father's internalized white supremacy and misogyny. We also discuss the brain-searing experience of being mistaken for your father’s girlfriend, and Youngmi’s life as a happily divorced single mother to a young son. Then it's on to daddy issues in the news, as we dissect the ironic infantilization of women pregnant enough to have an abortion, and the fetid stench of recent Twitter purchaser Elon Musk and his dad Errol, who married—and has a child with—his stepdaughter. The Musk men stink and our commentary is the spiritual Febreeze you need.

In this episode, Erin and Elizabeth talk to actor Ray Abruzzo, who played the deceptively wise mobster-dummy Little Carmine Lupertazzi on The Sopranos (see Tell Me About Your Father episodes 34-39 for our exegesis on the daddy issues inherent to that show). You may also know him from Night Court, LA Law, Dynasty, The Practice, Mad Men and Transparent. We came for Ray's insights on the family dynamics present in the ensemble casts of our favorite TV shows, and left with a heartwarming portrait of Ray's father, a colorful working-class character from Queens, born to Italian immigrants, whose love of art and storytelling rubbed off on his son, and led Ray on an extraordinary pilgrimage to Sicily in search of his paternal roots that gave us chills. Listen as Ray lets us in on the many parallel themes in both their lives— cowboys unafraid to embrace their creativity—and how Ray's dad may have inspired his committed delivery of some of Little Carmine's most memorable malapropisms by advising him to "improvise extemporaneously." Please enjoy our mellifluous conversation with Ray Abruzzo.

**Little Carmine fans, Sopranos talk is from 34:29-50:48. 

Molly Shannon, beloved performer, Saturday Night Live alumna, and now New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Hello Molly! recently stopped by her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio on her book tour to speak with Erin in front of a sold-out auditorium. This special episode of Tell Me About Your Father is a live recording of their conversation from April 15th at the Cuyahoga County Public Library, and it's the first time Molly has returned to Cleveland since her dad, Jim Shannon, died in 2001. Jim takes center stage in her book and this conversation, where Molly details the aftermath of the unimaginable car accident that made him a single father responsible for raising two little girls. Molly credits her dad for helping her find her moxie and perseverance in the face of a family tragedy and for always encouraging "shenanigans," including the time he successfully dared her and a friend to sneak onto a flight to New York City as tweens. (That friend was in the audience and joins Molly on stage to re-enact the story.) This boldness is also what inspired her iconic SNL characters Mary Katherine Gallagher and Sally O’Malley, strivers who never quit. Listen as she shares the impact her dad had on her career, his coming out to Molly late in life, and their final goodbye.

Joining Erin and Matt on today’s episode of Tell Me About Your Father’s pop culture and current affairs show, Daddy Issues, is the charming, and thoughtful cultural critic, Naveen Kumar - who contributes regularly to the New York Times, Them, Variety, and Broadway News. And we do manage to cover it all: President Zelensky’s heroism, Will Smith’s tantrums, Sean Penn’s irrelevance, Broadways (off and on), Meghan Markle ™,  jockstraps from Berlin, the untouchable elegance of Jerrod Carmichael, and the voluptuous horror of Noam Chomsky.

For our latest episode, Erin and Elizabeth talk to the two-time-Emmy-nominated film director Erin Lee Carr, whose work features several acclaimed true crime titles for HBO, including Mommy Dead & Dearest, At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal, I Love You Now Die: The Commonwealth V. Michelle Carter, and Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall. For Netflix, Carr directed Britney Vs. Spears, about Britney Spears’ quest for freedom from her conservatorship controlled by her father. Erin Carr is the daughter of the esteemed New York Times media columnist David Carr, who died suddenly in 2015 at the age of 58 when Erin was just 26. David Carr had experienced what his daughter describes in our interview as “the rise and the fall and the rise,” grappling in his twenties with a crack cocaine addiction amidst the beginnings of what would become a meteoric journalism career. The premature births of Erin and her twin sister helped him get and stay sober, all of which is chronicled in his bestselling 2008 memoir The Night of the Gun. In Erin’s own memoir about her father, 2019’s All That You Leave Behind, she writes about the special bond she had with him over their shared career ambitions. And, as Erin would realize in her later twenties, their shared addiction to substances. Six years sober and engaged to a Washington Post media columnist (a similarity she thinks her father would have a field day with), Erin talks about the constant encouragement her dad bestowed on her—his toughness and tenderness—and shares the email he sent her after she was once fired that should probably be anthologized in parenting manuals.

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair’s chief critic and co-host of the podcast Little Gold Men, joins 'Daddy Issues' for a second year and counting to discuss fatherly presence in this year’s Oscars nominations and to make his winner predictions. Fathers were a source of tender support in several of this year’s nominated films’— as opposed to last year when they were tragically slipping away to Alzheimer's, drunk, or learning from an octopus. Nominated films like CODA, King Richard, Dune, Flee, Raya and the Dragon, Encanto, Mitchells Vs the Machine, and Luca all feature fathers of characters who are classic outliers. There’s a lot less bullying and emotional infancy among these characters and a lot more kind-hearted helping of those who deserve a voice. It was also a big year for female directors contemplating gender norms. Maggie Gyllenhall’s film adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter explores an ambivalent mother who leaves her family in pursuit of her own academic career in a narrative that is traditionally attached to fathers. Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, set in the 1920s American West, explores repressed rage and desire, internalized homophobia, particularly femme phobia, the complexities of mentorship, and history repeating itself. It’s also the most nominated film of the year, which really sticks in noted bitch Sam Elliott’s craw. We also discuss the "shockingly good" West Side Story, the incredible woof that was Being the Ricardos, and unpack Campion’s biggest Power of the Dog misstep. (Besides what she said to Venus and Serena Williams at the Critics Choice Awards.)

On our latest episode, Elizabeth talks with choreographer, writer and performance artist @jackferver about their work, which puts words and movement to the shattering of the self that comes with the near-constant existential and cultural threats the world poses to queer people and essentially anyone without power.

Jack’s piercing dance-theater pieces have been called “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms” by the New Yorker, and although pain is at the center of much of Ferver’s work it’s often bitingly funny too. A new performance forthcoming at MASS MoCA is titled, “Is Camp Global Warming and Other Forms of Theatrical Distance for the End of the World,” and incorporates Kellyanne Conway as a character.

If you've seen the now-iconic Starbursts candy commercial from 2008 featuring a character evocative of Little Lord Fauntleroy named “The Little Lad,” that's also Jack Ferver, clapping and exclaiming they're "a little lad who loves berries and cream." The commercial is deeply strange and silly and was otherwise forgotten until Gen Z TikTok users started posting clips of Jack as the Little Lad in 2021, prompting them to make the Little Lad their own viral account.

Our conversation in this episode centers less directly on Jack's experience of their own late father, or difficult childhood growing up in rural Wisconsin, but about what the "Little Lad" that makes adults uneasy with their femmi-ness has come to represent for a new generation of other "half boy and half girls." (Which is the way Jack described themself in kindergarten, and which led to relentless bullying from classmates and society at large.)

Jack, who is a faculty member at Bard, also talks to Elizabeth about the role of the teacher, the loss of would-be mentors to AIDS, the ruinous defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 80s under America's abusive father Ronald Reagan, Tori Amos's "father record," and the importance of learning how to take off your own handcuffs.

Additionally, you can watch Jack’s work at JackFerver.com, find their poetry on Instagram, or see them as the Little Lad on TikTok or YouTube, where a recent piece, Anna, directed by Jack’s husband Jeremy Jacob with cinematography by Daniel Rampulla, features the Little Lad trying desperately to connect with their mother, Anna Wintour.

Welcome to this Valentine's Day edition of Tell Me About Your Father, where Erin and Elizabeth are applying the same razor-sharp critical analysis they've given to television shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos to an extraordinarily horny 30-year-old movie called Damage. It's the story of a family torn apart by a father's affair with his son's girlfriend and is based on the sensational 1991 novel by British author Josephine Hart and directed by Louis Malle, known for films like The Lovers, My Dinner with Andre, and Pretty Baby. This hot, psychosexual trauma romp stars Juliette Binoche, Miranda Richardson, and as the father, EGOT-winner Jeremy Irons currently playing the patriarch, Rodolfo Gucci, in House of Gucci, but also known for such classics as the French Lieutenant's Woman, Reversal of Fortune, and of course for playing Humbert Humbert in the Adrian Lyne version of Lolita. We also discuss the sad childhood of Hart, who died in 2011, Malle's relationship with two of his children, and Irons' idiotic comments about father-and-son relationships in relation to gay marriage. If you liked our episodes dedicated to season six of The Sopranos, you're going to love this feel-bad movie of a father, unwilling and unable to stop destroying his family in the name of sexual obsession. This episode includes audio of sex scenes, a truly insane orgasm from Irons that will haunt you, and mentions disturbing topics like incest and suicide. If those are things you don't want to hear, we totally understand and we'll see you for our next episode. We love you. Happy Valentine's Day.