The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Aunty Donna is an Australian sketch comedy group that includes no aunts and no Donnas, but instead one Mark Samual Bonanno, Broden Kelly and Zachary Ruane. They burst onto the comedy scene Down Under with their first show in 2012 at Melbourne's comedy and fringe festivals. They produced a new show each year since, taking three of them to the other side of the globe at the Edinburgh Fringe, and they've accumulated almost 150,000 YouTube subscribers by the time they sat down with me at ShowBriz Studios, where they're prepared to launch their first North American tour starting in May 2017. So let's get to it!

Eddie Pepitone has been called "The Bitter Buddha," which also is the title of the 2012 documentary about the comedian, a New Yorker by birth who has called Los Angeles his home for the better part of the twenty-first century since landing a role in the hit movie, Old School. You've seen and heard him in many TV shows over the past decade, including The Sarah Silverman Program, Bob's Burgers, Maron, Community and a recurring bit as Conan O'Brien's late-night heckler on Conan. His first Netflix special is In Ruins, and he plays a tortured soul in Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell, which wraps its third season on Adult Swim this May. How close is that to real life? Pepitone sat down with me during the Moontower Comedy Festival in Austin, Texas, to talk about his comedic journey from Chicago City Limits to Hollywood, with a detour into the chaos of politics after the 2016 presidential election, his Twitter feed, and how he can find any serenity today.

So let's get to it!

Joe DeRosa started his comedy career in the urban rooms of Philadelphia, and not long after he moved to New York City he earned a spot touring with Dave Chappelle. With Bill Burr and Robert Kelly,DeRosa co-wrote and starred in a short film called CHEAT, which they also turned into a book. DeRosa also has written for TV shows including The Pete Holmes Show and Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp; and like Burr, he also has ties to the Breaking Bad universe, appearing onscreen as the veterinarian Dr. Caldera on AMC's Better Call Saul. He released three previous comedy albums for Comedy Central records, and his new hour special, which he directed, "You Let Me Down," premiered in February 2017 on Comedy Central. You can hear DeRosa on several different podcasts, most recently engaging in Emotional Hangs with Kurt Braunohler. He and his dog checked in with me from his home in Southern California, so let's get to it!

Americans may know Aziz Ansari, Hari Kondabolu or Russell Peters, but Vir Das is the biggest Indian-born comedian and Bollywood actor back home, where he hosted up to four shows at once on Indian television. Das first came to America for college, and he's back now on an American tour promoting his first Netflix special – TENT – which he filmed in both New Delhi and New York. His 2017 tour also will take him to 20 countries on six continents, including Canada, Australia, Switzerland, the UK, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Belgium, Nigeria and France. Das also curates Weirdass Pajama, India's largest comedy festival, so let's get to it!

Ian Harvie came out to his family three times in Maine, as gay at 19, as transgender at 22, and as a stand-up comedian at 33. Now a trans man in his 40s, Harvie produced one of the best stand-up specials of 2016, Seeso's "May the Best Cock Win." In between, he met Margaret Cho thanks to MySpace, eventually becoming her opening act across North America, taking his own solo shows to the Melbourne comedy festival and San Francisco Sketchfest, starting his own comedy festival back home in Maine, and appearing onscreen in Amazon's award-winning series, Transparent, and ABC's soapy drama, Mistresses. He shares his relentlessly positive outlook with me and lessons he has learned along the way, so let's get to it!

Jimmy Pardo and Matt Belknap are some of the funniest comedy pioneers around. Matt Belknap was an aspiring screenwriter when he launched a message board for Tenacious D fans that became something larger, ASpecialThing.com. Around the same time he decided to start his own record label, he also convinced stand-up comedian and host with the most Jimmy Pardo to launch a weekly podcast. Never Not Funny debuted in the spring of 2006, put up a paywall in 2008 because how were you supposed to make money making podcasts? And in 2015, Never Not Funny joined the Earwolf podcast network. They'd just completed their eighth annual Pardcast-A-Thon raising more than six figures worth in donations to Smile Train when I convinced them to come back into their studio to meet up with me and travel back down memory lane. So let's get to it!

Jay Chandrasekhar has spent the past two decades writing, directing and acting in film and television. With his group Broken Lizard, he has co-written, co-starred and directed their feature films, Super Troopers, Beerfest and Club Dread. He's also directed the big-screen version of Dukes of Hazzard, small-screen episodes of Arrested Development, and appeared in a memorable stunt for Jackass 2. But Chandrasekhar also spent some of his formative years studying improv comedy from the legendary Del Close in Chicago, editing the late Mitch Hedberg's film, Los Enchiladas!, and bringing sketch and improv comedy to New York City when the only other game in town was a plucky group from NYU called The State. Chandrasekhar shares stories about all of that, plus the successful Indiegogo campaign to fund Super Troopers 2, in his new memoir, Mustache Shenanigans, and also in a sit-down with me in the offices of Dutton's Penguin Random House. So let's get to it!

Jim Norton is a best-selling author and comedian you've seen in multiple stand-up specials on HBO and EPIX and in recurring roles on Louie and Inside Amy Schumer. But you've likely also heard him for almost two decades now every morning on the radio -- first as the third mic with Opie and Anthony, then second mic with Opie, and now co-hosting his own SiriusXM program weekday mornings with Sam Roberts. Norton's newest stand-up special, his first for Netflix, is called Mouthful of Shame. Jim sat down with me at the Olive Tree Cafe above the Comedy Cellar to talk about how we all can get over our personal shame, how he was three years sober when he finally felt ready to pursue his comedy dreams, how Jim Florentine, Andrew Dice Clay and others helped him along the way, why he chose to work with Jay Leno, how to stay above the fray when comedians attack other comedians, and having gratitude that you can get Robert De Niro to spank your bare ass. There's a lot to get to, so let's get to it!

Gina Yashere first came to the attention of Americans in 2007 when she appeared on season five of Last Comic Standing (the first international season, which also featured finalists Amy Schumer, Doug Benson, Lavell Crawford and winner Jon Reep). But Yashere already had plenty of successful experience with comedy contests in her native England, a finalist for the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year and then on The Big Big Talent Show. The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Yashere rose from elevator engineer to sketch comedy player on The Lenny Henry Show, to the first and only British comedian to perform on HBO's Def Comedy Jam. She now lives in New York City, where she just released her newest stand-up special, Ticking Boxes, on Seeso, and began work at her new job as a correspondent on The Daily Show on Comedy Central. So let's get to it!

The child of Afghan immigrants, Fahim Anwar grew up in Seattle, went to the University of Washington and got a job at Boeing in aerospace engineering to make his parents proud. But Anwar had a different dream, and no, I don't mean the dancing machine Lance Cantstopolis. He took a job in Long Beach so he could drive to stand-up open mics in Los Angeles, and he was able to quit the day job once gigs on TV shows such as Chuck and Disaster Date proved he had staying power. He's also performed on Conan, Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Carmichael Show, @midnight, and the movie Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. His first one-hour special, There's No Business Like Show Business, is out now on Seeso. Well, there's no place to discuss the comedy business quite like the basement of The Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, where Anwar and I could catch up and make sense of it all, so let's get to it!