This Is Your Afterlife

Sean Morrow (Senior Writer, More Perfect Union) wrote the Eli Lilly tweet. You know, "We are excited to announce insulin is free now"? As a type 1 diabetic grateful for his service, I wanted to learn more about the man behind the mischief.

Content warning: depression, Nothing, Pete Campbell, not introspective enough, is "SNL" the New York Times of comedy?

Patreon supporters make This Is Your Afterlife possible and get awesome bonus episodes. Become an Afterhead at patreon.com/davemaher.

Follow Sean on Twitter: @snmrrw

Check out his work at More Perfect Union too!

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs. And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

Finally, if you want me to launch this new newsletter, Surrounded by Blankets: An Independent Podcast Review, you can subscribe here.

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / James Blackshaw: "The Cloud of Unknowing" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"

"If you're not having fun, you're the asshole," is a Susan Messing joint. It's a zen koan of a piece of comedy, art, and life advice that I took issue with back in my improv days. The hella influential improviser and teacher shares why she said it, her own issues with it, and ideas about death, learning what you actually want, a motorcycle ride with her dad, Neptune Society, and being choke fucked with love by a redwood tree.

Content warning: cancer, stroke, improv comedy.

Patreon supporters make This Is Your Afterlife possible and get awesome bonus episodes. Become an Afterhead at patreon.com/davemaher.

Susan is teaching a 5-day improv intensive with Rachael Mason at iO Chicago December 12-16, which you can sign up for here.

Follow Susan on Instagram: @susanalicemessing

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs. And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / James Blackshaw: "The Cloud of Unknowing" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"

We need good comedy criticism, and Madeline Lane-McKinley's new book, Comedy Against Work, assesses comedy not just as an art form but as a way of envisioning utopia. She examines our relationship to work and the kinds of futures we imagine through the lens of comedy on stage and TV.

In this episode, she shares herself as well as her ideas. She also tells me what to do for my next show.

Content warning: suicide, childbirth, constipation, the opposite of constipation, childhood abuse, misogyny, Blob.

Patreon supporters make This Is Your Afterlife possible and get awesome bonus episodes. Become an Afterhead at patreon.com/davemaher.

Buy Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times, and read more of Madeline's work in Blind Field Journal.

Follow Madeline on Twitter: @la_louve_rouge_

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs. And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / James Blackshaw: "The Cloud of Unknowing" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"

Franco Danger is a superb standup I met when he opened for Chris Gethard, and we immediately hit it off. That energy—and a jaw-dropping Relive 1 Memory segment—translates into one of the funniest conversations ever on the podcast.

Content warning: anxiety, Catholic guilt, Edinburgh Fringe, food poisoning, God is a single dad, multiverse reincarnation.

R.I.P. Mimi Parker of Low. Revisit my conversation with Mimi and her husband/bandmate Alan Sparhawk here.

Patreon supporters make This Is Your Afterlife possible and get awesome bonus episodes. Become an Afterhead at patreon.com/davemaher.

Follow Franco on Instagram: @franco_danger

Check him out on Twitch and YouTube at @francodanger

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs. And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / James Blackshaw: "The Cloud of Unknowing" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"

Tiffany Topol's debut album, Sophomore Effort, is a bubbly, swooning, nostalgic pop record years in the making. I'm so happy she came on this show to share her anxieties about death and have a full-on psychological epiphany.

Content warning: seeing NSYNC live as a 14-year-old, sensory deprivation chamber, friend's death, crying to Beyonce's Lemonade, how reliable is your memory?

Patreon supporters make This Is Your Afterlife possible and get awesome bonus episodes. Become an Afterhead at patreon.com/davemaher.

Listen to Tiffany's album, Sophomore Effort!

Follow her on Instagram and TikTok at @tifftopol.

On/after November 11 (I say November 4 in the intro, don't crucify me!), check out the new Youth in a Roman Field album Tiffany plays on, Get Caught Trying.

Catch her live with Youth in a Roman Field at Mercury Lounge in New York City on December 1.

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs! And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / James Blackshaw: "The Cloud of Unknowing" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"

Cannibalism? Addiction? Colonialism, patriotism, capitalism? What is the Windigo?! Abolitionist organizer and previous guest Bettina Johnson and I get to the bottom of Ravenous (1999) on this edition of This Is Your SLASHERLIFE.

Content warning: blood, guts, skeletons, eating people, tricksterism, telling time by the moon, overblown queer readings of this movie, did Dave condescend to the Indigenous painting?

Show your love for This Is Your Afterlife at patreon.com/davemaher. Subscribers get extended episodes, aftershows and Afterlife Movie Club episodes, and shoutouts in future episodes.

Read Braiding Sweetgrass, and check out Liberation Library, an organization Bettina co-founded that provides books to incarcerated youth.

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs! And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Thanks to Associate Producer Sam Welbel!

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"

All that shimmers is... whatever The Shimmer is. I'm talking Annihilation (2018) on this edition of This Is Your SLASHERLIFE with previous guest Oui Ennui, the brilliant and thought-provoking experimental musician.

Content warning: bad words, magic, the gimp, is it COVID?, Isaac Mizrahi & Lena Dunham.

Show your love for This Is Your Afterlife at patreon.com/davemaher. Subscribers get extended episodes, aftershows and Afterlife Movie Club episodes, and shoutouts in future episodes.

Listen to Oui Ennui's music!

Thanks to Associate Producer Sam Welbel!

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs! And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Thanks to Associate Producer Sam Welbel!

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"

John Waters' Serial Mom is the horror-adjacent movie up for discussion in this edition of This Is Your SLASHERLIFE, with previous guests Annie Donley and Jo Scott, cohosts of the Mom Stomp podcast.

Content warning: motherhood, the MNU (Mom Nutting Universe), unconditional family support, useless cops.

Show your love for This Is Your Afterlife at patreon.com/davemaher. Subscribers get extended episodes, aftershows and Afterlife Movie Club episodes, and shoutouts in future episodes.

Listen to Mom Stomp!

Follow Mom Stomp on Instagram: @momstomppodcast

Thanks to Associate Producer Sam Welbel!

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs! And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Thanks to Associate Producer Sam Welbel!

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"

Johanna Isaacson wrote the freakin' book on The Babadook. It's called Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror, and it's about a bunch of other horror movies too. She kicks off This Is Your Afterlife's FIRST EVER themed series, a run of four episodes in October about horror movies I'm calling This Is Your SLASHERLIFE.

First, I talk to Jo about standard This Is Your Afterlife stuff—hell, the afterlife, memories, her "coma" moment—and then we kick off the SLASHERLIFE series with an in-depth discussion of The Babadook! Hopefully it goes without saying, but there are gonna be spoilers up and down this series.

Content warning: woo woo Marxism, communal luxury, the "manosphere," smoking a bunch of hash, Arches National Park, the grotesque feminine.

Show your love for This Is Your Afterlife at patreon.com/davemaher. Here are reasons it is good:

• Subscribers get extended episodes, aftershows, and shoutouts in future episodes.
• It's the same cost as a nice coffee or a cheap meal.
• You're part of making independent art outside of corporate backing.
• I need literal insulin.

Buy and read Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror!

Catch Johanna live at The Hollywood Theatre in Portland, OR speaking before a screening of The Babadook on October 23 and before a screening of It Follows on October 30 in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater.

Read more of her work at Blind Field Journal: blindfieldjournal.com.

Join her on Facebook in the group she runs, Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films.

Follow Johanna on Twitter: @StepfordDotter

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs! And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Thanks to new Associate Producer Sam Welbel!

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / James Blackshaw: "The Cloud of Unknowing" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"

One of the most unique episodes yet! Jon Matteson (StarKid Productions) comes on the show with a mission: to make sense of a spiritual experience he had as a child. Once he introduces the experience, I spend the rest of the episode helping him chip away at its meaning.

Content warning: Catholicism, Kansas, terrible choirs, beautiful music.

Show your love for This Is Your Afterlife at patreon.com/davemaher. Here are reasons it is good:

• Subscribers get extended episodes, aftershows, and shoutouts in future episodes.
• It's the same cost as a nice coffee or a cheap meal.
• You're part of making independent art outside of corporate backing.
• I need literal insulin.

Follow Jon: @jon.matteson on Instagram and TikTok, @jonmatteson on Twitter and Twitch, where you can watch him play video games.

Leave me a voicemail to play on the show: (313) MIST-URA (647-8872).

Subscribe to my newsletter, Definitive Answers, for weekly personal and culture essays, plus music recs! And follow me @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram.

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Transcript: This Is Your Afterlife on Podscribe

Music = Future: "Use Me" / Johnnie Frierson: "Miracles"