Plus: His Crazy Car Accident, Comic Books, Letters From Prison, Hegseth, Hampshire College Closing and More!
Comedians are under attack. The MAGA machine has pushed Stephen Colbert off the air, gone after Jimmy Kimmel, and skipped a comedian at the White House Correspondents Dinner for the first time in memory. That’s not an accident — it’s the playbook of every authoritarian regime that ever feared a punchline. Paul Rieckhoff sits down with his old college friend, beloved comedian and actor Eugene Mirman — Bob’s Burgers, Flight of the Conchords, and the new special Here Comes the Whimsy — for a candid, funny, and unexpectedly moving conversation about what it means to make people laugh while the rigged two-party system burns and Trump and the executive branch goes all gas, no brakes.
Eugene, a refugee from a genuinely authoritarian country, doesn’t sugarcoat it: Trump’s instincts are fascist, the cruelty is the point, and the use of state power to threaten billion-dollar companies into firing comedians is straight out of the thug-regime handbook. But he also refuses nihilism — America, he argues, is too big and too used to freedom to be wholly silenced, and that’s exactly why the work of comedians, podcasters, and independent voices matters right now. Along the way the two cover Eugene’s harrowing New Hampshire car crash and rescue, the absurd unqualified men running the Pentagon and the VP’s office, comic books as hopeful dystopia, and why the angry middle should keep laughing — and keep showing up.
Eugene Mirman is one of the most respected comedic voices of his generation. A refugee from the former Soviet Union, he is best known as the voice of Gene Belcher on Bob’s Burgers and as the landlord on Flight of the Conchords, and was a regular on Adult Swim’s Delocated. He co-founded the Pretty Good Friends comedy company in the basement of Brooklyn’s Union Hall, has opened for The Shins, Modest Mouse, Yo La Tengo, Gogol Bordello, and Cake, and was named best New York City comedian by The Village Voice. A graduate of Hampshire College — where he designed his own major in comedy and delivered a one-hour stand-up set as his thesis — his latest special is Here Comes the Whimsy.
