Parenting is a Joke

You know when you talk to your friends about your childhood and end it by saying, "But look at us, we're fine!" Here's my question: Are we fine? Because we're sitting here doused in CBD oil under a weighted blanket recording a podcast called Parenting is a Joke. Each week, host and standup Ophira Eisenberg talks to a different comedian about their career and their kids. Conversations tackle the tooth fairy, eating sticks, summer camp anxiety, the hidden horrors of childbirth, and the obvious horrors of our own childhoods. We celebrate the absurdity of shuffling a career with raising a kid, and highlight less traditional parenthood journeys, all while relishing in the fact that no one knows what they're doing, but we're all trying! Sometimes even our best. New episodes every Tuesday. New Season October 1st.

Parenting is a Joke is a comedy podcast hosted by Ophira Eisenberg, with 258 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Ophira Eisenberg hosts Parenting is a Joke, a comedy show with 258 episodes published.

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  Episode #505

  Jena Friedman Knows Grief is a Real Motherf*ker

  Oct 6, 202636 minS5

  Jena Friedman returns to Parenting Is a Joke with a now four-year-old, a new solo show called Motherf*cker, and a lot to say about what happens when motherhood, grief, politics, and a creative career start occupying the same space. She and host Ophira Eisenberg talk about the strange economics of being a working comedian—including Jena’s son looking at her $40 stand-up paycheck and asking, essentially, “That’s all you make?”—as well as the practical reality of getting to Edinburgh for 17 performances while trying not to be away from her child for too long. Jena explains how losing her mother to pancreatic cancer while she was 34 weeks pregnant changed the way she talks to her son about death, including the decision to make mortality less mysterious through conversations, The Lion King, Coco, and Día de los Muertos. She remembers being devastated while her eight-month-old son gently tucked her hair behind her ear, and later records a conversation in which her three-year-old tells her he doesn’t want her to die, listens to her explanation about death, and then immediately announces that he has farted on her knee. The conversation also turns toward the complicated guilt of considering another child, the fact that Jena froze her eggs, and the larger anxiety of raising a kid while worrying about climate change, artificial intelligence, regulation, and a future involving drones and locked bank accounts. That political anxiety feeds directly into Motherf*cker, which Jena describes as using the political comedy she knows how to do as a way to approach the grief she doesn’t know how to do; she also argues that comedy can become more interesting with age because perspective accumulates, illustrated by the brutally specific joke she delivered to younger colleagues grieving Trump’s 2024 election victory: wait until your mom dies. The episode keeps finding that same uneasy intersection of the personal and the political, ending with a shared desire for a mug that simply says, “Don’t talk to me until your mom has also died.” October Shows are in Watertown, SD, Pennsylvania, Niagra Falls, Canada, Washington, DC, Catskill, and NYC Follow Jena Friedman : https://www.instagram.com/jenafriedman Get tickets to her Off-Broadway Show Motherf*cker: https://www.sohoplayhouse.com/see-a-show/jena-friedman-motherfucker See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon Primehttps://www.ophiraeisenberg.com Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Episode #504

  Giving Up Control with Marc Kaye

  Sep 29, 202629 minS5

  In this snack-sized follow-up with host Ophira Eisenberg, comedian and author Marc Kaye digs into the split between fitting in and belonging that gives his essay collection its spine, admitting he's spent a lifetime chasing the former while quietly resenting how much it costs him, a distinction he says reframed the whole book once he stopped blaming other people for his own discomfort. The conversation turns most vivid around "Chance of Showers," the essay Mark almost cut from the manuscript because writing it forced him to relive the five-hour drive dropping his son Elliot off at college in Pittsburgh, where he realized the grief wasn't really about the empty bedroom. It was about his own unlived dreams, the ones he'd been shoving, as his girlfriend puts it, under "the lumpy rug." He walks through the advice he actually gave Elliot before move-in (make the kind of mistakes that become funny stories at 40, not the kind you carry as regret) and his own unfulfilled curiosity about a guided psilocybin retreat, name-checking Michael Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind" and the documentary "Fantastic Fungi" while making clear he wants a real facilitator, not "somebody hanging on South Street." He also traces the origin of his comedy album title, "I'm a Good Dad," back to a running joke with his kids after his own less-than-proud parenting moments, including the story he tells to close the episode, about buying his son a bulk box of Costco condoms before college, only to find it ripped open "like a monkey" on a closet shelf a year later while his own unsuspecting father stood right next to him. September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC Follow Marc Kaye : https://www.instagram.com/awkwardlymarc Buy his book: A Is For Awkward https://www.marckayetoday.com/a-is-for-awkward See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon, Google Play and Apple!https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Episode #503

  Marc Kaye’s Kids are 1 in 8 Million

  Sep 22, 202650 minS5

  Comedian and debut essayist Marc Kaye joins host Ophira Eisenberg mid-vacation, sweat-soaked from a Yellowstone-to-Badlands road trip, to talk about the strange math of raising kids you can't actually engineer — a fitting theme from a guy with a mechanical engineering-turned-raver son and a musical-theater daughter now working inside the Bureau of Prisons at Fort Dix. Mark, who spent a year teaching biology in Camden through Teach for America, walks through the genetics lesson that quietly reordered his whole parenting philosophy: two parents, 23 chromosome pairs each, roughly eight million possible combinations before you even get to eye color, proof, he argues, that most of what parents take credit for was never in their hands to begin with. That idea threads into two very different formative stories: his post-college stint as a Big Brother paired with a kid with "violent tendencies" (a 138-pound psychology grad's crash course in letting go of outcomes), and the moment his son, mid-meltdown, declared the family dog-attacked stuffed animal "Bob is blind" — a small domestic crisis Mark still can't quite explain his own panic over. He and Ophira also dig into growing up with older, more rigid parents shaped by World War II, DIY households versus outsourced adulthood, and Mark's theory, half joke, half warning, that couples should have to do a Catholic-style pre-Cana before marriage, since nothing prepares you for becoming "a different person" alongside another one under exhaustion and diapers. Mark's new essay collection, "A Is for Awkward and Other Reflections on Belonging," and his comedy album "I'm a Good Dad" both hover in the background of a conversation that keeps circling back to one blunt, useful phrase he uses often with his now-grown kids: you get what you get, and you don't get upset. September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC Follow Marc Kaye : https://www.instagram.com/awkwardlymarc Buy his book: A Is For Awkward https://www.marckayetoday.com/a-is-for-awkward See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” is AVAILABLE on Amazon, Google Play and Apple!https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com Listen to it as an Album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Episode #502

  Sona Movesesian is the World’s Best Mom

  Sep 15, 202634 minS5

  In this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg talks with Sona Movsesian, author of The World’s Worst Mom and The World’s Worst Assistant and co-host of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, about the strange overlap between parenting, creative work, anxiety, and the relentless business of keeping two five-year-old boys alive. Sona explains why she and her husband gave their twins the reassuringly ordinary names Charles and Michael—despite her Armenian family background and the guilt she still feels about not choosing more traditional names—and how giving them Armenian middle names became her compromise with her ancestors. She also describes writing The World’s Worst Mom while her sons were growing from three to five, which meant the book itself changed as the children did; one chapter, in which her subconscious addresses her, was so aggressively self-critical that her friend Nora told her to be nicer to herself, while Sona’s husband illustrated the transformation from her pre-kids “flower child” subconscious into something resembling the blob from The Substance. The conversation takes a much heavier turn when Sona recounts losing her Altadena home in a wildfire when the twins were three and a half, choosing not to tell them that their house had burned because she wanted home to feel permanent and safe, even as the adults dealt with their own trauma and the long process of rebuilding. There is dark comedy amid the loss—Sona is genuinely relieved that the fire eliminated their old diaper genie and some terrible shirts—but the things that mattered most to her children survived: the stuffed animals they had slept with since infancy. That instinct to protect children from adult fear runs through the episode, including Sona’s description of fertility treatment and pregnancy with twins, when she refused to “celebrate before you win the game” and kept baby preparations deliberately minimal until her sons were safely in her arms. Parenting then becomes an exercise in sleep-deprived consumerism as she recalls ordering every vibrating toy, pillow, sound machine, and supposed sleep solution she could find online when one twin would not sleep, including a $50 weighted suit that made the baby look like a gingerbread cookie and that he absolutely hated. The twins’ radically different personalities also shape the comedy: one stays relatively close while the other is a self-described nomad who wanders off, including at Disneyland and at a botanical garden, where Sona eventually received a call from a security guard after her son used the phone number she had taught him. As the boys prepare for school, Sona admits that having twins gives her a built-in advantage because each child has the other as a familiar face, even though one of them has melted down at virtually every camp or first day of school, dramatically reaching a hand toward her and yelling “Mama” while she has to walk away. The episode ultimately connects Sona’s creative career to the same instinct that drives her parenting: anticipating needs, managing logistics, and accepting that perfection is not the assignment, a lesson perfectly embodied by her fantasy for a third book, The World’s Worst Beach House Owner, followed by her modest new standard for success—buying another house that simply doesn’t burn down. September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC Follow Sona Movsesian : https://www.instagram.com/sonamov Buy her book: The World’s Worst Mom: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/785801/the-worlds-worst-mom-by-sona-movsesian/ See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” as an ALBUM is available now https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  Episode #501

  Sona Movsesian: Two Moms, One Computer Connection

  Sep 8, 202637 minS5

  In the Season 5 premiere of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg talks with Sona Movsesian—co-host of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, former longtime Conan O’Brien assistant, and author of The World’s Worst Mom—about becoming a mother without ever having pictured herself as one, and about building a creative career around the unpredictable logistics of raising children. Their conversation begins with a fitting technological disaster: the two women spend 45 minutes switching laptops, sign-ins, servers, and microphones before finally getting the connection to work, with Sona appearing on video as a “foreheadless Sona” because neither wants to risk touching anything that might break the internet again. From there, Sona describes life with her five-year-old twins, Charlie and Mikey, and the unusual presence of her friend Brad, a comedian and writer who moonlights as their nanny and has become “Uncle” Brad to the boys. She recalls her pre-parenthood life as a five-a.m. party girl who kept toothpaste, deodorant, makeup, and a change of clothes ready for whatever morning she happened to wake up in, then explains how meeting her husband made her want “humans that are the combination of the two of us.” The discussion turns to fertility, the expectation that conception should simply happen, and the strange emotional math of discovering how common fertility treatments and miscarriage actually are; Sona jokes that she had taken the morning-after pill repeatedly before realizing she might have saved herself the money, while Eisenberg observes that if she had been slightly less responsible in high school, she might already have had a child in college. Sona also describes becoming pregnant with twins through IVF at 38, abandoning any romantic notion of childbirth once her doctors strongly recommended a C-section, and declaring, in effect, that after hormone injections and having her babies “manufactured,” she was perfectly happy to skip the water breaking and get everyone out safely. One of the episode’s most striking creative-life intersections comes when Sona remembers that Conan’s final late-night show fell exactly one week before her scheduled C-section: she hoped the boys would stay put long enough for her to attend, and they did, leaving her so pregnant at the after-party that several people had to help her stand up from a chair. Three days before the twins were born, her 96-year-old grandfather died, making the end of Conan’s show, the end of Sona’s role as his day-to-day assistant, her grandfather’s death, and the birth of her sons feel like an extraordinary cluster of endings and beginnings. The two comedians then make the surprisingly persuasive case that years of assisting Conan prepared Sona for motherhood, since anticipating where a 55-year-old boss will need to sit, eat, change clothes, find a bathroom, and get from one place to another is not so different from managing two five-year-olds—except, as Sona points out, she can finally prioritize the twins instead. The episode closes on the tension between competence and creative ambition: Sona jokes that if she had treated Conan the way she now manages her sons, she would have been the greatest assistant imaginable, but that this hard-won organizational skill came too late to help her write her first book while working for him. Her twins holding on long enough for her to watch Conan’s final show—and the image of multiple people physically lifting her out of a chair afterward—becomes the episode’s perfect collision of parenting, work, timing, and the absurd logistics of trying to do everything at once. September Shows are in Toronto, Canada, Cleveland & Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, MO, Saint Paul, MN, NYC Follow Sona Movsesian : https://www.instagram.com/sonamov Buy her book: The World’s Worst Mom: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/785801/the-worlds-worst-mom-by-sona-movsesian/ See Ophira LIVE: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/events/ Check out my NEW Comedy Special “I Used to Be Nicer” as an ALBUM is available now https://open.spotify.com/album/1rHqPoBYc78gzMnCrCFoZy SUBSCRIBE so you never miss O thing: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/sign-up Follow PIAJ:  https://www.instagram.com/parentingisajoke/ https://parentingisajoke.substack.com/   Follow Ophira: https://www.instagram.com/ophirae/ https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg/ https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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