Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2: So I made a bet with a gentleman by the
Speaker 2: name of Jalen Bronson. He's a basketball player for the
Speaker 2: we call them the New York Knickerbockers. He's a point
Speaker 2: guard for our New York nicker Barers. He and I
Speaker 2: made a bet about two months ago. His bet was,
Speaker 2: if the New York Giants lose to the Philadelphia Eagles
Speaker 2: in the regular season, I have to wear a Saquon
Speaker 2: Barkley Eagles jersey to Madison Square Garden. I accepted this bet,
Speaker 2: even though this bet is in inevitability, like the Giants suck,
Speaker 2: Like the Giants won three games this year, and the
Speaker 2: Eagles are in the Super Bowl. And that was It's
Speaker 2: not like that surprised me. It didn't sneak up on me.
Speaker 2: Like when he asked me. I was thinking in my head, like,
Speaker 2: but the Giants suck. But I didn't say, like, give
Speaker 2: me points. I just went like ooky. And so Saturday night,
Speaker 2: this Saturday night, I went to the Knicks game in
Speaker 2: a Saquon Barkley Eagles jersey and an Eagles bucket hat.
Speaker 2: And I was in my home arena booed relentlessly and
Speaker 2: by the way, like not just in the arena, on
Speaker 2: the street, like walking by pretzel guys who were like
Speaker 2: you chuck. So that was my weekend. So good luck
Speaker 2: in the super Bowl.
Speaker 3: Oh question over the hand back? Yeah, over name.
Speaker 4: Yeah, how did you find your interview character? Some guy
Speaker 4: just like like skid on the floor when you want
Speaker 4: to sing.
Speaker 3: It what you say?
Speaker 5: Oh, this never.
Speaker 3: Happens by all. So I just walked backstage. I'll speak
Speaker 3: loudly because I'm not where the might know.
Speaker 1: But they said that you're very excited today because today
Speaker 1: you just found out that you would become an American citizen.
Speaker 3: That's alive.
Speaker 4: That's all right, that's a crazy it's a crazy day.
Speaker 3: That's about that.
Speaker 5: You.
Speaker 3: That's good that the best, right.
Speaker 4: Worst interview ever just wouldn't leave. Yeah, it's a crazy
Speaker 4: experience to become a US is on the same day
Speaker 4: you're suposed to interview Bill Murray. So I guess that's
Speaker 4: a it's been a long day. I had to go
Speaker 4: for an interview. They asked you like a hundred questions.
Speaker 4: It's questions which I bet none of you could find answer.
Speaker 4: And I have to memorize how many colonies there were
Speaker 4: and there was like a state and who's the president
Speaker 4: right now? It was very difficult.
Speaker 2: Now I'm going to bring out somebody right now who
Speaker 2: has also been through a lot. He is a correspondent
Speaker 2: on the show. But he hurt his foot. Yeah, he
Speaker 2: heard his his fife. He tripped on a curb. So
Speaker 2: I'm going to bring him out now, very slowly, but
Speaker 2: I want you to give him encouragement. Michael Consto ladies
Speaker 2: and gentlemen.
Speaker 5: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, all right, hold on, you want
Speaker 5: to see.
Speaker 2: Here's my favorite thing about this. His crutches are my height.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you what I mean.
Speaker 2: How are you feeling?
Speaker 3: I really did a number on my ankle?
Speaker 2: Do you want to tell the story? So can I?
Speaker 2: Can I tell? Michael was like an actual, like real
Speaker 2: kind of world class athlete, to be honest, like it's
Speaker 2: kind of unusual for comedy, Like he has a functioning
Speaker 2: body and face.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: So when he came in, I thought this was Michael
Speaker 2: was like a world class tennis player, and so I
Speaker 2: thought it was that. Yeah, and it was. I fell
Speaker 2: off a curb.
Speaker 6: My wife and four year old went skiing. I was
Speaker 6: in charge of the two year old, so I took
Speaker 6: her to a water park. No one else got injured
Speaker 6: except for me. I was the only one not doing anything,
Speaker 6: and I fell on a curb.
Speaker 3: And I'm at that age, John, people.
Speaker 2: Were at the age where if I had fallen on
Speaker 2: a curb, I would no longer be working in show business.
Speaker 3: Well and also selfishly, people came over to check on me.
Speaker 6: I thought, they're really checking on my child. So you
Speaker 6: had your child, you had my child with me and
Speaker 6: she was she was crying, but she was more crying
Speaker 6: like how did you fall on the curb?
Speaker 2: Anyways, it was a cry of disappointment. You you're okay now?
Speaker 3: So are you x rayed? A broken not x rayed?
Speaker 3: I know, super swollen. I also have to host this week.
Speaker 6: And I just I get annoyed that you get so
Speaker 6: much attention on Mondays.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to hurt myself.
Speaker 6: But you you played collegiate soccer.
Speaker 2: I did play collegiate tccer, but I will not to
Speaker 2: be self effacing. It was in the eighties when talcer,
Speaker 2: I mean the level we could still use our hands.
Speaker 2: It was really at that point in American talcer was
Speaker 2: more like elevated kickball. What made you want to do
Speaker 2: any entertainment, at least TV.
Speaker 6: Well, there's like the bullshit answer of you know, it's
Speaker 6: important to question societal's rules, And there's the real answer,
Speaker 6: which is I'm the youngest of four kids. I'm still
Speaker 6: trying to get my parents' attention. My mom tells the
Speaker 6: story that we would sit at this dinner table in
Speaker 6: Michigan and when the sun would go down this the
Speaker 6: glass door would become reflective and I could never sit
Speaker 6: in this one seat because I would just stare at
Speaker 6: myself the whole time, like and I was like, well, yeah,
Speaker 6: that's because you guys never looked at me, so I
Speaker 6: had to stare at myself.
Speaker 3: I love comedy. Holy shit, do I love comedy. We
Speaker 3: get to make people laugh.
Speaker 6: Once your guard is down, we can maybe sneak an
Speaker 6: important message in maybe not. It feels good to laugh
Speaker 6: for once you feel present moment when you're laughing. There's
Speaker 6: very few rules in comedy. If I say something brilliant,
Speaker 6: it's like, holy shit, he's an excellent journalist.
Speaker 3: If I say something stupid, it's like relax. I'm a comedian.
Speaker 3: It's like.
Speaker 6: It's amazing that people get mad when comedians say things
Speaker 6: that are truthful and not as mad when politicians do.
Speaker 6: This is just such a wonderful I grew up in
Speaker 6: an Annabur, Michigan, which is a wonderful Midwest town of
Speaker 6: sensibilities of both sides, very educated, and I just think
Speaker 6: it just fits perfectly for me, and I'm thankful for that,
Speaker 6: and also how I ended up here. Holy shit, this
Speaker 6: is like there's very there's very few places like this
Speaker 6: of late night.
Speaker 3: I told you when we first met, we came in today.
Speaker 3: There's no show. There's no show.
Speaker 6: There's a blinking cursor on a blank computer, and we
Speaker 6: create the show.
Speaker 3: We meaning me, I write the show. No, there's two.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of people. But it's very fun.
Speaker 6: And here's the thing it's also fun is that no
Speaker 6: matter how today went, tomorrow there's a show too.
Speaker 3: So we'll be back.
Speaker 2: Because we've already paid for him with our somebody. I'll
Speaker 2: keep going to the hospitals. You know, it's important to
Speaker 2: remember who the real heroes are. So my favorite thing
Speaker 2: out of all that sort of Indy five hundred pit
Speaker 2: stop trying to keep the car on the road was
Speaker 2: and I'm not even sure where who said it, but
Speaker 2: they just go you want some duct tape on that
Speaker 2: old electricians, old electricians trick. I'm like sure. For those
Speaker 2: of you who watched the show for many, many years,
Speaker 2: you will know. This is the second time that I
Speaker 2: have going for physical comedy cut myself to the point
Speaker 2: right in its stitches. When did we do it? The
Speaker 2: last time? It was a Marguerita blender with me and
Speaker 2: Oliver and I hit it down and like just drew
Speaker 2: blood and Oliver couldn't have been happier. I've never seen
Speaker 2: anything like it. He sat there gleefully watching and that
Speaker 2: was more of an artery. I was just spurting everywhere.
Speaker 2: And at one point he yells at me, it's just
Speaker 2: a flesh wound.
Speaker 3: Stop making such a big deal of it.
Speaker 2: That's not good. I'm probably gonna need to go to
Speaker 2: the hospital.
Speaker 7: And as for you, Stuart, and you're visibly visibly injured hand.
Speaker 7: That's a genuine problem. That's a genuine problem. That's that's yep.
Speaker 2: We better hard up this because I am bleeding out.
Speaker 7: Mother John, let's it toss it in he can, he
Speaker 7: can swap himself down. You're fine, You're fine.
Speaker 2: Thank you all very much. Fire. There's really there's no
Speaker 2: dignified way to do this really is there? Oh and
Speaker 2: by the way, the story that I'm going to tell
Speaker 2: my wife and children when I get home very different
Speaker 2: than the one that.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 2: I was on fifty falf intention an old woman being
Speaker 2: hounded by thugs and Bulgarians. I swung my fist.
Speaker 8: Was there ever a moment of empathy did stuck out
Speaker 8: with you at one of those rallies? A moment of
Speaker 8: empathy that stuck out with me?
Speaker 4: Something like?
Speaker 8: No, that is a good question. I you know what,
Speaker 8: there is one of the last route, one of the
Speaker 8: well not even like this last election cycle. I went
Speaker 8: to a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and it was
Speaker 8: terrible weather and we were talking to people in the morning,
Speaker 8: and as I was talking to people, there's this guy
Speaker 8: who dresses in a brick suit suit. It's a bespoke
Speaker 8: suit that looks like Trump's wall, and he has a
Speaker 8: handlebar mustache and he dresses like the wall. And he's
Speaker 8: one of the first people in line, and Trump often
Speaker 8: brings him up on stage, so he's a mini celebrity there.
Speaker 8: And he started hounding us at this rally, and he
Speaker 8: was streaming and he was saying, fuck these guys. Don't
Speaker 8: talk to these guys. These guys are fake news. And
Speaker 8: to be fair, he's right, but he sort of trolled
Speaker 8: us for hours that day. He literally took out a
Speaker 8: phone and he stuck it into a wall. He's obsessed
Speaker 8: with wolves to try to capture something. Our crew was
Speaker 8: on a smoke break and he wanted to try to
Speaker 8: capture something to get them in trouble. And it was
Speaker 8: a long, hellish day of filming, and it was a snowstorm,
Speaker 8: and so we rushed to the airport and we got
Speaker 8: snowed into Green Bay, Wisconsin for the night because we
Speaker 8: usually try to leave, and so we stay in Green Bay.
Speaker 8: And the next day we all leave on different flights
Speaker 8: and I go to the airport alone and I show
Speaker 8: up at the airport and my flight is delayed three
Speaker 8: and a half hours, and who is there but bricksuit man.
Speaker 8: And this is the Green Bay Airport, so nobody else
Speaker 8: is there. And he looks at me and he says,
Speaker 8: do you want to talk? And obviously I'm like, no,
Speaker 8: I don't want to talk. This is a nightmare. And
Speaker 8: this is before I'm with four security guards and real talk.
Speaker 8: Security protocol has changed since the story but I sat
Speaker 8: down with him, and for the first half hour, I'll
Speaker 8: sort of feeling each other out. But then once we
Speaker 8: got past this fear one his fear that like I
Speaker 8: got a camera crew trying to catch him, and my
Speaker 8: fear that he's trying to have some sort of gotcha
Speaker 8: moment me as well, we started talking about shit. I
Speaker 8: started to learn about him, he started to learn about me.
Speaker 8: I asked him about things that I thought were bs
Speaker 8: about Donald Trump. He was open and vulnerable things and
Speaker 8: the weaknesses he saw in Donald Trump. Like there wasn't
Speaker 8: a middle ground that we found, but there was a
Speaker 8: softening in those relations. And I'd like to tell you
Speaker 8: that like bricksuit guy was crazy and he's not. He
Speaker 8: was a smart guy. He was an ideological guy. He
Speaker 8: was a conservative guy, more libertarian, loved to be a
Speaker 8: shit poster on the internet, but he wasn't an idiot.
Speaker 8: We talked for three and a half hours, and as
Speaker 8: we walk we literally get on the plane. We walk,
Speaker 8: We're talking all the way up to get on the
Speaker 8: plane and I show my tickets to the ticket taker
Speaker 8: and she goes, oh, you're in an egxer row, And
Speaker 8: I'm like, oh, and I'm like, she says, do you
Speaker 8: accept the responsibilities of being the EXI row, and I say, yes,
Speaker 8: I do. And then I turned to Bricksuitka and I say,
Speaker 8: I hope this freaks you out, and then you know
Speaker 8: what happens. He laughs, And to me, that is that
Speaker 8: is the whole thing. Like he wasn't offended, he didn't
Speaker 8: take it personally. He found humor in that moment. And
Speaker 8: I'm like, I find optimism in that. I don't know
Speaker 8: how to recreate three and a half hours in a
Speaker 8: Green Bay airport with a nemesis of yours, but I
Speaker 8: know that, like there's a softening when you remove the cameras,
Speaker 8: when you move the fear that this conversation isn't just
Speaker 8: transaction for a gotcha moment, but an actual conversation about
Speaker 8: the things that you care about and things you're unsure about.
Speaker 8: I think that kind of vulnerability, that kind of uncertainty,
Speaker 8: is paramount in any kind of situation that you you
Speaker 8: hope to find any kind of humanity or common ground,
Speaker 8: And so I think that is there. I don't. I
Speaker 8: think we live in a media environment that cultivates that situation,
Speaker 8: but I think we are humans that necessitate it, and
Speaker 8: so that has not been erased by Donald Trump, but
Speaker 8: it has been pushed to the sides of the conversation.
Speaker 8: And so if we can find a way to allow
Speaker 8: that conversation to not exist only on the periphery, but
Speaker 8: somewhere in our own lives, I think we're going to
Speaker 8: get through that cool because of then, Yeah.
Speaker 6: What do you say to your critics are saying that
Speaker 6: you're being white on the fascist message system?
Speaker 2: Oh, I tell my critics, shut up, You're a fascist.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 2: So I do appreciate that because I understand the desire,
Speaker 2: but like I'm very big on and I know it's annoying,
Speaker 2: but specificity and nuance, And I think if you cry
Speaker 2: fascism at every administrative overreach, even the ones that are
Speaker 2: constitutionally okay, you will find yourself out of fascism bullets
Speaker 2: when the time really comes to remind people of because
Speaker 2: you will. I think what the media has done over
Speaker 2: the last ten years is cry wolf to the point
Speaker 2: where they numbed everybody. It was an anesthetic and it
Speaker 2: got to where what was the thing they litigated throughout
Speaker 2: this campaign? He's a fascist, He's a terrible person. Democracy
Speaker 2: is on the ballot. Guess what lost at the bat
Speaker 2: If you told us democracies on the ballot, well, democracy
Speaker 2: got its ass kicked by a majority vote. So I'm
Speaker 2: very cautious about when to know, Like, yeah, hopefully I
Speaker 2: won't do it the night after Crystal knocked. I'll get it. Like,
Speaker 2: but it's like when do you put your dog down?
Speaker 2: Like it's one of those things, like you're not quite sure.
Speaker 2: But I do understand how annoying that is.
Speaker 4: I was just wondering, you know, how do you maintain
Speaker 4: a sense of hope and levity when times.
Speaker 2: How do you keep laughing? Right? How old are you?
Speaker 2: I'm nineteen years old and the world's already beat the
Speaker 2: shit out of here, and that it's always the young
Speaker 2: dudes that are like, I have a quick question. I'm
Speaker 2: nineteen years old when hope is gone, when the darkness
Speaker 2: slowly creeps down. Uh, I'm sixty one, so I'm already
Speaker 2: an injury time Like so I'm I'm I'm good. I'm
Speaker 2: actually weirdly always optimistic.
Speaker 3: We go.
Speaker 2: I think maybe that is the horizon of history. I
Speaker 2: came up at a time in the sixties where we
Speaker 2: had all these great leaders and we killed all of them,
Speaker 2: every single one, and then we went to Vietnam and
Speaker 2: law and then Watergate, like shit was just unraveling. So
Speaker 2: I do think it gives you a sense of oh,
Speaker 2: it's always a mess, like and and what that makes
Speaker 2: you realize is, oh, so it's just it's just that's
Speaker 2: the game. We buckled down. You gotta lunch pail it,
Speaker 2: and you carry through like you're nineteen, like you'll someday
Speaker 2: when you're sixty one and people be saying like, how
Speaker 2: do you maintain optimism and be like, you have no
Speaker 2: idea what it was like when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: Like you will be that guy to be able to say, like,
Speaker 2: you think it bad now and obviously, look it is.
Speaker 2: These are tenuous times and maybe even we'll talk a
Speaker 2: little bit about that on the program, and I I'm
Speaker 2: a terrible times good thing, no, But because part of
Speaker 2: the issue is, like you just want someone to talk
Speaker 2: to you like you're a human, like you're an adult,
Speaker 2: not like they're like it's a work, not like it's
Speaker 2: they're they're spinning you or any of those. That's my
Speaker 2: biggest complaint with all of this. Nobody expects perfection. Everybody
Speaker 2: knows that the obstacles and all the things that are
Speaker 2: going to be thrown in front of us are going
Speaker 2: to be arduous. That's life, Like, it's life is hard,
Speaker 2: you know, but you just want someone to not bullshit
Speaker 2: you when what you know, you see and hear is
Speaker 2: what you've see. Like, that's all that that you can
Speaker 2: really do. But how do you maintain So you're nineteen?
Speaker 2: So are your friends optimistic or pessimistic? Or do they
Speaker 2: not talk about it? Or are they just on discord
Speaker 2: being racist? What is going on?
Speaker 5: God?
Speaker 3: I mean, I think a lot of people are pessimistic.
Speaker 3: I mean, how do I maintain optimism?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 3: I try to laugh. I watched the Daily Show.
Speaker 2: You Yeah, so here's the only thing I would say.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you do that. But really we write it
Speaker 2: for eight year olds, so nineteen is a little above
Speaker 2: our pay grade.
Speaker 5: But is it? I do?
Speaker 2: I do remember nineteen? Like that age, there is a
Speaker 2: certain existential anxiety that creeps in because the world does listen.
Speaker 2: It feels out of control. You probably know more about
Speaker 2: it now than we did when I think one of
Speaker 2: the things that's probably harder for kids now is you
Speaker 2: are the amount of information that you absorb is probably,
Speaker 2: but I would imagine hopefully your brains will evolve to
Speaker 2: you know, because when I was a kid, like TV
Speaker 2: happened and everybody's like, that will run, don't sit in
Speaker 2: front of the TV and eat and just watch TV.
Speaker 2: And now you'd be so happy if your children would
Speaker 2: do that, Like you'd just be like, don't send pictures
Speaker 2: of your dick to people like.
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