『Parenting is a Joke』のカバーアート

Parenting is a Joke

Parenting is a Joke

著者： Ophira Eisenberg
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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.2024 © Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent 人間関係 子育て
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  • Sona Movesesian is the World’s Best Mom

    Sona Movesesian is the World’s Best Mom
    2026/09/15
    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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    34 分
  • Sona Movsesian: Two Moms, One Computer Connection

    Sona Movsesian: Two Moms, One Computer Connection
    2026/09/08
    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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    37 分
  • Adam Cayton-Holland Is On the Big Screen

    Adam Cayton-Holland Is On the Big Screen
    2026/09/01
    Host Ophira Eisenberg brings back this favorite episode with Adam Cayton-Holland in celebration of his new film See You When I See You recently featured at the Sundance Film Festival, the Nantucket Film Festival, and more. They talk about the peculiar math of building a creative life around two young children, five-year-old Malcolm and a two-year-old, and how becoming a parent turned the ambitious comedian who once imagined “conquering the world” into someone who now negotiates club weekends down to the hour so he can catch the first flight home. His new special Wallpaper gets its title from his observation that once you have kids, you become the supporting character in your own life, and he admits that dialing back his career was less a sacrifice than a necessary recognition that his children changed what he wanted from his time; after two days away, he misses his boys enough to optimize every travel itinerary around getting home. That shift extends to his wife, who initially imagined she would be “alpha mom” but discovered she also needed time to be a person outside motherhood, and to the small rituals of being a touring dad, like bringing his wife coffee beans and his sons treats from airports—after learning the hard way that three stuffed animals are considerably less useful to a two-year-old than plane pretzels. The conversation also moves into Cayton-Holland’s history as a Denver comedian who helped build the city’s DIY comedy scene with The Grawlix, his early work as a substitute teacher, and the strange realization that he was good with little kids but terrible with middle schoolers, whom he describes as having adult feelings and no acceptable outlet except cruelty. The emotional center of the episode is his family history and the death of his younger sister Lydia, whose depression, OCD, and suicide forced him to confront his own anxiety and fears about passing mental illness to his children; he talks about EMDR therapy, the recurring traumatic memories he eventually learned to “file away,” and how writing his memoir Tragedy Plus Time gave him a way to tell Lydia’s story with the care he felt it required. Rather than treating comedy as automatic healing, he explains why he initially stopped performing altogether, then eventually returned through a one-man show where audiences understand that the story can be funny without pretending everything is okay. Parenting brings the conversation back to the everyday indignities of raising children, from a five-year-old who threatens to call the police because his mother ran a yellow light to the nightly competition over which parent gets chosen at bedtime, while Cayton-Holland quietly counts his teeth when his mind wanders—and still somehow insists there are 32 of them when he actually has 28. 📍August Shows are in Las Vegas NV, Los Angeles CA, NYC Follow Adam Cayton-Holland: https://www.instagram.com/caytonholland 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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    44 分
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