Parenting is a Joke

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.

Episodes

The Parent Trap with Ahri Findling

April 21, 2026 • 35 mins
In this follow-up Parenting Is a Joke episode, Ophira Eisenberg and comedian Ahri Findling zero in on the strange overlap between parenting, comedy, and creative identity, starting with Findling’s Instagram bits that splice mundane parenting tasks—like folding laundry—with explosive movie quotes that suddenly feel accurate once you have kids. Their conversation moves through watching childhood films with a new lens, as Ophira revis...
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Ahri Findling is An Emotional Support Dad

April 14, 2026 • 45 mins
Ophira Eisenberg opens this Parenting Is a Joke episode with a vivid, slightly unhinged comparison between riding Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure at Universal and the physical intensity of having her membranes stripped hours before going into labor, setting the tone for a conversation with comedian Ahri Findling that toggles between bodily reality, parenting anxiety, and the strange logic of creative life. Findling, a dad of a six-yea...
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Laurie Kilmartin Parents From the Green Room

April 7, 2026 • 41 mins
This episode of Parenting Is a Joke revisits Ophira Eisenberg’s conversation with comedian Laurie Kilmartin who recently wrote for the Academy Awards. They talk about  the realities of parenting a teenage son, sustaining a comedy career, and processing grief in real time. Kilmartin talks about raising her 16-year-old largely on her own while maintaining a relentless stand-up schedule—flying red-eyes from Los Angeles to New York to ...
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Good Mom, Bad Puppy with Ashley Austin Morris

March 31, 2026 • 48 mins
In this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg revisits a favorite conversation with actor and comedian Ashley Austin Morris recorded while Morris was four months pregnant and still adjusting to the surreal reality of becoming a parent after never planning to be one. The two comics swap very specific pregnancy experiences from the perspective of performers who work nights, including the strange logistics of building a com...
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Writing Horoscopes for Tiny Terrors with Johanna Gohmann

March 24, 2026 • 40 mins
On this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg talks with author and humor writer Johanna Gohmann about her new book, All Toddlers Are Scorpios, an astrological guide that reframes toddler behavior—revenge plotting, emotional volatility, public nudity-adjacent costume choices—as pure Scorpio energy. Johanna shares how the idea struck while she was standing in the humor section at Barnes & Noble when her agent called with ...
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Johanna Gohmann Declares All Toddlers Are Scorpios

March 17, 2026 • 52 mins
On this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg sits down with humor writer Johanna Gohmann to talk about raising a teenage son while building a comedy writing career that includes pieces in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Wall Street Journal—and the release of her new parenting book, All Toddlers Are Scorpios (out April 7). Gohmann, a self-described astrology skeptic, explains how she researched zodiac lore to frame ...
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Raising Responsible Subway Riders with Gideon Evans

March 10, 2026 • 38 mins
On this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, writer and podcaster Gideon Evans joins Ophira Eisenberg to talk about raising subway-riding kids in New York while building a creative life that has required real-time pivots from television to podcasting. He explains the surprisingly durable concept behind his history podcast Bad Elizabeth—born out of a pilot recorded with a former Daily Show colleague and eventually profiled in The Guardia...
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Gideon Evans Confronts Mickey Mouse

March 2, 2026 • 44 mins
On this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg talks with writer and producer Gideon Evans about raising two teenagers while building a career in comedy that’s ricocheted from scrappy theater internships to six years at The Daily Show. Gideon shares the surreal early days of hustling in Manhattan—once driving Frank Langella around in his parents’ station wagon to pick up a giant painted portrait of the actor—before landin...
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Durable Gladness with Annabelle Gurwitch

February 24, 2026 • 33 mins
On this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg continues her conversation with Annabelle Gurwitch, focusing on community, money, anxiety, and what parenting looks like when your child is grown and the ground keeps shifting. Gurwitch talks about creating stability through “Stammtisch”–style standing lunches and Sunday meetups, describing how scheduled friendships became a lifeline after COVID and as creative communities fr...
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Annabelle Gurwitch is Just Trying to Eat, Pray, Live Story

February 17, 2026 • 42 mins
On this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg talks with writer, performer, and memoirist Annabelle Gurwitch about parenting an adult child while still actively shaping a creative life that refuses to behave. Gurwitch reflects on writing The End of My Life Is Killing Me while navigating stage-four lung cancer treatment, explaining why she frames the book as a “second life” rather than a comeback story, and why she delibe...
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Jon Fisch Explains Why Bedtime Is the Deadline

February 10, 2026 • 36 mins
In this second conversation with Jon Fisch, Ophira Eisenberg and Jon settle into the daily mechanics of parenting two young kids while maintaining a working stand-up career, from navigating December birthdays, redshirting anxiety, and Malcolm Gladwell math, to the quiet shock of realizing your kid suddenly wants to walk to school alone. Fisch talks through the practical negotiations of comedy life now that bedtime matters—calling c...
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Jon Fisch Has Enough Stuffies

February 3, 2026 • 37 mins
In this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg sits down with longtime friend and comedian Jon Fisch to talk about becoming the parent he always knew he wanted to be—just not in the order he expected—starting with the moment he learned his girlfriend was pregnant while sitting across from his mother at a Cheesecake Factory in the Natick Mall. They trade stories about raising young kids during COVID, from how lockdown acci...
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Star Wars Gave Phuc Tran a Way to Relate

January 27, 2026 • 33 mins
In this episode, Ophira Eisenberg reconnects with author, dad, and tattoo artist Phuc Tran for a conversation that zigzags from Star Wars as a childhood lifeline to parenting philosophies shaped by motorcycles, rotary phones, and letting kids touch the metaphorical hot pipe. Tran talks about growing up Vietnamese in a town where missing one TV network meant missing cultural shorthand, and how Star Wars became a rare common language...
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Phuc Tran Trades Punk Rock for Parenting Teen Daughters

January 20, 2026 • 43 mins
Ophira Eisenberg sits down with author, tattoo artist, and Maine-based dad Phuc Tran for a wide-ranging, grounded conversation that moves from frantic school drop-offs and topping off windshield wiper fluid before a storm to the deeper anxieties of becoming a parent after trauma, bullying, and immigration. Tran talks candidly about growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in small-town America, finding safety in classrooms when home wasn...
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Building a House Everyone Comes To With Carole Montgomery

January 13, 2026 • 37 mins
Carole Montgomery and Ophira Eisenberg zoom out from early parenting to talk about what happens after the kid grows up, moves out, and then… moves back in. Carole describes her son’s room as a frozen time capsule—albums, toys, and CDs untouched—while explaining how his first attempt at college lasted six months before the classic millennial boomerang returned him home, a pattern she sums up as “they leave, they come back; I moved—h...
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Jennifer Wai Connects Reiki, Fortnite, and Staying Close to Your Kid

January 6, 2026 • 42 mins
In this New Year’s episode of Parenting Is a Joke, Ophira Eisenberg talks with mystic, Reiki practitioner, and parent Jennifer Wai about raising kids while trusting intuition in a culture obsessed with rules, experts, and productivity. Jennifer explains what it actually means to be a mystic—describing herself as a human antenna fine-tuning static—and traces that sensitivity back to a childhood marked by literal thinking, bullying, ...
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Carole Montgomery Raises A Kid In A Green Room

December 30, 2025 • 46 mins
Comedian Carole Montgomery joins Parenting Is a Joke to talk with Ophira Eisenberg about raising a kid while building a stand-up career that never paused, even when everyone told her it should. Carole traces her path from starting comedy at 21 in male-dominated Brooklyn clubs to touring relentlessly as a new mom, pumping breast milk backstage and leaving her six-month-old with a six-foot-five tattooed bouncer who didn’t know how to...
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Mike Feeney Shoots a Comedy Special on No Sleep

December 23, 2025 • 36 mins
Comedian Mike Feeney joins Ophira Eisenberg in the thick of brand-new fatherhood, talking through life with his 15-month-old son Leo while juggling touring, illness roulette from daycare, and a self-imposed creative gauntlet that included shooting, directing, and editing a high-concept Comedy Cellar special when his baby was just ten weeks old. Feeney gets specific about the early months—the shock of sleep deprivation, the grim ho...
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Advancing the "Advanced Maternal Age” With Emily Walsh

December 16, 2025 • 35 mins
In this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, comedian Emily Walsh talks to Ophira Eisenberg about becoming a parent later in life and being labeled “advanced maternal age” by New York doctors while taking “nightly little baby aspirin” she was told “sometimes works” for reasons no one could explain. She describes meeting her tiny five-pound newborn who arrived a month early with “newborn fuzz” on her ears and back and a full head of hair...
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Emily Walsh Redefines What “Ready" Means

December 9, 2025 • 45 mins
In this episode, Ophira talks with comic and new mom and comedian Emily Walsh, who shares how she spent her twenties and thirties convinced she didn’t want kids, only to find herself writing an Edinburgh show about that exact ambivalence and then trying to conceive between gigs in Atlantic City. Emily describes entering stand-up at 30 after years painting sets for Blue Bloods—so many beige walls she started an Instagram called “Bei...
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