How to connect with literally anyone (w/ Chris Gethard)

Chris Gethard https://punchup.live/chrisgethard?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAcGRvZgJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAadb8vQl9dLenMbbGd7OVlAtdNvFTPfmxCmVGDmCmVH2RJ9HIgWGqRWM-Yb9IA_aem_U3bQs3CWDhXiCxHMEx-Uvw is a comedian and the host of the podcast Beautiful Anonymous https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beautiful-stories-from-anonymous-people/id1090147504, an unscripted, unpredictable show where one anonymous person calls in and shares their family woes, secret confessions, or anything at all they want to talk about for 60 minutes. The only rule is that Chris Gethard can’t hang up. Gethard shares what he has learned from the show about how to talk to literally anyone, the life skills he mastered through improv comedy, and why making people laugh has been so important for his own mental health. Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDPods https://www.youtube.com/@TEDPodsFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksFor the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:42Speaker 00

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• 1:14Chris Duffy?

  This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at nrdc.org/human and your gift will be matched five times.

• 2:04Chris Duffy?

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. For years now, I've kept a list on my desk with several reminders of the kind of person, the kind of artist that I want to aim to be like, the kind of person that I want to aim to become. And one of the people whose names is on that list is today's guest, Chris Gethard. And I really do mean that literally. Like, Chris Gethard's name is written on a list that is taped to my wall. And what I admire so much about Chris Gethard's work is that he does not play it safe. He doesn't make boring or predictable choices just because he knows how they're going to go and that they're going to go well. Instead, Gethard experiments. He does things that might not go well. They often don't. In fact, Gethard often fails. He literally wrote a book called Lose Well, which is about all of the public humiliations

• 2:49Chris Duffy?

  and total failures that have led him to his creative voice and to his current successes. Let me tell you a story about the funniest live show that I've ever seen in my entire life. It was in 2012 during an improv comedy event that happens every year called the Del Close Marathon. And this was at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York City. I was at one of the shows that was happening late in the night. This is a 24-hour event and just goes nonstop. And I seem to remember this show happening around midnight, maybe it was even later. But Chris Gethard and his improv team, The Stepfathers, take the stage. And they're putting on a 30-minute improvised comedy show. They ask the audience for a suggestion, and someone calls out rewind. So then they spontaneously create this hilarious show with a series of interconnected scenes,

• 3:34Chris Duffy?

  all inspired by the word rewind. But then about halfway through the show, Gethard steps to the front of the stage. He pretends to press a remote control and he says rewind. And instantly, the entire group silently began walking in reverse, pantomiming, moving backwards, and hitting every single action and doing every single scene that had come before. They literally went through everything in reverse.

• 3:59Chris Duffy?

  And mind you, this was not a show that had been scripted or planned or rehearsed ever. They were all just perfectly remembering and immediately executing this in the moment. And then, when they got back to the very first moment of the very first scene, the lights went out, then they came back on, and then the group redid the entire show for the third time now. But this time, they were doing it the right direction, and they were doing it with a director's commentary, as though it was a DVD. I have never laughed harder in my life than that show, and I've never had my mind blown like that. Because Gethard and his teammates, they embody one of my favorite things about great comedic performers, which is that improvisers like Gethard are fully in the moment. And they're always looking for ways to connect more deeply with the people they're on stage

• 4:44Chris Duffy?

  with, to listen and support them as fully as possible. But they're also paying really close attention. They're remembering details and actions and tiny turns of phrase, and then they're bringing those back. They're creating magic out of how intently they are focused on what is happening. And now, all of those things, all of those skills are obviously incredible for live performance, but I think that they're also at the heart of everything that I want to be as a human being. So today with Gethard, we're going to talk about how to connect with other humans and how to find something fascinating and extraordinary in literally anyone, a skill that Gethard puts into practice in every single episode of his podcast, Beautiful Anonymous. It's a show where an anonymous caller calls in, and Gethard has an unplanned, spontaneous

• 5:27Chris Duffy?

  conversation with them that is always unpredictable and frequently unforgettable. Here's a clip from an episode of Beautiful Anonymous.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Thank you for calling Beautiful Anonymous. A beeping noise will indicate when you are on the show with the host.

• 5:43Chris Duffy?

  Hello?

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 5:45Chris Duffy?

  This is Chris Gethard.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:47Chris Duffy?

  No way.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:49Chris Duffy?

  No way.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Yes, way. It's me.

• 5:52Chris Duffy?

  That's too crazy.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  It's pretty. It's funny. That's so nice that people say that, but from my perspective, it's not that. It's not, I'm just a guy.

• 6:02Chris Duffy?

  No, I just listen to you a lot, so you're a little bigger than that. I've had a lot of conversations with you in my head.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  That's nice. That's nice.

• 6:11Chris Duffy?

  Well, you caught me at quite the pivotal moment in my life.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Really?

• 6:17Chris Duffy?

  I'm actually at a hospital, a children's hospital, waiting. I got here early because of traffic, and I'm waiting to meet with my daughter's oncologist about her scan that she had last night.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 6:30Chris Duffy?

  And I'm nervous. I'm anxious.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  I can imagine. I've never met you, and I'm nervous and anxious as well. So you're like in a waiting room right now?

• 6:37Chris Duffy?

  Yeah. We just are sitting outside waiting.

• 6:42Speaker 04

  You and your family, is your daughter there?

• 6:45Chris Duffy?

  My husband's with me. No, we didn't bring her to this one. This is actually the first time we didn't bring her along because it was, it's early and she is asleep and there's not much. We didn't need to check her, they just needed to give us the news, so.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry you're dealing with that.

• 7:05Chris Duffy?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  I can't imagine.

• 7:06Chris Duffy?

  Yeah, it's quite the journey. It's not, it's not an easy thing. And, and waiting to find out about these scans is probably the hardest part. So you can be a therapist for me for the next.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Well, I can't do that.

• 7:21Chris Duffy?

  However long.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  I can't be a therapist by a long shot.

• 7:24Chris Duffy?

  Well, you can distract me, how about?

• 7:26Speaker 04

  I can distract you, I can be a shoulder for you to lean on. I'm very happy to step in and do that. And I can try to, try to distract you. And as a comedian, I can try to look for a couple of laughs, although I can't imagine a call where that would maybe be less appropriate, but that's always my instinct.

• 7:45Chris Duffy?

  No, it is appropriate. We actually, we've been doing this since August 2015, so.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 7:51Chris Duffy?

  It's just part of our life, and we've learned to find the joy in the journey and, and find the laughs along the way. And, and your podcast has helped, for sure.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Well, that's super nice to hear.

• 8:03Chris Duffy?

  We are going to be back with a beautiful, unscripted, unpredictable conversation with Chris Gethard, right after this.

• 8:23Chris Duffy?

  This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Planet Visionaries is the podcast celebrating the people creating practical, hopeful solutions for our planet's urgent conservation challenges. Season six launches this fall with bold, real solutions. Hear from Anna Rathman of the Jane Goodall Institute on protecting wildlife, Tom Pachak on his epic 396-day journey documenting the entire Amazon, and Lydia Oshie, a Guatemalan leader opening doors for Indigenous girls to access global education. Hosted by legendary climber and advocate Alex Honnold, each episode goes beyond the headlines to show what's actually working and who's making it happen.

• 9:06Chris Duffy?

  In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 9:15Speaker 05

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• 10:13Chris Duffy?

  This episode is brought to you by Whatnot. You know what makes shopping great? When it feels like an experience, like a conversation with someone who's just as excited about what you're buying as you are. That's what I like about Whatnot. Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping app, where you can hop into a live show, hang out, and ask questions. And on the other side of the screen, sellers are building real, thriving businesses. I recently joined a couple of live shows on their app, and I found all sorts of great deals. I bought giant boxes of candy bars at a huge discount for Halloween, and then I got a tool I needed for my home repairs. It's just such an interactive way to shop. It's really unlike any other way that I've bought things, and it's a lot of fun. And not only can you shop, you can sell too. It doesn't matter if your business is big, small, or still just an idea.

• 10:55Chris Duffy?

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• 11:14Chris Duffy?

  Today, we are talking about how to connect with other people with the comedian Chris Gethard.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Chris Gethard. I host Beautiful Anonymous, just a podcast. I've written a bunch of books. I used to host a TV show. I had an old HBO special that some people say changed the conversation regarding mental health in America. So that's cool. It's good to see you.

• 11:35Chris Duffy?

  Let's start with your podcast Beautiful Anonymous, which in a really cool way, you've been doing for 10 years now. This is the 10 year anniversary this season. You've spoken with hundreds of anonymous callers about their lives and the stories on the show, they range from very funny and lighthearted to challenging to heartbreaking. You never know what's going to happen. The listeners never know what's going to happen. What got you curious about the idea of talking to strangers over the phone?

• 12:00Speaker 04

  Well, I was a huge fan of prank calls as a child. I think prank calls are one of the most underrated forms of American, not just comedy. I think it's like an art form. I think people are really good at prank calls and growing up, I used to call WFMU radio. My brother and I used to prank call their shows. WSOU had the hall line, the call in show after Seton Hall Pirates games. So I was always really fascinated by phones as a kid. And then where it really locked in was I had a public access TV show and it was a very

• 12:36Speaker 04

  like high octane, absurdist, ridiculous feeling and looking talk show that fell apart because it was on public access television and it was kind of weird. And I loved the phone calls. The phone calls were secretly the whole thing with my old TV show because we would do a lot of stuff that was strange on camera, but the stuff I loved the most was that people would call in, you know? And some of them were kids, reminded me of when I was a kid and they didn't have to prank me because I was down with them doing whatever they wanted. They didn't have to pretend it was something else. And sometimes people would call me and tell me really revealing, personal things and I'd have to handle it and the whole show was live.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  It was impossible to avoid. We couldn't edit these phone calls out. I had to handle them live on public access television. And it was also gaining never massive numbers, but a really pronounced audience streaming. It was one of the first. I think one of the first shows that was actually streaming.

• 13:38Chris Duffy?

  Definitely.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  We kind of predated streaming technology, like Twitch didn't exist. Our lives would have been so much easier. So I loved the phone calls so much. They kept me on my toes and they were, I think in many ways, the heart and soul of why my show was addictive to many people was not the comedic ideas, it was the unpredictable phone calls. So I fell in love with them there. And then when we got picked up by cable, a quote unquote, real network. The show was going to be half hour and edited. And I realized, ooh, if it's edited, that means no more phone calls. We had to figure out ways to kind of stage the phone calls or have people be able to watch online if they were calling in. But the purity of the unplanned chaotic phone call went away and that was the original

• 14:23Speaker 04

  reason I wanted to do Beautiful Anonymous. It's kind of how I knew it was a good idea, even though no one else thought it was.

• 14:29Chris Duffy?

  Well, I started just being a fan of your comedy and thinking that, watching you perform live on stage and improv shows and thinking that it was incredible. The first time that I saw you perform, you were doing the Chris Gethard Show live and actually I probably saw you before that in just an improv team. But there was always this rule that you were either going to make sure that the show was so funny that you never forgot it or so bad that you never forgot it. You were just not going to accept mediocrity and that.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  No middle ground.

• 14:59Chris Duffy?

  There was no middle ground. It was either like, you're going to love this or you're going to hate it. And either way, you'll remember it forever. And for me, that actually is true. I've seen so many comedy shows and I cannot remember the vast majority of them, but I could tell you exactly what happened every single time that I saw the Gethard Show live.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  Thanks, man.

• 15:16Chris Duffy?

  One time I saw you do a show in Boston where the conceit of the show.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Oh, you were at the Boston shows? We only did insane stuff in Boston. Was it the acid trip or the pool?

• 15:28Chris Duffy?

  I saw the acid trip and if people don't know, the acid trip was, your premise was without making anyone in this room take drugs. You will feel as though you are tripping on acid. And one of the things you did was like the lights were flashing in the room and it was playing very loud techno music. And then you were just saying, or someone on the show was saying people's names into the microphone. So like you would hear your own name because they had, I guess you had a list of like all the ticket buyers. So it would be like techno music and there'd be a person wearing like a face mask going like, Chris Duffy, Chris Duffy. And I would go, how do they know my name? And then it would just move to the next person in the audience.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  I've never met anyone who actually attended that show. I think I met somebody once, like five years later, and they did not love the experience. They found it off putting.

• 16:12Chris Duffy?

  Well, I thought it was great because it was so memorable and so different, but I didn't leave going like, you gotta hear this joke that I heard, right? It wasn't like, what was the punchline in there?

• 16:20Speaker 04

  That was one that leaned towards so bad that you never forgot it. That tended to happen when we did the Chris Gethard Show on the road. Strangely enough, for some reason, the vibe of that show mixed with New York public access.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  That has the foundation that it was standing. And even UCB, right? UCB back then in particular. Now it's, you know, it's been bought out by some venture capital people. It still has some of the spirit it used to, but UCB, when I started there was grungy. It was New Yorky nonsense.

• 16:52Chris Duffy?

  This is the upright citizens brigade.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  The upright citizens brigade.

• 16:55Chris Duffy?

  Kind of like a hallmark of like underground improv comedy in New York City. And now it's like spread to, it's defined comedy in Hollywood.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Yes, LA and Scotland and Pittsburgh and Seattle. And it's great and it's great, but it is different. And when I was there, it was very legitimately. I was 19 years old and I look back, I should not have been hanging out there. I shouldn't have been. There was a lot of strange stuff going on. Fun, interesting, challenging stuff, but I was in over my head as a kid taking the train in from Jersey. And then public access television in New York is wild. So that foundation. I remember that show in Boston was okay. My favorite thing about that show was we somehow went, we found this place in the garment district where we were able to buy like a 10 foot by 10 foot square of spandex.

• 17:39Chris Duffy?

  Yes.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  And stretched it across a big doorway at, was that Improv Boston, I think?

• 17:44Chris Duffy?

  Improv Boston.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Improv Boston. And we had a character named The Human Fish that people loved from our public access show. And he famously wore goggles and we had this spandex lit up with like purple lights. And then the human fish every once in a while would just lean his whole body weight in to the spandex and his face with the goggles would just emerge and make eye contact with people. And I felt like that was cool. I take no credit for this, nor do I compare myself to them, but I'm like De La Guarda, Fuerza Bruta predated us. Those were famous aerial shows that were audience interactive and I was too ignorant to have gone. But so many artists who are about four to five years older than me say that those shows changed their life. And then Sleep No More was the one right after.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  And we did not do anything nearly as good as those shows, but the instinct of this stuff that was happening in New York that was like, we don't want, it's not that we want the audience to have a bad time, but if an audience needs to be comfortable, there's enough people in New York that are willing to be uncomfortable. There's enough people in New York that are willing to kind of walk out on a limb with you. And those are sort of definitively the more interesting audience members. And if we can get the whole room full of them, that's a blessing for us and them. But it was hard to spread that to Boston. We did another one that bombed

• 19:05Speaker 04

  so hard in North Carolina that people attending walked out and people in the show were backstage crying afterwards.

• 19:15Chris Duffy?

  Well, the reason I even brought it up is because I think that a barrier a lot of people have to talking to strangers. Right? It's like, how is it going to go? What if it goes badly? What if I don't look good or I have something weird happen? And I bring up that kind of like onstage rule and that ethos because it seems to me like part of the reason why you're so good at talking to strangers is you have just built up over years, the expectation that it's okay if it goes bad. It's okay if it goes really bad and if it's uncomfortable because like the goal is not for it to just be neutral and not weird. Like weird is good.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  Sometimes it's better. Weird is good. And with Beautiful Anonymous, what I didn't expect was that people were so willing to get very emotional and very dark. That I thought it would be an extension of my previous work, which had been absurdist comedy. Very quickly, people started calling the show and telling me about watching loved ones not survive cancer. And I'm going, okay, this is not a comedy show anymore and I need to be humble enough to own that. And it took me, it took me a while to roll with that and fully embrace it. But I would say, I don't know if anybody else was better positioned to do so because I'm a funny guy. Don't get me wrong. I'm proud of my comedy career. But if you just look at the generation I came up with, they were killers across the board.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  I was never going to shine if what I had to offer was who's the funniest because, for example, like my two closest friends coming up were Bobby Moynihan and Zach Woods. And I'm not trying to be too name dropy, but one of them got The Office and the other got SNL. And then I was kind of the third friend in that triad who then waited three more years before I got my first shot at a job. So, and then the Sunday night show at UCB was this legendary show called ASCAP, which was great. But as a, as the young guy on the totem pole in that show back in the day, it was a gauntlet.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  I'm up there with half the cast of SNL and then three writers from Conan O'Brien, who are my heroes, that writing staff. And then me, very often just me and Jason Manzoukis, the only two people who hadn't been on TV. And so I just realized very young, okay, like I can hang and these people like being on stage with me, but from the audience perspective, I'm going to get eaten alive. So I better figure out what I'm the best at. And it turned out that was being vulnerable. That was being willing to walk right off a cliff and know that it would be okay. I gotta be more honest. I gotta be more brave, especially I think with the way I look, no one expects me to be the bravest, but it's what I had.

• 21:57Chris Duffy?

  I think there's also this thing that is really.

• 22:01Chris Duffy?

  Interesting to me about you. I mean, you literally wrote a book called Lose Well, right? So like you wrote a book about how losing and failing and being public about it can be the like greatest tool that you have or the greatest success.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  It's a skill. Losing is a skill.

• 22:17Chris Duffy?

  It's a real skill. And I, I think it's not only like really important right now, but it feels like it's only going to be more important because I sense that like with all of the technology and AI and everything that's happening is just getting easier to polish things, to make things look really polished and perfect and, and smooth. And so all of a sudden, that's like not valuable anymore, right? Like being able to make something that looks perfect or professional. It's, it's like a cheap trick now. Whereas being able to take a swing and do something that no one else has done and have it maybe be a disaster, that's still scary to a lot of people. And that's still something that not everyone can do or, or will do. When something goes wrong, you don't try and like, say like, but this

• 22:59Chris Duffy?

  is actually a real cool thing. And it turns out that I am actually as cool and successful and amazing as you think. You don't go like, but that was so cool. And it was like, we did something the audience didn't get. It's like, no, it just went badly. And that's funny to me.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  You'll never see me posting a standup photo that's cropped to show like the half dozen people in the audience that makes you think it's full. I'll post, hey, I went all the way to Detroit and the room is one quarter full. I have a child and a mortgage. How's this gonna end? I just think that's more honest and more interesting for my audience. All I can say is like, it's down to my core. I strike out a lot. I have to figure out how to make that one of the more interesting things about me. If you want to get on board with me because it, it happens a lot. And the audiences have not always come with it.

• 23:44Chris Duffy?

  I do think that like, that idea that you said of like, ah, the loser shtick is going to get old, like, cause you have good things happen. To me, it's like, the key thing is you can lose. It doesn't make you a loser, right? Like the thing that I think is so cool about you and the fact that you've done that is when you lose or when you have a failure, what it really means is that you were like taking a swing. That is true, even if you're not a comedian, right? Like if you don't try, you're definitely not going to have something get better.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  You have to evolve. You have to change. And if that means, if that means that you are doing stuff that's off putting or strange, I just, I can't stress it enough. Reliably solid gets boring the longer you are reliably solid. Be a chance taker who everyone thinks is an insane weirdo.

• 24:32Chris Duffy?

  You are still like a truly talented performer. I just saw you perform several weeks ago and it was hilarious. But you also now have this whole thing where people who listen to Beautiful Anonymous are not tuning in going like, this is going to be a million laughs per minute. That's not the goal. Sometimes it is, but it's not like, if I don't get laughs, that's a failure. That's not the one thing. The thing that I wonder is like, especially when you're talking about something like grief or depression, or someone who's really struggling. I feel like maybe the reason you as a comedian are the right person for that is because you're able to hold the real, instead of trying to be the like polished, like let's, let's smooth over the weird edges here. Let's smooth everything out so that

• 25:17Chris Duffy?

  there's nothing rough or unfinished. You can kind of hold that, that actual raw energy of grief in a way that you might not be if you weren't necessarily coming from the world that you come from.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  I think so. And I think so much of comedy is actually about active listening. It's actually about understanding where your audience is at, where they come from, what the tenor of the times is, what the tenor of that room on that night is. So I do think that a lot of comedy is inherently empathetic. I do think that a lot of my favorite comedy and a lot of what I've, I've aspired to do is comedy where when the whole room laughs, there's some sense of shared understanding, shared value system, catharsis. And not all

• 26:09Speaker 04

  comedy is that, but I don't like some types of comedy as much as I like others, right? Some comedy is just mean. And some comedy is just wit. I am not good enough to have, I'm not a Mitch Hedberg. I idolize Mitch Hedberg. I can't sit down and write a joke where you just go, damn, right? Norm MacDonald, people worship Norm MacDonald, rest in peace. I have a lot of respect for Norm MacDonald. Norm MacDonald used to say he didn't like storytelling comedians. And I always was insecure, wondering if like my HBO special is one of the ones that made him made fun of that because it was not too long after it came out. But like, I respect it and I've giggled so much at a lot of his stuff. It's

• 26:51Speaker 04

  not totally my thing. I think a lot of comedy that I like is less about wit and certainly not about, about aggression. It's empathy. It's about, man, everyone is laughing and laughing is involuntary. And when you're laughing, that inherently means we are all on the same page about some aspect of this idea. So if you spend a lot of years training yourself to go, how do we all get on the same page? And how do we actively listen to each other? How do I get them to actively listen to me? How do I feel out where they're at? So I can actively listen to them? It naturally lends itself to a conversation about grief or about loss or about, we had a call where it was live. It was live on

• 27:34Speaker 04

  stage in front of an audience and it was someone who was standing on the property next to the foundation of their house that had recently burned down. And it was a farm. They owned a bunch of animals and they're like, hey, my house burned down. Oh, I'm standing next to the house. And if I remember, this was years ago, but it was like within 72 hours since the house had burned down. And they're on the phone telling me about it. I have to be an empathetic, active listener in order to justify their trust in calling me in the first place. And comedy did teach me that.

• 28:04Chris Duffy?

  Can you be a little prescriptive about like, how does, how do you do that? How does someone become a better active listener and a better empathetic listener?

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Well, despite how much I've been rambling in this interview, I think you have to learn to listen more than you want to talk. I think that that inherently sends signals to someone else's brain, that they're being respected, that they're being heard and that they're in safe hands. I also think, I had years of training at the Upright Citizens Brigade, as I mentioned, and a lot of the training at the UCB is the way you find the funny part of a scene is you just commit to whatever's happening, treat it like it's real, and really try to listen hard for the first unusual thing. Whatever the first unusual thing is, there's potential to make that the entire comedic conceit of what happens for the rest

• 28:56Speaker 04

  of your time on stage. So if you spend all these years training yourself, what's the unusual thing? I tell you, a lot of episodes of Beautiful Anonymous, when you listen, it's like chit chatty. And then all of a sudden about halfway through, somebody feels safe enough with me, comfortable enough with me, comfortable enough with the idea of an audience listening to it. And they'll go, and let me tell you what it was like to, you know, date somebody who, you know, or be married to somebody who was an addict and find out years into the marriage. A lot of times they are not coming out because we don't overproduce it. My producer checks for the sound quality of the connection and nervousness. And that's it. Can you give your pitch in a sentence or two? And how

• 29:41Speaker 04

  does it sound? And that's it. It's not judging the quality of the idea. It's judging, does this person seem relaxed? Do they sound like they're in a wind tunnel? It's my job to get them relaxed. A lot of times you'll hear, it doesn't happen until 10, 15, sometimes 30 minutes into a call, you know?

• 29:58Chris Duffy?

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• 31:23Chris Duffy?

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• 32:42Chris Duffy?

  And we are back. There's this other part of comedy, especially improv comedy, not really actually stand up, but like improv comedy, people who are really good at it, in my opinion, tend to really embody the idea of making the other person look good. So like, what's the move you can do in the scene that will make your partner get the big laugh, that will like move things forward, but not necessarily like you stealing it for yourself? Because if you try and steal the spotlight, often the scene ends. And I think you are one of the masters at like making the other person look good and setting the scene up for, for, for a laugh. Even in, we were just talking about the, the conference that we went to, that, we were about that. There was a comedy show afterwards that was an improvised comedy show. And to get it going, one of the other performers was interviewing

• 33:26Chris Duffy?

  people in the audience, then you're going to pull material out of that to make scenes. And one of the people in the audience said something about like a tier one intervention. And yeah, none of the comedians had any clue what that was, but the whole audience, because they were all educators, knew exactly the difference between like a tier one and tier two. And so it was kind of a little bit of an awkward moment. And then in the show, you found a way to like, as a character, explain what a tier one and tier two intervention was. And it got a huge laugh, but it also was this very like generous act for the other performers that now they could all know.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now everybody else can chill out. Now the game isn't going to be that you guys look dumb or don't know what you're talking about because you know, we can aim a little higher than that. But yeah, I've often said with Beautiful Anonymous that, you know, it's a big fish, small pond situation. But there were, there was a stretch of time where, and this is a sentence that honestly, a lot of people would cringe, but there was a stretch of time where I was probably one of the better improvisers in the country, certainly one of the best improv teachers in the country.

• 34:29Chris Duffy?

  For sure. Back both of those statements up, without a doubt.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  I don't usually say anything that's self praise, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of Beautiful Anonymous, especially in the early days, was one of the better improvisers in the country who had learned that he did not need to be the funny one to feel safe. Doing improv with other people on the phone, and the improv just happened to be about them telling me real things about their life and them not fully understanding that I was using, you know, 15 to 20 years of high level training at the most competitive improv theater in the world to put them on a pedestal, because that's what I do with other people on stage. Try to make your scene partner look like a genius. Try to make your scene

• 35:14Speaker 04

  partner look like the most brilliant person in the world. I'd spent, I'd been doing that from when I was 19. Beautiful Anonymous launched when I was 36. So I know how to make other people feel comfortable in a public setting. I know how to hear what other people are saying and go, that's actually really interesting. What you're saying is really interesting. What about that part? I remember one of our very first episodes, a guy called up and wanted to tell me how he got a passport on like 48 hours notice, which is notoriously hard thing to do. And he was like, I thought your listeners might be interested. And then

• 35:52Speaker 04

  if I remember right, he offhandedly mentioned along the way that he grew up either ultra orthodox or Hasidic in the Jewish faith and had progressively gotten more liberal in terms of religion throughout his life. He somehow indicated that in the course of this passport story. And I was able to pretty successfully go like, the passport thing, genuinely interesting. People want to know. He's talking about how you sometimes need to like, look at all the cities within a five hour drive at their cancel, be on the waiting list for every city and be ready to go. I'm like legit interesting, but also this other thing where you grew up ultra religious and have become progressively less

• 36:35Speaker 04

  religious. That's really interesting too. And I got both of those in the air. And I think that was one of the early ones where people were like, this dude's listening abilities are eerie, you know, sort of fine tuned in a way that goes beyond most, because I was able to suss out, what's the second story? What's the thing you weren't planning on telling? What's the detail you dropped that I went, hold on, I clocked the thing seven minutes ago, and I wanted to let you finish out that run of thoughts. But you said something seven minutes ago that makes me actually, most people don't say that. And then they go, oh, you're good. You're good. I go, well, I've been trained to be one of the world's best listeners so that I can survive on stages in New York City.

• 37:20Chris Duffy?

  How do you think about when to put some of yourself in and like relate and say, oh, here's a thing that I have that's going to make sure that you know that I'm coming from a place where I have, you know, I can relate versus not making it about you and kind of just asking a follow up question, turning it back on to them?

• 37:37Speaker 04

  You'll hear some episodes where I do make it more about me. And if that's coming from a manic place or a place of like, man, I just, I'm just so excited. You'll hear me actively apologizing. I will say this one's way more about me than it usually is. My bad. I just got excited. Generally though, I would say 85% of the time, if you, if you really listen to Beautiful Anonymous from like a conversationalist perspective and how the show survived 10 years and got all these accolades, I generally only make it about me when I am sensing that the person is feeling some discomfort, needs to take

• 38:16Speaker 04

  a breath, or is feeling a little exposed. Sometimes, especially as the show has gone on in the years, people will call up and think they, they're like, if I ever get on Beautiful Anonymous, I'm going to talk about this. And that's a 60 minute long show. And then 11 minutes later, that has been covered. And they go, I don't know what to do now. Well, now I might fill some of the time and talk about me. And I might be talking about me in a way that makes you know, that some of the details you brought up are things that I greatly identify with, you know? One thing that Beautiful Anonymous has taught me, I grew up in the Northeast, largely New York City centric, where I think you are just around people who, religion is not a major face, front facing factor with a lot of people

• 38:59Speaker 04

  in New York City. The amount of people that call me and talk about growing up in cults, growing up in very extreme religious orders or sects and untangling that. I go, oh, for a lot of parts of America that aren't the East Coast cities, struggles with religion are a big thing. And people will tell me about that. And I've talked a lot about how me, growing up Catholic, in some ways was so beautiful and in some ways messed my head up. And if I feel someone's telling me about religion, for example, and then they feel like, man, I'm betraying a lot of secrets here. And I'm feeling pressure because I'm on a show. Well, now maybe it's appropriate time for me to talk and tell you, hey, I've been through a similar thing. So it's a protective instinct. Talking about myself

• 39:43Speaker 04

  might seem selfish, but I would actually argue in the show, I generally only do it in a way that's aimed to be protective of a caller who feels overextended or overexposed.

• 39:56Chris Duffy?

  That idea that you want the other person to feel comfortable.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:59Chris Duffy?

  And you don't want to like railroad them the whole time. It's not, it's not a show in the sense of I'm performing the whole time.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  I have railroaded occasionally, but it's rare. I also think some of it, Chris, is it is humanity. It is a recognition that even a rambly, a rambly conversation where sometimes we cross talk and don't edit it out. That sounds real. That sounds like you're sitting on a subway, listening to two friends talk. It's not edited. And I think when Beautiful Anonymous launched, I was already noticing, man, people want to talk less in person and less on the phone and more things are through email, more things are through text. Beautiful Anonymous launched, launched 2016. That was not too many years after Twitter launched, where you go, oh, people are curating their public contribution, that people are

• 40:50Speaker 04

  curating their contributions to public discourse down to 140 perfectly formulated letters in a way where you get to curate your own personality now. But I know that's not your own personality. I know you get sad. I know. So I think there's some aspects of Beautiful Anonymous that are, a lot of it's just, what is the human way to go? And, and you know what's really interesting is, I've mentioned that I've had these ebbs and flows. I've had some stretches of my career where I'm very hot and can sell a lot of tickets. And New York was loving me for a while. And then I felt, oh, you're the old guy in the room now, and you're a little irrelevant. And those days are past and you're not like the young troublemaker anymore, the experimenter. There's other experimenters now. We got Connor

• 41:35Speaker 04

  O'Malley now, man. We got Joe Para now. We need white guys who are pushing the form. We got other guys now. And I can feel it. More power to it. These are friends of mine. But I have felt in the last year or so, that without me changing much of what I do or much of my approach, I'm starting to feel this uptick in enthusiasm again. And I think it's because people are starting to reject the publicly curated personalities. The, we only communicate through technological means. The, I have a feeling this email wasn't one you typed. I have a feeling that the Gmail suggested to you how to finish it and you just went with that. And I can smell it a mile away. So I am not a TikTok guy. I can't

• 42:20Speaker 04

  get to a punchline in three seconds or less. And I'm not going to change everything about what I do to try that. And God bless the people who figured it out. I'm not a Luddite and I'm not shaking my fist at the clouds. I just know, I would never be able to do it in a way that felt genuine. But after many years of everything becoming more clips, both comedy clips hitting three seconds or less to that punchline. Instagram reels that just jump out you from the start, right? Tweets that in one sentence, you can do what you do. And everything becoming sort of driven by technology as these publicly curated personas. All of a sudden, a lot of my stuff, which is rambly, human, people talk over each other.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  My jokes take a long time to get to the punchlines, but you get to go on a story where you actually feel like you were at the beginning, middle, end of a story. I can feel it starting to come back, and I think there's starting to become a lot of people that go, pardon my French, but people are going, I just want to fucking feel like a human connecting with other humans. I mean, I have a few thoughts. One is, I have this reputation for being this empathetic, compassionate listener, and all my work is based on it. And that is not my natural setting. I am an introvert, just to be clear. I'm not one of these comedians that walks into the room and is like slinging zingers and rubbing everybody on the shoulder. I'm a shy person in real life.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  I actually found that as a young person, when I was full of a lot of anxiety and loneliness and depression, I had to learn how to connect with other people in order to feel like I could walk out the front door. I had to figure out how important eye contact is. I had to learn, like, I'll tell you, just a few months ago, I was in a situation with a friend I know from town, not that well, a mom at my kid's school. We don't have kids in the same grade or anything, but we see each other at a lot of community events. And she saw me out one day and she was like, how are you? And I was like, I'm good, I'm good, thanks. And I wasn't good, I was having a really tough time. And she stopped and went, no, no, no, for real, how are you? What does she say there? She's basically saying, I see you.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  Your body language is different. Your vibe is off from what it usually is. You're usually comfortable with me and you seem disengaged. How are you really? That right there?

• 44:46Speaker 04

  As a human, I think we all know that feeling. That's not too far off from being underwater and coming up and taking that first big, deep breath. Feeling seen, feeling like another person in your community noticed when something's wrong. Oh my God, that's like getting oxygen when there was no oxygen in the room, right? So I'm living proof of the fact that these are learnable skills. I'm an introvert. I, I'm not a high status person. I was in the green room of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater last year, and a guy had to get by me and just put his hand on my head and pushed me off to the side. Like, I am a Charlie Brown-esque figure in a lot of ways.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  But I have had a pretty successful, happy life because of my ability to connect with others.

• 45:32Chris Duffy?

  You know, we've talked about a lot of the other elements of your career, but we've, we've mentioned that you have an HBO special, but the special is called Career Suicide. It talks about very openly about you dealing with suicidal thinking, with depression, with anxiety, with a lot of mental health struggles. And now you are really involved with using comedy to get people to talk about mental health more openly. You're involved with getting young people to have mental health support in schools.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's something that I'm really proud of. And my HBO special, I still think it's pretty good. I think when you watch it now, if you discover it in 2026, you're like, oh, that's all right. The jokes are kind of spread out. But in 2017, when it hit HBO, let alone 2015, 14, when I was working on it in New York, it was pretty shocking. Like it, it felt like a taboo. It felt like, especially to be a guy standing in public and being like, I took pills and the side effects were so bad. And here's a list of them. And some of them are sexual side effects and some of them are like body fluid side effects.

• 46:42Speaker 04

  And to make jokes out of that, people were like, we don't do this, man. So in the 10 or 11 years since that project caught momentum, it's been really beautiful to see, oh, I think if my special came out right now, today, it would feel pretty soft. And that's because a conversation has really cracked open in this country. And I think that's for the best. There's like doctors and surgeons general who have talked about the effects of loneliness and depression. And also other comedians like Maria Bamford, Gary Gullman, Aparna Nanchala, Mark Maron. I was part of a wave, I think, of people that were like, we have to start, we have to be honest about this topic.

• 47:22Speaker 04

  But in some ways, um, some ways it's the thing I'm absolutely most proud of in my life. In other ways, it made me like the depression guy forever in a lot of people's eyes. In a way that can sometimes be a little depressing. I do think there's something to be said for,

• 47:45Speaker 04

  if you really consider yourself someone who wants to like make art for a sense of purpose and not just for money. I think that there's something to be said for, well, then you're going to kind of like leave some scars on your own psyche. Or, you know, um, there's going to be some collateral damage there. And I don't know if I fully knew that when I was a 19 year old kid who just felt very compelled to do comedy. But it's definitely, uh, it's been pretty pronounced.

• 48:14Chris Duffy?

  Like thinking about your story of that mom at your kid's school who asked you, like, are you actually doing okay? You know, I think myself and a lot of people often have this mistaken idea of like, man, what I would love is if everyone just thought of me as like so successful and like a person who doesn't have any problems. Like if they only thought like that guy has an HBO special and they hadn't actually watched the HBO special to know that it's about you struggling, right? Like, I think you think you want that, but then if you have that, it actually is such a barrier to, to her actually connecting to you or being willing to talk to you about her own life or anything like that. So the fact that you put yourself out there in a way that doesn't just make you look like good and unapproachable,

• 48:56Chris Duffy?

  then lets her say like, hey, are you actually okay in the moment when you need someone to say that?

• 49:01Speaker 04

  It's very depressing to say, but there are times where,

• 49:08Speaker 04

  there are times where I start to feel like there's a lot of neighborhoods in America where it's really decent looking houses with very well manicured lawns. And a lot of people right behind those doors with real severe problems, pretending those problems don't exist. And that's every house on the block, um, which is dismal and cynical. But on the days when I go, and I was one of those people and did grow up in a society that felt like that and decided to start screaming to the hilltops about it. And not only did it help me, but to this day, I mean, that special came out on HBO in 20, early 2017.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  I still get weekly messages from people telling me it helped them. I get messages from people, I just got one, I think, two days ago from someone who said they forced their parents to sit down and watch it with them so that their parents would understand why they actually needed to take medications. I once had a woman tell me that her brother took his own life and she never understood him until she watched my special and she wasn't as mad at him anymore. I mean, it means so much and I've done some good. It's also a really strange, strange way to live.

• 50:23Chris Duffy?

  Well, Chris Gethard, thank you so much for being on the show. It's always a pleasure to talk to you and this was really cool. I really appreciate it.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  You're the best, dude. I like that we sometimes go such a long time between talking and then all of a sudden we got like two really huge ones within like three weeks of each other. That's awesome.

• 50:38Chris Duffy?

  I know, it's really good. I feel like we really got some, some good catch up here.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks so much.

• 50:45Chris Duffy?

  That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to our guest, Chris Gethard. His podcast, Beautiful Anonymous, is available wherever you're listening to this. You can and should check out his books, A Bad Idea I'm About to Do and Lose Well. They are hilarious and incredible. I really recommend them. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can read my book, Humor Me, which is available now. You can find out more about my book and all my other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. This episode of How to Be a Better Human was assembled in a dirty basement underneath a supermarket in Lower Manhattan. On the TED side, our show is put together by a team of anonymous beautiful strangers, Daniela Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey La, Tansika Sumanivong, Antonio Lei and Joseph DeBryan.

• 51:29Chris Duffy?

  Ryan Lash put together this video while laughing hysterically inside of Penn Station. And Mateus Salas confirmed all of our facts, including that Chris Gethard once tried to make an entire audience in Cambridge, Massachusetts feel like they were tripping on hallucinogenic drugs. On the PRX side, our show is a live streamed, public access cable experiment hosted by a man in a banana costume, Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you for listening. Please share this episode with someone who you would like to connect with, someone who makes you laugh. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and lose well.

• 52:11Chris Duffy?

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