ON EMBARRASSING MOMENTS… With Dan Levy and Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Welcome back to this How to Fail episode where we journey through the archive to revisit some of the best bits. This week we’re keeping it light and taking a look at some of the funniest and most entertaining embarrassing moments on How to Fail. You’ll hear from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, originally released in July 2018. Phoebe talks about trying to impress Meryl Streep and her body sort of malfunctioned… involving an apple crumble! Then we hear from Dan Levy, from his original episode in January 2024. Dan talks about his birthday cake failure from his childhood and the humiliation at his knee-jerk response. I hope this episode brings some light to your day and reminds us that everyone experiences embarrassment at some point! Listen to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s full episode of How to Fail here: https://link.chtbl.com/Xr_yQtIZ Listen to Dan Levy’s full episode of How to Fail here: https://play.megaphone.fm/b0cje4y2thgpbbpms2q64w 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Elizabeth’s Substack: https://theelizabethday.substack.com/ Join the How To Fail community: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @howtofailpod @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod @elizabday Website: www.elizabethday.org Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Elizabeth Day?

  One of the things I hear a lot from listeners is how tiring it can be when your mind just doesn't settle. And I can only imagine this feels even heavier with intrusive thoughts. It's that quiet sense of being worn down by something you never asked for and never wanted, but just can't seem to switch off. If you struggle with this, I want to tell you about NoCD, because it's a resource that genuinely helps people. NoCD provides specialised treatment for OCD. And what I appreciate about their approach is how human it feels. You're matched with a licensed therapist trained in ERP therapy. That's exposure and response prevention. And over time, you learn skills that help your OCD symptoms become manageable, so you can live more of the life you want to live.

• 0:45Elizabeth Day?

  If you're struggling with OCD or unrelenting intrusive thoughts, NoCD can help. Book a free 15-minute call to get started at learn.nocd.com/fail. Confession time. I have a tendency to postpone certain decisions for far longer than is sensible. Not the big life decisions, oddly enough, those I can usually handle. It's the smaller ones that somehow become disproportionately complicated. For me, rugs fall squarely into that category. I've known for a long time that a rug can completely change how a room feels, but I've always found sizing for a space tricky. That's why Ernesta appealed to me.

• 1:26Elizabeth Day?

  Ernesta makes designer-quality rugs, custom-cut to the exact dimensions of your space. So instead of making do with something that's close enough, you're choosing something made specifically for your home. I also love the fact that you can order five oversized 12 by 12 samples for just $10 before committing. And Ernesta's design team will help with sizing completely free of charge. Visit ernestacom and order five samples for only $10 and you'll get $50 towards any rug of your choice. That's ernestacom.

• 2:09Elizabeth Day?

  Welcome back to this week's archive episode reflecting on some of the best bits from How To Fail's past. This week, we're keeping it light and taking a look at some of the funniest and most entertaining embarrassing moments from guests on How To Fail, starting with the one and only Phoebe Waller-Bridge. This is honestly one of the most hilarious moments, listening back to Phoebe talking about trying to impress Meryl Streep and her body malfunctioning. And all I need to tell you, because you might have heard it before, is that it involves an apple crumble. I've lost count of the number of times listeners have come up to me at live shows and said, "That apple crumble story", and I know immediately what they're talking about. It's one of those anecdotes that gets better every time you

• 2:54Elizabeth Day?

  hear it. Then Dan Levy talks about a birthday cake failure he remembers vividly from his childhood, and the humiliation he felt at his knee-jerk response to dropping it. I hope this episode brings some light to your day, and reminds you that we all have embarrassing moments, whoever you are. First, it's Phoebe and the apple crumble.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  I was really excited to meet Meryl Streep when I was doing the Iron Lady.

• 3:21Elizabeth Day?

  Was she?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  I was weird with her, though. I go weird around celebrities, and always in a very individual way for each celebrity. I should just not be around them.

• 3:33Elizabeth Day?

  What did you say to Meryl Streep that was weird?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Well, Meryl Streep was doing the Iron Lady and she was in this prosthetic, whole-body-face scenario. The lights were so hot, so whenever she was on set, she couldn't really speak in between, because so much energy was taken up and just acting through this mask and everything. So she would never say anything in between cuts, and we always knew. And she was always like, "I'm really sorry, but I just can't. I just need to power down, sip some water through the straw." But there was one day when the lights went off, they called cut, and then she just turned around to this room of people and went, in her Margaret Thatcher voice, and just went, "So, how's everybody's day?" And everyone just freaked out. Everyone just froze in the room, because they were like, "Oh, my God", everyone at the same time. We were like vultures, just like, "This is our moment to share words with Meryl Streep."

• 4:20Speaker 01

  And so everyone sort of was being very casual and it was the scene was like a drinks party or something, but edging towards her with this kind of wild look in their eye. And everyone was trying to have some some personal bounce with with Meza. So she was just opening the conversation and then it was getting like weirdly competitive. We were like crowding around her, but everyone was trying to be very casual. And then she started up this conversation about something. Anyway, I tried a joke and it landed. And she laughed and she was like, oh, and everyone else looked at me with steel and an ash and face and fury. And I was like, I've won it. She's mine. She's mine. So she was mine. But after that, I was like, she's totally mine. She's totally mine. We're gonna have a day together. We're gonna like like nod to each other respectfully in the corridors. We're gonna, we may even like, you know, graduate to a drink at some point.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  And then at lunchtime, I was sitting at this table with everybody and I was eating this apple crumble and she came down the stairs. She was feeling lively this day, uh, obviously outside of the prosthetic. She came down the stairs and she was walking towards me and I was like, oh, my God, oh, my God, like, she's gonna come to the table and we're friends now because I was the one that made her laugh. And she walked up to the table and she put her hand on my shoulder and she said, oh, what are you eating? I have never, I'm so, I just, I got so excited about the banter with Meryl that I flung my apple crumble straight into my chest.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  My costume chest and I and I literally squawked, my apple crumble.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  And she went, oh. And then she went back to her American accent, which she hadn't done for the whole time. And she went, I wasn't gonna take it from you. And I was just holding this awful like dripping pudding over my my beautiful silk shirt and I'm just holding it there really tightly, not letting it go. I was just like, oh, my God, oh, my God, everyone's doing me like, what was that? That was the strangest response. And then she was like, okay. And then she she moved off and then I had to go and apologize costume thing, get my shirt. So just weird stuff like that.

• 6:18Elizabeth Day?

  You made her break character.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  I made Meryl Streep break character.

• 6:26Elizabeth Day?

  Your first failure relates to a time in second grade, which for UK listeners is when you're about seven or eight years old?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  I would think so.

• 6:34Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  It's like kindergarten for a couple of years and then first grade and second grade. So I don't know what that.

• 6:39Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah. So what happened?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  I bring this up as a failure because sometimes, you know, there are these snags in our memory where we stick on these moments and they should have just come and gone. And yet they are as vivid as the day it happened. And the earliest huge failure for me was it was my birthday, except my birthday is in August. So we, you know, you're very young and you want to celebrate with everybody because everybody who has a birthday during the school year gets to have cake and thing. So my mom made me a cake to bring in right as the school year started in September in Canada. So we did a celebration around my birthday because it's in August.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  And I was feeling a little embarrassed anyway because it wasn't really my birthday, but it was anyway.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  The cake is at the back of the classroom. My teacher says, we have a surprise for the class. I knew what the surprise was. And she said, Daniel, I'm going to go and get the cake. And I said, no, no, no, I can get the cake. I'll get the cake. Very excited, happy to share with the class. The cake is revealed, the class is excited. Just as I get to the front of the classroom, I trip and the cake falls out of my hands and onto my shoes and flips sort of cake first onto the ground. And the class obviously is hysterically laughing. And it is the deepest humiliation I'd felt in my young life. And I looked around and didn't know what to do. And it's that time where you're young and you don't know whether you should cry or laugh.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  And so my reaction was to sort of, I guess, go completely pale in the face and then reach down and start to eat the cake off my shoes. I don't know what that impulse was. I think it was kind of panic and, and deep embarrassment. And it was a moment that I've remembered because in a way it.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  I've kind of intellectualized it as like the first exertion of hubris or something. Like, I was like, no, no, no, I'm, I got the cake. You don't need to get the cake for me. I have it. And I didn't. I was too young. My hands were probably too small. The cake was too heavy. All of those things. And then it, it just, it was a, it was a symbolic thing.

• 9:01Elizabeth Day?

  Yes.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  I have to say.

• 9:02Elizabeth Day?

  It's so interesting to me. How many people on this podcast do choose moments like that from their early childhood? Where they embarrass themselves? And I think it's that thing of when you're a child and you're trying to work out who you are in this confusing world, and you don't know whether someone is making fun of you or is on your side, it can feel quite terrifying.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:24Elizabeth Day?

  And, and I, a bit like you, I didn't have the happiest school experience for various reasons. And I wonder what you were like after that as a child at school? What was your school experience?

• 9:36Speaker 02

  I just, to me, I look back, I've never liked school.

• 9:40Elizabeth Day?

  Me neither.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Not a single day. And I think part of it had to do with the fact that I wasn't the truest expression of myself. And I think when you're playing a part, it gets exhausting and you don't like yourself because you're hiding yourself. In, in, in my particular case, I just wanted to get through it because I think in my mind, I thought, once school is done, people will have the maturity to accept me. I think it was toward the end of the last year of my high school experience that I told some friends, it wasn't a safe space. It's, uh,

• 10:17Elizabeth Day?

  I mean,

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Tough.

• 10:18Elizabeth Day?

  It's tough. And I think also when you're the butt of the joke or you are bullied, it makes sense to me that you now write the jokes.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 10:26Elizabeth Day?

  You want to be in control of when people laugh.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, I didn't think of it that way, but now that you bring it up, it makes sense.

• 10:32Elizabeth Day?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  It's, and also, yeah, a control of, and also how the jokes are formed. And I think the one thing I, I learned from both my dad and Catherine O'Hara during the, the creation of Schitt's Creek was you can tell very funny jokes about people in celebration of people, but not at their expense. And there's a very fine line between. Cruel comedy and observational comedy. And I will always lean towards observational comedy. The roast sort of world of it all is its own subculture, which is something I would kill for the self-confidence to endure. I also think that's why shits worked.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Because there was a warmth to the comedy and everyone was laughing at themselves as well as everyone else. There was a kind of democracy of comedy across the board. There was no butt of the joke. And that will always be something I'm trying to rewrite through my whole life, I think, through anything I do is the kind of reversal of the first chapter of my own life, I guess.

• 11:44Elizabeth Day?

  Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.