Tamara Yajia’s family immigrated to America from Argentina twice before she became a teenager, and the second time prevented her from becoming potentially Argentina’s version of Britney Spears, for better or for worse. Yajia documents it all in her new memoir, CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA: My Life as a Failed Child Star, and she sat down with me to talk about how she dealt with the pangs of life not meeting the expectations her family had given her growing up, how she strayed from performing for more than a decade and what drew her back to show business, where she has worked in the writers rooms of Apple TV’s Acapulco, Hulu’s This Fool, and Netflix’s upcoming show Strip Low. Her own script was picked up for development by an actual former child star in Selena Gomez, but I’ll let Tam tell you all about the importance of having celebrity mentors and surviving mishaps and family embarrassments. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, Veronica Osorio moved to New York City after spending her teen years clowning and acting in South America. Once in America, she joined the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where she performed on house sketch teams with Kate McKinnon, Nicole Byer, and Natasha Rothwell, among others. In New York and Los Angeles, she has started and/or hosted all-Spanish and all-female shows, and co-hosted a Star Trek podcast, Treks and The City. Her screen credits include film roles working with the Coen Brothers in Hail, Caesar! and with Steven Soderbergh in The Laundromat. And she has two different stage babies: Medicine Woman, where she puts her certified healer work to test with live audiences at Fringe festivals from Hollywood to Edinburgh to Brighton to Adelaide; Cherry Baby: Lover Girl, a clown where she tries to find a spouse before the show is over. But as we caught up over Zoom, she’s also about to deliver a real-life baby. She shared her journey with me, talking about the dangers she faced in Venezuela, the difficulties in her path trying to find acceptance with her American comedy teammates, and how what’s happening now to her loved ones and other Venezuelan refugees in America, along with her impending motherhood, has impacted her work onstage. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

I spoke with comedian Nimesh Patel when he thought he had licensed his new hour, Instant Karma to Netflix. Shortly after our chat, Netflix decided to film a brand-new hour with Patel instead later in 2025. So our chat found him at a crossroads — Patel had just filmed an episode of CNN’s Have I Got News For You, and subsequently performed a second time on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Our conversation spanned from his earliest video sketches and emails with me back in 2010, and tracing his time with Michael Che as part of the Monday night Broken Comedy showcase in Greenpoint, where Chris Rock saw him and hired him to write for Rock’s stint hosting the Academy Awards in 2016. Patel told me how he felt inspired watching his peers find fast success, how he handled free-speech backlash at Columbia University well before Columbia made nationwide news for it in recent years, and how Patel’s approach to crowd work has changed since it has become the trendiest thing to see on TikTok. Patel released his previous specials on YouTube, and filmed a short set for Netflix’s Verified Stand Up showcase in 2023. As he preps his new Netflix hour, he is embarking on a live theater tour that extends through the end of 2025. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Go see Nimesh live on his theatre tour which is happening now through the end of the year. For show and ticket info go to www.FindingNimesh.com

The comedian James Tom now jokes about having told they/them pronoun jokes as far back as 2013 quote-unquote “before most non-binary people were born.”

Back then, Tom felt alone in the world and in the comedy community. But now, living and performing as a gay trans man, Tom told me over Zoom that he feels more like “the estranged father of the non-binary transmasc comedy community.” We also spoke about Tom’s unique experience getting Just For Laughs New Faces in 2021 when the pandemic forced the festival out of Montreal to Los Angeles, writing for the queer pirate comedy, Our Flag Means Death, on Max, what to make of Dave Chappelle and JK Rowling’s obsession with trans people, and what it has felt like to watch other comedians such as Molly Kearney and Mae Martin successfully navigate similar spaces in show business. Tom’s credits also include appearances on Life & Beth, Tuca & Bertie, an Off-Broadway run in 2023 of one-person-show, Less Lonely, and the 2024 Netflix stand-up showcase, Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda. We spoke about all that and more just before hitting the road for a West Coast tour. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Rory Rosegarten started his career as a comedy manager by the time he was 20 with a whopper of a first client: the already legendary Robert Klein. More than four decades later, as founder and still president of The Conversation Company, Rosegarten manages a small but highly successful comedy clientele — his longtime roster includes both Brian Regan and Ray Romano, his newer client Tom Green recently premiered a documentary, a stand-up special and a docu-series all this year on Amazon Prime Video, and he’s currently working with comedian Gary Valentine on a TV series based on golfer John Daly. Rosegarten sat down with me over Zoom to talk about his teenage years interviewing celebrities first for his high-school and then for Playboy magazine, how he recruited other comics to work with a manager younger than them during the 1980s comedy boom, and how some things change and some things never do in the comedy business — including the fact that Rory has done it all while always living in Long Island. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Mike Drucker is an Emmy-nominated and WGA-winning writer and comedian living in New York. Drucker’s comedy career really began with an internship at Saturday Night Live, where he later contributed to SNL’s Weekend Update as well as The Onion before leaving the city and the East Coast for a gig writing for video games with Nintendo of America. So it makes sense that his memoir, Good Game, No Rematch, would share his love letters to video games and their place in his life and comedy. Drucker sat down with me to talk about how he kept his comedy career humming in the background while he worked for Nintendo and later IGN, before returning to NYC, where he eventually found himself at Full frontal with Samantha Bee, rising to the level of executive producer and head writer by the end of that late-night talker on TBS. He also has written for The President Show, Adam Ruins Everything, Bill Nye Saves The World, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and has enjoyed two stints back in 30 Rock writing for Jimmy Fallon on both Late Night and The Tonight Show. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Fooling media outlets into thinking she created the Netflix series Emily in Paris may have won the comedian and Fordham grad Abby Govindan plenty of new followers on Twitter in 2021, but it didn’t go a long way in making her the pride of her Indian American family back home in Houston. It’s just one of the stories Govindan shares in her debut Off Broadway one-hander, “How to Embarrass Your Immigrant Parents,”produced by the comedians Hasan Minhaj and Daniel Sloss.

In the show, she reveals how she struggled with her mental health before finding therapy and stand-up comedy, and learns how to love or at least understand her father’s responses in the family’s group chat. Just 24 hours before her opening night at New York City’s SoHo Playhouse, Abby sat down with me over Zoom to talk about how much has changed for her in the past five years. She explains what she has learned from social media and working with and for more famous comedians, and how Jungle Cat, the stand-up showcase she co-hosts with Mohanad Elshieky, has helped her both mentally and professionally. There’s a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!

Brad Alexander composes music for television and musical theater, whose notable works include the music for See Rock City & Other Destinations, which won the 2011 Drama Desk Award, Richard Rodgers Award and BMI Foundation’s Jerry Bock Award, and more recently served as lead composer for the PBS/Amazon animated series, Clifford The Big Red Dog. I remember seeing and hearing Brad as a piano whiz as early as the second grade, as we were elementary-school classmates and friends growing up in small-town Connecticut. We had a great time catching up on how his career went from the Berkshire Theatre Festival to ad agency music producing, working in piano bars both as a soloist and as a dueling pianist — eventually owning his own business, The Flying Ivories . His other staged works and collaborations include Click, Clack, Moo, We The People: America Rocks!, the Emmy-winning PBS series, Peg + Cat, and he wrote the music for Dog Man: The Musical, which is currently on tour across North America. We spoke about all of that, plus the work he’s currently engaged in adapting the film Bread & Roses, into a stage musical with his wife, actress/singer/writer Jill Abramovitz, who’s on standby for the cast of the new all-star Broadway production, All In. There’s definitely a lot to get to, so let’s get to it!