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Walter Senior editor Jesse David Fox. Our guest this week is Anthony Jesselnick.

Loe, as he puts it, pinnacle of a certain sort of dark offensive style of joke writing and my mom's favorite comedian.

When he was in college, Anthony wanted to be a novelist, and Brett Easton Ellis was his favorite author.

I mentioned this because, though Anthony never became a novelist as he quickly tossed that dream aside

Over the course of his 17 years in stand-up he has created an American psycho-esque character

This persona of his, ego-driven, pompous, evil, is one of the great achievements

in modern stand-up. It's a villain he can use to talk about the inappropriate and the

taboo to help his audience process the parts of life

that are hard to accept.

Mortality, illness, suicide, murder.

Yeah, so essentially just mortality.

And somewhere in there, there's always Anthony the person.

Creating as his stand-up has evolved a compelling paradox, a question of what is real and what is fiction.

What was interesting about doing this interview in front of an audience live at Clusterfest

was seeing how in front of my eyes Anthony would sort of tune up or two down the persona,

depending on where in the question he was or if the audience hadn't laughed in a while.

And Fire at the maternity ward, his newest Netflix special,

...