This is the Last Laugh.

I'm Matt Wilstein from The Daily Beast, and this week on the show, we are doing something a little different to mark the one-year anniversary of the week our entire world came crashing down.

This Thursday is March 11th, or as I will forever think of it, Tom Hanks

day. That was the day in 2020 that we found out our national treasure Tom Hanks had tested positive

for the newly terrifying coronavirus. Also, the NBA suspended its season, and Donald Trump finally acknowledged in a primetime address

that something bad might be happening.

In the year since, I have talked to dozens of comedians on this new thing called Zoom,

and for the most part, those conversations have been pretty great, despite the immense

distance between me and my guests. To mark this bizarre

anniversary, we are looking back at clips from eight of those talks in which comedians

explained what it has been like to try to make comedy in the middle of a pandemic. And I wanted

to start with the first full interview I did on video chat with one of my favorite stand-up

comedians, Cameron Esposito.

It was early April at this point, and she was just learning how to tell jokes on Zoom.

It didn't go exactly his plan.

I'll let Cameron pick it up from here.

You know the part of a movie where they do the evolutionary like montage sped up from a

cell, from like a single cellular organism to like the fish that then is climbing out of

the ocean that then becomes the stand-up comic? It always is a stand-up comic at the end,

obviously, since that's like sort of our final form. I feel like that is what the last couple weeks have felt like.

I've had some legitimate work stuff to do, but it has also all been in a new way. Like, not one of the things I'm currently doing for work is a skill set I had prior to three weeks ago.

Yeah, like your main skill set of getting on stage and telling jokes.

...