Summary
John Powers reviews a new collection of work by the writer Maxine Hong Kingston.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | NPR is doing its annual survey to better understand how listeners spend time with podcasts. |
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| 0:22.8 | This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Sam J is a comic writer and actor |
| 0:28.6 | who has her own series on HBO called Pause with Sam J. A lot of her comedy relates to being a black |
| 0:35.5 | masculine of center lesbian who didn't come out until her early 20s. Her show Pause is kind of |
| 0:41.3 | like a house party with Sam J as the host and her actual friends, fellow comics and TV writers |
| 0:47.2 | as her guests. They have lively talks about subjects like queer culture, relationships, |
| 0:52.3 | black conservatives, money and power and racism and tribalism in America. Last week she talked about |
| 0:58.8 | how her brother's life was changed by being in prison. Season one premiered a year ago, |
| 1:04.0 | season two is in progress. Before Pause, Sam J was a writer on Saturday Night Live, where her sketches |
| 1:10.8 | included black jeopardy, including the sketches with Chadwick Boseman in his black Panther |
| 1:15.4 | role as Tachala and Eddie Murphy as his character, Velvet Jones. She joined SNL in 2017 and left |
| 1:22.8 | to co-create Pause. She also co-created in co-stars in the series Bust Down along with Chris Red |
| 1:29.3 | who she worked with on SNL. Her latest stand-up special, Three in the Morning, is streaming on Netflix. |
| 1:36.2 | Sam J, welcome to Fresh Air. It's a pleasure to have you on our show. So how would you describe |
| 1:40.8 | your show to someone who's never seen it? Oh wow. That's always tough because it's not. It's a weird |
| 1:48.7 | show. But I guess I would say it's a drunken house party where you get to soberly go out and like |
| 1:56.7 | prove your point afterwards. It's kind of how I always looked at it. Like, what if you could take |
| 2:01.7 | all this stuff you argue about at a house party and actually go out in the world and find out |
| 2:07.2 | these things that you're standing on and saying are true or false or what your assumptions are of |
... |
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