Funny You Should Mention: Myq Kaplan
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2025
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Comedian Myq Kaplan joins the show for a deep dive into joke logic, philosophy, and the very slippery business of defining who counts as a comedian. Using his new special Rini as a jumping-off point, he and Mike wander through Grecian maxims, the paradox of the heap, why some laughs are closer to enlightenment than punch lines, and how his relationship with Rini turned into a whole cosmology of love, language, and life on stage. Along the way they talk genre, jazz, governing boards of comedy, and what it means to do "Myq and Rini based" comedy instead of fitting into anyone's box. Plus, revisiting Biden world's insistence that the disastrous 2024 debate did not hurt the president in the polls.
Produced by Corey Wara
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Friday, November 21st, 2025 from Peachfish Productions. |
| 0:07.6 | It's the gist. I'm Mike Peska. |
| 0:09.7 | President Joe Biden's senior advisor, Mike Donnellin, hasn't talked much about the 2024 race, |
| 0:15.1 | but he was there on stage at a recent USC conference on President Biden being pressured to drop out of the |
| 0:22.1 | 2024 race end. He said this about the polls. This is what I think. You know, you go back |
| 0:28.8 | and look at the polling at the moment. Okay. And I think you'll be surprised by a few things. |
| 0:37.5 | Biden went into that debate roughly two points down nationwide. |
| 0:44.4 | The race got closer in the days after the debate. |
| 0:49.4 | It didn't get wider. |
| 0:51.2 | Wow, that does seem compelling. |
| 0:53.2 | He's certainly assured and also dishonest, |
| 0:56.1 | or at least unbelievably misleading. |
| 0:58.4 | Here's a sample of CBS News coverage |
| 1:01.0 | from the days after the debate |
| 1:02.9 | when the first polls were coming in. |
| 1:05.0 | All of this comes as concern mount |
| 1:07.8 | within the Democratic Party about whether the president can defeat former President |
| 1:12.0 | Trump in November. Those concerns rising as a new post-debate CBS News poll shows a shift |
| 1:19.4 | and keep battleground states away from the president. And here is New York Times reporting. |
| 1:24.3 | I put all this up on my Twitter feed at P-E-S-C-A-M-I. Here with the States takes a few |
| 1:31.1 | days for good polling to come in. I'll read what the Times reported. In the weeks after the |
| 1:36.2 | debate, Biden's position deteriorated in three states crucial to his re-election, Michigan, Pennsylvania, |
... |
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