Maria Bamford on Stand-Up, Netflix and Mental Health
The Last Laugh
The Daily Beast
4.6 • 661 Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2023
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Maria Bamford has been performing stand-up comedy for more than 30 years and just keeps getting better. Her most recent hour-long special ‘Weakness Is the Brand’ found her at the top of her game, delivering operatic bits about her ongoing mental health struggles and relentless drive to be a good person in the world. In this episode, we talk about how she arrived at relative stability, the challenges that female comics still face in a male-dominated industry, how she felt when Netflix canceled her autobiographical show ‘Lady Dynamite’ after two seasons and a lot more—including an unvarnished take on Louis C.K.
This episode was originally published on January 28th, 2020.
Buy Maria Bamford’s book ‘Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere’
Follow Maria Bamford on Twitter @mariabamfoo and Instagram @mariabamfordcomedy
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is The Last Laugh. I'm Matt Wilstein from The Daily Beast, and yes, in case you were wondering, I am still on paternity leave. |
| 0:13.1 | I hope you've been enjoying the episodes we put out over the summer, revisiting my interviews with some of this year's Emmy nominees, |
| 0:19.1 | and we will have even more of those coming your way over the next several weeks. But this week, I want to do something a little different |
| 0:24.7 | and listen back to a conversation I had in early 2020 with one of the most innovative and |
| 0:29.8 | hilarious stand-up comedians of all time, Maria Bamford. That's because today, Tuesday, September |
| 0:35.9 | 5th, marks the release of Maria's excellent new book, |
| 0:39.6 | Sure, I'll Join Your Cult, A Memoir of Mental Illness, in The Quest to Belong Anywhere. |
| 0:44.7 | I just finished reading an advanced copy, and I can tell you that if you are also a fan of |
| 0:49.4 | her comedy, it really is everything you want it to be. |
| 0:53.1 | So, anyway, I recorded this episode with Maria around the release and for 2020 special, |
| 0:58.0 | Weakness is the brand. |
| 0:59.4 | We talked a bunch about that special and covered lots of other highlights from her career, |
| 1:03.9 | including her experience making Lady Dynamite for Netflix, the shame she feels now about |
| 1:08.4 | working with Louis C.K. and so much more. We began by discussing her |
| 1:13.0 | very unique process for putting together new material. This is a really special one, so please |
| 1:19.0 | enjoy me with the great Maria Bamford. I guess just to start, can you talk kind of about that process of working out material |
| 1:29.6 | and all these different places and then kind of molding it into one big thing for the special? |
| 1:34.9 | Oh, yeah. |
| 1:36.3 | What I do and I don't know what other comics do, but I just start at zero all over again. |
| 1:43.3 | And then the past few years I've been, I'll get some time at, |
| 1:48.4 | there's a black box theater in Hollywood at Vermont and Hollywood Boulevard. |
| 1:54.6 | Best parking in Los Angeles, right between John's supermarket and Fias Paredes. |
... |
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