Pushkin. This is talk easy. I'm San Fr writer, actress and comedian Zeway. As you may remember, Zeway came to prominence

at the height of the pandemic when most of us were trapped at home endlessly doom scrolling in

search of signs of life. For most of 2020 though Zeway would take to

Instagram Live every Thursday at a p.m. where she would conduct a series of charged

interviews with actors authors and fellow comedians many of whom had either

been quote canceled or had recently made a public misstep on social media.

These conversations, especially when the subjects were white, would invariably turn

to the matter of race. And this is where things got famously complicated as

Zeway would pose questions like, Can you name five black people off the top of

your head? How many black friends do you have? And when you say

black people, do you capitalize the bee? Comedian Larry Wilmore called these IG live

performances a kind of racial high wire act that would often reveal the subject's

ignorance or self-involvement or frankly both.

Zeway would then move these interviews out of her Brooklyn bedroom and into a studio where

she would create her self-titled late night variety program for Showtime.

Starting in 2021, it ran for two excellent seasons before abruptly being

cancelled this past spring. She's recently returned with her debut collection of

essays entitled Black Friend, which you can now find wherever you get your books.

She's also at the tail end of her tour, so if you'd like to check out one of her shows,

visit Zeway.com. For today I wanted to talk to the

writer comedian about the art of interviewing, the influence of the Colbert Report, the power of the COBé report, the power of satire, why she turned to memoir, and how

she found her singular voice after years of searching.

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