Heidi Gutman / Peacock
Jena Friedman wants you to know that she’s in on the joke. And in her new book of essays, pointedly titled Not Funny, she deftly demonstrates how she has become one of the most uncompromising comedic voices of her generation, from her days as a field producer on The Daily Show, to her Oscar-nominated writing on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, to her first hour-long stand-up Ladykiller, in which she delivered some killer abortion jokes while pregnant with her first child.
In her third appearance on The Last Laugh podcast, Friedman holds nothing back, spilling tea about her negative experience with James Corden, revealing why she decided to turn the tables on male comedians like Jon Stewart and Jim Gaffigan by asking them the offensive questions female comedians constantly get asked in interviews, and discussing that time Bill Burr “told on himself” by responding to her tweets about predatory comics.
When Friedman was on the sixth-ever episode of The Last Laugh, back in April 2019, I deemed her the “feminist Sacha Baron Cohen” for the gonzo, confrontational interviews she was conducting as part of her Soft Focus specials on Adult Swim. When she returned to the podcast in 2021—this time as an Oscar nominee for writing on Baron Cohen’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm—to talk about her series True Crime Story: Indefensible, she described herself as the “hipster Nancy Grace.”