Category: Full Interviews With Our Guests

2 Mad Men Comedians

November 7, 2013 - Comedians, Full Interviews With Our Guests, Most Recent, Our Podcast

David was in a horrible mood until he realized his guests Cathy Ladman and Brian Scolaro both appeared on Mad Men. Cathy Ladman is a Jewish American stand-up comedian, television writer, and actor. She was featured in her own installment of HBO’s One Night Stand comedy series, and has been a guest on The Tonight Show on nine occasions. She has had numerous supporting roles in films like Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead (1991), My Fellow Americans (1996), and White Oleander (2002), and two Mike Nichols films: “What Planet Are You From? (2000)” and Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), as well as TV shows like Roseanne, Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, Caroline in the City (in a recurring role), and Everybody Loves Raymond. She won an American Comedy Award for Best Female Stand-Up Comic in 1992.
Ladman’s comedy is self-described as “self-probing, anxiety-venting vehicle” for “exposing personal neurosis”. She is currently working on a new solo show, entitled, Does This Show Make Me Look Fat? In 2007, she was featured in the Off-Broadway production J.A.P. – The Princesses of Comedy, which included live standup routines by four female Jewish comics juxtaposed with the stories of legendary performers from the 1950s and 1960s, Totie Fields, Jean Carroll, Pearl Williams, Betty Walker and Belle Barth.

Brian Scolaro (born October 18, 1973 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn) is an American comedian, actor, voice actor.and producer. He is most known for his half hour special on Comedy Central and his roles on FOX’s “Stacked” and TBS’s “Sullivan and Son” and NBC’s “Three Sisters.”
He first established himself as a stand up comedian in Manhattan and appeared in Montreal’s Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in 1999. He was hired by writer Steve Koren (Click, Bruce Almighty, SNL, Seinfeld) to be a regular cast member on a pilot for NBC “Everything But the Girl” with Tiffani Amber Thiessen. He moved to Hollywood to be a regular cast member on NBC’s Three Sisters. He then shot an ABC pilot by director Tom Shadyack (Ace Ventura, Nutty Professor) called “Platonically Incorrect”. After a holding deal with CBS, he was cast as Stuart Miller for both seasons on Fox’s Stacked. He was also cast as a recurring character Doug on the first season of TBS’s “Sullivan and Son”. He also has played numerous characters on HBO’s “The Life and Times of Tim”.
Since then he has acted on AMC’s Mad Men, TNT’s Men of a Certain Age, Showtime’s Dexter, ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place, NBC’s “GO ON”, and the film “The Brothers Solomon.”
His half-hour special Comedy Central Presents: Brian Scolaro premiered in January 2009. He has done stand up comedy Late Nite with Conan OBrien, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Comedy Central’s “Live at Gotham”, and ABC’s “Comics Unleashed.”
His production company, Voodoowop Pictures, was formed in Brooklyn in 1996 with his college friends and their short films See That Guy and Something were featured respectively at Chicago’s Angelciti and Hollywood’s Show Off Your Short Film Festivals. His production company is available on YouTube. And their webseries “Hitman” was picked up by Atomic Wedgie TV and their webseries “Legend Hunters” remains a popular series on YouTube.

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Today’s featured songs: “Man Out Of Time” by Elvis Costello. And Macarthur’s Park sung by Richard Harris.

Do Dogs Really Love Us?

November 7, 2013 - Authors, Full Interviews With Our Guests, Most Recent, Our Podcast

Why does a dog love us more than it loves another dog? Are dogs really racist? What’s up with dogs and urine? Our guest is Dr. Gregory Berns, professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University and the author of “How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain.” And then Film Critic Michael Snyder on what movies to see.

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Fred Stoller Behaves Himself

October 31, 2013 - Comedians, Full Interviews With Our Guests, Most Recent, Our Podcast

Comedian and Bestselling Author Fred Stoller controls his temper no matter how much David Feldman pokes and prods him. Steve Skrovan, director of “An Unreasonable Man” and Will Ryan also join us. Fred Stoller published a successful e-book titled My Seinfeld Year, in which he chronicled his experiences after being hired as a new staff writer. He has since released a book titled Maybe We’ll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star. Stoller has been a stand-up comedian in nightclubs since the early 1980s at the time of his first television appearance, in 1987, when he appeared on Stand-Up America and later on The Young Comedians Special alongside six other comedians.
He is best known for his frequent appearances as Gerard on the CBS sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, Mr. Lowe in Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide and as Sheldon Singer, the son of Harold Gould’s deli-owning character, on the short-lived sitcom Singer & Sons. He has also made guest appearances on several other TV series. He wrote two episodes of Seinfeld (“The Soup” and the Kramer/chimpanzee subplot of “The Face Painter”). Stoller is also known as the voices of Stanley in the Open Season franchise, Rusty the Wrench on Handy Manny and Fred the Squirrel in The Penguins of Madagascar.

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Alison Wolf

October 26, 2013 - Authors, Full Interviews With Our Guests, Most Recent, Our Podcast

Alison Wolf is author of the new book, “The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating A New Society.” The New York Times writes, “In short, with ‘The XX Factor’ Wolf accomplishes a rare feat: She combines real breadth with real depth. No matter how much you think you know about this hotly debated subject, and whether or not you agree with every one of Wolf’s ideas, you will come away from her book with new information — some merely amusing, but some foundation-shaking.” In her introduction Professor Wolf writes, “For most of history, being female defined the limits of a woman’s achievements. But now, women are successful careerists equal to men. In Norway, women legally must constitute a third of all boards; in America, women have gone from 3% of practising lawyers in 1970 to 40% today, and over half of all law students. These changes are revolutionary – but not universal: the ‘sisterhood’ of working women is deeply divided. Making enormous strides in the workplace are young, educated, full-time professionals who have put children on hold. But for a second group of women this is unattainable: instead, they work part-time, earn less, are concentrated in heavily feminised occupations like cleaning and gain income and self-worth from having children young. As these two groups move ever further apart, shared gender no longer automatically creates interests in common with other women. The XX Factor lifts the curtain on these social, cultural and economic schisms.”

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Sasha Abramsky On Poverty In America

October 23, 2013 - Authors, Full Interviews With Our Guests, Most Recent, Our Podcast

Sasha Abramsky writes for the Nation Magazine, his new book is “The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives.” On today’s show Sasha talks about how bad things are getting for ordinary Americans, and how we can fix it. Then Activist Georja Umano talks about the plight of elephants in Africa, and how you can help by donating to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Please subscribe to our show on iTunes and Stitcher, leave a review and share us with a friend.