Comedian Bonnie McFarlane is the director of one of David’s favorite documentaries “Women Aren’t Funny. Her new book “You’re Better Than Me” comes out in February. She also hosts the wildly popular podcast “My Wife Hates Me” with her wildly unpopular husband Comic Rich Vos. On today’s show Bonnie and David share their love for Rich.
Director of LISTEN TO ME MARLON Stevan Riley. Then Jeff Maurer, comedian and writer for HBO’s LAST WEEK/TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER. Visit us at www.DavidFeldmanShow.com. LISTEN TO ME MARLON is a documentary that utilizes hundreds of hours of audio that Marlon Brandon recorded over the course of his life to tell the screen legend’s story. It’s playing at at theater near you and will soon be on Showtime.
Greg Fitzsimmons is a stand-up comedian and a regular guest on The Howard Stern Show, Chelsea Lately, The Adam Carolla Show, and The Joe Rogan Experience. His 2011 book, Dear Mrs. Fitzsimmons received critical praise from NPR and Vanity Fair.
Since 2006, Greg has hosted a radio show on Howard Stern’s Sirius/XM channel and his own twice-weekly podcast, Fitzdog Radio. A regular on Letterman, Conan, and Kimmel, Greg also had two stand-up specials on Comedy Central and spent five years as a panelist on VH1’s Best Week Ever.
Comic Nick DiPaolo catches up with David and then David surprises Nick by bringing on Nick’s comedy hero. Nick’s weekly podcast is on the Riotcast network and his new comedy special is entitled Another Senseless Killing. DiPaolo has written and performed three stand up specials for Comedy Central Presents, appeared in the HBO Young Comedians Special and an hour-long comedy special Raw Nerve, which he wrote, performed and produced. It premiered on Showtime on April 30, 2011. Buy his new special for only 8 bucks here.
Richard Beck is author of “WE BELIEVE THE CHILDREN: Moral Panic In The 1980s” published by Public Affairs. WE BELIEVE THE CHILDREN IS A brilliant, disturbing portrait of the dawn of the culture wars, when America started to tear itself apart with doubts, wild allegations, and an unfounded fear for the safety of children.
During the 1980s in California, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere, day care workers were arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of committing horrible sexual crimes against the children they cared for. These crimes, social workers and prosecutors said, had gone undetected for years, and they consisted of a brutality and sadism that defied all imagining. The dangers of babysitting services and day care centers became a national news media fixation. Of the many hundreds of people who were investigated in connection with day care and ritual abuse cases around the country, some 190 were formally charged with crimes, leading to more than 80 convictions.
“Intellectually nimble… [Beck’s] argument should prove far more enduring than all the lies and self-deceptions, so credulously believed in the 1980s, that this book does a devil of a job correcting.” —NEW YORK TIMES
“Understanding a moral panic requires perspective—distance from the emotional heat of anger and anxiety. Sometimes it is precisely those who didn’t live through it who are best suited to providing that perspective. In WE BELIEVE THE CHILDREN: A MORAL PANIC IN THE 1980S, Richard Beck accomplishes this difficult feat, and he does so calmly, detail by meticulous detail…. A thorough account… His important book gives readers who don’t know the story—or who think it is over, so 20th century—an understanding of its lingering, pernicious effects on our lives…. Mr. Beck’s book is valuable because it is timely and comprehensive. He not only tells the story of a moral panic with a fresh eye but provides context, identifying the forces that preceded it as well as those that fed it and have kept it going today.” —WALL STREET JOURNAL
“[Thirty] years ago America was described as experiencing an ‘epidemic’ of sexual abuse in day care. Richard Beck, an editor at N+1, does a herculean job of investigating why this happened in his absorbing book WE BELIEVE THE CHILDREN.” —WASHINGTON POST
“In this sharp, sensitive debut [Beck] deftly examines all the forces that came together in this strange moment in our history.” —BOSTON GLOBE
It would take years for people to realize what the defendants had said all along—that these prosecutions were the product of a decade-long outbreak of collective hysteria on par with the Salem witch trials. Social workers and detectives employed coercive interviewing techniques that led children to tell them what they wanted to hear. Local and national journalists fanned the flames by promoting the stories’ salacious aspects, while aggressive prosecutors sought to make their careers by unearthing an unspeakable evil where parents feared it most.
Using extensive archival research and drawing on dozens of interviews conducted with the hysteria’s major figures, n+1 editor Richard Beck shows how a group of legislators, doctors, lawyers, and parents—most working with the best of intentions—set the stage for a cultural disaster. The climate of fear that surrounded these cases influenced a whole series of arguments about women, children, and sex. It also drove a right-wing cultural resurgence that, in many respects, continues to this day.
Comedy geniuses Frank Conniff and Colleen Werthmann join the roundtable for a look back at the week’s news. Colleen writes for Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show and Frank Conniff is Frank Conniff.