Mo Welch spent years trying to make jokes about the father who abused her mother and abandoned her family without totally bumming out her audience. Now, she has perfected the art of the extremely dark “dad joke” in her new stand-up special-slash-documentary Dad Jokes.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Welch talks about how terrifying it was coming face to face with her father for the first time in 20 years after he went to prison for stealing TVs, and how she managed to thread the needle of turning that trauma into comedy on stage. She also reveals what she has learned about comedy from collaborators (and previous Last Laugh guests) Anthony Jeselnik and Beth Stelling, and tells the story of how she dropped her microphone in a toilet seconds before her late-night stand-up debut on Conan.
Among the jokes that Welch wasn’t sure her audience would laugh at is a bit from her new special—available to stream on 800 Pound Gorilla Media’s YouTube channel and website—in which she brags about the nature of her father’s incarceration the way others might refer to Ivy League schools.
