Christina P is the matriarch of modern American comedy. Her no-nonsense, unfiltered “talking out her *ss” has won her a legion of devoted fans. For 5 years, Christina chaired Where My Moms At?, a podcast that tackled the ups and downs of motherhood. Today, she co-hosts the wildly popular Your Mom’s House podcast with her husband and fellow comedian, Tom Segura, and continues to tour the globe as a stand-up comic. Her latest special - Mom Genes - is available now on Netflix.
Why did we invite her on?
We’ve been fans of Christina’s for some time. Recently, it came to our attention that the feeling was mutual. Immediately, we had her down on our wishlist for the next America trip.
In the last decade, comics - for better or worse - have become increasingly outspoken. For most of the artform’s history, performers were discouraged from dividing their audience - keep it clean, light, and send everyone home happy. These days, it’s hard to find a successful comedian who is entirely apolitical - you’re the last bastion for free speech/social justice, get out there and fight.
No one could accuse Christina of holding her tongue, but she’s hesitant to participate in the political mud-slinging.
But, as we discovered, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have some views of her own.
What did we talk about?
“I always considered myself a ‘90s liberal, and now that’s a conservative. I don’t know what happened.”
It’s a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme. The jaded Clintonite, the neo-liberal Republican, the Left the Left left. Without moving a comma in her personal political manifesto, Christina finds herself on the ‘wrong side’ of the line, and she’s disturbed by it. Her country’s increasing acceptance of far-left ideology doesn’t just bore and bother her - it’s a cause for alarm. Like Konstantin, Christina’s post-judice towards communism isn’t merely ideological - it’s a primal response to a personal history.
”My father predicted this … my parents escaped communism in 1969, so I have a real f*cking visceral reaction when I hear people being censored. My *sshole really puckers when I hear people are unbothered by being censored.”
To Christina, the slippery slope started in the late 2000s. Not with the financial crisis, and not with Obama, but when a has-been sitcom star got on stage and lost his cool.
On November 17 2006, Seinfeld star Michael Richards ruined his life. Midway through a performance (it turned out to be the end) at the famous Laugh Factory in Hollywood, aggravated by some hecklers, Richards let them have it. What followed was a shocking tirade of racial slurs, peppered with Jim Crow-era rhetoric and threats of lynching.
”There was no joke; it was just him lashing out, so of course it didn’t do well. But someone recorded him and now he was being crucified for it.”
This was no mere ‘bombing’ - this was career Agent Orange. Yet, In another time, such an incident will have come and gone. He might not have got an encore, but Richards might have been able to live it down. 20 years later, the incident haunts him. To Christina and her father, it was a sign of things to come.
”I went to my Dad’s house and asked him if he’d heard about it, and he said ‘This is how it starts. This is the beginning. This is how it was when the communists came’. That was [2006], and now look.”
If any country seems naturally immune to communism, it’s America. For decades, the country’s central identity was entirely positioned in opposition to the East’s appalling totalitarianism. Wall Street, capitalism, land of the free, and home of the brave. Give me liberty or give me death.
That’s no longer true. As many European countries - some even former Soviet satellites - are embracing the right-wing capitalist/traditionalist mindset, the ultimate success story of free markets has turned against them. Why?
”There is a disillusionment with government, and thinking they have our best interests at heart. I learned about post-modernism in college, and my professors said ‘You can learn this, but nobody believes it because it’s dumb’. That’s the ideology of wokeness… breaking the binary, the gender stuff…”
That might be true, but not every woke kid is a philosophy major. You ask many of them why they believe what they do, and they struggle to identify a fundamental, guiding principle beyond ‘kindness’ and ‘progress’. Post-modernism is a word you hear much more from wokeism’s critics than its advocates, and that’s no surprise. So, what else is there?
”I think a lot of it is mental illness. I know that’s not politically correct, but… Look, if there was one normal motherf*cker claiming to be ‘astralgender’, maybe I’d believe in it. Dude, I’m friends with everyone, and I’ve never met one. And they’re hard to be friends with; they’re not cool, and they’re not fun. They’re f*cking bummers…”
If these ‘bummers’ were only a drain on themselves, that’d be one thing. But, as Christina explains, it’s not just them who suffer. When our institutions welcome these bores, they ruin many of the finest things about being human.
First that comes to our guest’s mind?
