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.
ADVERTISEMENT
“When we were kids, my dad lived in this super-exclusive gated community… called prison,” she says from the stage. “And I really don’t want to be a total brat, but my dad went to private prison.”
It’s the perfect encapsulation of how she has been able to find humor in some of life’s darkest moments—something she learned in part from her time opening on the road for self-described comedy “villain” Jeselnik. To this day, she says, “Those dark jokes kill when I open for Anthony.”
But now that she’s the parent of a young daughter with her wife, writer-producer Samantha Martin, Welch says she has more trouble telling those types of jokes on stage. “It makes you soft when you’re a parent,” she admits. “I guess it’s a good thing, but it also sucks so much. I’m like, why am I so soft? Why am I crying at every movie? Why can’t I watch murder documentaries anymore?”
When Welch first set out to reconnect with her father on screen, her mother warned her it was a bad idea. “She knew him more than us. I was a child,” she says of her difficult upbringing in the incongruously named Normal, Illinois. “So when she was like, ‘I’m still scared of him,’ I was like, ‘That’s really sad.’ The truth of it is, when you get out of a situation like that, it still follows you. I still feel like she’s scared of that situation, and that part of her life, which definitely scared me. And I was definitely like, ‘Uh oh, what am I doing?’”
At the end of the new hour—spoiler alert—we see Welch finally come face to face with her father. She says she had “never been more scared” in her life and remembers thinking, “Oh my God, just commit to the bit, just commit to the bit,” while at the same time asking herself, “Why am I doing this?”
The “bit” in this case is that, instead of having some emotional heart-to-heart with her dad, she decides to ask him the “dumbest question” imaginable. As she puts it now, Welch ultimately didn’t want to give him a platform to share his perspective with her viewers. “This is my story,” she says. “This is not his side of the story. He can go make his own documentary.”
Welch says she doesn’t think her father has seen the special, but really has “no idea” since they haven’t been in touch since that single meeting. When I suggest that one would think he’d be curious to see what she says about him on stage, she replies, “You’d think so, but I just don’t think it’s on his radar.”
If he has watched it, he made no effort to contact her afterward: “There’s a chance that he saw it and just didn’t say anything. But I don’t think he’s mad about it. So that’s a plus.”
Now that she got the material about her father out of her system, Welch says she’s “so done” with dad jokes and has mostly pivoted to material about being a mom. “It’s like I’ve finally moved on from childhood,” she says. “And now I’m here. I’m a grown-up.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
