Comedian Natasha Leggero doesn’t think she’ll ever make a Netflix special about her daughter. So instead, she wrote a laugh-out-loud hilarious book about what it has been like to become a mother.
In this bonus episode, Leggero returns to the The Last Laugh podcast to talk about the cathartic process of writing her new book The World Deserves My Children. She also breaks down how much her parenting style differs from husband and fellow stand-up comic, Moshe Kasher, and opens up about how motherhood has affected everything from her career trajectory to the way she sees the world.
Leggero opens the first chapter of her new book by laying out just how much her life has changed since becoming a parent.
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“You can’t do shit. Your time no longer belongs to you,” she writes, explaining that “having a kid is loving something so intensely that you can’t live without it, mixed with desperately wanting that something to take a nap so dangerously long that you have to go into its room and check if it’s still breathing.”
That combination of intense love and existential dread runs throughout the book, which manages to be very funny while at the same time dealing with the most traumatic elements of parenthood.
“I really was able to come to terms with the fact that you don’t have a child to stay the same,” she tells me. “So even though I’m missing the pre-motherhood Natasha, I’m trying to also enjoy post-motherhood Natasha, who’s totally different and capable of much more love and selflessness, but also much more fear.”
For a long time, it was almost considered a given that if female comedians wanted to become mothers they would have to sacrifice their careers. It’s an issue that was addressed in the most recent season of HBO Max’s Hacks and explored by comedian Jena Friedman during her recent Peacock special Ladykiller. Before a pregnant Friedman joked about her decision not to get an abortion on stage, Leggero was among the comedians—including, most famously, Ali Wong and then Amy Schumer—to tape a special while pregnant as an act of defiance against a stereotype that has never applied to men.
But when I ask if there was ever a point when she felt like she had to choose between becoming a mother and being a stand-up comic, Leggero jokes, “Maybe, like, in the past week.” Her daughter now goes to school during the week, but her husband, who is also a successful stand-up, has been on the road most weekends. “It’s really hard to keep up,” she admits.
Leggero and Kasher have always been brutally honest about each other in their respective acts, as well as when they create comedy together, as they’ve done in their joint Netflix special and Endless Honeymoon podcast. But she says it wasn’t until very recently that she started really considering how her jokes might affect their child.
“Honestly, it’s something I had never thought of,” she says. “And it sucks, because I’ll say something about her to a friend in front of her and she’s like, ‘Mom, don’t tell other people what I say!’ So I’m like, hmm…”
Leggero doesn’t think there’s anything in the book that would particularly embarrass her daughter. “But am I going to do a Netflix special where I make fun of her?” she asks. “Probably not, because she’ll be able to access it when she’s 12 and I don’t want her to be mad at me.”
When I ask if that feels limiting as a comedian, she replies, “Of course!”
Later in the book, Leggero looks to the future and expresses the anxieties of many liberal parents who fear the ramifications of bringing a child into a world that can feel like it’s on a downward spiral toward climate catastrophe and fascism. She also accurately predicted that Roe v. Wade would be overturned by the time her book hit shelves. “Welcome to the burning, melting world, my sweetest darling!” she writes.
Still, Leggero takes on a hopeful disposition, predicting in our conversation that her child will be a “funny Greta Thunberg, the first climate activist who has a really great sense of humor and is just really able to get everyone on board.”
If nothing else, she says liberals should be having more children to “create your own army” so the “dumb people” won’t automatically win the coming civil war. And if that doesn’t work, she suggests recruiting a Canadian citizen to form a “throuple” and escape America once and for all.
Listen to the episode now and subscribe to ‘The Last Laugh’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
