This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:19] Matt Rodin: Welcome to The Come Up. My name is Matt, and on this episode, a conversation with stand-up comedian and storyteller, even though she would hate me saying that, Janine Harouni.

[0:30] Janine Harouni: Janine has a really fascinating backstory, origin story.

[0:34] Matt Rodin: And we talk a little bit about in this episode, but we also talk about comedy as an art form and how it's changed with social media in the past two, five, ten years.

[0:44] Matt Rodin: We do talk about politics and how she has navigated having vastly different political views than her parents.

[0:51] Matt Rodin: And we talk about the process of writing her first special, which is now streaming in full on YouTube.

[0:58] Matt Rodin: And this new special, Minoosh, which is coming to New York at the Soho Playhouse, December 3rd to the 21st, which I cannot wait to see.

[1:07] Matt Rodin: Janine is warm and smart and funny, obviously, and I just had a really wonderful time getting to talk to her.

[1:15] Matt Rodin: And I think you'll find this conversation both entertaining and also insightful. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Janine Harouni.

[1:49] Matt Rodin: So can you tell me your stand-up origin story and your relationship with the confidence around getting on stage and being funny?

[2:01] Janine Harouni: It comes from a deep-seated insecurity. There is no comedian on the planet who feels like their parents are proud of them. Do you know what I mean? Like in order to get up and be like, look at me, you guys think this is funny. I think you have to have a very, very low self-esteem, but high self-confidence. It's a rare combination of low self-esteem, high self-confidence. I started as an actor. I went to I live in London now. I moved here to go to drama school in London, and I thought I was gonna be like a very serious Shakespeare actor. And when I graduated, I got cast straight away in a West End show in a very serious drama. It was a dramatic adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, and I was playing Julia, the love interest, and I thought, like, this is it, I'm gonna be a very serious actor.

And then I did like 300 shows or something like that, and it was so boring. It's just every day, the same thing, and also I found it so weird pretending that the audience, the whole idea of a fourth wall is so strange when you actually think about it. It was very weird to pretend that they weren't there because especially when you do a drama, funny things happen. One time we did a matinee, and it was all school kids that came to the show. There's like a really like animalistic sex scene, and then it immediately cuts to a blackout, and then the lights come up, and our clothes are kind of half off, and we had a standing ovation from all these teenagers. So I'll think we're supposed to be completely serious.

And I was absolutely cracking up on stage, trying to do anything, like drinking water, trying to hide it. And I thought, I don't think this is my world. I think I should be doing comedy and trying to make people laugh. So I went from the West End to doing open mic comedy, which I don't know if you've ever had the absolute misfortune to go and see an open mic comedy show. It's pretty grim. You go, you sit there for three hours and watch comedian after comedian absolutely eat shit and you're sweating because you're terrible at comedy still. And then you go up, then you bomb, and then you go home and you didn't get paid. And you had to buy drinks while you were there. So I did that for maybe two years while I started working on my own solo show.

And then I brought that show to the Edinburgh Fringe and it did very well. It got filmed as a special for Amazon and available now on YouTube. And it's weirdly become incredibly timely because it's about how my parents are Trump supporters and how I got hit by a car, paralyzed my leg, and had to move back home with them while we weren't on speaking terms, and how we had to kind of bridge the political differences that we had in order for me to learn to walk again.

[4:53] Janine Harouni: I'd been out for my friend's 21st birthday. None of us were drinking. We had a sober driver, and she got a flat tire, so we pulled over in the shoulder, and there was a slight curve in the shoulder. And my friend was on the phone with her boyfriend trying to explain to him where we were and asked him if he could come and help change the tire. And I put my hand out the window and I said, Someone will see there's just three girls in the car, and they'll pull over and they'll help us. And as soon as I finished that sentence, we got rear-ended at 70 miles an hour because a woman who was coming home late from work, she worked in a hospital. So she was doing one of those, you know, ridiculously long shifts.

Fell asleep at the wheel, we think, and veered into the shoulder thinking that we were another lane of traffic. And everybody else in the car was okay, but I didn't know why at the time, but I couldn't move my legs. And then I realized I'm pinned in the car. And so I was in the car for maybe 15, 20 minutes before the police turned up, and then the hottest fireman I've ever seen. Because I don't know if you know this, there's this thing where when someone rescues you, I think they've done studies on it, but you perceive them as much more attractive than they are because you're in such a vulnerable position. But this guy was actually hot. But this was. Right. It's hard to know. But there was like three of them, and they were the most like Staten Island, New York, sexiest firemen I've ever seen.

And they were like, we're gonna, and here I was like trying to like I'm bleeding. Yeah, right. And they cut the car off me and pulled me out. And yeah, went to the hospital. And that's I think when they put me on the stretcher is when I realized like my leg was the wrong way round. I'd completely dislocated my hip. And yeah. Then my mom turned up because I called my parents while I was in the car because I thought I was gonna die. Right. And my mom was they weren't far. They got there, and the first thing my like Brooklyn-born New York mother said to me, She sees me covered in blood, leg mangled on a stretcher with a neck brace, and she goes, Right if you girls drinking, like she is she wanted to lecture me immediately.

[7:07] Matt Rodin: It was right, it was your fault.

[7:09] Janine Harouni: Yeah, I'm from the North Shore of Chicago, so I understand that very well. I think it's like sort of same same but different.

[7:15] Matt Rodin: Yeah. So you move in with your parents who had a totally different political viewpoint than you. I'm curious, like if having immediate family with opposing political viewpoints has changed the way that you think about or the way that you view people on the other side of the political spectrum just as a whole.

[7:39] Janine Harouni: I think I mean, first off, I just want to say I don't have any answers for any of this. You know, I and when I wrote the show, I didn't want to write a show that was answering the problem of the division in America. I just wanted to write a show that was sort of the most accurate depiction of the problem, which is there are people that you love that believe vastly different political views than you do. And if you were to see what those were written down on a piece of paper, you'd think this is someone I'd never want to spend two minutes with, and yet you love them more than anything because they're your family. And I was very I was really trying to, I was really wrestling with the fact that my dad is and mom are two of the most generous, caring, loving people I've ever met.

They volunteer in soup kitchens, my mom has completely uprooted her life to come and live with me for the past two months to help out with our baby that's just been born because my husband got a job abroad. I mean, they would do anything for their family, they would do anything for anyone. They're just lovely people, but they love Trump and they voted for Trump and they voted for him again, this election. And it's not easy, you know, it's not easy to sit with that. And so I wrote the show to try and I don't know, give people a little bit of hope that I think the division that we're all feeling I think the world isn't as bad as we think it is when we look at stuff online.

[9:14] Matt Rodin: Yeah, two things can be true at once, right? Like you can love someone and they can have a different political viewpoint than you.

[9:21] Janine Harouni: And I also think that they can still be a good person. Do you know what I mean? I don't agree with everything that they think, but I still understand that their intentions aren't bad, you know.

[9:34] Matt Rodin: Yeah. I imagine writing a piece about that or even with that as a thread through it, is healing in some way, is helpful in some way in processing that.

[9:50] Janine Harouni: I think the healing thing is laughing about it. I think there are lots of hypocrisies that I mean I'm not a perfect person at all. And I think that in this special, I tried to show my shortcomings and my parents' shortcomings because I think that's the thing that just unites us as human beings, as we're not perfect, you know, and I think we have much more in common than we do different. So I don't know. I wrote the show because it was just plaguing my mind and I put it out online hoping that it wouldn't become relevant again, but it has.

[10:27] Matt Rodin: Yeah. Well, and you know, obviously, you can see the relevance in the way that people respond on social media too. Like the clips, I mean, obviously, we live in a new world. Even five years ago, comedy is different, you know, than it is now.

[10:42] Janine Harouni: Usually, yeah.

[10:43] Matt Rodin: With social media, there seems to be this craving for escapism, maybe is the word I'm looking for. That like I do want to sit on TikTok for two hours and just scroll away. And I do want to find things that make me laugh. And I do want to find things that I can just kind of like turn off that part of my brain, even for a small part of time. And it's why, listen, it's part of the reason why I love part of the reason. I love theater and I love comedy, because I do get to go in and I like having my beliefs challenged, but I also get to go in and enjoy something for a short period of time with a group of other people that regardless of what our belief systems are, we're all sharing an experience in a singular moment.

[11:32] Janine Harouni: That's what I love about comedy because there's a visceral response to comedy that is so uniting. You can't help what you laugh at. You think something's funny, you laugh, regardless of whatever you believe, whoever you are outside of that room, and it is such a unifying thing. And that's the exact reason that I love doing stand-up every night.

[11:55] Matt Rodin: And like you said, it's immediate. You're getting immediate feedback. Whereas in the theater, I guess you get applause sometimes, but like there definitely is this feeling of like, how did that go?

[12:08] Janine Harouni: Yeah, you know when it goes good, and you really know when it goes bad. You know, you know, the immediate feedback is not always great, but so I know you're doing a show here for a couple weeks, the new show here for a couple weeks, but I saw you're also doing a couple nights at Union Hall.

[12:25] Matt Rodin: Yeah, you're working on new material too.

[12:27] Janine Harouni: Yeah. Well, I've been doing I've been touring this show for two years now. So I'm I and I wrote it before I had my son. I wrote it while I was pregnant. So so much has happened since then. So I'm kind of itching to write a new show, and I think I'm ready to kind of hang up the towel on this one.

[12:47] Matt Rodin: Yeah, and move on to the next.

[12:49] Janine Harouni: So yeah, I'm also doing two shows at Union Hall. Can you talk to me about how your writing process has changed from the first show to Minoosh and now like moving forward? Like, is it the kind of thing that your phone is full of notes that are overflowing, or do you sit down and dedicate time to like sit and write out jokes, Jerry Seinfeld style?

[13:15] Janine Harouni: It's a combination of both. The main thing, and it's the sort of and it's the hard thing about stand-up is that you can really only do it by doing it. So you do have to just step off the ledge and get up on stage and say stuff. You can't sit down and write an hour of material and then think, well, that's 70% there. I mean, you just don't know. You write five minutes of material, and I'd say you can keep some at best one minute of that, you know, because four minutes of it isn't gonna work or isn't clear or so it is. I always imagine it as first you build all the bricks and then you take those bricks, because I do narrative stand-up, so then you take those bricks and build the house.

[14:02] Janine Harouni: But the jokes are the bricks and the house is the narrative, you know. And no matter what, it's always hard. Whenever you have to clear the slate and start over, it's never easy. It's always hard. And that's kind of what I love and hate about it because it definitely always keeps you on your toes, but it also is so painful when it's bad head. So painful. Especially what for me because I write about really personal stuff. You know, the show was about a car accident I was in and my relationship with my parents and this new show, Lanoche that I'm doing, is about pregnancy loss and my grandmother who was a singer, a Lebanese singer, who we lost and the director of my show who died very young, 43, halfway through making the show.

[14:56] Matt Rodin: I want to talk about Adam a little bit. I'd love to hear about your relationship with him and you know, everyone that talks about him, everyone I've ever heard say anything about him, just has only glowing things to say about him as a collaborator, but also about him as a human being. So I just I would love to hear you talk about him a little bit.

[15:20] Janine Harouni: He was just the best. He was just the smartest person I'd ever met. I met him because I did a comedy course at Soho Theatre in London, which is the theater that he worked, he was the associate director for years at. And he came in, he was hungover, he was wearing like a crisp shirt, clearly didn't want to be there. Like, you know, slightly hung over. And we was like had a very very frank way of speaking, which is not and he's he was English, and that's not the English way. English people are very, very polite. I think New Yorkers are much more direct. We value I don't know what you're talking about.

[16:02] Matt Rodin: You don't think so?

[16:03] Janine Harouni: No, of course I do. I'm scared.

[16:05] Matt Rodin: Oh my shit.

[16:05] Janine Harouni: It's crazy. Yeah. We time is money. And so if you're not being direct and honest about what it is you need and want, you're wasting my time, you know. And he was the most New York person I'd ever met, and he'd never even been to New York. And I mean, he was cutting people down. Like one after one, comics were coming up, and he was just like, Well, that's just not funny what you're doing. You know, like he was and I got up and we had a huge argument. He said this bit that I was doing wasn't gonna work, and I'm like, it works. And he was like, it doesn't. And then he said, You're not scared of me. And I said, No, should I be? And he was like, Some people are scared of me. And I was like, And then afterwards people told me who he was, and I was scared of him.

He had directed two of the most beautiful shows that I'd seen at the Edinburgh Fringe, including Alex Edelman's Just For Us, which did a big long run on Broadway. And I'd seen them that summer, those two shows. And so I sent him a very like lame email. Like just was like, I'm writing a show and I loved I love your work, and I'd love, you know, to work with you if you had any, you know, if there was any, and he like immediately wrote back and was like, I think you're good, and I like you, and why don't you come in and we'll sit down? And that's how it how it started.

[17:22] Matt Rodin: And you guys just had a loving, loving collaboration from there.

[17:25] Janine Harouni: Yeah, yeah. He, um, the room that I'm sitting in was me and my husband, this is so lame. When me and my husband like moved into this place, we were like, this will be the room that we can sit down and have drinks with Adam in, you know. You know, we're like, we'll get a record player in here, and because he was like a very sophisticated, you know, yeah, alcoholic and no politically. Um, yeah. He was he was just the best. He was always God, always there for you if you needed him for anything, always on call and like fiercely smart, fiercely funny, and just died way too young, like just a huge loss to comedy in general, because he was a genius.

[18:08] Matt Rodin: Yeah. It feels like I don't know if you feel this way, but from an outside perspective. It feels like there has been a shift in the last, I don't know, two, five, ten years, um, towards narrative comedy. Um, and I and I'm thinking of, I mean, certainly Alex and the fact that that special, I mean, he won a Tony and then now HBO.

[18:31] Janine Harouni: He won an Emmy.

[18:32] Matt Rodin: He just won an Emmy.

[18:33] Janine Harouni: Holy shit, that's right. Um I think he even was like, what the fuck? Um I look at someone like Mike too, Mike Rabiglia, and I know that he's a big inspiration for you too. Um, and how his sort of fame, whatever that word is, has grown in the last two, five, ten years. I'm sure Mike Robey will really appreciate you putting his fame in quote.

[18:57] Janine Harouni: Fame, yeah, right. Um I wonder like what your take on why that's happening, you know. I mean, there certainly is gonna be a place for stand-ups that are doing, you know, joke, joke, joke, Mitch Hedgeburg set up punch. Um, but this this narrative thing seems to really be catching in a way that I feel like it hasn't in in the past.

[19:20] Janine Harouni: Yeah, that is a great question, and something that I've thought about a lot because you're right. I do think that we are starting to see a real shift towards narrative stand-up. And I and I hesitate to call it storytelling because that sounds I know shit. Like that just sounds so shit, you know. I like the idea of calling it narrative stand-up because it still is stand-up. I mean if you take any bit out of Alex's show, it would be brilliant stand-up that he could do in a club. And I think that is really important because it should first and foremost be funny. But I think the reason that it's leaning towards more narrative is because of the internet. I think, you know, in the 90s, 80s and 90s, people were doing observational comedy and that still exists, but good luck trying to do that for a long time because the minute you have an observation about something, you go online, there's 15 memes about it already and somebody's made a TikTok about it.

I think that's the place for observational comedy now and stand-up is a place where it's an art form that lasts for an hour or so. And so I think that if you can fill that hour with a story, a narrative that gives it a real sense of place and time that that that is um that there's a reason that it lasts for that long. Whereas with just observational stand-up you can just get it as small clips.

[20:56] Matt Rodin: Yeah.

[20:56] Janine Harouni: And um and I think not only is it leaning more towards narrative because not everybody who does stand-up is narrative, obviously. I think it's leaning more towards personal. I yeah, you know, you'll see a lot of specials come out where people are really getting personal and talking about their childhood, their parents, their family lives. And I um and I think part of that is because that's so much more timeless, you know, than anything you can observe and throw online. That I mean, the cycle is so fast. Even even three years ago, I felt like if I post something online, it would go if something went viral, it would go viral for a week, and now I feel like it only goes viral for a day. The cycle is so fast.

[21:40] Matt Rodin: Yeah.

[21:42] Janine Harouni: People so interesting. Yeah, people just want new stuff. And and everybody's online all the time post-pandemic. And just to say, I do think there's also a place for that. If that's the kind of stand-up that you like or that you do, I think uh God, when I see somebody do that really well, I I can't understand how they can do that. And the people who put out that kind of content over and over and over again every week, I'm amazed by. That's crazy to me.

[22:07] Matt Rodin: Yeah, I know, I know.

[22:09] Janine Harouni: To churn that out, like that amount of also like to come up with that many ideas. That's the other piece too. I'm like, I I don't think that fast. The other piece, the other type of comedy that I'm finding myself being pulled towards is it's interesting, it's sort of on the other end of the spectrum from narrative. It's like full clown Natalie Palomar, like yes, like I I this sort of on the edge, risky, there's this feeling of like, what is going to happen? Yeah, that I I find myself like really drawn towards because I I don't know, I want I want to like live on the edge a little bit.

[22:46] Matt Rodin: Yeah, right, exactly.

[22:47] Janine Harouni: Oh, I love Natalie. She's so cool. I um I did uh I did a I've done a few shows with her and I did one where she did this like character that's a mermaid and she she does like uh I guess it's called Buffon, it's like kind of chaotic clowning. But she was this mermaid who who gets legs, and the way she gets legs is she peels off her her fins that she's wearing, and Natalie just did it as it would be, where she would have no nothing on underneath. So she's just walking around completely naked from the waist down, and then she's like, she just played it completely straight, and she was like, She's like, What are these? you know, and it was her toes, and she's like, What's this? It was her knees, and then she's like, What is that?

And it was her vagina, and then she asked someone in the audience to give her a mirror, and they gave her her their phone. So she took a picture on a stranger's phone of her own vagina on stage in front of like 300 people, and I watched it from the wings and thought it was the coolest thing ever. And then she came backstage and she never put pants on. She was naked backstage the whole rest of the show. Yeah, and just walking around, and she was just like, I think we're gonna go for a hike tomorrow if you want to join us for a hike. I'm like, put some pants on.

[22:48] Matt Rodin: She's so cool.

[24:07] Janine Harouni: Yeah, I just I I just like seeing it feels like comedy is um opening up in a way that I I it it wasn't, I don't know, when I was uh a kid, I probably wasn't even that aware of comedy at that point, but it's been really interesting to sort of see the evolution, especially in the age of social media. Um how is your relationship with it?

[24:32] Janine Harouni: I'm currently my my new thing that I'm trying to keep in mind is like the comments are not for me. You know what I mean? I would never finish a set or do a show and then go out in the audience and like secretly find out what everybody thought of it. And even then, even then, those people have like consented to be there. They've paid. Presumably, something about your show has drawn them there. So there may be interest in the kind of stuff that you do. Whereas comments online, it's just being served out randomly to people. And I mean, oh, there's a lot of crazy people out there. And I mean, people talk about coming up through the clubs in like the 90s as being so tough, and they had to endure like hecklers and drunk people and all that.

Try reading 2,000 comments about yourself. Like try reading three comments about yourself. What do you mean? Like what's wild. So now I try as hard as I can to not look at what they say. Um, because even the nice ones, that the problem is even when people say nice things, it kind of draws you in. But if you believe the people who say nice things, then you have to believe the people who say terrible things. And so I think it's better to just be like, I'm putting it out there and it's not for me anymore. Uh it's just people can watch it, they can comment. And if I do see a mean comment come up, I just think just feed the algorithm, baby. You're gonna pay my mortgage, just feed the algorithm, get the views up, that's fine.

[26:00] Matt Rodin: Um, do you notice a difference between audiences over there and audiences over here?

[26:09] Janine Harouni: Oh yeah. I love I love living in the UK and I love British people, and I think they're so uh smart. Uh like as a whole. I think they're really intelligent, but for the love of God, they don't laugh out loud. It's wild to me. Americans know how to have a good time, you know.

[26:30] Matt Rodin: So well, they wanna have a good time too.

[26:33] Janine Harouni: Yeah, I know, and they need a good time right now. Anytime I do a show in the UK, uh, it feels a little bit like working out with weights on, you know what I mean? Because you go out there and you have to be like, this has gotta be the you know the best version of this joke, and this all this all has to piece together and tie together in a nice way. Cause British audiences and they're very they're very snobby about uh, you know, the British sense of humor. And so if you're an outsider coming in, they're a bit like, well, this better be funny, you know? Uh so then when I go to the States, it's so nice because people love laughing, they love interacting, um, and they're there to have a good time and it feels like you've taken the weight fest off. You've done the work, you've taken the weight fest off, and now you're you're there to just have fun, which is is nice.

[27:19] Matt Rodin: Well, I'm excited for you. I'm excited that you're gonna get to do the show for an extended period of time for like a little bit of a run that'll be interesting and different.

[27:27] Janine Harouni: Yeah, yeah. Um I've never done it for more than I've never done this show for more than three times in one city. So I'm doing it for three weeks in New York.

[27:36] Matt Rodin: So yeah. Well, I'm excited for you to be here, and I I I can't wait to see the show. I'm so excited, and I thank you for taking the time to do this. I really, really appreciate it.

[27:45] Janine Harouni: Oh, thank you so you've done so much research. It was so nice talking to you.