A few weeks ago, journalist and author Hillary Frank hosted a live recording of her award-winning podcast The Longest Shortest Time in our Bryant Park Showroom. Her guest was Negin Farsad: host of Fake the Nation, a regular on Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!, TED Fellow, filmmaker, author of How to Make White People Laugh, and stand-up comedian. The last time Hillary had Negin on the show was in 2017, when listeners sent in questions their children had asked that were simply unanswerable such as: Am I allergic to falling? What cloud does God live behind? What would happen if you eat fire and your clothes are made of a couch?

At the time, Negin didn’t have kids. Her daughter is now seven, and she returned to The Longest Shortest Time with her own daughter’s unanswerable questions to grapple with, and thoughts on finding humor even in the darkest of times. The conversation that follows goes from her daughter’s conviction that parents should earn $1,000 a day to what it takes to be funny when your family is unreachable in a war zone: absurd to profound and back again, with an unexpected ruling from the former commissioner of the FDNY for good measure.

This conversation was recorded live at M.M.LaFleur’s Bryant Park Showroom. It has been edited for length and clarity. For the full version, and to subscribe to The Longest Shortest Time, which Time Magazine named one of their top 100 podcasts of all time, click here.

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Hillary: Tell me about the early years of motherhood. How did that go for you?

Negin: I was never one of those people who noticed children. I just didn’t see babies. I didn’t have the “Oh my God, how cute,” response: I just had complete child blindness. And then I had my daughter, and I was suddenly aware of the sheer breadth of children that exist in the world.

The bigger change, though, was to my anxieties. Before, I was worried about things like: how is work going? Is my boyfriend cute, but also nice? In retrospect, that feels almost quaint. I was not operating at my full range of anxiety. Having a newborn really helped me access it.

Hillary: How would you characterize your anxieties pre-child?

Negin: I mean, work, relationships – those things felt like everything at the time. But in retrospect, I just wasn’t operating at capacity. I’ll give you an early example.

The baby came with a husband; it was a combo deal. And one night, when the baby’s a few weeks old, we’re at home and suddenly, we’re smelling a gas smell. So we called 911. I think I’d probably smelled gas before – a pilot light situation, I don’t know – but I’d never done anything about it. This was the first time I was like: well, now I have this child. I have to call 911 immediately.

They dispatched, I want to say, the entirety of the New York City Fire Department and closed our block. They checked the whole building. And as I was calling 911, I was like, “Guys, this entire building might erupt in flames, or not at all. Like, I might just be crazy.” They were like, “Well, there’s a protocol, so we’re going to send a bunch of hot firemen to your home.”

Hillary: Were they hot firemen?

Negin: They were actually hot firemen. And they were really nice, not that I didn’t think they would be, but they could sense that I had just discovered my new anxieties.

At this point in the live recording, Hillary turns to Laura Kavanagh, the former commissioner of the FDNY and a previous Longest Shortest Time guest who happened to be in the audience, for a ruling. We caught the moment live on video!

Hillary: Laura, was calling 911 the right thing to do?

Laura Kavanagh: Absolutely. You err on the side of caution. I will also say: firefighters really love kids. That is not a PR shtick. They generally have a lot of kids themselves. They sensed your anxiety and felt empathy.

Negin: That’s exactly the sense I got. Like: we’ve been here before. We ourselves got nervous when we had children. And that was kind of the beginning. From there, I was just worried all the time.

Hillary: Toddlerhood is when kids really start getting curious. Sometimes their questions are deep and existential, sometimes they’re absurd and silly. Often, they’re unanswerable. Can you share a question your daughter asked you that you didn’t know how to answer?

Negin: She asked about death. Many times. And I think this is true for a lot of parents: You’re like, oh my God, is this what Albert Camus was like when he was little? There’s this burgeoning philosopher thinking about our traipsing off this mortal coil. It’s so fascinating that that’s what they think about, and they ask about it a lot.

At some point someone mentioned to her that our dog, who’s now a young, beautiful ten-year-old, was old. And she was like, “What? Does that mean the dog’s going to die?” So we had to go through: how long does a dog typically live? But he’s really healthy, so he might live a little longer. And then from the dog it moved to her grandparents and how long are they going to live. And then, of course: what happens to them after they die?

That’s a really tough question. I always said, “They go to heaven.” And she said, “What’s heaven?” And I said: I’m Muslim, I don’t really know. Do you want a cookie? I’ll give you ten cookies if we change the subject right now. Do you want screen time, a thing I never let you have? Let’s do that instead of answering this question.

Answering it felt like it would open up every question about religion, and I just didn’t want to get into it.

Hillary: Have you ever given a satisfying answer?

Negin: No. I have never given a satisfying answer. I’ve said a lot of gibberish that I hoped would pacify her until the next time she brought it up. She’s seven now, and she’s moved on to other questions.

There’s a funny thing that happens around three or four: you realize they have no idea what you do for a living. One night I was going out to do a show. I said, “Okay, bye, I’m going to go to a show.” And she said, “Oh, you’re going to go see a show?” And I said, “No. I’m going to go perform.” And she said, “Oh, you mean like a dancer?” With these legs, no. Not a dancer. I’m a comedian.

And she said, “You’re not a comedian.” Just like that, like she was Chandler Bing. And I thought: I don’t know what’s worse, hearing it from her or from a Hollywood producer. Either way, I didn’t want to come home and get notes.

She eventually came around to understanding that I’m a comedian. Then she started having concerns: what do I do if people don’t laugh? Which is an age-old question. And she didn’t want me to go on the road. So one night when I was leaving for Vancouver, she said, “Why don’t you just cancel the show?” I said, “I can’t cancel: that’s how I make money.” And she said, “I have an idea. Why don’t you cancel the show and tell them to pay you for being a parent?”

About a week later she came back and told me, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I figured out how much you should get paid for being a parent. $1,000 a day.”

I was like: “You came up with this number all on your own? Are you saying this because you sense how annoying you are to parent? Because I’m absolutely down: $1,000 a day sounds exactly right. Let’s find the right person to call.” How a person earns money, and what that means, is very of interest to her right now.

Hillary: Well, here’s a would you rather: Would you rather get paid to stay home and be a parent, or be paid to go be a comedian? Do you actually want this policy?

Negin: What I want is extra money. I want to be paid to be a comedian, and I also want this other check so I don’t have to work so hard. That’s what I want.

Hillary: Your comedy is very political. And politics are feeling especially dark right now. How do you find the funny when life is not funny?

Negin: I’m Iranian, and most of my extended family is still in Iran. When the bombing started, especially in Tehran, I was not well. There was a blackout, and it was very hard to get in touch. They eventually figured out ways to call us, because we couldn’t call them. It was a nightmare.

At some point my daughter heard me and my mom talking and asked, “What’s going on? Why is our family in Iran?” She’s seen this family on FaceTime her whole life. And I said, “There’s a little war, which is when countries are fighting. But don’t worry, they’re going to be fine.” Which is of course not a thing I actually know for certain.

What’s interesting is how little control you have over what they hear from other sources. A kid in her class asked the teacher why they were at war, and my daughter, who is very proud of being Iranian and goes to Farsi class every Sunday against her will (but will thank me later), her little heart didn’t totally understand what she was feeling, so she just started crying. The teacher called us: “Something happened today. She’s feeling things she can’t articulate.”

So what I’ve learned is to give her the reassurances that we all need as adults: “We heard from your uncle, he’s doing fine.” But you can’t shut out all of those dark things from their lives. You just can’t.

Hillary: And then for you, it’s your job to go out there and be funny so that you can get paid. How do you go back and forth between “my family is in danger” and making jokes?

Negin: When I’m on stage and audiences find out I’m Iranian, there’s a thing that happens where they can’t think past it. They need to know if I’m affected. It’s like if a comedian shows up wearing a Hawaiian shirt. The audience can’t get past it until you acknowledge the shirt.

So I’ll say something about being Iranian, and I’ll say, “By the way, yes, hopefully we’re still in a ceasefire, and my family is okay.” And then I’ll add: “The thing is, I can’t stop enriching uranium.”

I try to turn something genuinely traumatic into a moment where we all recognize we’re human, we’re all in this together. And here’s a joke. It helps everyone move on. And honestly, it helps me move on. I don’t want to think about it all the time.

Hillary: I wonder if there are any surprising ways that motherhood has changed you. I’m going to start by telling you something I’ve recently noticed about myself. I have a 16-year-old, and I’ve realized I cry every time I see children singing. My daughter doesn’t even need to be the one singing. We went to see the Mean Girls production at her school. It’s not even a poignant show: it’s super raunchy. She was playing percussion in the pit, and when those kids started singing, I’m all tears.

Negin: You sign up for a level of emotion you didn’t know you were signing up for. Similarly, there was a heat wave in New York a few weeks ago. It killed a lot of trees. And I walk around looking at these trees thinking: When are we going to get these replanted? We’ve got to figure out the right tree strain that’ll be sturdy enough for climate change. We need to make sure we have enough trees because my daughter and trees and breathing. And I go into this crazy thought process: we’ve got to make sure the world is saved because of this one kid. It’s sometimes crazy-making. I didn’t really sign up to feel an emotional connection to every tree in my neighborhood. But that’s kind of what’s happened. I fixate on these things, and it’s all because of her.

Hillary: Have your daughter’s questions made you see the world differently?

Negin: She wants to open a store and be a fashion designer. And she told me: “I’m going to have an income test for people. If they own more than $100, they have to pay. If they own less than $100, everything in my store is free.”

And I was like, that sounds so cool. You do have to think about the cost of materials at some point, but let’s not worry about that now.

What really struck me is that there’s something embedded in her that just understands what people have and don’t have. Her natural instinct is to want to be a force for good. It makes me feel hopeful. I think everybody is born with some sense of justice. It’s about how much we nurture it, or how much it gets beaten out of us. But it can be activated at any moment, at any age.

Hillary: We’re at M.M.LaFleur. We have to talk about fashion. What outfit has your daughter worn where you were like, I’ve got notes.

Negin: Sometimes she does a power clash with patterns and I am not on board with that. Plaid and floral together is fundamentally not okay.

For a long time she didn’t listen to anything I said about fashion. And then her teacher offhandedly said, “Your mom’s really fashionable.” And my daughter came home completely transformed. Now she asks me if things match, and when I say no, she actually listens. I think it’s because she’s genuinely interested in achieving fashion. Not in pleasing me.

Hillary: What would you call your own fashion sense?

Negin: I’m accused of being colorful. A little mod, a little colorful. And I think that’s accurate.

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