The Comedy Cellar: Live From The Table

Kliph Nesteroff is the author of The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy and We Had A Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy.    James Mattern is a stand up comic and regular at The Comedy Cellar. His special is called The Check Spot. 

Akeem is a regular at the Comedy Cellar in NYC, was a semi-finalist on Stand Up NBC, has been seen on Kevin Hart’s LOL Network and just recently made his television debut on The Late Late Show with James Corden. He is on the new season of PAUSE with Sam Jay. 

Michael Tracey is a journalist for Substack. Has written for the Wall Street Journal, NY Daily News, The Nation, The Spectator, and other publications. Sean Patton is a Comedy Cellar regular whose multiple TV appearances include Maron, Inside Amy Schumer, Fallon, Conan and many more. 

Noam Dworman, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand discuss abortion and the overtuning on Roe v. Wade with famed attorney, author and Professor at Harvard Law school for fifty years, Alan Dershowitz. 

Ryder Kessler is a Working Families Party-endorsed candidate for New York State Assembly in the 66th District. He was the founding CEO of DipJar, and since 2016, he has worked in Democratic politics to take back the House, Senate, and White House, with a focus on voting rights. He is a member of Community Board 2 in Manhattan and has written extensively about the need for more vibrant, equitable, sustainable neighborhoods downtown. Mike Feeney’s appearances include NBC's Last Call with Carson Daly, Barstool Sports, Fox’s Laughs, Funny or Die and more. His stand up special is called “Rage Against The Routine.” He is a Comedy Cellar regular. 

Authors Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx of That's Not Funny--which shows how much political and cultural power the right-wing comedy world has gained. Sienkiewicz is Associate Professor and Chair of the Boston College Communication Department and Marx is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University.  Dan discusses being rejected from The Tonight Show. 

Dr Jo Boaler is a Stanford Professor. Former roles have included being a maths teacher in London schools. She is author of 18 books, numerous articles and a White House presenter on women and girls. Her latest book is called: Limitless Mind: Learn, Lead and Live without Barriers. She co-founded www.youcubed.org, is currently one of the writing team creating a new Mathematics Framework for the state of California, co-leading a K-12 Data Science Initiative and was named as one of the 8 educators “changing the face of education” by the BBC.

Mike Pesca is host of The Gist,and guest hosts the NPR Programs All Things Considered and the news quiz, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. His work has been featured on This American Life, Radiolab, and Planet Money. He has frequently appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and The PBS Newshour, and written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, GQ, Slate, and Baseball Prospectus. Tanael Joachim (TJ) is a stand up comic, a regular at the Comedy Cellar and an Op-Ed contributor for the New York Times. His first special, January 3 is available on Amazon Prime. 

Famed attorney, author and Harvard Professor and Comedy Cellar regular, comic Danny Cohen. 

Noam, Dan and Periel catch up: Dan gets to Vegas despite a cancelled flight, Louis CK's Grammy, Noam’s interview with The Hollywood Reporter about the slap, Justice Jackson, "Don't Say Gay" and more. 

A CONVERSATION highlighting the role of comedy as a political, moral and analytic tool in our time: Taboos are everywhere. Plain facts are being denied. Arguable propositions are foisted on us as if they were certainties. Decorum and politeness sometimes blind us or intimidate us or deceive us. The comic makes us laugh, for sure. But, in that act he also creates space for saying the unsayable. He has "plausible deniability." He can be a truth teller, a liberator, a sage... Featuring: Glenn Loury: Professor of Economic and Professor of International and Public Affairs, Brown University. Host of The Glenn Show podcast. He is among America’s leading critics writing on racial inequality. Roland Fryer: Harvard Economist, Macarthur "Genius" Fellow, Time 100 Honoree, McDonalds Employee of the Month specializing in Race and Education. Standup Comedian. Coleman Hughes: Writer, podcaster, rapper, and multi-instrumentalist who specialises in issues related to race, public policy and philosophy. Noam Dworman: Owner

Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by comedian Mia Jackson and Juanita Dworman to discuss the slap heard around the world.  Mia Jackson is a Georgia native now living in New York.  Her first half hour special is available on Epix and her second half hour special is on Comedy Central. She is a regular at The Comedy Cellar. 

Harrison Greenbaum is a magician and a comedian who began performing stand-up comedy while studying psychology and English at Harvard. He has been featured on numerous television shows, including NBC's America's Got Talent, NBC's Last Comic Standing, TBS's Conan and Comedy Central's This Week at the Comedy Cellar.  He is a regular at the Comedy Cellar. 

David Stone is a Comedy Cellar superfan. He has played in Scrabble tournaments since the mid-1990s and was once rated within the top 50 players in North America. Katie Hannigan is a stand up comic and actor. Her television appearances include The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central, Just For Laughs New Faces and MTV. She is a Comedy Cellar regular. 

Michael Mailer has been working extensively in the independent film world since graduating Harvard University. His first feature film, A Fool And His Money, starred Sandra Bullock and George Plimpton. Since then, Mailer has gone on to produce over 25 features. His father is the American novelist, Norman Mailer.  Nick Griffin has appeared on Conan, The Late Late Show, in his own half-hour Comedy Central special and was featured on The Late Show with David Letterman eleven times. He is a Comedy Cellar regular. 

David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU.  He is president-elect of the American Philosophical Association.  He is known for his formulation of the "hard problem" of consciousness, which inspired Tom Stoppard's play, The Hard Problem, and the idea of the "extended mind", which says that the tools we use can become parts of our minds. Al Lubel is stand up comic and a regular at The Comedy Cellar. His special, Mentally Al, is available on YouTube.

Alan M. Dershowitz is Brooklyn native who has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer” and one of its “most distinguished defenders of individual rights,” “the best-known criminal lawyer in the world. He was a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School for  fifty years.  He has published more than 1000 articles in magazines, newspapers, journals and is the author of fifty books.

Frida Ghitis is a long-time world affairs columnist. She is a weekly contributor to CNN Opinion and World Politics Review and a contributing columnist for the Washington Post. In addition, she is an on-air analyst for CNN en Espanol, and provides her perspective across multiple television and radio outlets in the US and elsewhere in English and Spanish. Frida started her career at CNN, where she worked for almost 20 years as a unit manager, producer and correspondent. She has worked in more than 60 countries, in all corners of the world.  Frida is the author of The End of Revolution: a Changing World in the Age of Live Television.

Guests: Tanael Joachim (TJ) and Fred Kaplan.  Tanael Joachim is a standup comedian who has made appearances on Gotham Comedy Live on AXS TV and on Good Day New York on FOX. He is based in New York City but was born and raised in Haiti and is a regular at the Comedy Cellar.  Fred Kaplan is is the national-security columnist for Slate and the author of six books, including The Bomb and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, which was a New York Times best-seller and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He was the Boston Globe’s Moscow Bureau Chief and the Globe’s defense correspondent for a decade before that, during which time he was on a team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize for a special magazine on the nuclear arms race. 

Coleman Hughes is a writer, podcaster and opinion columnist who specialises in issues related to race, public policy and applied ethics. He is also a jazz/hip-hop artist.