Ophira Eisenberg doesn’t talk like your average public radio host
The host of NPR's "Ask Me Another" on processing trauma, where honesty meets humor and pain, and sleeping with a Garfield obsessive
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Ophira Eisenberg, the host of NPR’s comedy quiz show “Ask Me Another,” is a funny lady who has experienced her share of trauma. The two—humor and pain—are of course indelibly linked in comedy, and her own brutally honest approach is no exception. But where Eisenberg could easily have infused her comedy with bitterness, she has refused to let anger get the better of her. And her work, as a result, is full of keen observation and no shortage of empathy.
“It really comes back to the honesty,” she says on the latest episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.”
She’s certainly not shy about unpacking some of that trauma, which includes surviving a car crash as a child that killed a close friend and, later, surviving cancer and a miscarriage. On the podcast, she describes “being so angry … feeling cursed and marked.”
She has processed her experiences through writing and her stand-up, finding a surprising connection to audiences who also share deep reservoirs of anger, of feeling “not even feeling depressed or suicidal, but wanting to rip the sky,” she says. “Like, wanting to destroy everything around me and light it all on fire, because I was just enraged with the circumstances and the pain of all of that.”
Before the pandemic, “Ask Me Another,” a nationally syndicated comedy quiz show, was recorded in front a live audience at the Bell House in Gowanus. Today everything is assembled remotely, which has, she says, altered the show for the better. She is also a stand-up who has appeared on Comedy Central, NBC’s “Today Show” and HBO’s “Girls.” She is also an essayist who has performed for the Moth and written a book “Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy,” which is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. She is also involved in a new talk show on Hulu for moms by moms called “Up Early Tonight.”
We talk about all of that, plus her upbringing in Canada as the youngest of six children. And we do keep it light: We even turn the tables on her and administer a quiz of our own. Give it a listen to see how she does when the script gets flipped.
