Transcriber: Nam Nguyễn Reviewer: Eunice Tan
Hi, I’m Brian Kiley.
I’m here today to talk about what I learned during the pandemic.
At first, we were all stuck inside,
and the first thing I learned is that I’m not essential personnel -
at work or at home.
When the pandemic started, we all had to make adjustments.
I noticed all my restraining orders now said I had to stay 506 feet away.
I live in Los Angeles,
and things shut down here last year around March 15th.
So I haven’t been to the gym
since 1989.
When COVID began,
the little girl next door had a birthday,
and she couldn’t have a birthday party because of the pandemic.
So instead,
all of her friends drove by her house and beeped and waved
and wished her a happy birthday.
It brought a tear to my eye
because that’s how my parents used to celebrate my birthday.
As the quarantine wore on,
I started to feel like I was in prison.
I was doing push-ups, I was reading books, I was making toilet wine.
That was pretty much my day.
Some days, I spent the day binge-watching,
my older brother binge-drinking.
That guy cannot handle his toilet wine.
After a while,
we were allowed to go outside.
And here in Los Angeles, you get a bit of a skewed perspective.
I drove by the park one Saturday,
and I spotted a guy sunbathing naked.
I yelled, “Hey, buddy!
Put a mask on!”
I saw a doctor on TV one day
saying that we may have to wear masks for the rest of our lives.
I thought,
“I wish he had told me that before I got my kids braces.”
I have a cousin who refused to wear a mask,
and he’s a welder.
When I’d go out,
I’d wear a medical mask, and I’d wear surgical gloves.
In fact, on my walk one day,
I removed a kidney.
I hope the guy didn’t mind.
I did go to the supermarket from time to time.
And here in Los Angeles, they’d make you wait outside
while the senior citizens cut in line and got all the good stuff.
So here I am.
I’m in my 50s.
I’m still having older people buy beer for me.
When’s that going to end?
Now, around this time,
we all learned about a new internet platform called Zoom.
I’m a comedian and a comedy writer,
so I was able to write during the day and do Zoom shows at night.
But a lot of us picked up some bad habits during the pandemic -
we’d work all day without wearing pants.
I finally had to say something to my mailman.
I mean, come on.
After a while, I got a little depressed.
You know, we didn’t see my wife’s parents for Thanksgiving,
and we didn’t see them for Easter.
And I got a little depressed because I knew at some point
we’d have to see them again.
I finally caught a lucky break:
My kids were coming home.
My daughter was sent home from college,
and my son decided to postpone law school for a year.
I got to watch baseball with my son and sitcoms with my daughter -
my two favorite things.
I was so excited about having them around,
I didn't realize how miserable they were.
At one point they said to me, “Dad, this quarantine sucks.
We can’t go to work; we can’t go to the mall;
we can’t hang out with people.”
I said, “What are you talking about?
This quarantine’s fantastic.
We don’t have to go to work; we don’t have to go to the mall.
we don’t have to hang out with people.”
I couldn’t see things from their perspective.
A lot of people my age make fun of the younger generation,
and if I’m honest, I’ve been guilty of it too.
I tweet out a joke every day,
and normally each tweet I send out gets a dozen or so likes.
A big one might get 40 or 50 likes.
Several years ago, I sent out a tweet
that got 61,000 likes.
Here’s the tweet:
“My daughter is looking for a summer job.
She’s a millennial,
so she’s hoping for part-time work as a CEO.”
Now, some millennials were very angry about that tweet,
and normally if one of my tweets offends someone,
I’ll delete it.
But this one got 61,000 likes, so I wasn’t about to take it down.
My second-most popular tweet was this one:
“Fun fact:
the African nation of Ivory Coast
is the only country
named for two brands of soap.”
That one got 1,000 likes;
the millennial one got 61,000.
I touched a nerve.
You often hear people my age complain that these days everybody gets a trophy.
For some reason, people my age are very concerned
about the worldwide problem of oversaturation of trophies.
We think of trophies as being a finite resource
and yet fossil fuels will last forever.
I never understood that.
For years, my kids played sports.
They played baseball and soccer and softball,
and sometimes they were the stars of the team,
and sometimes they barely played.
When they were the stars of the team,
they were striking out batters and scoring goals
and getting all kinds of praise from their teammates and coaches
and the other parents.
But the times when they barely played,
they tried just as hard.
They’d go to all the practices, they’d do their best,
and then they’d go to the games and sit on the bench
and feel bad about themselves.
To me,
that was when they deserved the trophy.
That’s when I was most proud of them for hanging in there and not quitting.
There’s a myth that young people today are entitled,
that they’ve been pampered and spoiled.
It’s just not true.
They’ve been saddled with a mountain of student loan debt,
a dismal economy, and terrible job prospects.
On top of that, growing up,
they’ve had to deal with school shootings and cyberbullying and teen suicide.
The entitlement myth was never true,
but now, thanks to the pandemic,
it's been destroyed forever.
They’ve had a year and a half of their youth taken from them.
They deserve all the trophies they can get.
So while this has been a terrible year
filled with huge challenges and tremendous loss,
there have been some silver linings.
Many of us got to spend bonus time with the people that we loved the most.
And now that the pandemic is finally winding down,
I talk to my kids over Zoom every day.
They’re still at home.
They just prefer to talk to me over Zoom.
Thanks for listening to me.