-Hello, everyone. Oh, goodness.
Well, thank you for your enthusiasm.
This is what I'm like.
This is me all the time.
I'm like if a cardigan were a person, so...
Let's get cozy for a little while, shall we?
I had a pretty good 2017, despite 2017, and...
I'm here to tell you a little bit about it.
My wife and I adopted a dog. That's very exciting for us.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Yeah. Oh, thank you.
She's a pug, so, scientifically, she shouldn't even exist,
so every day's a miracle with our little dumpling.
If you can't imagine a pug from the name of the breed,
it's one of those dogs
that looks like a loaf of white bread
with a face smushed onto the front slice
and a butt smushed onto the back slice.
And if you've never hung out with a pug before,
it's kind of like if that loaf of bread
came some of the way to life.
That's her vibe.
She's so cute. I love her so much.
Her name is Busy, but it wasn't always.
When we adopted her, her name was Daisy,
but we didn't like that, so we switched it to Busy.
Which is very rude of us,
because when we adopted our dog, she was eight years old.
You guys get that's middle-age for a dog.
That's like meeting a 56-year-old human and going,
"What's your name? Debra? Nah.
I'm gonna go ahead and call you Barbara.
Hope that works for you."
I mean, you better be cool with it,
'cause I control all the food and water,
and you're too small to reach the door knob, so...
Anyway, Babs, I was thinking...
let's get you into your Halloween costume.
And, yes, I know it's January, but I'm sad right now,
so for the next several hours, you're gonna be a ladybug."
I got married last year. That was very wonderful.
[ Cheers and applause ] Thank you.
It's the best.
It was so good, I should have mentioned it first.
My wife is amazing, and I know it sounds corny,
but she really does make me want to be a better person.
That's real.
[ Audience "Aww's" ]
Thank you.
She's a big reader,
and I've been going through her favorite authors
to understand how she sees the world.
And I recently came across a famous feminist quotation
by Canadian author Margaret Atwood,
which is probably how many of your favorite jokes start.
Margaret Atwood once wrote,
"Men are afraid women will laugh at them."
Women are afraid men will kill them."
Yeah, that's heavy.
And I don't know how to feel about that
as a man who is also afraid that men will kill him.
Worst-case scenario, while a woman laughs,
if I'm being totally honest.
When I get up in the middle of the night for a glass of water,
I get fully clothed.
And I don't just mean T-shirt, boxers.
I'm talking blazer, high tops.
And that's because I'm modest in front of my wife
or nervous the neighbors will see me nude through the window.
It's because my greatest fear in the world
is that there's a burglar in our apartment,
ready to take all our stuff.
But before he does, he sees my naked body
and just goes, "Weird dick, loser."
Bang. And that's it for me. I'm done.
Then my wife wakes up giggling
like, "You did have kind of a weird one."
And then they get married to each other.
And I'm just stuck in the apartment as a ghost,
haunting them forever,
like, "Every dick is kind of a weird one! Boooo!"
And that's why I'm a feminist. That's my journey.
We all have our own. Thank you.
[ Cheers and applause ]
I'm trying to be more attuned
to little acts of sexism when I see them.
For example, back when we were engaged,
people would ask my then-fiancée, now-wife
all the time, right in front of me,
if she was gonna take my last name,
which is a little presumptuous,
and it's a little sexist, right?
'Cause no one ever asked me
if I was gonna give it to her, huh?
If I was just gonna let her embrace the poetry
that is "Gondelman" into her life every day forever.
That's my name, and it's my choice.
It is so political, what you do with the name.
Especially for women.
It's who you are.
Some people keep theirs. Some people switch.
I know a bunch of couples, both parties hyphenate.
That's a good solution in the short term.
Long term, it creates more problems than it solves.
'Cause what if you hyphenate, you have a baby,
that little hyphen grows up, marries another hyphen,
then, at their wedding, their last names
both become sonnets, just like that.
It's too much.
I have a friends whose name is James Irving-Thompson.
That's a wonderful name,
rich with family heritage and tradition.
Last two hyphenate, no big deal.
But what if he goes out
and marries a woman named Kelsey Love-Smith?
Also a wonderful name, but on their wedding day,
he becomes James Irving-Thompson Love-Smith.
That's not one man's name.
That is literally the starting lineup
of last season's Cleveland Cavaliers.
It is.
I know I don't look like I know that,
but I know that.
I learned it for you, because you, audience,
also make me want to be a better person.
Thank you guys so much.