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The ban has finally been lifted… Ira and Louis are joined by guest host Jon Favreau to discuss the Grammys, Bruce Willis films, Sarah Palin, Elon Musk owning Twitter, and Paula Patton’s fried chicken recipe. Plus, Sheryl Lee Ralph joins to discuss Abbott Elementary, Moesha’s second life, Dreamgirls backstage stories, and more!

 

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Ira Madison III: And we are back with an all new episode of Keep It. I’m Ira Madison III.

 

Louis Virtel: I’m Louis Virtel and you can hear there’s a tremble in my voice because something is wrong here. Somebody snuck it, snuck in onto the podcast.

 

Ira Madison III: Something wicked this way comes

 

Louis Virtel: I’m hiding my jewels and my silver. Yeah

 

Ira Madison III: No we are. I’m excited to have Jon Favreau on. Keep it today. First time ever,

 

Jon Favreau: I want everyone to know that when I was offered an invitation to be on the show today, I was convinced for a while that it was an April Fool’s joke and that you guys were going to have me on. And first of all, I thought you guys were going to have me on and no one was going to like, let me into the into the actual room. And I did, like, wait here for 10 minutes and I thought, Oh, wow, this is actually happening. They’re not going to let me in. This was just a joke. And then I thought, maybe you would pretend to record it and then not release it. So I don’t know how I got here, but I feel grateful.

 

Louis Virtel: I like how there are several versions of cruelty in there that you think we are capable of, which is thrilling. I mean, I sort of like having that power.

 

Jon Favreau: Mainly Ira.

 

Louis Virtel: Yeah, but no, but it it was suspiciously around April 1st. So I do sort of feel bad that we put you through that.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. But I’m happy to be here.

 

Ira Madison III: You mostly scammed your way in and because you have a new podcast called Offline, which I feel like is sort of a misnomer because you are online more than ever.

 

Jon Favreau: I’m trying, though, I’m trying to do less. I’m, you know, like I felt like the internet was breaking my brain like it is to everyone else. And so I thought I would do an interview show about it. And I’ve talked to some really cool people like Monica Lewinsky, Colbert, Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay had Sam Bee last week. I have Ev Williams this week, who’s former founder of Twitter, so we’re going to talk all about Twitter. And that’s, you know, I feel like Ira I’m going to have you on and I want to have you on to talk about being banned from Twitter and what that’s been like in your life.

 

Ira Madison III: It has been beautiful.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh yeah, he doesn’t miss Twitter at all. I’m sure that’s the denial. The denial on him

 

Jon Favreau: You don’t give off those vibes, so that’s good.

 

Louis Virtel: I just want to say that last August, I was in Chicago for market days and I was in a club called Hydrate, which is a very traditional gay club. The lights, the music, etc. And somebody is looking at me sideways in a way that I would almost call flirtatious, but I couldn’t solve it. Clearly inebriated, the person comes up to me and and sort of leans in with, but that snake like movement of his neck and says, I know who you are, Jon Favreau, and I want you to know the mixture of emotions that went through me. I was like, That’s very flattering. And also, you’re on the right track. And but instead, I said, Thank you so much. Tell me what you love about the podcast, and I pretended to be Jon Favreau for a few minutes. So it was actually like the beginning of a desperately seeking Susan like switch. I was taking over. Yes, it was. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. I was very flattered

 

Jon Favreau: No, I have I have been to hydrate quite a few times, so that’s so I can understand.

 

Louis Virtel: Yeah, I kept thinking, Imagine if Jon Favreau was standing around at Hydrate. That’d be so amazing.

 

Ira Madison III: I would. I would buy you being at Hydrate before I’d ever think to see Jon Lovett there.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah, true Lovett would be the last on at Hydrate of all three of us.

 

Ira Madison III: I also do want to say that it is nice to have you here because truly the question I’m plagued with often is Ira, if you hate Jon Favreau, why was he at your house warming? Why were you at his 40th birthday party? And then I’m always like, Why do you know so much about my life?

 

Jon Favreau: Ira, I can’t remember, like how our beef actually started because it’s fake beef, but it’s been fake for so long that at some point you start to believe the lie. And I was like, Did I almost hit him with my car?

 

Ira Madison III: It started in a joke, in an ad. I true. I think that’s how it started. That’s when we used to put like random jokes in the ads that would then spill over into the show. That’s where we first made our joke about Tommy’s cakes.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh yes, that was me.

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah, it was a Louis

 

Jon Favreau: which is still alive today. You see it on Twitter every once in a while.

 

Louis Virtel: Sure, no I’m up for the Mark Twain Prize this year because of that. So thank you guys so much.

 

Jon Favreau: But nothing embarrasses Tommy more than talking about his cakes. So just keep it going.

 

Ira Madison III: You know, we’ve kind of been reticent to have you on the show, too, because you know you, you run Pod Save America, you know? And like, what are we going to talk about with you on Keep It? But.

 

Jon Favreau: It’s a good question.

 

Ira Madison III: The stars have aligned and we’ll we’ll see how you do this week because we’re going to talk about the Grammys, but also the music we’re listening to, because who cares about the Grammys and who they decide to give awards to? And our guest this week is the icon, the legend, the diva, Sheryl Lee Ralph, who joins me and Louis for a conversation about Abbott Elementary, the sitcom that everybody, everybody is talking about right now. And we’re also going to revisit the career of Bruce Willis now that he’s retiring from acting. So it’s appropriate that you’re here because I figure you’ve seen at least one or two Bruce Willis movies.

 

Jon Favreau: I have I have seen a couple of Bruce Willis movies. There’s a lot of pop culture things that I would not get from from this show, but Bruce Willis, I think I think I can do Bruce Willis and the Grammys.

 

Louis Virtel: What are what are your like areas of? If you had to pick an area of expertise in pop culture and an area you know nothing about, what would those two things be?

 

Jon Favreau: I am. I’d say I’m probably best at television stuff. I like television a lot. Movies I’m movies I’m not great at. I feel like there were a lot of movies as a child that I saw, like 10 times, which made me miss a whole bunch of other movies that I should have seen. There is. There is this moment when I was working in the White House and we were all talking about movies with President Obama because he’s like a huge movie buff, and he started listing off movies that I hadn’t seen, and he was so angry and shocked that I hadn’t seen them, that he ordered me to go home that weekend and watch all the movies like classics like Chinatown. I hadn’t seen Casablanca. Like all that kind of stuff. He was like, You cannot come back in Monday until you go home and watch those movies. So that’s the kind of person I am on movies.

 

Louis Virtel: One time he released his list of movies he loved for one year, and one movie on it was Diane, which is this independent movie starring Mary Kay Place and the idea that Barack Obama saw that movie before I did. I was like, Wow, like, I mean, like, I don’t think this has ever been said about Barack Obama before, but what a fagot. I mean, it’s just so unbelievable. So, yeah, you can pass that one along.

 

Jon Favreau: I will let him know. I will let him know that. Next time when I see him at Hydrate in Chicago, I’ll let him know.

 

Louis Virtel: Yeah, his favorite Chicago haunt. Yeah

 

Ira Madison III: Michelle hosts a night there.

 

Louis Virtel: He and Michelle met at Sidetrack. People don’t know that. Yeah.

 

Ira Madison III: All right. We will be right back with more Favreau and more Keep It.

 

Ira Madison III: In 2022, we need to work harder than ever to inform and mobilize voters to make sure their voices are heard in spite of the efforts of anti-democratic forces across the country. That’s why Vote Save America is launching its biggest volunteer effort yet and asking you to be part of your region’s midterm madness team. East, South, Midwest and West. Sign up and learn more at Vote Save America dot com slash midterms to receive actions you can take every week to get involved in the most important elections in 2022. The Grammys were on Sunday, and I don’t know, I didn’t even watch them, I was at a Charlie S-E-X concert. Louis, what happened?

 

Louis Virtel: Well, I will say this. A lot of people won, but I don’t think where everybody’s first option, but in retrospect make perfect sense of these options like, Oh, Bruno Mars and Silk Sonic. Of course they won. Of course, Jon Batiste had the most nominations won album of the year. It would have been too soon for someone like Olivia Rodrigo, and that’s like not quite the Taylor Swift album we’re talking about right now. So I feel like the rollout was similar to the Oscars actually. Like you could have predicted it, but in this case, we actually didn’t. I also have to stick up for Jon Batiste as a late night bandleader since I work in that realm and I enjoy my job.

 

Ira Madison III: You’re a bandleader?

 

Louis Virtel: I know. Isn’t that crazy? I wear the jackets just like Michael Jackson. Yeah.

 

Ira Madison III: Mm hmm. I, at the Jon Batiste winning Album of the Year is interesting to me because it’s not, you know, a it’s not Esperanza Spalding situation or sort of is, you know, it’s I feel like people know who Jon Batiste is. They know his face, but I don’t know if they know him by name. I saw him recently at a secret Madonna show that I saw in New York, the one where she took to the streets singing like a prayer in Harlem, as Madonna does. And he played the piano during her show. So like, I have video of her writhing on the piano in front of Jon Batiste, which I feel like should earn anyone an award, right?

 

Louis Virtel: A Purple Heart specifically? Right? Yes.

 

Ira Madison III: But do you know who Jon Batiste is?

 

Jon Favreau: He’s fantastic. I yes, I love Jon Batiste for a long time. Well, I’m like a big piano person. I play piano. And he did like a a fresh air a couple of years ago where he, like, sat down and talked about how he composes and like, took people through a composition on the piano. I think he’s immensely talented. That album is really great, so I was surprised that it won, but I was pretty happy.

 

Louis Virtel: Now did you actually watch the Grammys, by the way?

 

Jon Favreau: I watch, I watched most of the Grammys. I watch most of the Grammys.

 

Ira Madison III: OK. So what did you think of the Grammys?

 

Jon Favreau: I thought so I thought the I thought there were some really excellent performances. I thought, like it was definitely for a mass audience. That was my sense of the Grammys, like Trevor Noah. Like, I know that they were trying to do it sort of like the anti Oscars thing, right? They’re going to try to be like the kinder, gentler Oscars. But I kind of thought that, like a lot of Trevor Noah’s jokes were a little on the cheesy side. And so I thought the performances were good, but like, that’s it for the Grammys. It’s not like there’s anything but the performances, like the awards weren’t all. I mean, there was a few surprises here and there, and then that was it. Like, I didn’t. I don’t know. It got I got sleepy at one point and time

 

Ira Madison III: I’ll say that was our opinion last year, to be honest. You know, I feel like last year the pandemic one, which Trevor hosted too. I think we specifically noted on the show that Trevor’s jokes were very much bad CBS sitcom. You know, there’s there’s no like edge to them at all. And it’s like, there’s so sort of plain when he’s hosting something. The jokes are always so plain to the sense where it’s it’s not offending anyone. But then it’s also who is it for?

 

Jon Favreau: His jokes on The Daily Show are always much sharper than what he does on these award shows, which is weird.

 

Louis Virtel: I think also he has a naturally cynical quality in a lot of his comedy. And then when that’s not part of what he’s doing at the Grammys, it feels like he’s trying on an entirely other persona in case like Stephen Colbert needs to step down and somebody needs to step in like he’s sort of like. By the way, I’m here and I can do razzle dazzle nice guy show biz, too.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah.

 

Ira Madison III: Which is interesting because I’ve just never viewed Trevor Noah as that type of. Comedian, and maybe that’s a conversation for a different time, but you know, like Trevor Noah as a comedian has many facets and then, you know, he has this book where he talks about, you know, growing up in apartheid South Africa. But it’s, you know, it’s that I don’t see Trevor Noah as sort of like a razzle dazzle show man. It feels very weird.

 

Louis Virtel: But by the way, I never thought of Stephen Colbert that way, either. And look at the space he’s occupied for the past five years, where it’s like the memory of what he once was like. I barely have it anymore. And that was like, you know, the kind of rad Emmy winning version of himself. And now he’s I can I can settle in. I can go to sleep to Stephen Colbert now. Whereas before you know, you were sort of prodded into a more cynical kind of awareness about the world at one point.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah.

 

Ira Madison III: OK. But he’s done Sondheim on stage. So, you know, if if Trevor Noah wants to pull out his dancers, you know and do assassins or Sweeney Todd, then we can talk.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. Colbert is a man of many talents, and he’s like, He has a lot. He has so much more substance than the character he played for so long. And so once he took over that show, like, he’s brilliant about politics. He’s very funny. He’s very like deep and thoughtful. He’s like, Stephen Colbert can do it all. So he’s much different.

 

Louis Virtel: OK, back to the Grammys. Who was your favorite performance, Jon?

 

Jon Favreau: I thought Billie Eilish’s performance was the best. I thought the way I thought she, like, absolutely killed it. I thought the Taylor Hawkins tribute was nice. She was wearing the t shirt just like she. She crushed that performance. I also I’m an Olivia Rodrigo fan. I thought I thought she. I thought driver’s license was quite a performance, too. I really liked that. What about you guys?

 

Ira Madison III: Now is that Emily’s influence? Or was did she introduce you to Olivia?

 

Jon Favreau: No. You know whose influence that is, its Tommy Vietor. That’s his. Sour is his favorite album. No. It was. It was an introduction. It it’s true. It was an introduction from Emily, but I am a yeah, I’m a I’m a Rodrigo fan.

 

Louis Virtel: I love Olivia Rodrigo when she sounds like The Veronicas, which are an Australian duo that came out in the 2000s, but there’s specifically a song on that album called Brutal that I really enjoy.

 

Jon Favreau: Oh, Lil Nas X was also amazing. I thought that was a fantastic performance.

 

Louis Virtel: So I guess he’s just a supermodel. He’s just like like Lil Nas X appears and I’m like, You remind me of like every hot person I’ve ever seen. You’re just like, I’m like. And you’re like a talented person and like an out gay person. Too many, too many quadrants are hit. Yeah.

 

Jon Favreau: Well, it was the first like watching that whole performance live. My first question was like, why does he need Jack Harlow on this song? I don’t even know what he actually added to this, though. It was. It was a pretty amazing performance.

 

Ira Madison III: I will say that I am unfortunately and I’ve tried, I’ve tried to fight it. I am full Jack Harlow hive. There is something about that. There’s something about that white boy that I just find. I’m drawn to it and drawn to it in the way that like, I don’t know. I guess probably like I remember my sister had like Eminem posters on the wall when she was younger, but then she turned out to be a lesbian. So I don’t know the correlation.

 

Louis Virtel: Thats a Non-sequitur

 

Ira Madison III: But. But um. I don’t know. I like Jack Harlow and I like we’ve talked about before how he, you know, sort of gave like a different cosign to Lil Nas X initially, just because I like having a straight male rapper on a song like that. And in a video like that and performing with him on stage. I love their friendship, and I think it’s kind of done wonders for like people being interested in his career where it doesn’t feel like it’s gay baiting the way that other pop stars have had to do. It just seems like here’s my gay best friend and now I’m here, you know, it seems I like it.

 

Jon Favreau: Did you guys? Did you guys watch that performance, though? Lil Nas X one?

 

Louis Virtel: Oh, yeah.

 

Ira Madison III: Yes.

 

Jon Favreau: So did you? Variety wrote. This is my favorite line about the Grammys on the microphone thing. When they did little microphone swing, Variety wrote, “they were even engaging in mutual pretend penis play.”.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh my god, who? what pediatrician wrote this, right?

 

Jon Favreau: Just the word mutual really made that I thought. Just mutual pretend penis play.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh my God, that is a really mortifying sequence of words. My God.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah, that was pretty bad.

 

I want to shout out. Lenny Kravitz performed with HER, and there are certain songs where when you hear them now, you’ve heard them. So many times they simply remind you of being at the grocery store like they don’t have any like kind of radness value anymore. And Are You Gonna Go My Way , I truly. If you had said Louis pick five songs you never need to hear again, that would be one of them. And they were, I thought, awesome. It made me like that song for the first time in probably twenty four years or something like that. And also, HER has joined this coterie of people who I believe simply live at award shows. You know, there’s like John Legend. You can’t tell me

 

Ira Madison III: No, but John Legend, we at least see him other places. If you end awards shows HER would cease to exist,.

 

Louis Virtel: Right?

 

Ira Madison III: She is like she is. She nearly has a fucking egot. And I cannot place this woman anywhere else.

 

Louis Virtel: No.

 

Ira Madison III: Except she does have a really good song out with Saweetie right now called Closer, which I love, mostly because the internet refers to it as kiss me less.

 

Louis Virtel: Good one internet.

 

Jon Favreau: Also, Lenny Kravitz is going to live forever, I think, and looks the same.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh yeah. No.

 

Jon Favreau: All the time.

 

Ira Madison III: I think the family is vampires, actually. I mean, Lenny, Craig, Lisa, Zoe. It was nice to see Lenny thriving after his family took a bunch of stray bullets. That was the actual aftermath of the Oscars, by the way. I feel like people were worried about the Grammys being like, Oh, is it going to go so hard in the other direction where we try to like make sure like nobody gets slapped on this stage? But the funny thing that I did not expect to happen after the Oscars was, you know, the celebrities who spoke up about what happens then becoming targets and people sort of dragging them through the mud. And the Zoe Kravitz Lenny Kravitz thing was, I will say, it was funny, to be honest. It was funny to me because I feel like the easiest thing to do would be to mind your business.

 

Jon Favreau: I had Samantha Bee on Offline, and so I asked her I was like, Are you upset that you don’t have a daily show every night and instead go once a week because now you can’t cover the slap? And she’s like, Are you fucking kidding me? I am so happy that I don’t have to talk about that. And I asked her to talk about it, of course. But she. It’s like, why would you want to make a comment? Just shut up. Just go away. Don’t you don’t have to say anything. It’s fine. No one’s going to. No one’s going to double check that you said didn’t say anything.

 

Louis Virtel: I am utterly grateful for her because it always felt to me like Jane Curtin on Weekend Update in the 70s, there was no, for a long time, proper successor to the kind of salty, eyeroll laden things she did as as a quote unquote newscaster, and Samantha Bee absolutely has picked up that mantle. Like, it’s like, Wow, that is like.

 

Jon Favreau: Nails it.

 

Louis Virtel: That is a superstar, Jane Curtin, which are words I love saying. By the way, though, speaking of people who are at the Grammys and people who are also at the Oscars, something that sucked about the slap was a few things were overshadowed about that ceremony that I am still processing and something that nobody has talked about is that Megan Thee Stallion appeared as a surprise cameo during the Encanto song and sang a verse about about the jokes Amy Schumer, Regina King and Wanda Sykes were telling. And then we just moved on with life like, that’s something she does all the time. She said they are killing it with the jokes. And I mean, like, how much did they pay her or how much did they? How much money did they take away from her? I don’t know. I just

 

Ira Madison III: as she shouted Zendaya too

 

Jon Favreau: that was wild

 

Ira Madison III: The only celeb she shouted out.

 

Jon Favreau: That was so wild because we we listen to the Encanto soundtrack at my house all day long because Charlie is a huge fan. And so the song comes out at the Oscars and he, like he just got out of the bath, and he runs into the to the bedroom to see it. And then there’s like Megan Thee Stallion’s doing a verse. And he was very confused.

 

Louis Virtel: Right?

 

Jon Favreau: Very confused.

 

Louis Virtel: Not in the song.

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah, but but well, so speaking of Encanto, which you say you listen to all the time, you know, because you have a child, but also because you love it, I assume. What are you listening to in general right now? Like what? Like ignoring the Grammys, which you know, mostly cares about Silk Sonic and Olivia Rodrigo at the moment? What are you listening to at home? Like, what’s your music jam?

 

Jon Favreau: You know, on Encanto though like this is what happens in my household. Like, I have no taste in anything, so it’s just all osmosis. Like, you know, my Emily is the biggest Taylor Swift fan in the world. And so for like 10 years of knowing her, I’ve now become a huge Taylor Swift fan. Now I’m a fan of all the music Charlie likes, including Encanto. But when I’m on my own, like recently, recently because of like I’m having a midlife crisis. And so I’m like trying to listen to music that reminds me of my high school and college years. So I’m listening to the new The New Chili Peppers album, which I think is pretty good.

 

Ira Madison III: I like it.

 

Jon Favreau: I like Black summer. It’s Only Natural. The Heavy Wing, like, really good songs off that I thought

 

Ira Madison III: it was very jarring. I had no idea that the Chili Peppers were going to be releasing a new album until a signal came out a few weeks ago, and it was just very jarring to open up Spotify, which I feel like is how we learn about new music these days. Like you, you just got a new music Friday and you’re like, Oh, this artist has released a song, and I haven’t heard from them in years where it used to be like they would show up on MTV. Or you’d see, like, you know,.

 

Louis Virtel: Press junkets. yeah

 

Ira Madison III: Like a magazine or something that they’d be on. Yeah, I like it, and I’ve been a I’ve been like a big red Hot Chili Peppers fan for years. And so I appreciate that it’s a good album.

 

Louis Virtel: Also, like, like like the Foo Fighters, I just have this theory that they are all very nice guys. If you see Flea on Twitter, his whole thing. Yeah, he just tweets like, You know who I love gay people like. It’s like, shockingly optimistic for the band that gave you, for instance, under the bridge, you know?

 

Jon Favreau: Right.

 

Ira Madison III: There are very nice stories about him and Demi Moore’s autobiography, too.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh, right.

 

Jon Favreau: Oh interesting

 

Louis Virtel: Hopefully, we’ll get into her later. But by the way, I wanted to say that was also something about the Grammys. I loved the tribute to Taylor Hawkins. I’m sorry there’s something about him dying that like. It hurt. That’s not my type of music at all, but like he just had such an effervescent quality. Loved every second of what he did. I was reacquainted with how cool he was because of the Alanis Morissette Jagged Little Pill documentary, which he’s prominently featured in and he plays on you ought to know and toured with her for that entire time. But man, he just seemed fucking cool as hell. You know, just one of those Dave Grohl people who was, like, thrilled to do what he does and also like that band specifically, I think took the dick-ish-ness out of the archetypal rock star vibe. They’re like, you can. You can represent rock and roll and like, you know, a hard rock quote unquote hard rock and not be insufferable and not be Axl Rose. And I am thankful to them for that,

 

Ira Madison III: though I think that and Nirvana and sort of like that era of music, like the grunge sort of music era. I we’ve talked about that a bit like with Ben Folds when he was on too. You know, I think like that era of musicians were just sort of people who grew up with the rock star mentality of like, this is a person who’s going to trash a hotel at the Chateau Marmont and maybe they’ll overdose in it. And then you got people who are just like, no, we love music.

 

Louis Virtel: Yeah, right?

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah.

 

Louis Virtel: And had like a sensitivity vibe about them. Yeah. Mm hmm.

 

Jon Favreau: Trying to think of what else I’m listening to, so on my I have like a on my workout mix. I have that alter-ego remix of Toxic and My Pony is awesome. There’s that Latto song Big Energy that that samples Fantasy.

 

Ira Madison III: It’s it’s “Lotto” Jhn

 

Jon Favreau: Lotto?

 

Ira Madison III: because her original name used to be Mulatto.

 

Jon Favreau: Was Mullato right?

 

Louis Virtel: Miss Mulatto. Yeah, she also, if I’m not mistaken,.

 

Jon Favreau: I did know the original name. For some reason I didn’t pronounce it right

 

Louis Virtel: She won some rap based television competition, right? That’s like how she came to be. And then she her name was. She shortened her name eventually, but the Big Energy remix with Mariah Carey on it right now, that she didn’t do vocals on it.

 

Jon Favreau: Mariah Carey’s now in it.

 

Louis Virtel: I don’t know how I feel about that one.

 

Jon Favreau: Wait Mariah Carey didn’t do the vocals on it?

 

Ira Madison III: She did. She did do new vocals

 

Jon Favreau: Oh, oh.

 

Louis Virtel: Yeah,.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah, that’s what I thought.

 

Ira Madison III: I feel like I will love it more when the video drops. But right now, we grew up in an era where a Mariah Carey remix was like an event.

 

Louis Virtel: Yeah. Oh yeah,.

 

Jon Favreau: Yes. I know. I remember that

 

Ira Madison III: Like I, need to do something completely different. You know, I am right now. Louis knows that the only person I’m listening to is Charlie S-E-X,

 

Jon Favreau: who I feel like I get that from your Instagram

 

Louis Virtel: now. Now here’s the thing I feel like specifically gay men have are finally beginning to really adopt this woman as like a on the level of a Carly Rae Jepsen like she’s kind of for us and straight people have seen the name. But we’re going to seek her out in concerts and stuff. I still feel like and I like all of her songs when Vroom Vroom comes on. I get it, but I still feel like I’m missing. It’s like she’s lacking a specific, memorable identity quality or something that keeps that, that prevents me from going back to her. And I know she’s like super smart and cool, but I’m just not there yet. I’m not there yet.

 

Ira Madison III: I would tell you to listen to her recent interview with Zane Lowe for this album. Crash is the name of the album, and I just saw the concert on Sunday the second time. I adore her that I recently became like a dad within the past few years. Charlie is a person who started her career like ten years ago in her teens. You know, like she was making music when she was young, too. Like at home. And so she’s sort of like more. Not she’s sort of more of like an Alanis Morissette like, you know, this sort of type of person who was like making music on her own and then really sort of finding like weird ways to make sounds into music, et cetera. And that crash marks the end of like, it’s like her deal that she had for five records. And so now she’s sort of at this precipice where she could go mainstream, she could continue to be independent. But this is sort of like the culmination of everything that she’s represented. I would tell people to actually listen to this album first because he has the weird shit like Vroom Vroom, which she makes with her friends in like PC music, where that music that sounds like pots and pans being smashed together. But then this album was specifically her being like, I’m making like a pop record, you know, like she’d joke about selling out or being mainstream. but um

 

Louis Virtel: We love a sell out pop record. Liz Phair we speak your name.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah.

 

Ira Madison III: You know,

 

Jon Favreau: I’ve been listening to her because I follow your your Spotify playlist now. And so I was just listening to some.

 

Ira Madison III: Oh, you do?

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. I looped the March one March, he could have been killed.

 

Ira Madison III: I am obsessed with making a Spotify playlist now. I feel like I always used to make playlists in general for like parties or something now, but now I specifically make a playlist each month and put new songs that I like on it, but an also older songs that are just stuck in my head, mostly because I feel like I used to constantly get like DMs from people who’d be like, Oh, what are you listening to? Or if I share like a song in my Instagram Story? I’m like, People are like, I missed that the other day. You know, I feel like we’re slipping back into the era where people want to share playlists and music in a more meaningful way. Then you just have, you know, most of people’s Spotify I feel like it’s like workout mix 17, you know, or just

 

Jon Favreau: This is why I love following friends Spotify lists because otherwise I’m the type of person with music taste where I’ll just go to like top hits. And it’s just like 15 top pop hits that have been playing for five months now and it’s like gets very old. So I love doing that.

 

Louis Virtel: Well, speaking of current hits, guess who I’ve been listening to? The first recordings of Barbra Streisand, and I will tell you why.

 

Jon Favreau: Of course

 

Louis Virtel: First of all, we’re getting the first funny girl revival since Barbra did it in the 60s on Broadway with Beanie Feldstein. A few friends of mine have seen it. They’ve really enjoyed it, so that’s really exciting. Beanie Feldstein seems great to me. I’m thrilled to watch her. But Barbra Streisand is also turning 80 soon, and the official premiere of this musical will be on her 80th birthday, which is a Sunday which never happens. So it’s like a real specific tribute to her. And I don’t know. I’m somebody who gets a little in my head, worried about people honoring certain legends enough, like, are we doing enough to savor this moment to celebrate who Barbra Streisand was is and what I’ve come to realize? Listen to her first few albums, which have a lot of songs that are like child on it. She was sort of playing a child like character where she she pretends to be five on one and her impish character. Is there a lot of characterizations we would know later from movies she did? She was really originating on record. And I think the interesting thing about her is she’s somebody who could have won a Kennedy Center honors like three years into her career before she was ever even a movie star in her first movie, even. And I think I don’t know that anybody has ever gotten to that zenith that quickly. I think Barbra Streisand is the fastest that’s ever happened. So if you listen to her first albums and her first album, she won Album of the Year four at the time. For the Grammys, just you are hearing that moment occur. You cannot deny not just the power of what she brings, but how effortless the characterization in her vocals are. This is somebody who, if she was belting, she was also representing, you know, a kind of wisecracking character on the side while she did that. And that juxtaposition of vivid character and amazing voice that’s never been like we we have other people in that realm like Liza Minnelli, for example. But she really is the first position, no one of that of all time. And I hope people take time this month when she turns 80 to relish those early recordings specifically.

 

Ira Madison III: She has so many albums.

 

Louis Virtel: She might have the most albums. She might have the most albums. Yeah

 

Jon Favreau: My mom is was a huge Barbra Streisand fan. I remember growing up listening to Barbra because my mother loved her so much and then would sing her songs all the time.

 

Louis Virtel: All right, well, be like your mom, Jon Favreau. That’s what this lesson is today so.

 

Yea I was going to say I’ll dig back into it. After this conversation. Now I’m inspired.

 

Ira Madison III: Oh, all right. Well, I think we’ve exhausted music and the Grammys, but when we’re back, we’re going to speak to a music icon. Louis and I have a chat with Sheryl Lee Ralph coming up next. And then after that, more. Keep it with Jon Favreau.

 

Louis Virtel: [AD]

 

Ira Madison III: They don’t make legends like our guest today anymore. A Tony Award nominee, she has also been working in Hollywood consistently since she was 19, earning her three NAACP image award nominations plus an independent spirit award. You can currently catch her on the only network sitcom anyone has been talking about in forever. Please welcome Abbott Elementary’s own Mrs. Howard. Sheryl Lee Ralph.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Awww, thank you!

 

Ira Madison III: Miss Ralph!

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Yes.

 

Ira Madison III: First of all, let me tell you, we could catch you in Abbott Elementary, but you can also catch your voice literally every morning. When I listen to the Thoroughly Modern Millie soundtrack.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Ohhhh wow!

 

Ira Madison III: Specifically for the Thoroughly Modern Millie cast recording specifically what I listen to you singing Only in New York. I just recently moved back to New York, too, and so it’s been like an anthem for me.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: That’s so interesting that you bring that up, because what is it? 54 Below just reached out to me. They’re celebrating, I think, either five or 10 years, something like that. And they asked me would I come and join the performers in a anniversary concert. And I thought to myself, What song would I sing? You know? And then I said, Oh my God, it’s going to be 20 year anniversary of thoroughly modern Millie and the song to sing, and this time would be Only in New York.

 

Ira Madison III: All right, so how do I sneak in to? How do I sneak into that?

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: I think it’s next month, May 2nd.

 

Ira Madison III: All right. Yeah,.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: May 2nd. I think that’s it, so I’ll let you know. But listen, here’s something else you can clear up for me if you have been nominated for a Tony. And you win like Best Musical or Best Soundtrack or best this, does that mean that you’re actually a Tony winner? And if you get nominated for a Grammy and you win Best Albums cast recording, does that mean that you’re a Grammy winner? And if you get nominated for an image award and you win Best Show, does that mean you’re an image award winner? I need to know

 

Louis Virtel: it’s very confusing.

 

Ira Madison III: It is.

 

Louis Virtel: But I feel like, you know, well, here’s the thing, and here’s the thing you deserve credit for making that musical production whatever happen. As an awards stalwart, I have to unfortunately hold up a stop sign Sheryl Lee Ralph and say NO.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Awww noooo. No, Say it ain’t so.

 

Louis Virtel: I don’t. I don’t. I don’t want to be the crossing guard of this, but it’s just the truth of the matter.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: You know, I was ready after watching the Grammys on Sunday, I was like, Wait, we won best cast recording. Don’t I deserve a Grammy? Should I go get that golden album?

 

Louis Virtel: Yes.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Yeah. I was a part of the cast that sang those songs. I need mine. Oh, well.

 

Louis Virtel: No. Your office should look like Quincy Jones’ or something. There should be like, yeah, plaques, etc. all over the place.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Something. Exactly. But you squashed my dream. Okay?

 

Louis Virtel: I know I didn’t think that would be me today, but alas, No wait. OK, so we’ll start with Abbott Elementary. How does it feel? First of all, just to be part of a show that people care about and that is on normal television like TV used to be like, Do you feel like you’re in this strange kind of old school space, but feeling very current and rad at the same time?

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: You know something, I am in the most amazing show on TV right now, and people love it and they don’t hold back showing me their love telling me about their love. Talking about the show, tweeting about the show. Being socially current, about the show on time, about the show. Watching the show, I am in the space that every TV actor dreams about and that is being on a hit show. And I got to tell you, it feels good. It feels amazing. Oh my God. I thought I felt good when Moesha was on TV and, you know, people were talking about it. This is light years beyond that and it feels good and the fact that I work with people I like. Do you know that sometimes we talk with each other and we’re like, Oh, I miss you. Oh, I’d really like to see you like, OK, let’s get together. Most times we don’t, but at least we know that we made it when we said it. You know it is. So it is a great feeling. Yeah, I feel great.

 

Louis Virtel: It’s I feel like actors all the time are asked about if they hang out, off the set. It’s like guys, they are on the set all the time. There’s not much a need for them to hang out at other times.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Oh absolutely not. You know, although I got I have to tell you, Lisa and I, we like to go shopping and we really like really, really good food. So it’s always fun to have somebody who enjoys that. Quinta and I like to share thoughts. So there’s there’s that thought exchange. Um Tyler and I. It’s always talking about, Wow, doesn’t this feel good to be on another hit show? So that’s fun. That’s fun. So a lot of us share a lot of things in common that makes for good relationships, and it was so funny when we did that episode about work family because we really are a work. We really are a work family and it’s it’s I hope it stays that way and, you know, you never know, but God has blessed us with something very wonderful right now.

 

Ira Madison III: Mm hmm. It’s so exciting to hear you talk about how you know this is even feels different than Moesha, and I’m sure ugh for Tyler like it feels very different from like Everybody Hates Chris. But it’s so interesting because Everybody Hates Chris and like Moesha, are like Black sitcom classics, you know? And you imagine I remember when? When. Did you feel some of that when, like Moesha came to Netflix, and then all of a sudden you had like people rediscovering it and being able to talk about it in a way that, like, you know, if I was able to be online talking about Moesha when it was airing, when I was watching it, yeah, you. I would have been in your inbox every week.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: It’s. Let me tell you something, when Moesha came to Netflix, something brand new happened for this show. It was as if I got a brand new audience of very young people and they were into the show. I was. I shoot another show called Motherland Fort Salem in Canada. And this week I was up there shooting and a gaggle of little girls were there for maybe. Maybe it was cheer camp or something, you know, you can tell them because they have those big glitter bows and things in their hair. And all these little girls were gathered around and I walked in and I I did have on a great coat. I was dressed wonderfully and one of them turned around and she said, “Oh, you look beautiful, your coat is fabulous.” And I said, “It is fabulous, isn’t it?” And they all started giggling and laughing, and they got on the elevator and the little one peeked her head out and she said, Hey, aren’t you that lady from that show? And I was like, OK? Is she talking about Abott or is she talking about Moesha? But it’s a whole new audience of young kids, and it’s great. It’s great, really great because they want to talk, you know, before you know, kids just wanted your your autograph or something or to ask you how much money you make. But these kids, they want to know about the show. They want to know about how you feel. They want to know how much you make, of course. But it’s it’s different this time and I really like it

 

Ira Madison III: About Moesha, do you find that people’s thoughts on the show now may be differ than how they perceived maybe your character in the 90s?

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Now, that’s a good question, because it depends upon how old they are watching the show now. If they were a child

 

Ira Madison III: I watch the show and I’m on your side. I’m on your side now when I rewatch it. I’m like Moesha, you need to be in trouble.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Thank you. Thank you. And the thing that gets me now is if you were younger and watching the show, you couldn’t stand me as a child because you said I was too strict. You said I wanted too much out of her. I wouldn’t let her be a child. If you’re an adult now who watched it as a child, you’re like, Miss Ralph, I get it. Oh, I understand. I am so sorry for the things I thought when I was young, so it all depends how old you are. But a lot of the kids now they say things like, I wish I had a mom like that or I wish my mom was like that, or oh my God, the number of kids that write their little stories talking about how they understand the importance of boundaries, it’s really sometimes it’s heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. Yeah.

 

Louis Virtel: Now we’ve talked about a couple of the shows you’ve done, but the fact is you’ve actually been on every television show. Looking back at your filmography, it’s like there’s either recurring roles or you were on an episode or you were main cast. Do you have any like like hidden gems in your catalog that you’re either particularly proud of or were particularly great experiences like I had to like, like search my mind? Oh yeah, Sheryl Lee Ralph was on Designing Women like I like. Like all these like thought bubbles keep popping back up of the places you’ve been in your career.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Well, I think one of the most recent that I’m really very proud of, and I think it’s a show that people, for whatever reason, you know, they haven’t been able to see it or it has a niche audience. And that’s a series called Motherland Fort Salem and on Motherland Fort Salem. It airs on Freeform and streams on Hulu. I play the 45th president in an alternative United States of America. And she’s a very formidable president, and it’s one of the roles. I’m very, very proud of it. The series has been written by Elliot Lawrence, who also created Claws, and it’s a very dynamic series that for so many, you know, people don’t understand that a lot of our scripts, they’re written at least a year to six months before you ever see the show. So I’m saying things that are mirroring what’s going on in the world, and sometimes I’m shocked at what comes out of my mouth. You know, if if it makes it to the screen or the interactions that are taking place between people in the world, you know, no one could have foreseen Ukraine a year ago. But if you look at the series now, you’re like, Oh my God, this Elliot Lawrence must have a vision AI in his head or something. How can you think of these situations? I’m very, very proud of that. There is also some some steps taken with my character in designing women where I went against the grain. They did a flip on gone with the wind that I was Scarlett O’Hara, and that Scarlett did as a white woman are very different when they are done by me as a young black woman. Oh my gosh, it is something to see. Also, when I look back on my very first film role, I was, Oh my god, I had the greatest mentor in Sidney Poitier, and my first film was called

 

Ira Madison III: A Piece of the Action.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Yes, A Piece of the Action. And it’s so interesting when I look at Barbara Hanley in A Piece of the Action, so many people and I’m shocked when people are able to do that. They paired up young Barbara Hanley with the now older Barbara Howard from Abbott Elementary and said, This is why Barbara Howard is an amazing teacher because she knows what it is to be a challenged child and student. And I was like, Oh my god. You. I mean, the fact that I could have that 360 degree moment in fans or people who appreciate your work is truly wonderful. It’s really a gift.

 

Ira Madison III: Mm hmm. It’s it’s such a joy to watch Abbott Elementary every week, and it’s it’s truly what I say. People are talking about it, not just online. I am. I like hanging out with friends on the weekends and it’s like, like our friends. Like, I haven’t seen the new Abbott yet, and like, I’ll rewatch it with them and it’s like, Pull it up on Hulu. I like the way that we watch it. Like, it’s like, like, it’s Game of Thrones successor, and it’s truly remarkable to me and I want to know what it’s like working with, you know, the icon that is Quinta, who I used to work with her back at BuzzFeed when she was making her internet videos and like sort of blowing up there and now to see to see where she is now running a show. You know, what’s it like working with Gwen? What sort of, you know, wisdom? Have you been able to impart on her, you know, having been on successful television shows before?

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: You know what, she’s very smart. You’ve worked with her. You know this. She’s very smart. She you know what? Sometimes there are people who are, when they’re young, they’re actually older. And she is one of those young young people with an older spirit. And my father used to always say about me, You’ve been here several times before, you know? So it’s it’s I’m also someone who has been able to realize maybe I’ve lived here before, but I know certain things. So sometimes when we talk, we’re we’re on the same page. And I know this is an odd thing, but I’m probably the only person who is, and I will say, the mature person who has a baby boss. And I can say, my boss is a baby and I love her. Oh my God. I learned from that baby. Have been amazing. I I love working with Quintet. You know, she’s she’s sometimes like one of those people who. And I do this a lot, too. Sometimes I’ll think about something before I’m ready to say something about that. And she does the same thing. And I love that because that way I always tell people, never speak in anger. If you’re truly upset about something, walk away, come back later and said, OK about what you said. Here’s what I think now, you know, and we never have that kind of extreme, but she’s very bright. She’s very sharp. She’s very kind. You know, she will. She will look at the shade of orange I might have on, and I love that because every little thing means something. I’ve been on a lot of shows where a lot of things they didn’t mean anything. You know, they were just things. They were just clothes you put on. They were just things you said. But when I in working with this show, the words that come out of our mouth matter. And contrary to belief, we’re not a bunch of actors up there improvising. It’s not improvization. You know, our show is well written when it comes down to the things that we wear and what our characters look like. Everything matters. Sometimes I say to people, you should look at the jewelry I’m making because every now I’m not making that I’m wearing because every now and then I’m wearing something kind of special. But you have to pay attention to know what it means. You know what? What about the kind of woman that is a Barbara Howard and what do those pearls really mean? Why does she wear that cameo? That’s different, as in very different, you know, because you’ve probably never seen something like that before. You know, why is it that everybody else wears a lanyard? And you never see Barbara Howard in a lanyard? You have to catch it because you have to know that all of that means something to that character. So that’s all right. Those are the kind of things I love about working with Quinta, and she has this all in her head. It’s I mean, can you imagine what kind of brain she must have to be able to compartmentalize all of these things about this show and and and the ability to put a show in order so that the layers are peeled back on characters? It’s I. That’s why people love it. That’s why people love it. And who knew that Mr. Perfetti was into a bear? Who knew it?

 

Ira Madison III: I love Larry Owens so much. It was so exciting seeing him on the show, but not just him. Every guest star that pops up on the show, it’s like. Yes, exactly that is exactly who I envision in this role.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Oh, well, you ain’t ready yet. Just wait.

 

Louis Virtel: No, I just remembered that a few years ago you were involved with that production about Sylvester, and I think the the famous disco singer, you make me feel mighty real. And I was so thrilled by that. I was wondering if you had any particular memories of him that you would like to share with us, since he is, as far as I’m concerned, still a one of a kind. Pop culture presence. There is no second Sylvester.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: There is no second Sylvester. I don’t know about a lot of people, but I will never, ever forget. And this was way back in that day. Sylvester put on his dress, his big hair, his lashes, his nails, and he showed up on the Johnny Carson show. And America was like, “What new fresh heaven hell is this right here?” And he sat there in this wonderful ness. And just, you know, was there for his his interview. And in working on this this piece with Anthony and Ken Drill, you know, it was a musical and it was paying homage to this great spirit, this great voice, you know, very, very few people realize that, you know, Sylvester had his wedding in San Francisco. He got married to his partner in San Francisco back in the day in his white wedding gown and the pointer sisters, where his bridesmaids, this man through this man was. So I had of his wonderful time. And sadly, he was one of the first people we lost to AIDS. But when they had that AIDS. When they had that AIDS march there in San Francisco in. He could not walk any more, and he was not going to be left out. He was there in his wheelchair. And. Wow. You know, when you talk about people that you lost too soon and, you know, he was one of those people that you really you just lost way too soon, you know? And he was I just, you know, I just wish that he were. You know, around today, you know, he was he was good people. He was really unique and one of a kind, really unique and wanted it to be one of a kind, and he really deserves more. And people should be speaking about him more. And I really hope that at some point I’m able to get this, this musical mounted and up.

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah. No, we we we’ve talked about, Sylvester, many times on this show, I mean, it’s it’s just sort of who’s one of the blueprints of music, you know, and it’s it’s so exciting to introduce someone to Sylvester’s argument is that you make me feel like, you know, I’m like, the deep cuts are where it’s at.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: And you know, what’s what’s so interesting is not just so much the music, but it’s a movement, you know, music and the movement to include all people in our lives and who we are. He was at the forefront of that. Very often people who are at the forefront do not get what they deserve, and he’s one of those people.

 

Ira Madison III: Did you know him when you did Dreamgirls? Was he able to see you on stage?

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Who didn’t I know doing Dreamgirls?

 

Ira Madison III: I mean I feel like you had to know everybody,

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Everybody. Let me tell you, I will never forget the days they called me down to the stage door and they said, Someone’s here to see you. And I said, OK, you know, it’s like close to half an hour. And Dreamgirls was a show where you needed more than 30 minutes to get ready to get on stage right. So I was usually there by 7:15 and I come down to the stage door. And Diane von Furstenberg is at the state door and she has a gift for me. And it was her new perfume and it was called Bolt can be amore. And I remember and I can still see Diane von Furstenberg at the stage door saying in that accent of her, I have a gift for you. And I took it and I was like, Oh my God. Wow. I will never forget the time. Nancy Wilson Great. The Black one great jazz artist Nancy Wilson.

 

Ira Madison III: Mmmmm.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh yes.

 

Ira Madison III: Yes.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Showed up after her performance across town in her long limousine and said, Sheryl Lee Ralph, let’s go for a ride and talk.

 

Louis Virtel: Wow. Like The Godfather. Ok

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Okay.

 

Ira Madison III: Yes.

 

All:  *laughs.*

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: And do you know that woman stayed with me until her last breath in life? I will never forget Luther Vandross. Luther Vandross loved Dreamgirls and loved Jennifer and loved the dreams, and one day he showed up. This was before he had made up his mind he was going to really lose the weight and he was very serious about his relationship with weight. And one day we had a conversation in Vegas about the weight, and he showed up with a bucket of chicken. And sat in the dressing room and talked about the show, and we all ate chicken. I will never forget that. One day he stuck with me very long after that and I, you know, I got married. I had my son, my first child, and he said to me, I’m performing in Vegas. I need you to come, but don’t forget the baby. And I never forget these pictures we took, and it was just him talking to me, but holding my child and just talking, just talking. You know, and then time passed and it was him, my first child and my daughter and it like, Wow. And then in life, then life happens. But those are those are three things I’ll never forget. There were many, many more the way Sylvester Stallone looked at me in one snap shot. Yes, and yes, he did call me in for an audition for a movie, but the audition did take place in a hotel room. But I did go. So what could I say.

 

Ira Madison III: I feel like we need just a we just need one book. That’s just everyone in the Dreamgirls cast telling a story about who showed up at the stage door. I want the Dreamgirls Stage Door book.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: That part right there. I might have to steal that from you and start working on it now.

 

Ira Madison III: No, go ahead. It’s all yours. It’s all your stories. I just want to read it.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Thank you. That part.

 

Louis Virtel: I want. I want the audio book too, though  like you have to be telling it also.

 

Ira Madison III: Yes. Yes Yes

 

Louis Virtel: So .

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: That’s a good idea. That’s a good idea

 

Louis Virtel: Run your scales. And then do that one. Yeah. Mmhmm

 

Ira Madison III: Ugh, thank you so much for being here. Sheryl Lee Ralph. It’s it is truly an honor to be able to speak with you.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. I am always, you know, when people say that, I’m just like, OK, I you know, I guess I’m the one. I don’t get it as much. I guess I’d have to go back and look at my IM , IMDb and say, OK, maybe you really have done something. You know I umm, but thank you.

 

Ira Madison III: Mmhmmm,.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: No. You know, I just said it about Sylvester, but it’s like the energy is not like other people. Again, it’s like we only have one Sheryl Lee Ralph if if we if we if we misplace her, there’s no second one who picks up the slack. So that’s and it’s so thrilling to get to talk to somebody like that because it’s the one and only, you know,.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Aww, thank you. Although I have two children and they are, they’re pretty good. They’ve they’ve gotten.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh yeah.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: Yeah. Between my son and daughter, they’ve got their own kind of energy and I’m just like, Wow, I sometimes, you know what? Maya Angelou one time looked at me. It was towards the end of her life, and she invited me to hear her speak, and she couldn’t speak. And I spoke and she said, Sheryl Lee Ralph, every time I hear you speak, I know it was all work. And these two right here. And she was looking at my children, she said, will be your greatest achievement. She said there is nothing I could ever do not to ensure the success of my children and I. Time has passed and I so understand what that means. I so understand what that means.

 

Louis Virtel: Yes. And let’s not forget that Maya Angelou, also a Tony nominated actress. So these are just a couple of colleagues talking here.

 

Sheryl Lee Ralph: That’s right. That’s right. Mmhmm, wow.

 

Ira Madison III: Abbott Elementary airs Tuesdays on ABC and you can find all the old episodes on Hulu.

 

Louis Virtel: [AD].

 

Ira Madison III: Bruce Willis, one of the most iconic actors of the last 40 years, recently announced that he’s retiring from acting. Last week, his daughter, Rumer, posted on Instagram that he was retiring after health problems and a recent diagnosis for aphasia, which is a language disorder caused by damage in a specific area of the brain that controls language, expression and comprehension. Aphasia leaves a person unable to communicate effectively with others. And so obviously this has led to a lot of people remembering Bruce Willis, you know, writing pieces about him. And so I wanted us to take a moment to talk about why we love Bruce Willis. And I would say that I love him mostly because of not even his movies. It’s because of Moonlighting, the TV series,.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh. Which I I thankfully just watched the first episode of it, which is, I would say, the most quote unquote iconic episode of that show. It was a two hour premiere in the mid 80s. If you don’t know Moonlighting Bruce Willis, Cybill Shepherd. They end up running a detective agency after she’s she’s a this bankrupted star who finds that in her tax write off, she has the detective agency and they end up as colleagues solving crimes together. And it becomes kind of a normal procedural, actually. But in this first episode, Bay, the mismatched comic energy is there. She’s prim and over it. And, you know, and he’s like, you know, sunglasses snapping asshole. And it just nothing could be more 80s in terms of, you know, cokey thrills, you know, just like the music is playing dashing in the streets. She’s a bitch. He’s an asshole. You know

 

Ira Madison III: That and Miami Vice,.

 

Louis Virtel: Everything is there.

 

Ira Madison III: With the cokey thrills.

 

Louis Virtel: Yes, right?

 

Ira Madison III: But I would actually say that I would balk against, the like it becoming mostly a normal procedural? Because the thing about Moonlighting is that every TV writer of a certain age, like most of the people that they have, they were inspired by Moonlighting. When you look at shows like X-Files, Pushing Daisies, like things are sort of like break the form of TV. It started with Moonlighting, I would actually say the most iconic episodes of season two. It’s called the dream sequence always rings twice, and it’s completely black and white noir episode. And what Moonlighting did early on was episodes would just be like in randomly different genres. Or they do a black and white one, or they do one that’s like set in some weird location. And it was really sort of one of those early precursors to, I guess, sort of like streaming TV, which does that all the time. But I point out moonlighting because I feel like people know Bruce Willis from Diehard in the action movies or they love his sci fi films. And people are always sort of shocked at how funny he is and like how much like pathos he has as an actor. And it’s all on display in moonlighting. Like, his comedic timing is impeccable on moonlighting, and when you watch him in comedies, I think then you get you get some of that that people miss in his performances.

 

Jon Favreau: No, I mean that my favorite Bruce Willis movies well outside of the Die Hard series, and I think that my favorite in that series is Die Hard with a vengeance because I think the chemistry between him and Samuel L. Jackson is fantastic, fantastic and.

 

Ira Madison III: A perfect film.

 

Jon Favreau: Perfect film. They’re both funny. It’s just it’s amazing. But my next two films are Death Becomes Her and the whole nine yards.

 

Louis Virtel: Hmm.

 

Ira Madison III: Yes. OK. Death Becomes Her

 

Jon Favreau: Just like so funny, so funny

 

Ira Madison III: Death Becomes Her is a gay classic, uh obviously. You know, because of Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep. But Bruce Willis is so fucking good in that movie.

 

Jon Favreau: So good.

 

Louis Virtel: And you would never intuitively cast him its very strange casting.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. You’d think you cast like some dorky guy because that’s the character he plays. Yeah, he’s he’s perfect in it, right?

 

Louis Virtel: No. Like Ed Begley Jr. was in Chicago. I’m sure he could have been. I’m sure he could have been back for that because I’m sorry. You know,

 

Ira Madison III: and I’d forgotten how much I fucking loved the whole nine yards. That was that was like, I’ve seen it like early 2000s. Yeah, it was an early 2000s movie. So it’s definitely a movie where I was in high school and I like went to the movie theater on the weekend and saw it. And I think I saw that movie and theaters at least one or two more times. It’s really, really funny.

 

Jon Favreau: Amanda Peet is great. Michael Clarke Duncan’s great Natasha Henstridge. Like, it’s a great, great cast and that

 

Louis Virtel: I almost think beyond his movie roles. And obviously he was in classics like The Sixth Sense. There’s something about just the constancy of Bruce Willis that is important, and I think sort of like the glue of pop. Culture, guys, you know, you can always expect a a Bruce Willis movie to come out every year and whether or not you see it, you’re like, Happy, it’s there. I would compare it to if I’m turning on the TV at 7:30 every night. Guess who’s there, Pat and Vanna? And it’s like, it’s 1983, you know, literally watching the Grammys the other day. Keith Urban 20 years on, still looking like a shift manager at Paxlovid. You know, there are certain things where you want them to be the same and you get the same thing again and again. And you know, as much as you want, whatever progress to occur. New innovative television, movies, music, et cetera. You also want something to remain of the old. And Bruce Willis was so constant and what he brought, you know, whether or not the movie was good. I mean, I remember there’s this Bruce Willis movie called The Color of Knight, which had to have won 100 Razzies, but I watched it because Leslie Morgan is there and she gives a really good performance. So go and watch the color of night for Lesley Ann Warren.

 

Ira Madison III: And the Razzies took back his nominations when he when his diagnosis came, but also the Razzies said the Razzie should banished in general.

 

Jon Favreau: You know who needs the Razzies anymore? Like we have Twitter. Twitter is the Razzies. All the time

 

Louis Virtel: Yes. Thats even generous. The whole internet is Razzies. Yes. Right? Yeah. So it’s it’s people like that who just by virtue of continuing to work our institutions, and he represents that. I always get a little nervous when a celebrity diagnosis leads people to suddenly learning about the same syndrome or illness or whatever. But honestly, that is routinely how people end up knowing critical information about things again, like the word anorexia was not available to the world really until Karen Carpenter died of it. So in a way, I like that kind of confluence of health and media. I think.

 

Jon Favreau: I had heard about aphasia only because Gabby Giffords, the congresswoman from Tucson, when she was shot like one of the afflictions she had after after recovering from that gun injury was aphasia. So she’s talked about it a lot, and she actually did a video about Bruce Willis when this came out just recently.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh, she did. I didn’t see that.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah, yeah, she told me, like, learn more about the disease because it seems it’s so horrible.

 

Ira Madison III: I will say that one thing that’s come out of this, too, is the conversation about whether or not I guess it was appropriate for, like producers who knew he had a aphasia or some sort of cognitive disease happening to still be making movies.

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah, I mean, I was going through this. It’s like, look, the the most benevolent scenario here is that it’s possible that he believed that he would improve, that he could improve because a lot of people with aphasia do, especially with speech therapy. And that, you know, there were reports that sometimes he showed up to the set and he was in good shape and he was better. And so maybe because this is his whole life and he wants to do this. It was just the people around him being unwilling to tell him, like, Hey, step back. That’s like the benevolent scenario. The one that sort of the L.A. Times story was suggesting was a little more exploitative, which would be pretty sad if that’s the truth.

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah, I mean, he’s not Ronald Reagan. You know, he wasn’t. He wasn’t wandering around. Um on set with nuclear codes, so there’s at least that. But it does explain why when you look at Bruce Willis’s IMDb, or like when people looked at his IMDb this week, they were like, Why are there like 60 B movies that have not come out yet?

 

Louis Virtel: Right? He’s one of those. We call that the Eric Roberts syndrome. Yes.

 

Jon Favreau: But that that is a little bit I mean, that’s the producer’s fault. They bear some responsibility there because they were saying it like, you know, they just put him on. He was a he was a main character in a lot of these movies. Just so they could put him on the poster, put him on the thumbnail and then sell the movie internationally, which is pretty shitty.

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah. Well, someone in Indonesia is going to see all those movies on whatever the version of HBO Max is there. It’s it’s interesting thinking about him as sort of like a mainstay in popular culture, too, because he has like, you know, he’s been in so many areas. His 80s action movie era, the 90s is really sort of dominated sort of by his relationship with Demi Moore. The 2000s was like the sixth Sense era, and what I also loved is seeing his family rally around him. Because what I what really sort of told me that I liked Bruce Willis sort of as a celebrity. Early on when I was younger was the fact that he was still always around Jamie, even when she was with Ashton Kutcher.

 

Louis Virtel: Right, right, right. Very. David Arquette still working with Courtney Cox and making that game show they had together, yes. Also, I have to say about Bruce Willis, you forget sometimes.

 

Ira Madison III: Scream Scream is a game show.

 

Jon Favreau: No

 

Jon Favreau: Also Scream yeah

 

Louis Virtel: Celebrity name game celebrity name game. Yes. Yes, yes.

 

Ira Madison III: Oh, that’s right.

 

Louis Virtel: No. I also forget that Bruce Willis, though, because you would always want him back, like he’s the only person who brings that specific vibe. You do forget he is isn’t some of the biggest bombs ever. He is in like the Bonfire of the Vanities. He is in. He is in north. He is in a movie that at the time I did think was the worst movie I had ever seen. Armageddon.

 

Ira Madison III: You hate Armageddon?.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh my God. The scene where, like Ben Affleck, has put pushing an animal cracker down the like panties strap of Liv Tyler. I was like, Heterosexuality is not for me. I’m over. Done.

 

Jon Favreau: That’s fair, fair.

 

Ira Madison III: I think I would actually say the worst. Bruce Willis movie I’ve seen is um 2007 perfect stranger with Halle Berry.

 

Louis Virtel: Well, Halle Berry in the late 2000s. I mean, tough time. But what happens in that movie?

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah.

 

Ira Madison III: It’s sort of like Halle Berry is an investigative reporter, and she’s, by the way, she’s investigating a sex scandal with a senator with Giovanni Ribisi.

 

Louis Virtel: Right. Another person who’s in every movie.

 

Ira Madison III: And yeah her childhood friend dies, and so she got her childhood friend works for Bruce Willis, who’s like advertising exact. And so when her friend is found dead, Holly buried then has to sort of ingratiate herself into Bruce Wilson’s life to, like, prove, you know, like her friend’s murder or something. And it’s awful because the twist is insane. It’s one of those sort of like 2000’s thrillers, which has an insane twist in it, which at the end you’re like, What the fuck did I just watch? But basically, the twist is that Halle Berry was the killer and sort of didn’t know she was the killer.

 

Louis Virtel: Oh one of those? Yes, I don’t know I’m the killer.

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah. And so like, she killed. Yeah, so she like kills. She kills Bruce Willis at the end of the movie, and like after she has like a psychotic break,.

 

Jon Favreau: All set with that I think

 

Louis Virtel: That said, I do enjoy hysterics acting from Halle Berry, so maybe there’s three minutes of good material in there.

 

Ira Madison III: I mean that and Gothic. The double feature that we’re waiting for, right?

 

Louis Virtel: I just want to say, OK, I’m going to leave this topical alone Gothica was a movie when I was in high school. Everybody went and saw what the fuck was wrong with us. Like, what are you doing this weekend? Oh obviously, I have to go see Gothica. No you don’t. What?

 

Ira Madison III: Gothica is, I would say the Gothica is weirdly a movie for people, our specific age group where I don’t know what happened the year it came out. I feel like everyone our age has seen Gothica.

 

Jon Favreau: No, I never saw Gothica. I never totally missed that movie.

 

Louis Virtel: Well, that’s why society is still on track.

 

Ira Madison III: You were in college.

 

Jon Favreau: I was at college.

 

Ira Madison III: You were in college when Gothica came out.

 

Jon Favreau: Oh then that’s why I didn’t see it.

 

Ira Madison III: We were high school students, everyone in high school during the period Gothica came out somehow saw it on the weekend. Even though I guess the movie did. I don’t know if the movie flopped, actually, but somehow everyone seen Gothica.

 

Louis Virtel: Anyway. No, I guess the closest Bruce Willis ever got to an Oscar nomination would have been the Sixth Sense, right? I mean, like obviously, I think that years has a great best actor line up, but he didn’t really. And he’s in Pulp Fiction, obviously, and 12 monkeys. But his intersection with prestige was, you know, we’re few and far between.

 

Jon Favreau: He did. He did win an Emmy for his guest starring role on Friends,

 

Louis Virtel: and he has an Emmy, of course, for Moonlighting too. So.

 

Jon Favreau: Of course for moonlighting. Later in life.

 

Ira Madison III: So if the Oscars didn’t suck, sometimes he would have a award for Unbreakable or.

 

Louis Virtel: When people love

 

Ira Madison III: Moonrise Kingdom, Moonrise Kingdom

 

Louis Virtel: When people love Unbreakable, I’m like, Are you sure?

 

Ira Madison III: Unbreakable’s a good movie, Louis.

 

Jon Favreau: It was pretty good. It was pretty good

 

Louis Virtel: It was fine. I saw that one in the theater, too, and I’m like, oh you’re Mr. fucking glass here i go.

 

Ira Madison III: I will actually classify Unbreakable as I think we talked about these kind of movies weeks ago. Unbreakable is one of the movies that as a kid who, like, liked movie reviews and like Roger Ebert and like would sort of write my own like in the school paper or something, I saw unbreakable and for whatever mindset I was and then of the like hating M. Night Shyamalan phase of my life, I hated Unbreakable, and I was like, This movie sucks, and I don’t constantly reference it as like one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I rewatched it as an adult, and I love it.

 

Louis Virtel: OK, well,.

 

Ira Madison III: And I have no idea. Like, where my brain was at that time

 

Louis Virtel: I love that journey for you. I feel like it’s somewhere in between. I think it’s in the two and a half star range where Shyamalan comfortably lived until, you know, the 2000s took him somewhere subterranean shall we say.

 

Ira Madison III: I also revisited Disney’s The Kid. Have you seen that?

 

Louis Virtel: Oh with Lily Tomlin?

 

Jon Favreau: No.I remember that movie but I never saw it

 

Ira Madison III: Lily Tomlin. Jean Smart, the Angus, the kid who’s in it. It’s a really sweet movie. And I think Roger Ebert, in his review, pointed out that, you know, like for people who like were of the who who have missed the era, you know, like a moonlighting or death becomes her where he’s sort of like very good at comedy, like the comedy and pathos that, like Bruce Willis exhibits as an actor, is on display in that movie, which is sort of like a two and a half star movie is sort of too long, but it’s really sweet.

 

Jon Favreau: What about Look Who’s Talking? Look Who’s Talking, Look Who’s Talking 2? He was the voice

 

Louis Virtel: A major part of my life is getting over the fact that Kirstie Alley should be like an awesome person, and instead she is what she is?

 

Jon Favreau: She’s just a terrible person.

 

Louis Virtel: Yeah, I know. I mean, like, like I loved not just look talking. Obviously, cheers to an but fat actress was so good, and she’s this person who for a while on Twitter, I’ve brought this up before, I think truly seeking out. Gay comic, she just messages like gay people I know from time to time and you want her to be like, Yeah, right, exactly. I called her the people’s Lauren Bacall a few weeks ago, if I’m not mistaken. And alas, alas, in Alaska, it’s like sucks. Just it just totally sucks.

 

Ira Madison III: Well um. I’ve been revisiting Bruce Willis movies, and aside from the ones we’ve mentioned, I feel like people should make a point to watch the last Boy Scout, which I think is great and sort of missed in his action movie oeuvre because people tend to just think of die hard. But like the late Tony Scott directed that movie and he was the better director of the Scott Brothers. Unfortunately, I

 

Jon Favreau: I don’t know about that. Moving on

 

Ira Madison III: and Shane Black wrote the script so.

 

Oh interesting.

 

You don’t like man on fire? Enemy of state? Days of thunder?

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah. Enemy of state, Days of thunder are great.

 

Louis Virtel: Did you say days of thunder third like that that’s like the third best movie he made, because

 

Ira Madison III: no I’m just naming them,.

 

Louis Virtel: Uh OK,.

 

Ira Madison III: Deja vu with with with Denzel

 

Louis Virtel: days. Days of thunder is watered down Top Gun like it’s the same movie

 

Jon Favreau: thats true.

 

Ira Madison III: I’m I’m trolling a little bit. I do love Ruben Scott, but Tony Scott

 

Louis Virtel: you can’t troll a troll is all i’m, saying, Yeah, go ahead.

 

Ira Madison III: All I’m saying is House of Gucci would have been a lot better if Tony Scott had directed it.

 

Louis Virtel: that we can agree on that we can agree on.

 

Ira Madison III: All right. When we’re back. Keep it.

 

Ira Madison III: And we’re back with our favorite segment of the episode. Keep It. My Keep It is to Jon being here.

 

Louis Virtel: I know. It’s very uncomfortable. I’m kidding.

 

Ira Madison III: This is the new era now. We like Jon Favreau,.

 

Louis Virtel: OK? The vibes are not off. They’re on. We’ve decided.

 

Jon Favreau: They’re on. This is great. Vibe shift. Theres a shift

 

Ira Madison III: Yes, Jon, you’re our guest of honor this week. What is your keep it

 

Jon Favreau: so might keep it is about how we found out this week that Elon Musk owns 9.2 percent of Twitter, makes him the largest investor, one of its most attention starved users. So he was required to disclose this in a filing on Monday. But he bought these shares that are now worth like $2.9 billion. On March 14th, a week and a half later, once he’s the company’s largest shareholder, he tweets free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle? The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully. A few days later, he tweets that he’d been giving serious thought to creating a new social media platform as he’s already the owner of Twitter, Big Owner. And then yesterday he was asking everyone if they want an edit button. Today we found out he’s joined the board, so now everyone’s asking like what he’s going to do like, is he going to let Trump back on Twitter? Is he going to let Ira back on Twitter? Here’s what I think,.

 

Louis Virtel: Synance.

 

Jon Favreau: I think you should.

 

Ira Madison III: We’ve been having conversations. We’ve been having conversations.

 

Jon Favreau: I think my take on this is that he should not let anyone back on Twitter. I hope he takes over the whole fucking company and shuts it down. Just delete everyone’s account. Call it a day. Saved journalism. Save democracy. Save us all from ourselves. I think that’d be the best. The best. like you’re. You’re a better person. You’ve survived right Ira now that you’re not on Twitter.

 

Ira Madison III: I’ve survived. Am I a better person? Some would say,.

 

Jon Favreau: You let me on the show. I think thats an improvement.

 

Louis Virtel: Let you on the show?

 

Jon Favreau: He let me, yeah

 

Ira Madison III: I gotta, to be honest. We got an email from Crooked uh and it said Jon will be on keep it this week.

 

Louis Virtel: Right, yeah

 

Jon Favreau: Yeah that’s how I roll. That’s how I roll.

 

Ira Madison III: I actually. Do not think he is going to do any of that. We cannot count on Elon Musk to save democracy. No. You know, and I think that I don’t know what it means for Twitter. It sounds insane that he is an owner now. Um, but I guess I sort of expected chicanery to happen at Twitter once Jack Dorsey walked away from it.

 

Louis Virtel: Right? That’s kind of true. It it leaves me with a sense of unease and dis-ease, but TBD. I have no response to this. Elon Musk is somebody I refuse to think about, which actually dovetails nicely with my keep it. Speaking of Twitter and things that are expired. Sarah Palin is back in our lives. OK?

 

Jon Favreau: Oh yeah.

 

She wants to go to Congress, and Donald Trump has endorsed her. With a long winded, bad endorsement, the Wikipedia-ed her or whatever he had to do to remember who she was. We have already made every possible Sarah Palin joke. I have nothing left, though. Also, she is in this Caitlyn Jenner universe of no one respects Sarah Palin. No one is like, Well, thank God, she was here to contribute a b and C. She’s not contributed shit. This person sucks. I’ve already discussed, I’ve already described her as somebody who has been chased by the same b for 20 years. She seems like always like there’s the B again, like her vibe is recently electrocuted. You know,.

 

Jon Favreau: We talked about this on Pod Save America yesterday at the end, and I thought the same thing was like, I have nothing more to say about Sarah Palin. Lovett had a good joke when she said she’s now looking at Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and saying those assholes are like half as smart. But I have read half as much as them. I am half as well read as them, even though I’m twice as smart. So I gotta get my ass in congress.

 

Louis Virtel: There are levels there, right?

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah, that’s the thing about it to me that like she we’ve said everything there is to say about Sarah Palin, but also. She’s so unsuccessful at a at a grift that so many other people have become successful at post her right? Like those people like award Barbara or Marjorie Taylor Greene are like cribbing from the Sarah Palin playbook. But like, you could just sort of do that in politics now because of her.

 

Jon Favreau: Oh yeah, she gave it. She helped give us Trump.

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah. You know, so like, she’s, you know, she’s the um, she’s the House mother of the GOP. But she will not win any trophies at the ball.

 

Louis Virtel: No, absolutely not. She just doesn’t have the like. I guess I would call it like maniacal confidence that comes with most of the territory on this. Like Marjorie Taylor Greene is somebody who’s just like the fire in her eyes. I would compare her to Cruella driving the car, you know, in that scene in the original 101 Dalmatians, just like this total as pressed, like whatever comes out of my mouth. May it fly out. You know,

 

Ira Madison III: I would actually say the problem with her is that unfortunately, I don’t think Sarah Palin is evil. I think she’s just stupid. And.

 

Louis Virtel: I will say there’s a cross section.

 

Jon Favreau: There’s a touch of both.

 

Ira Madison III: There’s there’s a cross section as she could be hateful and bigoted. But like the actual evil, I feel like evil requires, you know, some sort of calculating. And I don’t think she even knows how to use a calculator for one.

 

Jon Favreau: In today’s Republican Party, you have to wake up every day with a burning passion to own the libs. Like, that’s right, you don’t have that. If you’re not driven by just trying to embarrass some liberals, then like you’re not going to make it.

 

Ira Madison III: And she can’t do that because she’s too busy being embarrassed by her family, which if you forget, the Palins are like basically white trash dynasty.

 

Louis Virtel: It’s like the Keystone cops. No, it’s like them colliding with each other and running and pointing in the other direction and all that. Yeah, screwball comedy.

 

Ira Madison III: when You think about when you think about everything with, you know, like Bristol and, you know, like the teen pregnancy, you know, and like Dancing With the Stars and like the public fights that brawls that they would have, you know, would show that, you know, like white people could cause chaos at public events, too. And there is no way her family was ever going to like, get it. So in order to be like calculating an evil and like a real like part of the GOP, you know, like for everything we say about the Trump family and how messy they’ve been in public life since, like The Apprentice and shit like that, like they at least keep most of their nonsense at least respectable in the way that, like rich evil white people like. Do you know, like I feel like people look down on the Palins.

 

Jon Favreau: I feel like they also inspired a lot of trashy entertainment like, you know, Honey Boo Boo and, you know, like Duck Dynasty. Like that was all like the Palins in real life reality TV. Mm hmm.

 

Louis Virtel: God, I did watch Sarah Palin’s Alaska at the time. Maybe I was tasked with recapping it for whatever website I was working for, but they could not manufacture one interest. I mean, it just was boring. And then too, it’s like. Man, I guess you’re just like kind of dim. That’s it. And that doesn’t necessarily make good TV. That’s what I learned from Sarah Palin. Even if you’re stupid and want to be on TV doesn’t mean I want to watch it. Which half of TV is about stupid and look what they’re up to now, you know?

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah, I mean, she is. She has no cast member of Florida Bama Shore ,.

 

Louis Virtel: Right?

 

Ira Madison III: I’ll tell you that much. I would. I will credit her, at least with she’s one of the last political figures to inspire like good parody, it’s sort of like the SNL room, like Tina Fey as Sarah Palin is iconic, there was around the same era, you know where we had the very good Jay Pharoah Obama. You know, I think that like, they’ve not been able to replicate that with anybody after, like, is there a good Trump? Is there a good Biden,

 

Louis Virtel: by the way? That’s true. But I don’t need to see Tina Fey do it again. I feel like she’s going to be forced to do it again. And it’s like, No, this shouldn’t be like a Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain thing. I was happy with it existing when it existed, you know.

 

Jon Favreau: Keep it as that moment that we watched, that we watched that during the Obama campaign in the campaign office, I remember and we were all cheering because we thought that we were worried about Sarah Palin for a little while, like when she first had those rallies in early September and then the Tina Fey stuff happened in the Katie Couric stuff and we felt a little bit better.

 

Louis Virtel: Ira, what is your keep it this week?

 

Ira Madison III: So my keep it is an Internet video that popped up starring Paula Patton, which speaking of déja vu, the film directed by Tony Scott that Denzel Washington was in that I brought up earlier Paula Patton is in that film. Paula Patton decided to share her fried chicken recipe on the internet this week.

 

Louis Virtel: I have seen this video, I really, by the way, by the way, cooking videos. The last thing I care about, it’s just it’s just not on my brand. I’m not like a food person. Paula, what the fuck went wrong here. Paula,.

 

Jon Favreau: What happened?

 

Ira Madison III: Paula Patton, Paula Patton shares her. She says it’s her mother’s fried chicken recipe, and it is the most terrifying thing I’ve seen since I saw the Movie X last week. And this is more terrifying. She, first of all, if you’re asking if her mother is white, yes, she is.

 

Jon Favreau: Oooh.

 

Ira Madison III: But I know plenty of white people from the South who were aghast at this fried chicken making. She, first of all, takes the chicken, washes it with water. And I also want to say that there’s a debate raging online, usually amongst like Black Twitter about whether or not you wash chicken before you cook it. And I am firmly in the camp of you do not wash chicken because you’re just spreading ecoli everywhere. Although sections of the internet will have you convinced that like if you do not wash your chicken, you are a terrorist because they don’t like to listen to science. And I get it. You know, the Tuskegee experiments are a direct reason why we now believe we have to wash your chicken. But anyway, she has this chicken that she’s then throws into a bag of flour. She does not season this chicken. She just puts it in the flour, and then she puts the chicken in a pan on the stove and is cooking it in grease. And then she decides to season the chicken, so she matters. She manages to under season and over season this chicken, because she’s basically seasoning grease and then she bites into it when it’s done, the inside is pink. I do not know. I do not know who in her life has had to endure this fried chicken recipe before. It’s changing my mind about a lot of her relationship with Robin Thicke, for instance.

 

Louis Virtel: It has been on my mind throughout this. Yes.

 

Ira Madison III: Because I know Robin Thicke know what good ass fried chicken is, OK? Alan Thicke’s son knows what good ass fried chicken is.

 

Louis Virtel: Classic Canadian fried chicken of course.

 

Ira Madison III: Alan Thicke is a white man of color. We we’ve better over that. Alan Thicke is Black. To sit there at the amount of times you probably have to sit there and, you know, eat Paula’s Fried Chicken.

 

Jon Favreau: Pink in the middle. Ugh

 

Louis Virtel: But then he still wrote that piece. Yeah, he still wrote that song, get her back. So there might, might have been some x factor to that chicken.

 

Ira Madison III: Well, I mean, that just means the sex was good.

 

Louis Virtel: OK. All right. But no, it is a really shocking video. As like you said, normally you would show that to whatever your publicist or whoever is around, and maybe there’d be an objection or two. The joy with which she shares this recipe, which has several mind-blowing plot twists as it goes on. I haven’t seen anything like it on the internet in a while.

 

Jon Favreau: I’m going to go watch that.

 

Louis Virtel: I haven’t been this worried for a Paula since Abdul on American Idol in 2009, which was treacherous. They were like, they were like, We’re going to bring in Kara DioGuardi now. Like, it was a really tough time for Paula.

 

Jon Favreau: Just swapped her out. Yeah, yeah.

 

Ira Madison III: The funny part about it, though, is I don’t get why Paula Patton was sharing her recipe for fried chicken. Like, was this a sort of like a precursor to her wanting to release a cookbook? I was like, Does she have a show coming out on the Food Network or something like it’s it’s very early pandemic era behavior, which seems like you. You don’t need to share a recipe with us in 2022 now. We’re outside.

 

Louis Virtel: Mm-Hmm. Sure.

 

Jon Favreau: We don’t. We don’t need to watch this at all.

 

Ira Madison III: So, yeah, so she clearly decided to embarrass herself for no good reason.

 

Jon Favreau: Well, she gave us some content here.

 

Louis Virtel: True. Yeah, I guess I’m thankful.

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah, true. So she’s maybe she’s launching like her version of Jackass, but it’s just, you know, like people cooking poorly.

 

Louis Virtel: Which reminds me, by the way, you got to check out Paris Hilton’s video where she’s cooking something. It’s from a few years ago, and I think it’s intentionally perotic. But man, is it worth it. She doesn’t know where any of the utensils in her kitchen are. Anyway, if somebody, if somebody wrote that at that turns out to be like a Julio Torres joint, I’m not surprised, but it was really funny.

 

Ira Madison III: Well, she has a cooking show cooking with Paris,

 

Louis Virtel: and of course, she’s incredibly handy. If there’s one thing we know about that Trump voting lunatic. I’m not.

 

Jon Favreau: She’s known for her cooking.

 

Ira Madison III: Its sort of. Yeah. Yeah, it’s sort of a rip off of Selena Chef, but I’ll get into that later,

 

Jon Favreau: which is good, which is good.

 

Ira Madison III: Of course you watch Selena Chef Jon.

 

Jon Favreau: I have seen a couple episodes, three or four episodes of that

 

Louis Virtel: Jon Favreau I would say your first outing with Keep It went really well. Thank God, you came.

 

Jon Favreau: Thank God. Thank you for having me. This is amazing. I’m now. Next time I see Ira in the crosswalk, I’m going to. I’m going to slow down.

 

Louis Virtel: Well, I didn’t tell you to do that. Yeah, I mean, live a little hit Ira with your car

 

Ira Madison III: Ugh no. Thank you so much for being here, Jonn. It was actually a joy to have you on the show, and I miss you.

 

Jon Favreau: Thanks for having me. I miss you too. Let’s hang soon.

 

Ira Madison III: Yeah. And thank you again to the iconic Sheryl Lee Ralph for joining us. This has been. Keep it!

 

Louis Virtel: Keep it as a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Kendra James. Our producer is Caroline Reston and our associate producer is Brian Semel. Our executive producer is Ira Madison III, but I, Louis Virtel, do a good job too our audio engineers are Charlotte Landes and Kyle Seglin, and the show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landes. Thank you to our digital team Matt DeGroot, Nar Melkonian and Milo Kim for production support every week.