2 ALs 1 Pod: A comedy podcast with a touch of crass. · Stand-up comedians Al Ducharme and Al Romas

2 Als 1 Pod Vol 372: One of the ALs is missing. Comedian Andres Fernandez fills in.

March 16, 2026·55 min·1 clip

We slept in Saddam Hussein's palace smoking cigars with comedy legends

Al Ducharme opens by noting that Al Romas is missing and Andres Fernandez is sitting in. Fernandez is introduced as an old stand-up friend from the late 1990s, but also as a restaurateur and comedy club owner, which gives the conversation the feel of a reunion and a career postmortem at the same time. He is trying to get back on stage. Fernandez says he never really left comedy in spirit because he kept working around comics and running his club, but the road is a different animal and the old rhythm of getting booked, traveling, and repeating the cycle has to be built again from scratch. The hosts spend time on that gap. They talk about how comics can be tough to hire for ordinary work, since years on the road teach a narrow set of habits and leave the rest of the world wondering what to do with someone who has spent so long chasing stage time. That leads to more jokes. The banter shifts to fallback skills, manual labor, and the lessons Fernandez picked up helping his father build businesses, with both men treating hard work as useful to know even if neither wants to live there. Fernandez calls himself lucky. He says that, through comedy and related work like voiceover, he has mostly avoided having to rely on those other skills for survival, which gives the talk a little gratitude under the wisecracks. Then the money talk starts. Fernandez explains that after years of running businesses he wants to return to stand-up, but getting back into that world at 61 is not easy, especially when business life keeps pulling him elsewhere. Cruise ships come up next. He says cruise work has become a major part of his income since COVID, and the hosts treat that as both a practical reality and a fresh source of comic material, another strange chapter in a comic's working life. His restaurant history matters too. Fernandez walks through a business sequence in which a cafe and a wine bar were put up for sale, the cafe sold first, and the empty space led to a grilled cheese idea because finding a good cook had become too hard. The talk stays loose. It keeps circling through comedy careers, club ownership, work habits, and the plain fact that staying alive in this business usually means reinventing yourself before the last version is fully gone. The closing gets messy. By the end, the signoff turns into the usual joke-heavy chaos, with review-and-rate reminders, fakeouts, and a final burst of nonsense that fits the show's blunt, unpolished way of landing a scene.

As heard by us

A blunt reunion that turns comic work, business backstory, and road life into an easy hang.

This episode plays like a loose reunion, with Al Ducharme at the center, Al Romas missing, and Andres Fernandez stepping in with a history that stretches from stand-up to restaurants to running a comedy club. That mix gives the conversation a lived-in feel.

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Why you'd press play

You want a loose, profane hang with comics who have lived some miles.

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