Baby, Please Come Home

December 24, 2025·32 min·3 clips

AJ Benza reveals his Christmas Eve sadness and the haunting song that led him to Vincent van Gogh's tragic ear-cutting anniversary.

Christmas Eve has AJ loose, sentimental, and irritated by almost everything. He opens with the holiday in his head, counting out December 24, 2025, and mourning the delayed seven fish dinner. A promised Christmas morning gift turns into a thank-you to listeners who have stuck around for eight years. The soft part does not last. AJ moves into celebrity damage, legal stories, and the kind of careful media wording that makes him lose patience. Matthew Perry gets a hard read: ketamine, the hot tub, addiction, and AJ rejecting the neat hotline language attached to tragedy. Then Russell Brand takes over. AJ reacts to the new charges, thinks about Harvey Weinstein, and wrestles with how certain allegations get described. It is blunt, skeptical, and uneasy. He keeps coming back to consent, public accusation, and the space between messy private encounters and criminal language. Aziz Ansari comes up as the earlier example. This is not tidy courtroom talk. It is AJ working through scandal out loud, with suspicion, memory, and no use for approved phrasing. Near the end, he softens a little. A wedding-food riff becomes a rough life lesson, where prime rib and mortality somehow fit together. Eat what you ordered. Under the joke is the warning that life can change before you are done enjoying it. The goodbye is almost tender: he calls the Christmas episode a gift and thanks the audience for giving him the longest job he has ever kept.

As heard by us

Holiday chatter, celebrity scandal, and a sharp-edged sign-off.

AJ Benza uses Christmas Eve as a loose excuse to move from holiday ritual and listener thanks into the celebrity scandal lane his show likes best.

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Why you'd press play

A Christmas Eve gripe session that still ends like a toast, with a promised Christmas Day gift.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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Play clips from this episode More from AJ Benza: Fame is a Bitch