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A Special Listen: Julia Gets Wise with Roz Chast

November 24, 2025·1 hr 12 min·6 clips

Julia Louis-Dreyfus lost her home and a file of beloved cartoons in a fire, sparking a search for a lost caveman cartoon.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus opens the episode by sharing that her Pacific Palisades home, a 1929 Spanish Revival house, burned down in the fires at the beginning of the year. She describes losing a file of cartoons she had been collecting for decades, comparing the form to poetry in its economy and precision. She recounts finding one of those cartoons—a crude caveman joke—accidentally preserved in a phone photo taken years earlier for other purposes. The guest is Roz Chast, who has been a contributing cartoonist at The New Yorker since 1978. Julia introduces her with extensive praise, citing the memoir 'Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant,' which won the Kirkus Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a National Book Award finalist. Roz received the National Humanities Medal from President Biden in 2024. Both women establish a mutual-admiration dynamic early and note their long-running appreciation of each other's work. Roz describes being 70 as primarily a matter of perspective: every pain-free moment now feels like a gift, and life resembles an asteroid field with increasing density. She describes anxiety and hilarity as alternating states rather than simultaneous ones, and notes that most cartoonists she knows tend to be anxious people. Roz's childhood was overprotected by a mother who viewed other children as disease vectors; her father was also anxious and partly afraid of her mother. She learned at age 12, from a question she posed in the car, that her parents had lost a child before her—which she believes shaped her mother's fears. As a child, she obsessively read the Merck Manual and invented diseases she was sure she had. She describes a self-portrait cartoon made for a magazine: herself at nine, surrounded by books with titles like 'A Child's Garden of Maladies' and 'Lockjaw Monthly.' Roz explains the New Yorker submission structure: about 50 regular contributors each submit weekly batches of six to seven cartoons, plus over a thousand unsolicited submissions arrive over the transom. Of roughly 1,500 cartoons, the magazine buys 10 to 20 per week. Her advice to aspiring cartoonists is blunt: if you can do anything else, do that. She describes being under contract but not salaried—paid only when cartoons are accepted. The conversation shifts to marriage: Roz met her husband on a first date to see Eraserhead and has been married since 1984. The move to suburban Connecticut after children was difficult, primarily because of the driving culture and the sense of a different social world. She bonded with other artists among the parents rather than with the more domestically oriented mothers. She recounts a disastrous attempt to parent more like her relaxed husband during a grocery trip, ending with her son shattering many glass jars. The sketch 'The Last F**kable Day' for Amy Schumer's show is discussed: Julia describes it as one of the most brilliant things she has seen, and Roz explains she said yes immediately because the concept was so good. Both discuss the cultural resonance of the sketch and the relief rather than anger it generated from women.

As heard by us

An intimate conversation about the grind and craft of cartooning.

Roz Chast is the clear center of the episode, and its main draw is hearing her talk through a long cartooning life: the weekly batch, the volume of submissions, and the discipline required to keep going.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a candid look at how New Yorker cartoons get made and chosen.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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