Hold Up with Dulcé Sloan & Josh Johnson from The Daily Show · Comedy Central

Texting vs. Calling

April 13, 2023·48 min·4 clips

Dulcé Sloan says if you break up via text, you're a mustache-twirling villain tying her to railroad tracks.

Texting seems harmless here. Then Josh and Dulce haul it straight into emotional court, where a breakup text looks cold-blooded and a phone call starts to feel like a loaded weapon for anyone who talks faster than they think. Nobody stays neutral for long. Josh treats the topic as weirdly serious for a show that does not want to talk world events, because calling versus texting quickly turns into an age thing, a dating thing, and a control thing. Dulce brings the receipts. She remembers a year and a half, almost two years, where texting did most of the relationship work, so the debate stops feeling abstract and starts feeling painfully familiar. Texting gets a real defense. A typed fight lets you read the line back, delete the cruel part, and maybe decide whether this person still deserves access to you. Calling gets roughed up. On the phone, feelings move at speech speed, which means the dumb sentence can get out before judgment catches it. But texts have their own little menace. Once the ugly thing is written down, a screenshot can make it look colder and more permanent than a voice ever would. That is the trap. Texting gives you control, then keeps your worst draft in a neat little box. The banter keeps snapping back and getting messier. A basic communication preference turns into a fake-serious case about tone, intent, memory, denial, and who gets to own the record after a fight. Even when they drift through dating history and comic hypotheticals, the question stays clear: do you want time to shape the sentence, or do you want the live, sloppy truth of a voice? The answer stays annoying. Texting can keep you from saying the wrong thing. Calling can keep you from over-polishing. Either one can make a breakup feel like theater. The outro switches gears as Josh and Dulce point listeners toward upcoming comedy dates, after somehow turning phone etiquette into a personality test.

As heard by us

A small choice about communication turns into a sharp comic debate about what people reveal when they text.

Texting versus calling becomes less a matter of manners than a question of trust, timing, and what lingers after a message can be read again. Josh Johnson and Dulce Sloan keep circling the ways people communicate and what those habits suggest about them, which suits a show that…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a fight about texts that turns into a test of how people communicate.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Hold Up with Dulcé Sloan & Josh Johnson from The Daily Show