I Said No Gifts! A comedy interview podcast with Bridger Winegar · Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

Christine & Xandy Schiefer Disobey Bridger

·1 hr 15 min·1 clip

My cat Juniper is the old god and he escaped to the roof while I'm judging my sister for living in Kentucky.

The discussion opens on a children's book and almost immediately turns it into a tiny revenge saga. A rabbit gets most of the attention. It wears the hunter's glasses, smokes, and shoots the hunter to death before the hunter falls into a well. The joke keeps stretching until the poisoned water turns a simple moral tale into something messier and a lot more absurd. From there, the conversation moves into family history. The guests describe a German household that mixed Catholicism, fear, and violent tales with a very specific sense of humor. Their parents met in Cincinnati. They got married, then later seemed to agree the arrangement had not been ideal. Their step-parents were American. Their half-sister was raised in a more ordinary context, while they describe their own upbringing as complete darkness. That darkness is part German folklore and part regional proximity, with Kentucky only ten minutes away, which somehow made everything feel more threatening. They also talk about visiting Germany every couple of years. The trips still happen, but they are not as close with their extended family there as their younger sister is. The result is a loose interview built from clarification, memory, and a lot of deadpan explanation. It becomes a strange little portrait of family lore, where cruelty, faith, and comedy all seem to have been stored in the same drawer.

As heard by us

A dry episode that turns childhood stories into oddly precise comic menace.

The episode jumps from children's books to revenge stories and family folklore, and the oddest turns are often the funniest. Small details carry the weight here: a rabbit in the hunter's glasses, the hunter falling into a well, and the dry little joke that the village is left…

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Why you'd press play

German family lore gets very weird, very fast.

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