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Entertainment

Meet the Married Comedians Who Share Their Private Life in a Podcast

Married comedians Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky talked to us about sharing their innermost details on a twice-weekly podcast, how bodily functions are an integral part of their branding, and how recent dirty talk has become their new catchphrase.

Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky inside Toronto's Big Picture Cinema. All photos via Anthony Tuccitto

Being a professional comedian can be fraught enough for personal relationships—most comics spend nearly every night of the week trying to convince strangers to like them, so it's no surprise that the complex emotional lives they lead often causes difficulties maintaining relationships. Naturally, being married to a comedian comes with its own host of problems. On paper, being married to a comedian who spends most of his or her time traveling while also being a comedian who spends most of his or her time traveling may be the Holy Grail of difficult—yet married comedians Tom Segura and Christina Pazsitzky have found a way to make it work.

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They got married in 2008 and, for several years, lived the oft-separate lives of touring stand-up comedians—spending most of their time apart in hotel rooms across the country, seeing each other an average of two days a week at home. That all changed in 2011 when, at the suggestion of podcast giant Joe Rogan, they launched a podcast of their own called Your Mom’s House,and began taking the show on the road.

Your Mom’s House is delightfully devoid of taboos—the show routinely features taped phone calls from Tom’s droll and poop-talk-obsessed dad, Tom and Christina discuss their sex life freely (like the time they shopped for cock rings together, or when Tom said, “You eat out of the trash” to Christina during dirty talk), and the show uses odd, short, user-submitted audio clips as a jumping-off point for discussion. The show is a direct portal into a married couple’s conversation in progress. Your Mom's House is a constant, ongoing narrative between Christina and Tom, their listeners, and the conversation that goes on back and forth.

Your Mom's House fans(lovingly referred to as "mommies" or "jeans") are unusually devoted. Some have contributed artwork featuring the couple’s dog, Theo Huxtable. Fans sing the show’s theme song with full-throated zeal and pepper the show with (literal) shout-outs to special moments from previous episodes.

For their part, Tom and Christina respond with equally fervent commitment—effortlessly spinning fan comments into hilarious and lengthy bits. In Tom’s words, watching the live show as a first-time fan can leave one with the feeling of having attended a slightly unhinged sales conference. To me, it felt like being an audience member at a gathering for the world’s most jocular cult.

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Christina and Tom visited our office in Toronto to talk about user-submitted clips that were too disturbing to air on the podcast, how they’ve managed to make bodily functions an integral part of their personal brand, and how some recent nonsense dirty talk became their latest catchphrase.

VICE: Have you guys ever received any user-submitted clips for Your Mom’s House that were disturbing to have on the show?
Tom Segura: Yeah, we just played one the other day—it’s a clip called “Black Salami” (link NSFW). I don’t know how to say it, but he put his dick in his own ass and it’s pretty remarkable.

Christina Pazsitzky: Yeah, it’s pretty great.

Segura: It’s a 20-year-old gay-porn clip—because one of the venues we pull clips from regularly is porno, since it’s obviously hilarious. We like audio where the listener is like, “What?!” We had a porn star named Juelz Ventura. She had a clip where she said, “It wasn’t until someone said, ‘You have two in you, you have three in you,’ that I was like, ‘Whoa! I’m proud of myself.’”

We really loved that clip and used it a lot. We reached out to her, and she came on the show. It was one of the highest-downloaded episodes ever, and she was amazing. A big part of the reason she came on the show was because we announced that we wanted her and our fans hit her up so many times that she reached out to us.

In a similar vein, you guys are astoundingly open. At the show on Saturday, you were talking about shopping for sex toys and quoting things you said during sex. Do you ever worry about peeling back the curtain a little too far?
Segura: Sometimes I think, Well, the way I said that could be misinterpreted. The thing for me is that my natural state is to be reserved and not share. Doing this show has made me become somebody who shares I’ve become so comfortable doing the show that it has led to me being somebody that talks about stuff.

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Pazsitzky: Yeah, you’ve gained openness. And as someone who’s been on reality shows since the 90s, I know this generation doesn’t have a sense of public versus private. If you look at things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—there’s very little delineation between the two. And I think you start to realize, “Dude, if we’re talking this way, then chances are that there are couples that are doing the same things we are, and what’s the fucking big deal?”

That being said, sometimes I’ll say something here during a taping at the house, and Tom will go, “Oh, you don’t want to say that,” or “You don’t want that out there.” And then we will go back and be like, “All right, that wasn’t a smart thing to say about my family. You don’t want to say something about where we live, the city or anything."

Fan art referencing the Toronto show, via Twitter

Your fans are crazily devoted.
Segura: Yeah, it’s been great. We get a lot of gifts. Last Saturday, one guy took two flights to come to the show. Two other couples drove more than four hours, which is really nice to know they invested so much time in seeing us.

Pazsitzky: Yeah, it’s really nice. This lady made us pickles this time around, and I had to smuggle them back from Canada.

OK. Here’s hoping customs doesn’t read this ever. Let’s talk about how you guys have made bodily functions one of your key tenants of your personal brand.

[Segura and Pazsitzky laugh and high-five.]

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How did that become your thing?
Segura: I think it became part of our lexicon because it happened separately in our households growing up. It was part of her experience with her stepdad.

Pazsitzky: Every morning, my mom and my stepdad would sit down, and they would report how their bowel movements were. It was very normal for us to be like, “How was your shit?” And Tom’s parents, too.

Segura: I have vivid memories of my dad talking to me as a kid being like, “Did you take a big shit?” And I was like, “Uh… yeah,” and he’d be like, “All right! Yeah, buddy! High-five!” He loves talking about it. You could ask him one question, and he gives you a six-minute answer on wiping. He loves it.

Oddly enough, at the last show, this couple came up to us and the woman said, “Did your father have intestinal issues at some point?” And I go, “Yeah, he had diverticulitis; he had his intestines removed.” And she goes, “We discovered your show when I was having intestinal problems. I had nine feet of intestines removed, and I was really self-conscious of what was going on, and your show made me feel comfortable and be able to laugh about shit issues.”

We never in a million years would have dreamt that our show would have that effect on somebody, but we were really thankful.

Tell me about this phrase that I keep seeing on your Instagram comments: “Show me how those big tits fart."
Segura: [laughs] It’s a pure nonsense quote that’s directly from our lives, and we talked about it on the podcast. We were about to do it…

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Pazsitzky: Yeah.

Segura: Yeah. I was trying to be romantic—I was kissing her ear, blowing on her neck—and then I whispered in her ear, “Show me how those big tits fart.” And it’s definitely…

Pazsitzky: So stupid.

Segura: I laughed a lot. Then she brought it up on air, like, “Oh, here’s something Tom said to me,” and we immediately had fan art, people started quoting it, people had their own shirts made. It’s really just nonsense, you know? I feel like silliness is maybe the biggest component of the show. It’s kind of reverting to being sixth-graders again.

Pazsitzky: It’s seventh-grade humor.

What would you say is the main takeaway of your marriage and podcast?
Pazsitzky: Look, there are enough podcasts that are talking about heavy life shit—we’re gonna talk about taking shits. It’s more fun.

To learn more about Your Mom's House, you can visit their website here or subscribe on iTunes here.

Follow Jordan on Twitter.