The whip-smart comedy duo Sorry About Last Night featuring comedians Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson of the infamous Guys We Fu@#ked: the Anti Slut-Shaming Podcast discuss changing paradigms, bestiality, and not being ashamed at the size of your nipples.
Sexuality can be a tricky subject. For hundreds of years, it’s been widely considered a social taboo—whether you’re partaking or just discussing it. From the days of the Crusaders to the Victorian era, religious doctrine has fought to make sex a prohibited activity that is saved for procreation. Suffice to say, it’s been more than annoying for billions of people who have fought to maintain their (ironically) God given gift to enjoy their sexualities. And few other people have felt the brunt of this brutal ideology than women. It’s something that the self-proclaimed anti-slut shaming podcast, Guys We Fu@#ked, has launched a dialogue to stop
But that’s not to say that they’ve begun some sort of crusade (the double entendre is definitely intended though) to put a stop to religious anti-sex dogma. Rather, hosts Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson have begun discussing why society has such a bizarrely egregious way in interpreting the sexual behaviors of men versus women. The man who beds numerous women is a stud, and yet a woman—well not so much. That’s something that the Sorry About Last Night comedy duo want to unwind, dismantle and squish into the smithereens.
From horrific personal sexual encounters to gut-busting stories about their partners’ fetishes, Fisher and Hutchinson subvert sociocultural sexual myths by personalizing the way in which we view sexuality. And with over 600 thousand followers just on their SoundCloud page, it comes as no surprise that everyone is dying to hear the cackle-inducing stories from Hutchinson and Fisher, which will unfortunately have its swan song at the New York Comedy Festival this November 9 at 9:30pm in the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. The Knockturnal had the opportunity to sit down and moderate a series of questions between college kids around the country and the comedians to talk about their future after Guys We Fu@#ked, personalizing their beliefs, and most importantly, bringing your mom to the show. Check out what they had to say below.
A lot of standup based podcasters either say, “I’m only going to have standup comics on my thing,” like The Monday Morning Podcast that Bill Burr does, or it’s an amalgamation of everything like WTF with Marc Maron. It’s good to know that you guys have that natural filter that you guys enact in your podcast. Do you stay informed about all these different topics that you cover? When you do controversial ones like bestiality and rape, like you just said? Is there ever a time where you’re just like “Let’s go in blind and we’ll find out what we find out,” or do you do some research beforehand?
KRYSTYNA H: We usually do research on statistics when it’s involved in something like that. One thing we don’t do research on is the specific history and the story that the guest is going to have because we like to keep it as conversational as possible. We don’t send over questions beforehand. The only thing we ask before we record is, “Is there anything you don’t feel comfortable talking about?” Because we’ll be sure to steer clear of those topics. But otherwise we just go and do it with some knowledge on the statistical side and the guest will tell us the rest.
CORINNE F: Also, for the record, we’ve never done an episode with anyone who was into bestiality. But we’re open to it. Just wanted to clear that up.
KRYSTYNA H: But if you know anybody, I would love to dive into that.
I mean who wouldn’t? That’s a rarity. Well yeah there’s the Mr. Hands guy, but he died. After that, where do you go from there? But how do you reconcile that fact between the personal stories that you guys have that you seem to inject a lot of the time into the podcasts, which is obviously, I think a lot of the times, the highlight of what people are waiting to hear. How do you reconcile that with the statistical, more factual side of things? So it’s not empirical versus statistical, I guess.
KRYSTYNA H: If we have a story that contradicts a statistic that we looked up, we certainly will share it. But we’ll share it regardless. I personally share my personal experiences when we’re interviewing people just to try and understand them more. Because the best guests for us are people that we’re curious about. So usually when I do share something personal during an interview, it’s an attempt for me to understand and grasp what the guest has gone through.
Do these personal stories that you end up sharing, do you ever find that it actually affects your personal lives outside of the podcast, or do you ever run into it during your standup acts or anything like that?
CORINNE F: It definitely affects your personal life, especially because this has become such a large part of our personal life. It started more as a side project and now is something that we put in a considerable amount of time doing. For me personally, for the first three years of the podcast, or two and a half years, I was single. So I was sharing very openly my New York City dating and sex experiences, but now that I have a serious boyfriend, I’ve definitely closed my lips a little bit on what I’m saying because I don’t want it to affect my relationship because I feel like I’ve shared enough and I don’t need to share anymore right now. I don’t think it’s super helpful to a new relationship to be sharing every single moment of it.
KRYSTYNA H: I shared a few things at the beginning of the podcast about my relationship with Steven when we first started the podcast and there was a day where he listened to six episodes, because that was how many we released at that point, and he just texted me throughout the day asking my why I told everybody he likes to get his butthole licked and stuff like that. So you know, you’ve got to run it by people before you share.
My next question was actually going to be what is the most difficult part of opening up your personal experiences so much to the public. That seems to be clear. But what’s the most rewarding part about doing that?
KRYSTYNA H: Probably when somebody relates to what you’ve said. Honestly, Corinne and I have talked about this a lot. We forget we’re recording a lot of the time when we’re doing the podcast because it’s such an informal setting. We usually record the episodes in my living room on my couch. I’ll be so interested and intrigued in the conversations we’re having, I’ll completely forget there’s a microphone in front of us. So a lot of times, people will come up to us after our shows and tell us a very specific detail about our life, and we’re like, “I said that on the podcast?” But it is rewarding when people can find solace in what we share. And a lot of times, people will come up and say, “We tried x, y, z because you mentioned it,” and that’s pretty cool.
You guys started talking about, like you said earlier, guys you’ve had sex with, but it’s evolved into something much bigger. There’s a lot more at stake it seems like with every episode you do. Where do you see the future of the podcast, or even to a larger degree, your careers?
CORINNE F.: The podcast really hinges on what people want to talk about and what is happening in society, so obviously with the Harvey Weinstein rape epidemic being released on our timeline, dating back to 1979, obviously we’re going to be talking about sexual assault a lot more. We always have though, because it’s a big problem. As horrifying as the Harvey Weinstein thing is, it’s not really surprising to two people who A- run a sex podcast, and B- are in the entertainment business. The entertainment business is a horror show. So I think we’ll just keep talking about things we feel need to be talked about and things that people don’t want to talk about.
We’ve discussed pedophilia, which is something which most people won’t even utter the word because they’re afraid how it will affect their reputation, but it’s happening. Sex trafficking is something we’ve discussed. I think that’s only kind of recently being talked about publicly. We’ve been talking about that for years. People think these things aren’t happening, or at least aren’t happening in America, especially with human trafficking. Its 100% happening in America. It’s not even that big of a secret. Any airport you go to, in the restroom, it’s a breeding ground for it. I was just in the Phoenix airport the other day. There are signs in the restrooms. You just have to be alert. And it’s about human trafficking. They don’t usually say sex trafficking, but it’s sex trafficking.
So what’s an example? Now I’m really curious. Now I’ve got to look out whenever I’m in the Phoenix airport. I’m going to get snatched in a burlap sack. What do you mean?
CORINNE F.: That’s what it is. It’s not going to happen to you most likely, but they’re looking for–
KRYSTYNA H: You’re fine.
CORINNE F.: They’re looking for young people, especially women traveling alone. A lot of times, they’re targeting women of color. They’re targeting people who quote, unquote, no one will miss. It’s a real serious problem. The Atlanta hub is a huge airport for human trafficking. I posted a statistic on my Instagram the other day and there’s hundreds of thousands of kids. In 2016 there was 465,676 kids reported missing. These are not all kids who went and fu**ing spent the weekend with their boyfriend and never came back. These were people who were abducted and we’re just not talking about it.
So clearly the harrowing stories is very much intertwined with the comedy in a lot of your material. But how do you constantly keep coming up with these ideas? I know this is very much based off of what are we seeing around us but how do you maintain that sense of continuously evolving these ideas into something that the audience would have never heard of?
KRYSTYNA H: Honestly, it happens completely naturally. We don’t look for subjects and go, “What do we want to tackle next.” It either gets brought up to us in our inbox from our listeners, or we become aware of it in the news, or we talk to a friend who is going through something. You would think that you would run out of topics under the umbrella of sexuality, but for four years, we still have so much more to cover, it feels like. So these things all come up organically, and I think once we earn the trust of our audience after interviewing one of our exes, and they started giving us advice, that gave us a reason to go beyond that and seek out these other topics that we’re talking about. Because we didn’t realize it would resonate with people so hard the way it did initially. So that’s why we’re like, “Okay, well let’s go farther and see what we can cover.”
CORINNE F.: I think for me, it’s very much like once you start scratching the surface on some of these bad things, you’re just going to go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. So one documentary about human trafficking, then you start researching human trafficking, then you realize that it’s been going on, then you realize that it’s really prevalent in Hollywood, and then you find all these stories that have been washed over because especially when you’re getting a lot of your news from the internet. The internet is controlled as far as the search engine and what’s popping up. That’s not just magic. People are controlling what happens, which is discussed a great deal in Jon Ronson’s book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. So it’s an interesting time to live in when we’re communicating and getting so much news from the internet as opposed to a newspaper or magazines, other things, periodicals.
I was just about to say also, it seems a lot of the podcast is created specifically to open up a conversation for women and to empower them. As a self titled anti-slut shaming podcast, what you hope that male audiences get out of listening to your podcast?
KRYSTYNA H: It’s funny, with what you just said. We created the podcast out of a selfish, specifically a selfish purpose. Let’s learn more about ourselves by interviewing the men that we’ve been with and go right to the source. That’s how it started. I added the anti-slut shaming tagline after Corinne had come to me with the idea of Guys We Fu@#ked, and that. And the reason I wanted to add that was just because I just wanted the notion of us just talking directly to the guys means that you shouldn’t feel ashamed to do that.
But then when we started to get these emails from people that were so ashamed about so many things, we were like, “Okay, we hit a nerve that we didn’t mean to hit, but now we’re going to keep exploring and going down that. It’s a weird email to get, but I like when we get it. Guys will email us and say something like, “I found your podcast on iTunes and I honestly thought I was going to jerk off to it or something, but I actually learned a lot.” And that means a lot, because we knew what we were doing with the title. We knew it was salacious, but also it was literally what we were doing on the podcast initially.
So for men, a lot of them write us, love listening because they feel like a fly on the wall, in a conversation that wouldn’t usually involve them, and we want to involve them because we’re all in this together. And something like feminism doesn’t work if you don’t have men on your side.
That’s true and that’s something that your podcast works tirelessly towards, to erase that stigma that it’s a one-sided affair. Are there any other stigmas that you hope to erase through the podcast through an open and honest conversation?
KRYSTYNA H: I think for me, I want to make sure everybody knows that sexual assault happens as often as it does. We hear about it every day from our listeners. Every show, after every single show, somebody comes up to us saying they were sexually assaulted. And so for me, I want to make sure that both men and women understand that this is happening way more than it should. It’s an epidemic. It needs to be figured out. And in order to do that, we need to involve everybody in the conversation and make everybody aware that it’s happening all the time. You shouldn’t feel ashamed to come forward, but we do because we want to keep it a secret, because a lot of times victims of sexual assault will get shushed. It’s very inconvenient to get sexually assaulted because if you don’t come forward, you have to live with that. Then if you do come forward you have to possibly go through a lot of scrutiny from your friends, from your family, from the police. So that’s what we’re trying to make sure people are aware of that.
CORINNE F.: In addition to that, the everyday stigmas that people have, whether it’s if you want to have a threesome there’s something wrong with you, or if you have sex with more than five people that you’re a whore, or that if you have herpes you don’t deserve love. We do get the really serious emails with the sexual assault and rape and pedophilia, but I think those everyday little things that are happening in people’s lives, those are really important to voice and remind people that this is happening to everyone. Most people in the world like something quote-unquote Fu**ked up sexually and it shouldn’t be something that you feel this deep shame about. And you’re not abnormal. I think if everyone realized that everyone would feel better about themselves and we would all reap the benefits of people walking around feeling better about themselves.
KRYSTYNA H: One of the things that we’ve written in the intro of the book was, “No matter what flavor of sexual shame you may have, you are not alone.” And that is the biggest thing we’ve learned. Whether you’re ashamed about the size of your nipples, or you’re ashamed about your penis, or you’re ashamed about whatever it is, you’re not in this alone. And I think that helps people.
You guys do standup, you do a podcast, you have books. How do you translate that humor between one medium to the other?
CORINNE F.: For me, it’s not translating. I’m using my sense of humor. No matter how I’m conveying it, it’s still my sense of humor. So it’s not different. The way you write something funny in a book is different than the way you tell a joke but it’s not like your sense of humor is different.
Are there moments in your jokes, is there a difference in things that you think are funny in standup, but not funny in a book or vice versa?
CORINNE F.: Well yeah, because in a book you have to worry about tone, because it’s the written word. So of course, I’m very sarcastic and dry so a lot of times comical conventions that are not going to go over in a book and you can actually get yourself into a bit of a pickle if you’re using a lot of sarcasm in a book. So it’s going to be a little bit more head on, a little bit more silly in a book for me, probably, because you just don’t have the little specifics of a voice and tone that you have in standup. Also, I’m not there to help explain it.
KRYSTYNA H: Corinne has always been a really strong writer. For my part of the book, I had to learn, how do I communicate my ideas without sounding dry. That’s one of the things my boyfriend told me a while ago. He’s like, “When you write things down in long form, it doesn’t have your personality into it.” I wrote things in the book that grammatically, a lot of LOLs, and a lot of what I would text to somebody when I wanted to make asides in the book to the reader in the same way I would make a joke via text to my best friend. So I used that type of communication and I integrated it into fancy words so that I would sound smart and also be funny.
Is there any way that you differed the way that you prepared for a live show from the podcast?
KRYSTYNA H: The live show, the experience show that we’re going to be doing on November 9th is a lot of Spice Girls and Ke$ha in the green room and we go over the set list for the show and we joke around, maybe sip a whiskey and chill. For the podcast we just go right into it. If there’s any preparation, it’s because we want to be up to date on the statistical information if we do need it for that interview. Otherwise, for the podcast we go into it a lot of times blindly because that’s how we navigate the conversation, through our own curiosities.
I was just about to plug your show again, the New York Comedy Festival if you want to tell us a little bit more about that and what it means for you as comedians to be part of such an intense legacy that’s attached to it.
CORINNE F.: This is our second year doing Guys We Fu@#ked as part of the New York Comedy Festival, so we’re really excited to be back. The theater that we’re doing this year is huge. We sold out Caroline’s last year and this venue that we’re doing is three times the size of Caroline’s so it’s exciting to be making such progress in such a short amount of time. When you see the name of your podcast scrolling over Conan O’Brien’s face, someone I used to intern for when he was still in New York it’s like, wow, you’ve come a long way.
KRYSTYNA H: Also, this is going to be a really special show for Corinne and I because this is our retirement show for The Experience. The Guys We Fu@#ked the Experience, we’ve been touring for a year and a half now and it’s been so much fun and it is an insane experience to be a part of, even if you’ve never heard of the podcast, because Corinne and I do stand-up but it’s a lot of audience interacting. And we do very uncomfortable things, very personal things, but it’s not recorded. It’s just what happens in this room, stays in this room kind of thing. So it’s really an exciting environment and it’s going to be extra exciting for us because this is the biggest venue Corinne have done in our home city and it will be the last farewell of the Experience show.
That’s kind of sad. I’m sure your audiences will be devastated to hear that, because especially it’s been such an established expectation at this point.
KRYSTYNA H: We’re still touring. We’re creating a new show.
CORINNE F.: We have a new tour.
Speaker 1: I know, but you know. There’s something about a format of one show that I guess there’s some sort of nostalgia that people come back to. That’s another thing that I was going to come back to I guess. What keeps drawing you to do these new experiences and these new different facets of your personality and your comedy, because you have an established and successful career as podcasting. What keeps you constantly evolving?
CORINNE F.: We always have a theory that comedy goes stale after a while. So no matter how many people have seen it, at a certain point when we’ve been living with the material so long, it just doesn’t feel new and fresh to us anymore and we feel like there’s something else bigger and better that we can do. So that’s when we feel it in our gut, we move on. That’s the same with anything, as far as different ways we convey the message of the podcast. I use the same kind of barometer for when I know a joke doesn’t work anymore. There’s nothing wrong with the joke, the joke hasn’t changed, I’m just done with the joke because I don’t feel that newness and attachment and excitement about it anymore. And that’s so much a part of what makes comedy work.
When we created The Experience Show, we’re like, “Okay, what do we want to do? What would be really fun for us? What would be a format where we would have a good time, or what’s a subject that we want to tackle that we would be really interested in?” So we kind of come at it from how will we enjoy this and have fun. It’s going to be noticeable. They’re also going to also have fun. So we approach it from that and whatever makes us laugh. And that’s obviously always evolving. Like Corinne said, when stuff gets stale, we move on. We always want to be creating new things and not sticking to, you know. We don’t want to be the comic that does the same joke, and I’m guilty of this, for like, seven years.
Speaker 1: I’m sure everyone is. I know that for a fact for me, and not to name. But Are there any topics you feel more comfortable talking about on the podcast versus in front of a live audience?
CORINNE F.: My pu$$y.
KRYSTYNA H: Not really. Oh yeah, pu$$y, that’s a good one. Not really, I’ll do anything, because I think there’s this type of “ooh” when you talk about something like threeways or whatever, honestly anything sexual. When you talk about it in front of an audience, there is just more a sense of urgency and excitement around it. So for me, I’ll go and I’ll dive into anything.
CORINNE F.: And then for me, Corinne, my pu$$y was a joke, but not really. I prefer not to talk so much about sex in my standup. I save it for the podcast. I’m just done with it really in my standup. I was also talking about it a lot more going into it. So the podcast gave me a distinct place to talk to that.
Looking forward to November 9th, New York Comedy Festival. Do you want to plug it one last time?
KRYSTYNA H: Yep, 9:30 pm, go ahead.
CORINNE F.: At the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. It’s going to be the last chance you’ll have to see this show ever. We have people flying in to see it from all over the country. Bring a friend, bring your mom or your dad if they’re cool. We have a lot of surprises.
KRYSTYNA H: Yeah, we have a lot of surprises up our sleeve. It’s going to be a very epic evening. So you don’t want to miss it. I won’t feel guilty if you spend a lot of money to come see it, because that’s how good the show’s going to be.
Hutchinson and Fisher will be performing their podcast Guys We F@#ked live at New York Comedy Festival this November 9 at 9:30pm in the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Tickets can be purchased online.