Chris Gethard on Being a Lonely Dad and How Parenting Is a Never-Ending Poop Joke

When I video call Chris Gethard about his new e-book The Lonely Dad Conversations, he’s just finished a jiu jitsu class and has yet to hit the showers. 

“I mean, this is the kind of weird shit people have come to expect from me,” he says from the corner of a locker room. 

As a darling of the alternative Brooklyn comedy scene, weird shit has defined Gethard’s life for a long time. He’s peed into a diaper in front of a crowd, been used as a human crane, and many other stunts (particularly on The Chris Gethard Show) that beggar belief. And now that he’s a dad in the suburbs of New Jersey weird shit still defines his life—though now it tends to be actual human feces.

“I mean, the amount of times that I’ve had urine and feces on me in the past four years, just that alone is hilarious,” says Gethard, who’s dad to four-year-old Cal. “Just the percentage of time that there’s feces touching me is hilarious. If you like a poop joke, parenting is one never-ending poop joke.”

The Lonely Dad Conversations isn’t the first time Gethard’s honed in on parenting in his work; his book Dad on Pills explores what it’s like to be a father struggling with mental illness, and worrying about his son possibly inheriting those same issues. While writing Dad on Pills, Gethard continually found himself ruminating on loneliness.

Image courtesy of Scribd

“It felt like the move to make was to try to crack open the conversation and say, ‘Am I just fucked up?’ Because that’s highly possible. I know that about myself. Would not be shocking to hear that I had trouble wrapping my head around something and people are like, ‘Yeah, no, that’s human.’” Gethard tells me.

He spoke with a dozen dads and one mom to see if he was an outlier, and the result was The Lonely Dad Conversations: “Everybody I talked to, no matter how they phrased their version of it, they totally understood and it felt cool to talk to a bunch of other dads about something when—my dad is a great dad, but when I when I think of his parenting style, I don’t really think of him reaching out for support too often. He definitely fits the baby boomer mold a lot more. So it felt good, and I think for a lot of the participants in it. We let our guards down and then floodgates kind of opened.”

Gethard writes admiringly of his friends in the book, giving them each their own personalized introduction and epithets (I mistakenly call them epitaphs during the interview, and Gethard quips that “is actually what you put on a gravestone, which is very reflective of your opinion of what parenthood is”—he has a point) to capture the fullness of their lives. From there, the conversations are written down interview-style, and though often funny, dig deep into the titular loneliness quite fast. 

What Gethard describes as isolation, though, changed form from dad to dad. One said that being a father weighed him down with guilt, and another of the comic’s friends said it made him deeply aware of his own mortality.

“I love being a dad, don’t get me wrong, it’s been insanely gratifying. It’s been everything, all the positives that people said it would be. But for me, there was this real sense of something, and the word that was closest for me was loneliness,” Gethard explains. “And I felt that in a really strong way for a really long time and it wasn’t going away, so I started reaching out to other dad friends of mine. And some of them were like, ‘Yeah, loneliness, I know exactly what you mean.’ More often than not, they were like, ‘Oh, that. I would call it this instead.’ Probably it’s fair to say what I’ve learned is like, when you become a dad, a lot of your most deep-seated Achilles’ heels come to the surface, your insecurities come to the surface.”