By Josh Gondelman — 23 Feb 2026

#172. Punch the Monkey and You

Punch, bravely protecting his orangutan stuffed animal from his peers.

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to type this first part quietly in a hotel room in Philadelphia because we stayed out a little late last night, and Maris is still sleeping. Thanks to everyone who came out to the Philly shows at the Fitler Club (which I almost suggested change its name to the Phitler Club for maximum Philadelphia, but then I realized that would put "Hitler" right in the name instead of just rhyming with it), through a new partnership with legendary Philadelphia comedy club Helium. Two of the three shows sold out, and it was a really great time! Huge shout out to Jamie Pappas, Jules Posner, and Parrish McWhorter for killing it across the board opening the shows.

Currently I’m waiting to see how badly the snow in NYC will fuck up my week. Fingers crossed for “not much.” (Note: We did manage to make it home from Philly just as the storm was getting started.) But most of my today activities have been cancelled or postponed. I’m supposed to fly to Indiana on Thursday and back Friday for a show where I earnestly sing a song from the musical theater canon (I’ve chosen “Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat” from Guys and Dolls and we will see how that turns out). But! I’m feeling at least medium zen about the fact that you can’t fight a snowstorm. When there's a big storm, I feel extra glad that I've cultivated a life where nothing I do is THAT crucial. If I were a brain surgeon, I imagine I'd be lacing up my surgery boots (?) and heading into the office/hospital/offspital.

Also! I finally posted a long-ish (three minute) clip that was cut from my special. It does appear on the album version of Positive Reinforcement but this is the only video version of it that exists. It’s a joke I really liked telling (and it did well during the taping, a fact kind of obscured by the unfinished audio in this version) but it just started the special off a little slower than I wanted. It’s also dark in a way that the rest of the hour isn’t, and I never felt like I found a home for it in that set, but it also wasn’t the right way to kick off this new hour I’ve been touring. So! Here it is! Or if you prefer TikTok to Instagram...here it is! I hope you like it!

Hopefully by next week the details for my show in Los Angeles in late March will be public. But in the meantime I will be back at the DC Improv in Washington DC on Sunday April 12th! I haven’t been back to DC for a full headlining set in a few years, and last time I was at the Improv on a Sunday night it sold out despite it being directly up against a Beyoncé concert. So I have high hopes for you, people of our nation’s capital! It’s one of the best clubs and one of my favorite cities to perform in, and I can’t wait!

And finally for now, Maris and I started watching Strip Law on Netflix and it's so funny! If you have not heard of this show, it's an animated half hour comedy series created by my friend Cullen Crawford starring Adam Scott as a struggling lawyer in Las Vegas and Janelle James as a magician who teaches him how to add some razzle dazzle to his practice. It's so goddamn funny. In the two episodes I've seen, there have been like a dozen jokes I'm furious I didn't come up with. You've gotta watch this show so we can talk about it and so my friends can get paid to make more of it!

PEP TALK FOR PUNCH THE MONKEY

Same image as the header. Punch and his orangutan stuffy. — For a critter named "Punch" he's playing a lot of defense.

Here’s the thing…I’ve seen pictures floating across social media all week showing an adorable little monkey holding a plush orangutan. Resting against the stuffy. Clutching it close to his tiny primate body. Dragging it across the floor wherever he goes. At first, I was charmed by the little guy’s antics and didn’t dig too deeply into their genesis. I honestly thought maybe the images came from a “Where are they now?” photo shoot with that one monkey who got into the Ikea a decade or so ago. I found out that Punch was named after a manga artist, which is cool. Previously I had thought that "Punch the monkey" sounded a little too much like how someone in a 90s teen comedy would refer to jacking off. And that's before you learn that Punch is a macaque (think about it phonetically). The jokes do not write themselves, but they certainly do throw the writer an alley oop.

Then, sadly, I learned even more about the story. This monkey, Punch, was born in Japan's Ichikawa City Zoo where his mother abandoned him immediately. Unclear why. It doesn't seem like he is especially curséd. Still, the other monkeys have not yet folded him into their social structure. Punch has clung to his stuffed animal as a sole companion in his lonely new world. And frankly, I wish I had stayed in the dark about the particulars of his story.

I do care about the wellbeing of animals. Not, if we’re being honest, as much as I care about the wellbeing of people. I don’t think that’s RIGHT. But it’s the same as how we cheer for Olympians from our own country out of a culturally-instilled sense of that’s one of us. But when I see a picture of a melancholy dog fade in and out over the music of Sarah McLachlan, I feel a pang of sympathy for that dog. I’m only human. Although I bet I'd be more moved if I were also a dog. I can't be sure about that though because my dog Maggie hates whenever she sees a dog on tv. She tries to fight the screen. Even when it's Bluey. Somehow she knows.

But, being just a person, I cannot take on the sadness of every individual animal equally. I cannot invest in the story of a lonely monkey just as I can’t allow myself to empathize fully with a toucan who suffers from vertigo or a blowfish who woke up to realized she’s lived her whole life in a daze and never made meaningful progress towards achieving her dreams.

I’m sorry, Punch. I hope you figure out how to bond with your peers over a shared love of bananas or a jealousy of the primates who get to learn sign language. But there is so much struggle going on in the world right now, and I simply cannot allow an individual zoo animal’s social anxiety to consume a substantial swath of my emotional bandwidth.

People often talk about how our brains are not equipped with the circuitry to meaningfully triage all the terrible news we’re bombarded with in the present day. On one hand, I agree. On another hand, I think it’s important to be aware of global conditions beyond our own sensory fields. On a prehensile tail, however, it’s a little too much to bear (no pun intended, I swear to frickin’ god) to consider the turbulent inner lives of creatures who are not in mortal danger and whom I am powerless to help in any way at all. No thanks, the internet.

I've heard that things have started looking up for the little guy. And that's heartening, but I will not be pursuing any more information in this arena. I want nothing but the best for you, Punch, but I also cannot allow myself to ever consider your plight again for a single moment. Good luck and I’m sorry.

PEP TALK FOR A READER

I've done very little editing on this request, although I did choose the nickname.

The predicted snow might keep my toddler home from daycare tomorrow, for a second three-day weekend in a row. I am ready to pull all my hair out and/or park him in front of the Wiggles for six consecutive hours, because I still have to do my damn job.
- Stuck In a Mom(b) Cyclone

The adult/child dichotomy regarding attitudes towards snow days is one of the great minor injustices of modern life. When you're a kid, too much snow for the world to function as usual means no school, some sledding, maybe a peek into the world of daytime television. As an adult, especially one with kids, it signals a scramble to make sure all your necessary household and professional tasks get done all with a little one rumbling around, classroom-less.

In the words of the inimitable Nancy Meyers...something's gotta give. Either you have to shirk your work (which can be financially troublesome, despite the appealing rhyme or near-rhyme) or you've got to let your kid(s) kind of just do whatever. Of course, the spectrum of "whatever" is fairly narrow with a toddler. You can't just leave one of them on a hillside with a piece of cardboard or a trash barrel lid to slide around on and tell them to come home before it's dark. So, screen time it is. You don't need to bonk yourself on the head for caving in when there are no other options. Sometimes you just have to throw up your hands when the easy way out is the only way out. Have you ever been on a road trip, and the only place to eat for a hundred miles is a fast food hamburgery? You kind sigh performatively and go "damn, I wish there was a single leaf of arugula within screaming distance" but there isn't so you enjoy your burger that is probably mostly sawdust, and you get a side of fries as long as you're there. This is that, but for childcare.

In a gentler world, our lives would have a little more flexibility to bend when the elements push down on us. But we live under Max Power Capitalism where productivity can't cease even when our other obligations are spreading us thin. You didn't create this system. And you didn't even plan badly. Sometimes circumstances are beyond our control, and we're not allowed the luxury of a contingency plan. You'll make it through the literal snowstorm and figurative shitstorm, even if you need a little help from a team of color-coded Aussies.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK: Alysa Liu's Free Skate

During Alysa Liu's gold medal free skate to Donna Summer's "Macarthur Park," the commentators remarked on how free and easy her performance was. And maybe Liu felt it too. Maybe the whole program felt to her like she was an ice cube skittering smoothly across a tile floor. But, if you'll excuse the activation of my latent New England puritanism, the joy she projected into the crowd during her skate (and spoke explicitly of afterwards) came from the freedom to train and compete her way, sure, but not from ease. Easy undersells the magnitude of her accomplishment.

Watching Alysa Liu felt like seeing someone completely aware she was meeting the moment, reveling in the absolute satisfaction of revealing that she is, in fact, built different. She executed with an artfulness and precision that (I have to imagine) wasn't easy, but rather was the result of hard-won comfort and familiarity with the high end of her own abilities, which happen to be the high end of all abilities in her field, period.

Liu returned to the sport after retiring in her teens, coming back having developed a healthier relationship to skating. It's really wonderful to see someone achieve a level of excellence without having to destroy themselves in the process. Maybe I am being too picky. Maybe ease in this context doesn't mean "without difficulty" but rather "without being too hard on herself or having anyone else make it hard on her." Difficult things can be accompli

It's such a thrill to see someone operating on this level of virtuosity, regardless of the medium. Athletics, music, painting, improv even. And it's even more impressive knowing how much hard work on and off the ice it took to make it look that simple.