Winston Hodges on Working With Autistic Students & Going Viral on Funny AF

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Gerry and I are joined by Funny AF top six finalist and stand-up comedian Winston Hodges, who, before he was making Kevin Hart, Chelsea Handler, and Kumail Nanjiani laugh on Netflix, spent four years teaching at a school for kids on the autism spectrum in Virginia.

Winston shares some of the wildest classroom stories I've heard on this pod, whether it's getting hit with a globe mid-Civil War lecture, becoming the school's unofficial crisis negotiator, or the one-month average staff retention that meant his coworker Marissa quit on day TWO. He also explains why special education teachers are tough as nails, and how working with kids on the autism spectrum made him weirdly elite at managing other comedians' meltdowns.

Then we go fully behind the scenes of Funny AF. Who ran the light by ten full minutes and genuinely thought they killed, the conversation about his late dad that got cut, why some sets got edited harder than others, and how he handled the brutal Threads discourse around the show.

Takeaways:

• Special education teachers are some of the toughest, most skilled humans in the building. The "sweet and gentle" stereotype misses the patience, paperwork, and de-escalation skills the job actually demands.

• Crisis de-escalation is a transferable superpower. Working with autistic students made Winston better at handling hecklers, talking comics off the ledge, and the kind of active listening most people don't get in their day-to-day life.

• Reality TV editing is real, but Funny AF wasn't a hit piece. Winston says the team genuinely loved comedy and worked to make everyone look good, even when they could have done the opposite.

• Don't trust the algorithm to tell you when your favorite comic is in town. Get on their email list, or you'll be the person commenting "when are you coming to my city?" two days after they leave.

• Comedy used to feel like a brotherhood, comics could trash-talk each other privately but had each other's backs publicly. That solidarity is slipping, and it's a bummer for the whole craft.

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