Art and story by Andrew Mitchell ’89. Full script available here.

Liz Fosslien ’09 is the co-author and illustrator of the Wall Street Journal bestseller No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work. She is also the head of content at Humu, a company founded by Laszlo Bock ‘93 that uses behavioral science to make work better. In her spare time, she draws cartoons that have been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, and TIME.

Q: When did you first start drawing?

I’ve always been an avid doodler. While I was working as an economic consultant in my early 20s, I started putting my feelings into charts and illustrations. One of the earliest projects I put online was “14 Ways an Economist Says I Love You”—super nerdy, but economists seemed to like it, which gave me the motivation to continue drawing in a more serious way.

Q: How do you come up with ideas?

A comedian friend of mine once said he only goes to gatherings he knows will be amazing or horrendous, because extremes give him the best material. I feel similarly. When I’m brainstorming ideas, I try to think back on the moments when I felt intense emotion, good or bad.

For example, last summer I went to a wedding that started at noon, which is a very early time to start an event that goes until midnight. I’m an introvert, so around 7 p.m. I could not bear the thought of one more small talk. The only closed-off, quiet area was the coat closet, so I went inside it, sat on the floor and started messing around on my phone. A few minutes later, another woman came in to do the same thing. We quickly bonded over being in the coat closet and then had a long and lovely discussion about all the things we’d done just to get some peace and quiet at a party. I made a cartoon out of that.

Q: How do you keep track of your ideas?

I send myself text messages. I tried writing ideas in a notebook, but it became too cumbersome to constantly be responsible for a notebook. Here are a bunch of idea texts I recently sent to myself: “weather forecast,” “coffee and garbage can,” “sharing and oversharing firehose.” They’re semi-nonsensical, but they usually do the job of jogging my memory. I don’t remember what the “coffee and garbage can” text meant, though, so it’s not a perfect system.

Q: What do you find funny?

Economics, the comic series Calvin and Hobbes, the book Catch-22, the human Larry David. And my partner—he is pretty funny.

Q: Many artists seem to have rituals. Do you have any?

So many. I’m most rigid about my morning routine. I’ve eaten the same thing for several years: seven mini-scoops of Trader Joe’s plain nonfat Greek yogurt and one s’mores Luna Bar. While eating breakfast, I read academic abstracts or, if there is a new episode, listen to the podcast Reply All.

Trader Joe’s has the best plain, non-fat Greek yogurt. My partner doubted there was any real difference between this yogurt and other brands, so we did a blind taste test. He fed me seven random spoonfuls of Trader Joe’s, Fage, Chobani, and Wallaby yogurts, and I had to identify which one was the Trader Joe’s yogurt. I got a perfect score.

More recently I’ve been experimenting with a new breakfast by swapping out the Luna Bar and swapping in peanut butter and walnuts. This is for health reasons only. The new breakfast is not as delicious.

Q: Have you ever had a cartoon bomb?

Sort of. I posted this cartoon [next column] on Reddit, where it made it to the front page and was then promptly ripped to shreds by Internet trolls. The top comment was “Hooray, I get to have a colonoscopy!” and it went downhill from there. My parents thought it was hilarious. My dad, who lives in Chicago, still texts me from time to time. “I get to shovel the driveway again,” he’ll write. “I get to file my taxes.”

Q: You’ve written a book about work. What’s a good joke to tell when you’re late to an important meeting?

My advice is to be punctual to important meetings.

Illustrations by Liz Fosslien ’09

Odds are high that food is one of your favorite topics. Office conversations about where to go for lunch. Calls home on your commute asking what’s for dinner. Recounting a delicious meal in meticulous detail to a friend. Binging on the Food Network. And, of course, your Instagram feed (no pun intended). Food is a near and dear topic for Samuel Yamashita, too. The Pomona College Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History combined two great loves—food and, of course, history—and wrote Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine: The Food Movement That Changed the Way Hawai‘i Eats. In the book, Yamashita chronicles the way Hawaiians have eaten over time, and the way good, local island eats combined with French and Continental mainland fare to create a distinctive style of cuisine.

PCM’s Sneha Abraham sat down for a chat with Yamashita on all things food.

PCM: You grew up on the Hawaiian Islands?

Yamashita: I did. I grew up in a suburb of Honolulu, a place called Kailua, which has one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, top 10. And it’s where Obama would rent a house during his presidency, but, of course, he really couldn’t go on to the beach because of too many people.

PCM: Security.

Yamashita: Yeah. So, I grew up in a beach town. I didn’t really wear shoes until I was 12. And so I had huge feet with really hard, kind of leathery soles. I had a great childhood. I mean, I played, I fished. I didn’t study much.

PCM: You’ve made up for it in the years since.

Yamashita: Well, I had to.

PCM: Were you born there as well?

Yamashita: I was born in Honolulu, in the same hospital where Obama was born.

PCM: What inspired you to do food studies?

Yamashita: In about 2007 or ’08, my editor at the University of Hawai‘i Press asked me out of the blue if I’d be interested in writing the history of Japanese food. She knew I was interested in food, and she was too. We’d have great lunches, and it was at the end of one of these celebratory lunches (on the occasion of the publication of my book Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies, that she oversaw) that she asked me, “How would you like to write a history of Japanese food?” I was old enough to know that I really needed to think about this. To think about what sources I would use, how I would organize it, what kinds of narratives I would write. And I said, “Let me think about this.”

I thought about it for half a year, and then I said, “Sure, I’d be happy to give it a try.” But I said, “You and I know that you’ll be long retired by the time I finish.” She was exactly my age, and I sensed that she was going to retire in a few years, and I was right. So she retired about four or five years ago, and I’ll finish this history of Japanese food in 2025 or so. It’ll probably be my last book. That was the beginning of my interest in food studies.

I also had collected and read many dozens of wartime Japanese diaries and had written some pieces on the food situation in Japan during World War II. My first food pieces were actually on the food situation in wartime Japan. And then in around 2009, or ’08 maybe, I was having to visit my widowed father in Hawai‘i about four times a year, and I thought, “I need to be able to write off these trips.”

So I began to interview chefs—the chefs for the Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine movement. And I ended up interviewing 36 people, including eight of the 12 founding chefs of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. And then I wrote a paper called “The Significance of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine in Post-Colonial Hawai‘i” and presented it at a conference, and somebody who heard it said, “How would you like to contribute it to a volume?” And so a volume called Eating Asian America was assembled and published by NYU in 2013. That was another important piece for me. And then I began to map out a book on Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. And in the meantime, I published in 2015 a book called Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 that used about 100 of the diaries I collected.

Once I finished with that, then I was able to concentrate on what became Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. I’ve also had good support from the College, chiefly in the form of the Frederick Sontag research fellowships, which are for senior faculty. So without those and without a series of spring leaves, I wouldn’t have been able to finish.

PCM: Talk about the perceptions of Hawaiian food that you write about.

Yamashita: Well, people who traveled to Hawai‘i didn’t go for the food, and Alice Waters once said to a friend, “If you go to Hawai‘i, be sure to take some good olive oil and vinegar so you can make a dressing and buy some watercress and have a good salad at least”—right? That was the prevailing view—that you went to Hawai‘i to spend time at the beach, to do other fun things, but not to eat. And the one food phenomenon that was somewhat popular was the so-called luau, a kind of Hawaiian feast. And I certainly grew up attending luaus because our Hawaiian friends and neighbors would usually have a luau whenever there was something to celebrate. When a new child was born or a child graduated from high school or somebody got married or when there was a new baby, often there’d be a luau. And this is pretty typical of the Pacific and parts of Southeast Asia—you raise a pig especially for the luau, and the pig is ready at a certain point, and it becomes the main item in the luau. And so, our neighbors would dig an underground pit called an imu, and they cooked the pig in the pit. They’d also make all sorts of dishes that accompanied it, including poke, which is very popular now in the U.S., but poke was … I could never eat poke outside Hawai‘i. Often they misspell it, P-O-K-I; it’s really P-O-K-E.

PCM: People here pronounce it poke-EE, too, right?

Yamashita: Yeah, yeah, it’s po-KEH. So, I’d say Alice Waters’s characterization of food in Hawai‘i and then the construction of the luau as a tourist food event were probably the two prevailing views of food in the islands. And, of course, as I point out in my book, there was fine dining in the islands, usually at the top hotels that would hire Anglo chefs, usually European or American French-trained chefs. And what’s interesting is that they would cook the very same things that their counterparts on the mainland or in Europe cooked. They would make the same French dishes, and they would use imported, generally imported fish, meat, vegetables and things of that sort. They weren’t using local, locally sourced ingredients much at all. And, of course, all the chefs, all the top chefs were Anglo, and locals served in subordinate positions as cooks.

So-called “local food” is the food that the local ethnic communities brought to Hawai‘i when they immigrated. The food they ate was denigrated by these Anglo chefs. So, there was a pretty stark hierarchy that separated haute cuisine, which was French and continental, from local food.

PCM: Can you talk a little bit about colonialism and then food, that relationship?

Yamashita: In almost all colonial situations, the food of the colonial masters is valued and elevated and affirmed. Of course, it is served in the homes and in the clubs of the colonial elite, and local food is denigrated. I have cookbooks from the 19th century and the recipes are typical of New England. And they added a few Hawaiian things, but about 96 percent, 97 percent of the dishes in those cookbooks were American.

There’s a scholar whose work I admire named Zilkia Janer who has written about food in Central America and Latin America. And, of course, there it’s the Spanish cuisine that’s elevated, and local cuisine of local indigenous people was denigrated. I actually use her piece in my book, as well as a number of other works on colonialism in South Asia, which offer a framework. So I also placed Hawai‘i in that broader colonial context.

PCM: Do you think we’re seeing kind of an iteration of that today in terms of globalization—the standard American diet is being adopted across the world?

Yamashita: Globalization is spreading American fast food as well as American popular culture. So McDonald’s is in many places, even places where you don’t expect to find it. Of course, now it’s almost everywhere. And that’s very typical, but it’s a new kind of colonialism; it’s a latter-day, postmodern colonialism that’s a little different from what existed earlier.

PCM: Talk a little bit more about the historical distinctions between fine-dining food versus local food. What dishes did you find in fine dining? What dishes in local food?

Yamashita: Before Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine?

PCM: Yes.

Yamashita: So essentially, fine dining was dominated by continental and/or French cuisine. And so lots of emphasis on heavy sauces, as was the case with the French cuisine served with imported wines. Usually not served with rice, but with potatoes. I analyzed menus from some of the top restaurants in the islands before HRC, and the menus would be recognizable to anyone familiar with fine dining on the mainland as well. It’s actually what you would find at top fine-dining establishments, especially French restaurants, in New York, in San Francisco and in Chicago. And you wouldn’t find local dishes on the menu.

What really suggested to me that something had happened was the following: My wife and I went to this really wonderful, well-regarded restaurant called CanoeHouse on the Big Island. It’s a great place for a great romantic dinner, located close enough to the ocean that you would hear the surf breaking. We got there at dusk and were led to a table and sat down, and I noticed on the table what you would find in the homes of locals and especially working-class locals—bottles of soy sauce and chili pepper water. And so when the waitress came back to the table, I said, “What’s this? What’s going on?” And she said, “Oh, we have a new chef. His name is Alan Wong.” That’s the two-word answer to the question. The bigger answer, the fuller answer is Hawaiian Regional Cuisine. Suddenly, people like Alan Wong and Roy Yamaguchi made it possible for local food to find its way into fine-dining establishments and, of course, this is what triggered my interest.

PCM: What did the chefs say triggered it for them?

Yamashita: Oh, that’s a good question that has several different answers. Let me give you the big answer first. Roy Yamaguchi graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, 1976. He was one of the first students of Asian descent to go there, you know—CIA in Hyde Park, New York. And after he graduated, he came to L.A. and cooked at a number of different places, finding his way in the restaurant world because there weren’t many Asian chefs. And he ended up finally at the best French restaurant in Los Angeles.

Then he cooked at two other French restaurants. And food critics writing for the Los Angeles Times wrote reviews of those restaurants and they said, “You know, I had the best French dinner I’ve had all year at this restaurant,” and who was the chef? It was Roy Yamaguchi. And then in 1984, he opened his own restaurant called 385 North, which was located at 385 La Cienega in West Hollywood. But what was also happening is that in 1982, Wolfgang Puck opened Spago, and then in 1983, he opened Chinois on Main, and then a bunch of Japanese chefs sent from Japan opened Franco-Japanese restaurants. And then Roy opened 385 North, and they were all cooking something that Roy called “Euro-Asian cuisine.” And he claims to have invented the concept in 1980; he may have invented it, but it quickly spread and was adopted by Puck and these other Japanese chefs.

Nobu Matsuhisa opened Matsuhisa in 1985, just about half a mile south of 385 North. But they were all doing Euro-Asian cuisine. And then in 1988, Roy came back to Hawai‘i and opened his own restaurant called Roy’s, and he used the Euro-Asian cuisine concept. And what that made possible was the adoption by chefs at fine-dining establishments of all kinds of Asian ingredients, the serving of Asian dishes. Conceptually that was what made HRC possible at a very high level. Because Roy was extremely well-trained and had experience and came to Hawai‘i, and that Euro-Asian framework was adopted by the other HRC chefs as well.

But at another level, if you asked Alan Wong that question, he would say something different—Alan Wong and Sam Choy, who were the two of the 12 chefs who are local. Alan Wong would say, “This is plantation food,” because the plantation communities were multi-ethnic.

Alan puts it this way: “You know, they would share their lunches, and so the Japanese would bring a Japanese lunch, the Chinese would bring a Chinese lunch, the Filipino would bring a Filipino lunch, and they would share food.” And so, Alan’s answer then is, “Well, this is what happened historically in Hawai‘i, beginning in plantation times.” It’s a very different kind of answer, but Alan did not go to the CIA. Alan went through a culinary arts program at a community college in Hawai‘i for two years, and then he went to a famous resort in Virginia called the Greenbrier, where he had two more years of training. And then he worked in New York at Lutèce, which was one of the best French restaurants in New York City. And after several years there, he then came back to Hawai‘i.

So he had the technical skill to make the best possible French cuisine imaginable, but he began to incorporate things from the local diet. That’s how he would explain that. So two very different kinds of answers. I think Alan’s answer is somewhat mythicized; it’s a kind of romantic view of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. I think the story of Roy is one that, historically, I’m more comfortable with. You know, I don’t like myth.

PCM: Yeah, you deal in history.

Yamashita: Yeah, that’s right, exactly right.

PCM: There is a sort of farm-to-table element, right, in Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yamashita: Well, that emerges somewhat late. Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine—its founding is formally announced in August 1991. It’s really not until the second decade, in the 21st century, that Peter Merriman and others developed the farm-to-table dimension of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine. Of course, farm-to-table also emerges on the mainland, the continental U.S., around the same time—I think in the 21st century. And, you know, it’s important, but the impact of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine on farming is actually much larger than that because farm-to-table is a kind of tourist phenomenon, right? It’s so that tourists can visit the farms with the chef and meet the farmers and so forth. What Peter Merriman and others began to do in the 1990s was to develop relationships with farmers. What it does is to encourage local farmers, and it makes possible a kind of locavorism that was beginning to be really big on the mainland as well.

PCM: What is the legacy of HRC?

Yamashita: Good, good—that’s an important question. In the first place, Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine has made haute cuisine in Hawai‘i part of what I call “the restaurant world” on the mainland, and this was very important. That is, they were noticed by mainland food writers and won national awards. Secondly, it affirmed locavorism and encouraged local farmers such as Tane Datta. His daughter’s name was Amber. I think she was a 2013 Pomona graduate. Third, Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine affirmed “local food,” in quotation marks—that is, the food that local people, non-Anglo people, ate. Fourth, it led to the formation of farmers’ markets throughout the islands. Fifth, it made culinary arts an acceptable path of study, and even graduates of Punahou [a prestigious private K–12 school in Honolulu] became chefs—Ed Kenney and Michelle Karr-Ueoka, they’re both Punahou graduates. In the sixth place, HRC helped de-racialize fine dining in the islands. And that’s, to me, a really important point. Roy Yamaguchi says, “In an earlier generation, I would’ve been a cook, not a chef.” So he’s aware of that demographic change.

It also helped shatter the domination of French cuisine. And I was able to track this in recipes of HRC chefs. And that connection made it easier for chefs in the islands to cook locally, to cook things inspired by what they grew up with in their respective ethnic communities. One of the post-HRC chefs, the Filipino chef Sheldon Simeon, says, “I’m cooking my community.” Which I thought was a wonderful way to put it: “I’m cooking my community.” And then finally, the HRC movement and chefs brought important food issues to the attention of the broader public. So, sustainability, obviously, is one important issue.

There’s a kind of bottom fish called pink snapper; it and other types of bottom fish were being overfished. And so HRC chef Peter Merriman brought that to the attention of the broader public in some editorials that he wrote. And this resulted in careful regulation of bottom fish catches. When a certain limit is reached, then they close it down. And some of the chefs even began to use farm-raised tilapia instead of pink snapper.

Tilapia can be farmed. And apparently, the farmed tilapia tastes good. Whereas the tilapia that some of us caught when we were kids, you know, it tasted muddy, it tasted like catfish. So, it’s had a huge impact. And, of course, the HRC chefs became celebrities, got TV shows and contracts. And so, they became part of this global celebrity-chef phenomenon. Yeah, big deal.

PCM: Yeah, it is. What was the most fun part about writing this book?

Yamashita:: Well, of course, eating the food.

PCM: I knew the answer, but I had to ask. Do you have a favorite Hawaiian dish?

Yamashita: A favorite dish? Well, you know, Alan Wong’s loco moco was my all-time favorite dish.

Alan Wong’s interpretation of loco moco

PCM: Can you describe for the readers what loco moco is?

Yamashita: Well, it’s an interesting story because the loco moco was invented in Hilo, after World War II. And it was a dish created for a bunch of local teenage boys who were about to play a football game. A particular cook said, “I’ll make a dish for you guys.” It’s a plate with a mound of cooked short grain rice, topped with a hamburger patty with brown gravy poured over it and a fried egg on top. So they got starch, they got protein, you know, and lots of carbohydrates, and that carried them through the game. And so if you go to L&L Drive-In, they serve loco moco.

What Alan Wong did was to deconstruct the loco moco. For the rice, he used mochi rice, which is a highly glutinous rice. He cooked it and then created a kind of patty, rice patty, and deep fried it briefly. And then, instead of the ground beef patty, he used ground wagyu beef and unagi, which is Japanese eel. Mixed that together, created a patty, and cooked that and slathered it with an unagi sauce, which is sauce made with soy sauce and sake, and probably sugar. It’s a thick, dark sauce. He poured that over it, and then he topped it with a fried quail egg. There’s a picture of it in my book, and it’s a magnificent, brilliant, brilliant take on a humble local dish. I had eaten several different loco mocos of Alan Wong’s over the years before I encountered the version I just described. This was, to me, the pinnacle.

PCM: Loco moco 2.0.

Yamashita: Loco moco 4.0.

PCM: Do you cook?

Yamashita: You know, I do, or I used to. My wife’s such a good cook that I leave it up to her. No, I like to cook the things that are my favorites.

PCM: What’s your signature dish?

Yamashita: I used to have my students over, and what I used to make was a beef carbonnade described in a French cookbook. It’s essentially a stew made with beef and onions and a lot of red wine. It’s just a really hearty, rich dish, but a lot of our students are vegetarians, so they didn’t always like that, but that was what I used to make.

At that point I started making instead a Chinese dish called white-cooked chicken, where you parboil chicken and serve it at room temperature, and you slice cucumbers into thin strips and put the chicken on top of that and serve it with a peanut sauce.

PCM: That sounds delicious.

Yamashita: That’s one of my favorites. So, when I’m a bachelor, I often make that for myself.

Photos By David Zaitz

JAMES DAVIS HAS been sitting at our table at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles in L.A. for no more than five minutes when his phone lights up with a call. He hasn’t even had time to order yet, and already, his attention is being diverted in another direction.

It’s a girl. Davis answers and tells her playfully: “I’m mid-interview, but I was, like, ‘I have to pick this up.’”

If she’s not used to hearing it from him yet, she will be soon: Davis’s work as a comedian, actor and writer is more in demand than ever these days. Since leaving Pomona to pursue a career in entertainment, Davis has appeared on shows like Kevin Hart’s Real Husbands of Hollywood, created and starred in Hood Adjacent with James Davis, which aired on Comedy Central for a season in 2017, and, most recently, acted as the host for a game show called Awake: The Million Dollar Game, which premiered on Netflix in June. He’s got 50,000 Instagram followers and a newly released stand-up special. He’s not all the way on top of the world yet, but he is definitely making a rapid ascent.

Davis is balanced on a precipice: He’s already achieved what many people would consider a lifetime’s worth of career milestones; on the other hand, he’s only 32, and he has “very big” goals he’s still aiming to achieve, he says.

On the day we meet, however, he’s just back from a weekend trip to Las Vegas for a friend’s birthday, where he learned he loves to gamble (“like, too much”). So for the moment, he’s less comedy superstar in the making, and more relatable hungover 30-something. For today, his goals are a little smaller: He wants to reassure his girl he’s still into her, eat some fried chicken, and then take a well-deserved nap.

Despite the fact that he didn’t end up graduating, Davis says that he loved his time at Pomona. He enrolled expecting to become a lawyer, but instead, he got distracted by studying English and taking acting classes. He liked the acting part so much that he started doing some work as an extra in L.A., and that was it for him, he says: “I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

“I chose the school; I chose my major,” he continues. “But that bug, when it hits you, it really hits you. And when that passion is so strong, everything else really starts to feel like a distraction.”

He quickly discovered that passion would only take him so far: “That was way more daunting than I’d assume it was going to be, coming from the Pomona bubble,” Davis says now, laughing at his youthful hubris. “Like, Hollywood. I’ll conquer that next!”

Luckily he’d grown up in L.A., so Davis had a place to crash while he was making a name for himself: His mom took him in while he went to auditions and started pulling together material for a stand-up routine. He doesn’t take that for granted, he says: “I didn’t have to sleep on any couches. I didn’t have that desperation with my comedy where I was like, ‘If this joke doesn’t land, or I don’t book this one gig, I’ll have to fly back home.’” Davis looks around the restaurant, which has been a touchstone in his life since he and his friends hung out here on weekend nights in high school, and smiles. “I’m already back home.”

Still, the climb from being a nameless nobody to the top-billed star of a Comedy Central show was a grind. Davis started out at the very bottom, doing what he describes as “bring a room” shows, which anyone can perform at as long as they have a friend who’s willing to accompany them (and buy a couple of drinks). From there, he befriended other comedians and persuaded them to watch his tapes; they, in turn, spoke to Ens Mitchell, who owns a mid-city LA club called The Comedy Union, on his behalf.

The Comedy Union was the perfect place for Davis to hone his craft, he says, in part because it tends to draw racially diverse audiences. Davis grew up toggling between black and white spaces: he was born and raised in Baldwin Hills, a historically black neighborhood, but as a teenager he would travel crosstown to Santa Monica to attend a majority-white private school, Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences.

So The Comedy Union immediately felt like home because “it’s predominantly black, but not all black. For someone who’s self-proclaimed hood-adjacent, it was important for me to have jokes that appealed to everybody. I didn’t just want to do rooms that were all black, and I didn’t want to be the comedian that only does all-white rooms either. When my friends come to the show, I want them to laugh, both white and non-white,” Davis says.

Davis credits his education with helping him craft the kinds of jokes that caught Mitchell’s eye and made him popular with those diverse audiences. “Those classes,” he says, talking about the time he spent in college, “are what I think make my jokes different from the majority of my peers’. Those classes are what gave me a certain awareness about the world, to then use comedy as a platform.”

When Davis is writing a joke, he says, he’s not just trying to be funny (though he acknowledges that getting a laugh is a critical part of his job description).  “I’m writing with multiple motivations,” he says. “I want it to catch you off guard, shock you a little bit. Under all of my jokes I feel like there is a message, some kind of actual statement.”

Davis sees himself as an activist for “my own causes, whatever I feel is important to me.” These concerns range from jokes about the absurdity of the NCAA’s rules about compensating student athletes to taking on police violence in black communities. One of his favorite bits from his stand-up routine, he says, is about the murder of one of his uncles by a police officer. There’s a joke in there, a standard laugh line: Davis riffing on how he never got to know what kind of uncle stereotype his uncle would have inhabited—the cheap one, the drunk one, etc.

But also, “I’m using this moment to say, ‘Hey, me too,’” Davis explains. “This person performing for you—I am one of those people who’s had a family member killed by a police officer. So if you think you’ve never seen somebody who’s been affected by this—here’s someone who has.”

He cites studying with ex–Black Panther Phyllis Jackson while at Pomona as an experience that helped him realize how important it was to share his perspective. “You realize that the rest of the world didn’t take this class; the rest of the world doesn’t see that particular point of view,” Davis says. “People say that I’m a smart comedian, that I’m clever. To me, I’m a product of the education I’ve been put in.”

He also recognizes that he’s lucky to have an audience to share with. “Not everybody is blessed with the opportunity to walk on a stage and be guaranteed a listening audience even for a split second,” he says. “I feel called to, in some way, use that platform for more than just self-gain.”

But putting so much into his comedy can be emotionally draining, and some days he’s not really in the mood to give his experiences a punch line. “I care about a lot of serious issues, but I’m a comedian,” Davis says. “I’m going through a lot of serious things in my personal life right now, but I’m a comedian. Right now, comedy is a little more challenging.” He pauses and considers. He also writes and acts; he could focus on those pursuits instead, and to some extent, he’s doing so. But he can’t bring himself to give up on comedy, because, he says, when he’s doing it well, it feels better than anything else on Earth.

When Davis first got into comedy, having his own show was the dream. “I remember watching Chapelle’s Show and being like, ‘This is what I want to do,’” he says. He was so focused on getting there that he regularly turned down gigs guest-starring in other people’s projects, which “would make people look at me weird, like I’m crazy.”

But his focus paid off: Hood Adjacent premiered on Comedy Central in June 2017. The show is formally similar to  Chappelle’s: It features Davis doing stand-up bits for a live audience before introducing prerecorded segments where he does things like gather a bunch of minority students from a local college campus to interview them about what it’s like to be the token in their friend groups, or takes his bougiest friends to try to earn their “hood passes” from a Compton native.

The show is extremely personal, and extremely specific to Davis: It’s his attempt to translate to a larger audience his experiences of blackness, of growing up in Los Angeles, of simultaneously belonging and not belonging in various communities. It was thrilling to get it made, but also “so stressful,” Davis says. At the time, it was hard to appreciate the full extent of what he’d accomplished, and even now, “I’ll sit back and realize, ‘I did it,’” he says, shaking his head, still amazed.

To be fair, he didn’t have very long to get used to the idea: Hood Adajcent lasted just eight episodes. “It didn’t stay on like Chapelle’s Show,” Davis says. So, on to the next one: “Then I was like, ‘I gotta create another show.’”

That next show is still gestating; in the meantime, he has to earn a living, which is how he ended up on a Burbank backlot shooting Awake, a show that feels like a hard left turn for a comedian whose work is usually fairly personal and political. There’s no discussion of the nuances of the black American experience on Awake; instead, Davis is responsible for shepherding a group of contestants through a series of goofy challenges made harder by the fact that they haven’t slept in 24 hours: They chug Slushies, thread needles, and turn off alarm clocks with bleary, sometimes daffy determination.

Davis recalls a Netflix executive calling to offer him the job and asking, essentially, Are you all in on this? Is this show the biggest thing in your life right now?

“I remember saying, ‘Listen, when I left college, it was not to be a game show host,’” Davis reports, laughing. “‘But I think this is gonna be a great show. I love the premise. I’m gonna take it seriously and do my best.’”

He saw Awake as an opportunity, and he’s been in Hollywood long enough to know that you should never turn down one of those. “Unless you’re a superstar, and you have that skyrocketing trajectory of a career, every appearance moves you a little bit closer, gives you more eyes,” he says. “Hood Adjacent opened up a lot of people to me. I did a Facebook game show with charities, and that helped me get Awake. Awake is going to open me up to more hosting opportunities. Which is not what I was trying to do, but if that’s what I do in between my passion projects, that’s super cool with me.”

Davis is at an interesting juncture in his career, and his life. He’s successful enough that friends are starting to ask him for favors. (He tells them, “Appearances versus payment are very different. I’m not Tom Cruise; I’m not Will Smith. I’m not anything close to that. I can get a couple of bills—like, dinner bills.”). And Twitter haters are popping up regularly. (“If they’re tweeting at you, they know about you. I remember when I had no haters because no one knew of me. There’s just too many people on the Internet to worry about whether it’s all positive.”) But he also still feels like he has a lot left that he wants to accomplish—getting another show of his own being just one of them.

“I shot a pilot for TruTV; TruTV went through some internal issues and didn’t pick up a bunch of pilots, including mine,” he says. “But I feel really good about what we shot, so I feel like it’s going to land somewhere. I feel like there’s going to be me hosting some other stuff—I’ve had a couple of meetings and some tests.”

“Right now,” he continues, “I’m really an open slate; it’s about what I choose to do. I know for a fact that I’m going to be doing short films, maybe put some stuff in some festivals. Just elevating, and continuing to use whatever craft to speak my mind.”

He’s particularly excited about doing more writing in every format: “Writing is always my favorite, because writing is at the base of everything,” Davis says. “My favorite part is receiving a blessing of an idea, and then just capturing it and executing it, no matter what the genre is.”

And maybe he’ll help some of those friends get ahead too: His rise has given him the opportunity to open doors for old pals, a position he says he both relishes and resents. It comes with a lot of pressure: “I’ve got friends who, the plan was always, I get on, and I help them get on,” he says. Which means he has to succeed for their sake as well as for his own: “If I can’t get on, I can’t help them get on.”

Davis feels the weight of his community on his shoulders, as well as his own high expectations for himself. But most days, the challenge excites him.

“I embraced that I’m the star of the team,” he says. “I’m Kobe. Comes with the territory. Heavy lies the crown, but I still like how the crown fits.” He tilts his head back and forth and smiles knowingly. “Even though it’s heavy and it hurts, I like how it looks on me.”

Wendy Molyneux holds a stuffed version of the mysterious Kuchi Kopi character from Bob’s Burgers.

TV FANS MIGHT get their notions of a comedy writer’s workplace from the sitcom 30 Rock, with its gaggle of unkempt guys tossing around food and sexist jokes. But reality is the polar opposite at the gleaming new offices of Fox’s long-running animated series Bob’s Burgers, where Wendy Molyneux ’97 works as a writer and an executive producer.

Molyneux’s private office is colorful and comfortable, but also tidy and sunny. Artwork by fans, depicting the show’s goofy but lovable characters, adorns the walls, attractively framed and carefully aligned. Beyond her door, the common areas provide roomy and serene spaces where colleagues can convene for group writing sessions or have a bite at a working lunch counter, a replica of the one on the show.

The offices reflect a designer’s orderly touch, not the unruly, chaotically creative mind of a comedy writer.

Tidiness, Molyneux will admit, is not her strong suit. She once hired a professional organizer to help get her life in order, as she explained to podcast host and fellow Pomona alumna Alison Rosen ’97. During that assisted cleanup, Molyneux rummaged through boxes of her old college stuff and got a glimpse of herself more than 20 years ago as an aspiring scribe. She didn’t like what she saw.

“I looked at some of the things I had written and thought, ‘Oh God, how did I have a single friend?’” Molyneux said on the episode of Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend. “Some people are better than I was at that age, but I think I was really pretentious.”

If so, Molyneux, now 43 and expecting her fourth child in just a few weeks, certainly seems to have grown out of it. Dressed casually with hair uncoiffed, she takes a seat on a cozy couch. At times, she seems self-effacing. Interrupted by the reporter, she apologizes: “Sorry, I ramble.” Asked a follow-up question for clarification, she takes the blame for the confusion: “This is, like, the least-clean bio of all times.” But she says it with a friendly laugh. Not a belly laugh or knee slapper, but a natural, spontaneous laugh that punctuates and ripples through her sentences, as if what she hears herself say just struck her funny.

That lighthearted quality hasn’t changed since her college years.

“I remember Wendy vividly and fondly,” says Thomas G. Leabhart, resident artist and professor of theatre at Pomona. “The mischievous twinkle in her eye and her love of a good hearty laugh did not prevent her taking her studies seriously. She performed classic roles with as much authority and ease as contemporary ones and seemed perfectly at home on stage.”

For Molyneux, the road from college theatre to professional comedy would be long and winding, with more than its share of potholes, detours and dead ends.

Wendy Molyneux (left) and her sister Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin chat in a working replica of the diner in Bob’s Burgers.

Molyneux  was born in New York and grew up in Indiana, the second child in a family of four girls and one boy. Asking if her family name is French elicits another laugh. “Our last name sounds a lot more sophisticated than we are,” she says. “We’re like 80 percent Irish, or more. We’re actually potato people.”

She attended Franklin Central High School on the outskirts of Indianapolis, an area that was, at the time, primarily white, staunchly conservative and stubbornly bent on maintaining its rural lifestyle. She calls it “very proto-Trump country.” Her parents, Richard and Susan Molyneaux, were “Democrats in a sea of Republicans.”

The kids, however, did not see the world in political reds and blues. For them, it was a fascinating playland of childhood adventures and sibling shenanigans. They were “free-range kids,” recalls Molyneux, out of the house in the morning, back at night. There were no fences, and no adult supervision.

It smacks of the idyllic suburban life nostalgically portrayed in Steven Spielberg movies. “We literally had a cornfield at the end of our street,” recalls Molyneux. There was also a creek running through their backyard, and endless open space where they could run wild, along with their imaginations.

That carefree lifestyle is still a source of inspiration for story lines on Bob’s Burgers, focused on the off-kilter but loveable Belcher family: owner Bob, his wife Linda, and their three rascals, Tina, Gene and little Louise with her perennial pink rabbit ears. Molyneux does not rely on her children for ideas; she draws on her own childhood experience to animate the episodes she co-writes with her sister and longtime collaborator, Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin. To them, the cartoon Belchers share much in common with the real-life Molyneux family of a bygone era.

That era came to an end when Wendy was 15. Her father, an engineer, got a new job with Mattel, the corporate toymaker based in El Segundo, and the family moved nearby to the tony suburb of Manhattan Beach. Wendy enrolled at Mira Costa High School, among the best in the country. Lizzie, who is eight and a half years younger, was barely starting grade school.

California real estate prices gave her parents sticker shock. But the political climate on the left coast gave them a new sense of belonging. “It was a revelation,” Molyneux recalls, “like, ‘Oh my God, not everyone is conservative!’”

Despite their age difference, Wendy and Lizzie were great friends. They went to the movies and joked around together. It would be another 15 years before they would start writing together too.

After graduating from Mira Costa in 1993, Molyneux started weighing her college options, though not too rigorously.  All she needed to make her choice was a casual glance through a promotional booklet for Pomona College that belonged to her sister Jenny, older by a year and a half, who had preceded her at Pomona.

Wendy zeroed in on a small boxed feature in the booklet, and there it was—her mission in life. “I literally can remember where it was on the page: bottom right-hand corner, somewhere in the middle of the book. A little box says, ‘Pomona College has an improv comedy group called Without a Box,’ and I was like, ‘Well, I have to go here,’” Molyneux recalls. “Literally, I didn’t care about anything else. I didn’t understand that most colleges have improv groups. I thought this was incredibly special.”

At Pomona, Wendy and her older sister took different tracks. Jenny majored in economics and sang in the Glee Club. After graduating, she worked in Pomona’s admissions office.

Wendy Molyneux works on a script with some of her colleagues at Bob’s Burgers.

Meanwhile, Molyneux was performing leading roles in classical theatre(Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière) as well as contemporary theatre(Sam Shepard, María Irene Fornés). When not on stage, she was immersed in the study of English literature and poetry, informed at times by her passion for feminist issues. Mixing the two did not always please her professors.

In her junior year, Molyneux took a course on modernist poetry, a seminar led by then English Professor Cristanne Miller, a foremost authority on Emily Dickinson with a strong interest in women’s studies.

“Only seven students were in the class, and Wendy was among the strongest, although I recall that we had a few conversations about the need to moderate her tone in her papers,” recalls Miller, now a SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. “A note in my grade book indicates that I handed Wendy’s first paper back ungraded, asking her to rewrite it, since it mostly raved about a single idea rather than developing an argument. The idea was in essence feminist and I was sympathetic to it, but expressing anger about T. S. Eliot’s portrayal of women is not sufficient for a literary critical paper—even a short one. Her second essay in the class was much better.”

Nowadays, Molyneux is not restrained by academic rigor in expressing her strong opinions on a host of topics, from feminism and gun control to motherhood, women’s rights and her none-too-subtle feelings about President Trump. Her Twitter feed (@WendyMolyneux) is peppered with F-bombs and other profane put-downs aimed at trolls, bots and other critics.

Some of her tweets are funny. Others are deadly serious.

“It’s going to be funny right until I get murdered,” she says, still laughing. “I did attract NRA trolls for a while. They send you pictures of guns and basically be like, ‘I hope you lock your doors at night.’ And then you report it to Twitter, and Twitter does absolutely nothing.”

Molyneux decided she would not be intimidated or back down. They want people to be afraid, she says, as a way to silence the opposition.

Recently, Molyneux spoke out against the diet industry as harmful to women’s self-image. She was particularly critical of a weight-loss app for kids called Kurbo from Weight Watchers. She tweeted a link and a deeply personal observation: “The first time I was told my body wasn’t okay, I was 4 or 5. Sad, right?!

Molyneux graduated from college with an English    degree and a lack of direction. “I think a lot of people came out of Pomona being like, ‘I’m gonna be a doctor. I’m going to be on Wall Street.’ And I was like, ‘I’m going to move to San Francisco and work at a crepe restaurant. It was not a good plan. But now I work on a show about a restaurant, so I guess in a way, I was being incredibly smart.”

For a few years after college, Molyneux “floundered around” in search of a clear career path in comedy, but with no map.

“I had literally no idea how to make anything happen,” she says. “I didn’t have any family in the business, and I didn’t know how you were supposed to get started. It’s not like jobs are on LinkedIn. It’s more like a room that you want to be in, but nobody’s ever seen the door, and you don’t know where the door is. So you kind of, like, have to feel your way into it.”

Molyneux “flamed out” in San Francisco after a year. She moved back to L.A., waited tables, took temp jobs, worked for an answering service. Through trial and error, she eventually “stumbled sideways” into comedy as a life-sustaining endeavor.

She got a day job selling group tickets for the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, “a little troll that they kept in the basement … and no one checked on me all day.” In her downtime, she started writing short humor pieces for the website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, “which is still a great place for young people to get their humor-writing published.” After hours, Molyneux pursued her passion at the legendary ImprovOlympic West in Hollywood (later the iO West), a training ground and cultural hub for comedians in L.A. until it closed last year.

But there’s one thing that Molyneux, a self-described introvert, would never, ever even try—stand-up comedy.

“I was too intimidated to do stand-up,” she says, recoiling at the thought. “Oh, no, no, no. I found it frightening to be on stage by myself.”

Improv, on the other hand, has been very, very good to Wendy Molyneux. It not only put her on a career path, but also on a path to starting her own family. She met her husband, fellow writer Jeff Drake, through the improv world, and their career paths merged along with their personal lives. At one point, Drake had a job writing promotional pitches for shows on NBC, and she joined him on the in-house staff when another job opened up.

They’ve worked closely together ever since.

In 2006, they were both hired as writers for a new NBC talk show featuring Megan Mullally, of Will and Grace fame. Though short-lived (less than five months), the show marked Molyneux’s first break into the TV-writing business.

During that time, Molyneux also started working for the first time with her sister Lizzie, who was still in college and doing a summer internship in entertainment. When Lizzie pitched a script idea to a producer, he liked it. With no experience, she turned to her older sister for advice. They worked on the script together, and though it didn’t go anywhere, a successful sibling writing team was born.

Theirs was no overnight success. They continued to work on pilots that didn’t get picked up and specs (or sample scripts) in hopes someone would like their ideas. They’re not sure how, but one of those specs made it to the desk of Bob’s Burgers creator Loren Bouchard. Suddenly—miraculously, they still think—they were hired for the show’s very first season in 2009.

“That’s the thing with entertainment,” Molyneux said on the podcast. “You have to keep throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks.”

The Burbank offices of Bento Box, the animation studio behind Bob’s Burgers, has been home to Wendy and Lizzie Molyneux for the past 10 years. Wendy’s husband Jeff (@hatethedrake, for all you Seinfeld fans) works on a different show in the same building, with offices just upstairs. Molyneux also thinks of her colleagues as family, all pitching in ideas, punching up jokes, putting final touches on scripts.

Fans are part of the family, too. They not only contribute artwork, but also fanatically keep track of episodes, minor characters, and running gags. One website ranked the show’s 149 special burgers by pun (no. 5: the Poblano Picasso Burger). Other fans intently try to catch all the punny names on neighboring storefronts (a pottery shop called “Welcome Back Potter,” or one of Wendy’s favorites, “Maxi Pads: Large Apartment Rentals.”)

The Molyneux sisters have become their own brand in the business, racking up writing awards together and getting hired as a team for new projects. Last month, they began work as showrunners and executive producers on a show they created themselves, along with Regular Show alumna Minty Lewis, called The Great North, about a single father in Alaska and his weird bunch of kids.

Molyneux is at the top of her game. But like many adults, she’s astounded how fast time passes. At heart, she admits, she’s “super sentimental and nostalgic,” especially when thinking back on those seemingly endless days of her childhood.

“I think that’s one of the reasons it’s good to work on an animated show,” she said on the podcast. “You get to stop time with these characters sort of permanently, which is maybe what all of us want to do at certain points in our lives. Like, ‘Oh, this is good right here. Let’s stop! Like everything’s fine right now. Let’s just stay here, getting to live in the eternal present.”

Photos by Iris Schneider