The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 397, titled:
Astrology of Comedy and Comedians
With Chris Brennan and guests Stevie Goldstein, Julia Loken, and Lisa Chanoux
Episode originally released on April 14, 2023
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Mary Sharon
Transcription released September 18th, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you’re listening to the Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m going to be talking with the girls from the What’s Your Sign? astrology podcast about the astrology of comedy and comedians. So hey, welcome each of you.
STEVIE ANDERSON: Hello.
JULIA LOKEN. Hi, great to be here.
CB: Yeah, this has been a long time in coming. You have one of the more popular astrology podcasts over the past several years and you had me on your podcast a few months ago. And during the course of that episode, at some point it came up– because each of you are not just in astrology, but also comedy– I mentioned that it would be really great to do an episode on the astrology of comedy and comedians. So here we are doing that today.
JL: Yeah.
SG: Yeah, so mote it be. We’re here in the digital flesh and thank you so much for having us. It’s a dream come true.
LISA CHANOUX: Yeah. Thank you, we’re so excited to be here. [Stevie laughs]
CB: Yeah, so each of you… So, your names are Stevie Anderson, Julia Loken, and Lisa Chanoux. And you each do comedy as well as astrology, right?
LC: Yes.
JL: Yes.
SG: I’m a Goldstein now, I got married. Well, we all got married last year. [Julia laughs] That’s another episode of the astrology of why do we all get married in 2022, but yeah, Anderson and Goldstein will come up in the Google searches. [laughs] And yes, to comedy.
CB: And how long have you been doing the podcast now?
JL: We just celebrated our five-year anniversary in February.
SG: Mhm. We launched on a New Moon eclipse. Eclipses can be good despite the fear that I feel comes up when it is eclipse season, which we will be heading into by the time this comes out as well. So yeah, eclipses can really open portals as they say.
JL: I do feel like starting a podcast is very eclipse energy because it is something that you just have to do. You just start it and you just decide that this is when it goes, and it goes from not being your podcast existing to existing and just going like, “Okay, let’s see what happens.” So it felt very fitting.
CB: Yeah, for sure. I’m a fan of eclipses because I always say they indicate great beginnings and great endings. And while that energy can be kind of chaotic, sometimes really momentous things happen under it; like you starting a podcast, or I published my book under a lunar eclipse, actually.
JL: Cool.
CB: Yeah. All right. Let’s talk about… Let’s see, what is our entry point into this? One of the ways I was thinking about it is in ancient astrology, astrologers were associated with Mercury because they were seen to be translators of the stars, and astrology was seen as a language and Mercury was the planet that had to do with communication. And when I was thinking about that, though, there’s many different Mercury-type professions and Mercury-type fields that have to do with speech and communication. And I couldn’t think of one that’s more fitting for that Mercury-type role in modern times than the role of the stand-up comedian and the person that literally gets up in front of a roomful of people and just talks and tries to make people laugh, essentially, is basically what they’re attempting to do, right?
JL: Yeah, I think it’s all of the facets of Mercury, too. Because it’s not only the literal talking, it’s also the writing, it’s also the processing and synthesis of ideas, and then also sharing that in both written and spoken form.
SG: Yeah, maybe this isn’t– and I think this is a good warning for your audience– since we are comedy people and not historians if you will. It was really interesting to me just starting to dig into the history of comedy because just like astrology, I was like, “Oh, wow, this is quite old. [chuckles] This is older than I’ve thought it would be, which makes sense in terms of court jesters and clowns and I mean Wikipedia goes deep if you go to just straight-up comedy, and I think the intention being to make someone laugh was always the through line. And then also for plays and things of that nature, it was always a happy ending. And I thought that that was another great distinction from drama or tragedy or whatever it might be. But yeah, not a hot take but, “Wow, it’s pretty old,” was what I realized looking back. But I do think stand up– and I looked into the first stand up, which was quite interesting– but stand up, and I think the film and television, is where we really have what we know as modern comedy.
CB: Yeah. Go ahead.
LC: I find it real Mercury, too, because it happens in the room. And I think there is a feeling that happens when you’re having a conversation and things really start flowing. I think that can happen in a room. And when we see it translated on TV, it’s not always as buzzy or Mercurial. Obviously, we have the screen and maybe some Neptune energy entering into that space or something else, but when you’re really in a room and either watching or performing, it’s such a Mercurial feeling.
JL: I like that, too, because it’s also thinking about the audience itself being Mercurial to the magic of it in the room, but also having to literally take the temperature of the room. And also, watching stand-up, engaging with stand-up, I think is Mercurial. I don’t know, is laughter Mercury? [laughs] I feel like it must be, but also it feels kind of Martian in an expelling…
SG: Impulse.
JL: But, yeah.
SG: Kind of Moonlike, too. I feel like it’s like… Well, is it all the planets? But it does feel like what tickles your fancy feels very like that Moon-Venus sort of energy. And then that, also, I just like this or this just hits for me. The je ne sais quoi of art that can be hard to encapsulate with words even though that’s what the medium also is. It’s communicating who you are, or a joke, or an idea. Or just a persona, a lot of the times too, I think can definitely be involved with comedy. A lot of times, these people who are in comedy are not always themselves… It’s themselves but like a different version of themselves for an audience.
LC: With the Moon, too. I mean, comedy generally happens at night and so I can see that having the lunar effects of it. There are daytime comedy shows, but they tend to not feel the same. [Julia laughs]
SG: I thought you were gonna say something else, Lisa. [laughter] They tend to be during the day.
CB: Yeah, and in terms of… One of the things I think is really interesting with the rise of podcasts and comedy podcasts is you hear a lot of– especially when comedians are interviewing other comedians about the craft of comedy or the craft of developing a bit or refining it or having that interplay with the audience or the tension between developing new material versus using old material and things like that, and there’s so many interesting things about comedy as a profession as well as just that different comedians approach things in different ways and clearly have sometimes very distinct personalities. And they develop their followings based on sometimes whatever their personality is and their approach to comedy is, like attracting people in different ways because it sort of hits different spots. And to the extent that one’s personality can sometimes be seen, or one’s manner of communication can be seen through the birth chart, I thought it might be interesting to look at some different charts today for different comedians to see if we can understand that as a lens through which to understand different people’s unique approach to comedy and to making people laugh through astrology.
SG: I love it.
JL: Absolutely.
SG: Let’s do it. I think that hits a good point, too. And from our research, it’s not like there’s no Aquarian comedians, right? There’s comedians of all signs and I think going back to like, any sign can be funny. But then also what is the through line of their different personal placements or aspects that are forming in the chart, or even just their timing? Maybe it’s a spoiler alert but I was looking into Joan Rivers in particular because I think her story’s a very interesting one especially in terms of society, right? When is society even ready for someone like Joan? Or, you know, is it just the timing too of when they’re ready to be entered a more publicly accepted space?
CB: Right, for sure. So she was like an early example of a woman that was successful as a stand-up comedian in the mid to late 20th century.
SG: Yeah. And Late Night was her main… I think that was the main threshold of being the first, again… Maybe there was someone else that was the first Late Night host, but I don’t think so. I believe she was the first woman in late-night television after striking up with friendship… Oh, there she is! [laughs] There is Joanie.
CB: We have a timed chart. It’s sort of rounded. It’s like 2:00 AM, but she was born July 8th, 1933 at 2:00 AM in Brooklyn, New York with probably early Aries rising, the Moon in Sagittarius, and Mercury conjunct Venus and the Sun. That’s actually kind of interesting because I was trying to look up… I pulled up the text of the second-century astrologer, Vettius Valens, and he talks about Mercury signifying communication and people that are good with words and people that are clever. But then when I searched for the word laughter or laughing, it actually came up with Venus as one of the positive facets of Venus. It’s like something that’s enjoyable or pleasurable or makes you feel good. And so it’s almost like it’s some combination, potentially, of those two of Venus and Mercury, at least in terms of some of those older texts.
JL: That’s interesting. That makes sense too in terms of Venus and style, too. Not only a comedian’s style but also you, the audience members, taste and preference and what you find enjoyable. And it isn’t necessarily… I mean, some people like real body and real gross-out humor kinds of things and I wonder if that would be reflected in a Venus aspect. But I think mostly there is, at the very least, something enjoyable about a punch line rhythmically hitting the notes that you expect it to or something that feels very Venusian. And when things don’t work, that is also like a missed punchline sort of thing.
LC: When you start to, everyone tells you to talk about things you care about. And it does feel like a lot of the time when it’s personal, and that it makes it even more relatable to others. So I guess that values thing with Venus, too.
JL: Absolutely.
SG: And for the audience, too, you’re probably going to go see someone you like, [chuckles] or that aligns with your values. Or when I was thinking with Joan, just seeing how much third-house energy she had too. Mercury and Venus together, she talks about her appearance and her looks and her place in the earlier days as a mother and a housewife sort of figure, but then obviously breaking that mold. And I think that third house, I don’t know. Sometimes when I look at a chart, I just get a flash of a sentence and for Joan’s, I was just saying what we’re thinking. And I think that that lends true to a lot of comedians, but especially… [chuckles] I mean, come on, Gemini Sun, Sagittarius Moon… All this stuff is just so potent and I think, too, that T-square to her Mars in the sixth to poking fun at everyday sort of things. That’s something we see so often in comedy and I think she’s just such a blueprint, too, for that style and just being unapologetically herself as well.
LC: Aries rising, I think, is very palatable too, to an audience. And I think if you’re different than what people have seen in the past– you’re a woman and that’s not really the common thing– then being palatable and people to be able to get it and be able to kind of flow in the natural natal chart makes sense.
SG: Yeah, with Uranus there. I mean, just being herself is radical.
JL: I think Uranus is really potent in a comedian chart. I think it is not only the archetype of the bolt of inspiration and kind of genius and ideas, but also the archetype of being a radical and being someone that also is kind of an outsider. Because when you’re performing comedy, you are the only person on stage, you’re standing up in front of everyone. And you might be saying what everybody is thinking, but you are the one saying it and taking that risk, being in the spotlight and being the lightning rod for those things. And I think not only that, also it speaks to me to a comedian’s cultural significance. We all have Uranus in our chart but I think that something that I noticed for almost every comedian that I looked at is a strongly aspected Uranus in some way. It differs and I think that it reflects their cultural contributions, but I think that for someone to not only be able to tap into our collective consciousness and also be the voice of it, that to me is very Uranian.
CB: I was thinking about that recently, actually, with Norm Macdonald because I was watching some comedians talk about him. And they said the thing that stood out about him among other things in his approach to comedy is that sometimes he would find a really unique way to approach a bit that would surprise other comedians with its innovativeness. They wouldn’t have thought of that. And I think that’s a very Uranian thing and he actually had Mercury square Uranus, to your point. We don’t have a timed chart for him but here’s his chart with Mercury at 12 Scorpio, and it’s sort of widely applying to a square with Uranus at 20 Leo.
LC: Julia’s husband saw him do a set. One, for one political direction, and then the following night do the exact opposite. [laughter] Which I think is very Libra Sun to see like, “Oh, let’s see both sides and see what people laugh at,” and then pick things out.
CB: Right. It’s always very Uranian in terms of not wanting to be pinned down and wanting to be rebellious or something, and that’s actually kind of why he got fired from SNL in the ’90s because he was doing a lot of jokes about OJ Simpson, and his boss at the time– the head of the network– was a friend of OJ Simpson so he told him he had to stop doing those jokes. And he sort of rebelled against that and he said no and he kept doing it, so they got rid of him basically.
JL: Yeah. And again, another Uranian kind of thing of ‘the rebel’ and also kind of the… I don’t know, someone who is poking… People like it, and comedy goes well, but it is also kind of dangerous and kind of– I don’t want to say dangerous because I feel like that’s also a buzzword that people are saying now and it’s like, “You can’t say anything you want!” But yeah, there literally were people who were arrested for doing stand-up comedy, which we’ll get to I think later on, but that idea like you said of not being able to pin down, of saying what you want and yeah, there’s just such a strong Uranian streak to me in comedy.
CB: But going back to your point, Lisa, about Libra, that’s true also of Norm just because of that strong Sun-Mars conjunction. Libras can have that feeling of wanting to be opposite to something or to play the counterbalancing role to something, and you can see that sometimes come up as a strong tendency with Libras. I see it sometimes even with skeptics of if everyone is doing this, then they’re gonna take the opposite side and say, “No, that’s wrong. This is the other end of the spectrum of that.”
SG: Wow.
LC: Also, Anthony Jeselnik is a Capricorn-Sun with a Libra-Moon and we don’t have the time, but everyone in comedy always talks about- He’s very dark on stage and he’ll go all the way in, but everyone that knows him always talks about how nice he is off stage. And so I think there is again that, “I’m going to take the other side to this and really balance my life in this way.”
JL: And another Sun-Mars, I also… [crosstalk] I think conjunctions, again, not a sign-specific comedy signature but I think that conjunctions are also very comedy to me. Because one of the things that you would read about a conjunction as far as significations would be tunnel vision on something, and I think when we talk about comedians, we’re often talking about someone who has a strong opinion about something or a strong point of view. And I think that seeing those conjunctions, whatever planets they are, I think Mars also to me fits because we literally give punchlines and that’s so Mars to me. [laughs]
CB: Yeah, or the notion of going into a room, and when a comedian does really well they say that they killed that room or they really killed. [Stevie laughs]
JL: Yeah. Yes, the delivery and the assertiveness of Mars, you’ll see it in different places, it’s not always necessarily conjunct the Sun, but I think that that is also very… You would describe Anthony Jeselnik’s humor as sharp to something with that Sun-Mars conjunction, but I think that conjunctions- We saw it in Joan Rivers, too. I think that’s interesting with the Mercury-Venus conjunction and that she would then go on to do so much fashion commentary on the red carpet, which I think is also very fitting. But I think the conjunctions in conjunction with tense aspects is fighting for differing points of views and needing to deliver something that you feel strongly.
SG: I just like that I can tell Libras when they’re being annoying. Chris Brennan said, “You’re just taking the opposite side just because.” [laughter] Now I know. I’m just gonna… This is my pull quote. I’m like, it’s not me.
JL: “Chris Brennan says.” [laughter]
CB: Yeah. I’m gonna get canceled with Libras because of you.
LC: I like the idea that comedians can get off stage and say they killed it, because usually they didn’t. [laughter] But that is a very Mars thing to come off and be all like, “Yeah.” [laughs]
SG: You don’t want to get up there too and be like, “Uhh…” You have to sell it even when you’re sucking. It’s sad when you don’t. [laughs] It’s sad if you see someone just take the defeat. You just have to still battle even if you are being defeated by an audience.
CB: Right. And isn’t that part of the process? Like, learning to do stand-up is going up there and putting yourself and subjecting yourself to that, where most people are going to do pretty bad early on. And people might not laugh or they might not do very well, but through doing that over and over again, you sort of learn how to do it. But it’s a process that’s not necessarily easy and doesn’t come naturally to every person.
JL: Yeah, that’s another planet that you would not necessarily think of as comedic. But Saturn, I think also kind of speaks to a comedian’s success and ability to endure. Because stand-up is tons and tons and tons of repetition like you just said, and you are pretty bad at it at the beginning and it’s a skill that really builds on itself. I also think it’s interesting that sometimes we refer to someone’s act as their standup routine, which is very, you know, I go, “Oh, that’s Saturn. That’s Saturn, too.” The idea of also having the discipline and the form to say the things that you intend to say every time and to be working on that and chipping away at that, I think seeing where Saturn is in a comedian’s chart also can speak to the heights that they’re able to reach and also the longevity of their careers.
LC: And doing it over and over and over. I mean, how many times do you do a joke that you… I have one that I’ve been doing for 10 years and inside I go, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re still doing this.” But outside, you have to be like, “This is my favorite joke!”
JL: And sometimes you still do– or maybe you don’t– but I find sometimes you do naturally just get to the natural response that you had when you first started writing it because that is so ingrained in doing it for so long. I don’t know.
SG: I think that’s why because Julia and Lisa– and check out the Chatterbox Comedy tonight, which we’ll plug at the end again– but when I dabbled in stand-up, I couldn’t keep going because of the repetition. And that’s when I went into more independent radio shows and podcasting because the patience to repeat yourself, even though I repeat stories all the time but not by choice, I guess, it was by not having the memory of a goldfish. But I’m going to blame my mutual reception with Gemini, Mercury, and Aries. No, excuse me, my Cancer-Mars and Aries-Moon where I’m just like, “No.” I think that diligence is an underrated skill because repeating yourself over and over like it’s the first time is not easy.
LC: And I think that goes back to Mercury, too, because a lot of the times you’re testing and seeing, you know, “I’m going to try this in front of this. Or I’m gonna move that there.” But you still have to do the same joke or the same material in a different order, or it’s a different older crowd or younger crowd, all of those types of things. So sometimes it can feel brand new when it’s words you’ve said so many times, but sometimes it’s a slog, or sometimes it doesn’t go well and you’re like, “I’ve been doing this joke for 10 years. What do you mean you’re not laughing?” So there is that, I don’t know, kind of investigation happening.
SG: Well, and Joan, just sorry to come back to Joan, but I deep-dived her. She finally made it on The Tonight Show with Carson after seven auditions over three years. It wasn’t, “You got it, kid! Let’s keep you moving.” There was also the grind, which we also hear in comedy as well.
LC: And her collection of note cards in her documentary of little setlists and jokes and things, it was massive.
JL: Well, what’s her Uranus?
SG: Aries in the first house.
JL: Because I think that that’s another thing to thinking of comedy in terms of their own timing, and that being a cultural moment that’s ready for them. You can be as radical but if the culture isn’t ready to hear what you have to say, then it’s easily dismissable sort of thing. But being ready for all of those things, she had jokes about every single subject categorized alphabetically in this thing. I mean, she was… That’s very Aries rising and Uranus in Aries to me of being ready to capture. Yeah, ready to capture any moment as soon as it’s happening.
SG: Well, get this. When she finally made it on Carson on February 17th ’65, Pluto exactly conjunct her chart ruler, her Mars Virgo. That was just like, “You’re ready kid? Let’s do this thing.” Yeah. She also had Venus conjunct her natal Saturn, too, like a degree apart. But Pluto was right on it at the same degree.
JL: I also think that this mutable, it’s not– again, we can’t say that a sign-by-sign thing, but I do think that this Gemini-Sag axis to me is very comedy, too. And with the T square to Virgo, I think the nitpickiness… I don’t know, all of those things but in the kind of outrageous communication; big ideas, small, micro, macro, and the details about it is so comedian.
CB: That’s funny that you should say that because every time I think about unfortunately the axis at this point, I can’t get over one of the most prominent examples that we’ve had of that in recent times, which was somebody that was born with a lunar eclipse in Sagittarius opposite to his Gemini-Sun conjunct…
SG: I don’t know. I think I know who you’re saying.
JL: Oh, we know who. [laughter] Hey, you know? The comedy is strong. Okay? [laughs] It’s undeniable. Unfortunately, it is a powerful comedic force.
SG: There’s a different timeline universe of everything everywhere all at once where he’s just a stand-up, killing it. You know? [laughter]
JL: And we all are loving it. We’re all like, “Yes, this is what you’re supposed to be doing.” [laughs]
SG: We have universal health care and he’s just, you know, has a residency in Vegas and all is well.
JL: Yeah. You were meant to be a clown, not… [laughter]
CB: … not President of the United States. Exactly. Talking about Trump’s chart, so Donald Trump has-
SG: Of course, he weasels his way in here too. [laughter] Every time. Every time.
CB: Sorry to go there.
SG: No, it’s good.
CB: But Moon at 21 Sag opposite to the Sun 22. Yeah. Well, that was one of the things when he first made his rise during the primaries in 2015 and 2016. He was just tearing apart his rivals through these devastating sort of broadly comedic but also just mean attacks on their character and everything else.
SG: Nicknames and stuff. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. He’s still doing the nickname thing. What’s his nickname for…
SG: What’s the Desantis’ nickname?
CB: Yeah, it’s like Tommy Meatballs or something like that. [laughter]
SG: It is. I believe that.
JL: It’s so catchy. I think that’s the Gemini-Sag thing where it’s not even necessarily true, it’s not even necessary, but it is fun. It’s funny in the moment and you kind of can’t escape it anymore. It’s in there.
LC: They coined it or something. I also feel like it’s, again going back to Mars, it’s burns. It’s like Roast jokes with the responses.
CB: They’re like fifth-grade bully sort of humor, but that is a version of the comedy archetype or that’s a piece of it.
JL: Well, that’s the Gemini-Sun Sag-Moon. We also see the flip of this. Tiffany Haddish is someone who has Sagittarius-Sun Gemini-Moon and I think that that’s more of a big personality who also can say things that are less personally attacking and more like, “This is who I am and I can say whatever I want.” And that also can kind of catapult someone. She also… [crosstalk] Yeah, she also has that Mercury-Uranus conjunction, which to me is pure comedy. Also, she has this T square too to all of this Virgo stuff up at the top, which I think is…
CB: Let’s just describe it for people listening to the audio version. So she has the Moon at 10 degrees of Gemini and the Sun at 10 Sag, and it’s squaring her Mars at five Virgo and Jupiter at nine Virgo.
JL: Yeah. And I think that that-
SG: I think that Mars Virgo’s T square is wild.
JL: Yeah. And I think that that is that meteoric rise. I also think that we see that Jupiter in fall there, too, which is the thing that’s not necessarily… It’s a big ascension, but not necessarily the way that you want to or in a way that makes you open to criticism. I think I’ve noticed also it’s a trend in comedians who have Jupiter in detriment.
CB: Sure. So let’s go back to, because that was a really interesting and important point because we’re seeing different manifestations of comedy through different planetary combinations. And one of the ones we were just talking about was Mars and Mars’ role in comedy and how that might be tied in with that feeling of killing or comedy bits that are biting or have this acerbic nature. Roasts, for example, would be a very Mars thing where you’re actually actively almost attacking somebody, but doing it in a comedic way so it’s making people laugh. Or you’re sort of tearing somebody down but doing it in the context of comedy. And in some controlled context, that’s kind of okay or is permissible, for example in the context of a roast.
LC: Yeah. In a roast, technically to, I think… I mean, now Roast Battle has changed that a little bit, where it used to be like an honor where you’re honoring one person and everyone goes through the dais roasts somebody. I think that’s interesting because it happens in a way where there is a little bit of back and forth, people kind of talk about each other that are on the panel or whatever, and of course, the person you’re honoring. But now in Roast Battle, it’s very much like a fight. Like, “Hey, these two people are going up against each other!”
CB: That’s a really good point. And actually even outside of roasts, there’s also comedy battles or where two comedians are just going out each other and then sometimes that being judged. That’s been a really popular format over the past decade, it seems like.
LC: Totally.
JL: That’s interesting, too, thinking of it being very Mars as a personal planet and these being personal attacks too, instead of like you were saying, Lisa, that kind of honorable roast attack which is on someone’s long and storied career or relevance this way instead of, I think now The Roast, or even comedian beefs with each other, are very personal and very ad hominem. [laughs]
SG: I think it’s also just Mars’ energy, too. We’ve all been at long stand-up shows and then someone just comes on and comes like a bat out of hell and you’re just like, “Whoa!” Like, the stage brought some life into you and you’re then bringing life into your audience, too. I didn’t think about it. Mars just kind of popped its way into the comedy chat. Mercury makes a lot of sense, but Mars and Uranus are holding court.
LC: I think if you look at it from the comedian’s perspective, too, no matter what your level of ability is, comedy is happening for you onstage in the physical body. And there are things you don’t learn how to control or your foot tapping for a long time or your handshaking and those things, and to me that is so Martian that you are like, “I’m here. I’m here in my body I have to be present, I have to be here.”
JL: Well, even thinking about talking for an hour. I mean, we do it on podcasts and I think it is an endurance activity. You don’t necessarily think of that because you just think of someone talking and oh, it’s not necessarily physically active. But when you’re doing an hour, you’re moving on the stage. And most people who are doing hours are also doing it for a large audience and they need to be moving and addressing different sections. They’re not just sitting and standing unless you’re, you know, a certain comedian. [laughs] [crosstalk]
SG: Name names. [crosstalk]
JL: [laughs] This made me think of another manifestation of this Sag-Gemini axis with the square to Virgo in Kevin Hart’s chart. It’s not his Sun but he has Moon in Sag, Mars in Gemini, which are in opposition to each other both square his Mars… Yeah, his Mars… Mars square Sun? Sorry, maybe I’m looking at my wrong notes. Let me pull them up. I know he has Virgo.
CB: Here it is. It was just taking me a minute to pull up the chart. So it’s Kevin Hart’s timed chart.
JL: No, it’s Virgo rising. That’s Saturn.
SG: Also, just a lot of… Sorry, but a lot of the charts have been so one-sided. A lot of the times we haven’t seen too many splays. Not to say that there’s probably not some in the mix, but just the folks who’ve come up so far have been very all-in-one sort of quadrant or hemisphere. It’s been a lot of concentration in one chunk.
LC: Interestingly, too. I didn’t know he was a Cancer-Sun but I do find that Cancer-Sun comedians talk about their families. And I’m just thinking of one recent– Kevin Hart maybe doesn’t do it that much but he talks about going to the school in a PTA meeting and stuff. It’s very funny. But Fluffy is another Cancer-Sun who talks about his son and his wife, and I think that’s interesting.
SG: I can’t believe Fluffy is a Cancer. [laughter]
LC: Of course, he’s a Cancer. His name is Fluffy. [laughter]
JL: Of course, he is. And he did one of the biggest shows in his hometown.
LC: Yeah.
SG: Wow. And didn’t he have a quinceanera for his chihuahua?
JL: Chihuahua? Yes, so Cancer. So Cancer.
CB: So I think one of the things we’re coming up with then is that it’s not that there’s going to be certain placements that will mean only comedians have this placement or something like that, but rather, a person’s chart is going to reflect their style of comedy as well as some of the topics that they’ll tend to gravitate towards, as well as their style of delivery.
LC: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that’s evident a lot. With Sun signs if we think of it as identity, Taurus comedians tend to be observational. I mean, you can kind of look at them. I know Bill Burr has a Cancer rising, I think he seems very every man to every… You know, people feel like they know him. He’s very, I don’t know, salt of the Earth.
SG: Totally. And I’m thinking of Seinfeld as the Taurus with observation.
LC: Nathan Fielder’s very observational in a different artistic– definitely a different way than Seinfeld, but he’s still observing.
SG: Yeah. Letting people sort of… Letting it breathe and letting people show their own asses, if you will.
JL: Oh, and that Mars-Mercury…
SG: Mars, yet again.
CB: This is Bill Burr’s chart. And we have another Full Moon with the Moon in Sagittarius opposite the Sun, Venus, and Mars in Gemini.
JL: Not exactly, but squaring that Pluto by sign energy, I think that having that Uranus-Pluto on the IC, again, not by degree squaring that access but I think we still see the influence of the nitpicky. And again, another person who hit a moment for sure.
LC: And, I think also, speaking of Cancer stuff, he helps other comedians and from what I’ve heard, he’s very generous to them when they open for him. He definitely, I’ve heard and I won’t say where, but asks, “Do you want me to watch you?” Which I think that’s a really nice thing to do for somebody. [chuckles]
JL: Nurturing and supportive. And also thinking of like… I mean, just literally calling him ‘crabby’ I think is very apt. [laughter]
LC: And he gets red in the face. Yeah. [laughter]
JL: Exactly. [laughs]
CB: So you’re saying that because he has Cancer rising?
LC: Yeah.
JL: I think that’s how he would.
SG: Well, with the fire Moon too, like real steamy crab energy.
JL: On this aquatic… On this aquatic tip, I think an interesting on both of these things that we’re talking about the rising sign and also delivery and all this, Ellen DeGeneres, I think has a really interesting chart for her.
SG: Oh, I haven’t looked at Ellen’s chart before.
JL: She’s a Pisces rising and is best known for playing a fish, I would say now, not always throughout her career, but one of her biggest roles was a fish. Do you have her Pisces rising or do we not have a birth time?
CB: I don’t know. I have it, for some reason, as a noon chart, which is usually when I don’t know the time. But it depends.
JL: I think we had her on our list as a Pisces rising. So I could also be… Hey, we might have to…
CB: But that’s worth discussing just in terms of- I liked the point about Bill Burr and his appearance sometimes when he’s giving comedy, and sometimes how somebody comes off or what their appearance is in style and initial presentation versus their sort of internal way of processing things and their internal monologue or way of interpreting things that might be more associated with other planets like the Sun or the Moon or what have you.
SG: Mm-hmm. I think, too, back to this Sag-Moon was in the sixth. I feel like that very hands up like, “Why are you doing the things you’re doing?” It’s very Sag-Moon sixth stuff of like, “I can’t comprehend why you all do things this way.” I think he talks in this very big-picture society at large, and if we all just did this thing sort of differently. It’s not lecture-y, though, there’s always still a sweetness to him. But it’s like everything ends with you idiots, basically, in the context.
JL: I think it’s also funny that he usually says, “I’m an idiot.”
SG: Mhm, he disarms them.
JL: Yeah, which I think is both Cancer and Sag-Moon to me.
SG: He’s calling them idiots when he’s saying I’m an idiot.
JL: Like, this is very much my idea, and that Gemini-Sag access to me is very much my truth. Obviously, we’re speaking about big philosophical truths, too, and we’re thinking of Sagittarius. But I do think that with the Cancer, where it’s like, “This is me, this is how I feel. But also what do I know?”
CB: Yeah. The ability, especially with his Cancer rising and Mercury in Cancer, Cancer is something that might be the ability to be self-deprecating, you know, as opposed to let’s say the opposite of that. Which would be like self-aggrandizing, which would be more of a Leo thing or maybe a Sagittarius thing.
SG: Or even Capricorn on the flip side, too. Maybe it’s not as braggy but more factual. Like, “I’ve done this, I have this cred to back up whatever it is I’m talking about.” But we see Capricorn and I feel like a lot to maybe a sign we haven’t talked much about, but I feel like there’s a lot of Capricorn comedians and Capricorn-Moon. I know we’ve talked on our podcast about a through line of Capricorn having that sort of dark… I think of Sarah Silverman as a dark sense of humor or just a little twisted. Yeah, Cap-Moon seemed to be… It’s a placement we would see but now we’ve been seeing all these Sag-Moons and I’m like, “What the- Why the hell am I talking about Cap-Moons over here now?”
JL: Sarah Silverman and Richard Pryor, I believe are the same birthday. And both Sag Sun Cap Moon– as am I, no big deal, I don’t want to say that I’m among this royalty. But we are what we are– And I think that with Sarah, there’s some– this is one side so heavy, but I also think that that… I don’t know, let’s talk about Sarah.
CB: Yeah, so the Capricorn and Saturn part is important because Saturn can be really good at being critical and seeing the flaws and things, as well as sometimes having a tendency towards seeing the darker side of life or things that some people can consider to be morbid. And that’s something that Capricorn and Scorpio share in common. So this might be a good area for us to explore here for a little bit, which is just that ability either to be highly critical or to focus on things that other people might consider dark.
SG: Mhm, totally. I’m thinking of Sarah now, too, of having one era of her standup be about how she wet the bed for a very long time. And I think there is that Capricorn “I should have not done this by now but I did not, so now I’m going to really put this on display in a very critical but reflective harsh love back towards an inner child.” I also think, too, maybe the first person we’ve talked about that also incorporated music like singing and bringing out the guitar-
JL: She has that Neptune in there.
SG: I think that can be kind of Cap because it’s like, “Mhh, maybe I can sing my feelings,” and then they won’t be as vulnerable or something, or as real.
CB: That brings up, also, sometimes Sarah sometimes in her earlier comedy would go there with almost gross-out humor or almost get a kick out of grossing people out sometimes with things that you normally maybe wouldn’t talk about in a standup set. And for the audio listeners, she has Sagittarius rising with the Sun and Mercury in Sag along with Neptune. But the ruler of her Ascendant is Jupiter which is in Scorpio in the 12th house with Venus, opposite to Saturn and Taurus. And then the Moon is in Capricorn in the second whole sign house.
JL: I also think that Neptune zero degrees Sag to me is very sacrilegious and also very… I don’t know. She does a lot of critique about religion and those kinds of things, but also plays someone. Her character is kind of a delusional character, which I think is very Neptune conjunct the Ascendant in Sagittarius. You know, she both is like, “There is no God but also I am God,” in several ways in both material and character. And I think that’s very fitting. I also think that that Capricorn-Moon, and maybe this is not true, but I guess it’s like the cardinal of being able to be… I’m thinking of her as being a woman who is singularly successful in a way that other women aren’t. And I don’t want to say that that’s just Capricorn-Moon but I think being able to excel in a male-dominated field and also being only the first is also just interesting.
SG: Well, she hangs with the boys historically. Now I’m thinking I got to see Garry Shandling’s chart now is where my mind just went. Because now I’m thinking of what a manifester he was. And I think they had a crossover, too.
LC: Well, I think a really wildcard Capricorn is Andy Kaufman.
SG: Oh, totally.
LC: It’s definitely experimental and all of those things but think of him just reading a book page by page at a thing just to incense people or to get a reaction. So I think that’s an interesting…
JL: Yeah, committing to the bit is very… [crosstalk]
SG: Oh my God, this Saturn-Moon conjunction, look at that.
CB: So, describe it.
SG: We have this Virgo-Moon conjunct Saturn in the second house with these Leo rising where we get an Andy Kaufman Capricorn-Sun-Leo rising. Rising conjunct Pluto too, so he would punish the audience. [laughter]
CB: Yeah, Pluto is right on the Ascendant and that can be really good for sticking with something. Because Leo is already a Fixed sign, but Pluto there can give you real staying power at the same time. And that’s opposite to Mercury at 16 Aquarius and Mars at 10 degrees of Aquarius. [crosstalk]
LC: Yeah, and I think Mercury-Aquarius. I mean, the voices doing weird out of… I don’t know, something [inaudible] comes to me.
SG: Yeah, just a weirdo. He was the OG weirdo. I always think if anyone would try to be Kaufman now, we would just be like, “He’s done it first.” There’s also something just… You broke this mold. But it’s wild. I think Jim Carrey, too, is also a Capricorn.
LC: Actually, I wrote that in there. He’s a Gemini.
JL: Gemini-Sun, but isn’t he Cap rising?
LC: Cap rising. Yes.
CB: Wait, wait, wait.
SG: No, he’s a Capricorn. He’s a Capricorn-Sun.
CB: Here’s Jim Carrey’s chart. [crosstalk]
LC: Why do I have a different…?
JL: I had a Gemini chart somewhere, too.
LC: Oh, this is Jim Carey. I’m sorry, the hockey player. [laughter] I know we’re all familiar… Clearly, we’re all familiar with Carey, James Carey. [Julia laughs]
JL: Because he famously stayed in character too when he played Andy Kaufman for Man on the Moon and would not release. And I think if I saw that chart right, also had some Leo placements going on with that Capricorn-
JL: Well, like 29 degree Leo-Uranus too conjunct the Midheaven? That, to me, is very powerful manifesting. Right? Literally write your own check, which is his famous story where he wrote himself a check for a million dollars, headed up on the wall forever and he was like, “One day I’ll be able to cash this.” And I think that that quincunx Capricorn– we’ve talked about this a lot on our podcast as those aspects that aren’t traditional aspects but are that je ne sais quoi about someone and I think that Leo-Capricorn are very powerful achieving energies. And I think Jim Carrey is both respected as a comedian because of how far he was able to push himself and what he was willing to do to be a character and literally would go to physical lengths and all of that too, but also I would say he has been at one point I think the highest paid actor and all those things. So to mean systemically successful and also… I don’t know, what’s the word?
SG: I mean, he really just was a breakout. I feel like kids would be Jim Carrey. At least growing up, they’d be like, “I’m doing the Jim Carrey face.” And that signature style was very emulated.
JL: And to me, that Uranus again-
CB: Looking at his chart, he has Saturn right at one degree of Aquarius and he just has this whole group of planets of the Sun, Venus, and Mars in late Capricorn. And then Saturn, Jupiter, and Mercury in the South node in Aquarius. That means that he would have been going through his Saturn return in the early to mid-’90s when he hit the height of his fame. So Jim Carrey’s Saturn return would have been basically hitting the height of his sort of comedic field at that point. Because he had that one year where two or three of his biggest movies all came out in the same year, I think. Right?
SG: Yeah. Ace Ventura, The Mask…
CB: And Dumb and Dumber I think was all in the same year.
SG: Dumb and Dumber, Hitmaker.
LC: Another Mercury-Aquarius; weird voices, faces, those interesting [imitates Jim Carrey] “Alrighty, then.” I don’t know. [Stevie laughs]
JL: It’s the quotables, too. Yeah, culture-changing, culture-capturing, culture-defining… So many quotes that I feel like people know still.
SG: Even if they don’t know where it’s from, they know that quote.
CB: So, that brings up two things. One, that now we’ve gotten into timing of him having a Saturn return and really hitting that high point comedically in terms of the direction that he had been building up for several years starting as a stand-up comedian in the ’80s and then going into comedy and doing skits on In Living Colour, and from that, parlaying that into a huge movie career. But one thing that’s interesting is that he then would have had a Saturn return in the early to mid-’90s but from a timing standpoint, he seemed like he wanted to go further than that. He didn’t just want to be known as a comedian or a comedy actor. And remember, he had that real abrupt turnaround that time period where he went into dramatic roles and he did that movie. First, The Cable Guy, and then eventually where he was playing a dark character that was supposed to be funny but was actually much more kind of dark and disturbing. And then eventually into much more serious dramatic roles with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and things like that.
SG: Truman Show, which was also very voyeuristic and being this performing monkey to, you know, like we want you to just be this guy. And I feel like those roles really reflected just rebellion.
JL: I think that’s very Capricorn too of reaching a pinnacle in your category and then needing to move on to the next thing. Because then we get to late-in-life-career Jim Carrey who’s like, “Actually, now I’m an artist and a spiritual person, and I’m actually not funny at all. I’m very zen and…”
SG: Now he’s just gonna voice on The Weeknd’s new album because they’re actually neighbors and they met and became friends and he was like, “Sure, I’ll do the radio announcer voice in your album, but only because we happen to live next door and be friends with each other.” It was pretty wild. He’s just gonna draw crude drawings of George W. Bush on Twitter. [laughs]
LC: I think Saturn returns too are such an interesting time for comedians. I know we’ve talked about on our podcast Eddie Murphy giving up comedy during his Saturn return and attempting to return to stand-up during his second Saturn return. However, COVID-19 thwarted that a little bit. He also fathered his first child during his Saturn return. There’s a number of other comics who’ve had big career changes happen during their Saturn return. I think John Mulaney’s first Emmy win is like two degrees from his natal Saturn. We don’t have time either, so it’s not maybe the most accurate. And I think Bo Burnham’s Inside happened while Saturn was in the same sign, though not exactly conjunct his natal Saturn.
CB: Yeah, that was a Saturn return.
SG: And I see from your notes too, Chris, it’s like, “Dane Cook had a gnarly Saturn return!” [laughs] I was like, “Hey, I need to hear more about this gnarly Saturn return.”
CB: And even more recently, Pete Davidson, I just noticed has Saturn in Aquarius. So the past three years where Pete is just constantly in the news and seemed to have hit the high point of both his career as well as his notoriety due to personal life has been part of his Saturn return.
JL: Well, it’s interesting thinking about comedian’s Saturn returns because it is like what you have built your material on then becomes what you are known for. And how does that then– like, what you’ve been doing repetitively, also personally, professionally or whatever, is now public? Not for everybody, I don’t think. Because not everybody reaches those successful levels. But I think…
SG: Well, he’s a unique case too just how young he started. Like, going into comedy clubs under age. I know that’s not a totally unique story for a lot of comedians, a lot start in their teenage years. But not many people skip college to go straight to SNL. That’s a very unique experience.
CB: Let me find his chart.
SG: Yeah, now I’m curious. I gotta see this chart. I gotta see why is he snatching up all these babes. He’s a Scorpio, right?
JL: He’s a Scorpio, I mean.
SG: But I need more. [laughter] I need to look under the hood. [laughter] He is. He’s like just a constant. He’s just hit a pop culture iconic… The tattoos, the nonchalant sort of gravelly voice… Just like an OG F-boy. F-boy vibes.
CB: There it is. I just found it. Hold on a sec. Okay, here’s his chart.
SG: Holding for Davidson’s chart! [laughter] Whoa! Oh, my god. [crosstalk]
JL: Uranus-Neptune conjunction.
CB: So this is an untimed chart but this is Pete Davidson, who has a Scorpio stellium with Jupiter-Mercury, Venus-Sun.
JL: Sun-Pluto, to me, is for sure the most intense magnetic… Like we’re under his spell, we’re powerless. We’re powerless before him. [laughs]
SG: Yeah, it’s like someone I feel like even if you’re not attracted to him, you meet in person and you’re like, “Oh, I get it now.”
JL: Yeah. And just that absolute concentration of Scorpio energy to me. And that Venus in detriment, I don’t like that. But I mean, we’ve seen it in the news. [Stevie laughs] I’m sure he doesn’t like it either.
CB: Well, with that conjunction of the Sun and Pluto and that squaring Saturn and Aquarius. But he, of course early on witnessed early in his standup career in doing some of the roasts, famously part of his background origin story is that his father had died in the September 11th terrorist attacks. So it’s like that’s a little bit reflected in there in terms of some of the pain and stuff that he had surrounding that growing up. But then at the same time, later, for example during roasts, that was one of the things that was unique; his ability to still embrace that and allow there to be jokes about that and things like that. Which seemed like dark or morbid, but it was an interesting example of the strength and resilience of somebody to go on and have success, and to move past a hard tragedy and still be a comedian and being able to be successful in that.
SG: Yeah, very legacy-oriented, too, going back to New York and firefighting. Then he made a movie– which we can talk off mic about that movie featuring Bill Burr. But going back to who he is is at the meat of it all.
LC: I think, too, with Scorpio-Sun he is pretty open about having been in rehab and using illicit substances. And I think it’s kind of that ‘taking the darkness and bringing it to light’ kind of stuff, that openness that sometimes occurs, I think. Also, obviously, mysterious. You know, drugs and stuff is something you hide often. So I think that’s an interesting observation.
JL: I think also having that Neptune-Uranus. Other people’s projections and also capturing an ideal of like you said, the F boy, and also sad, broken, whatever, and having that be your whole persona. And then how that then is like, “Well, if that’s how everybody sees me, then I’m absolutely going to lean into that if that’s all I can be is this.” It’s potent and it is useful, but I think it also can be diarhearing and degrading on him as a person too. And I think that it will be interesting to see post-Saturn return when he maybe hopefully he learns to, I don’t know, take care of himself in a better way or be more vulnerable- Continue that streak of vulnerability but in a maybe more emotionally tender kind of way. What am I learning about life? How am I beyond this thing? This is who I was up until this point and I get to decide who I am now going forward and what my life is. I’m not just defined by how my dad died and all of the women that I’ve been with.
LC: Julie, I never thought I’d hear you say something so beautiful without being told to. [laughter]
SG: Waxing poetic about Pete Davidson.
JL: [laughs] Hey, that’s my Mercury-Scorpio growing up.
LC: You can’t wait to see him grow up.
JL: And become the tender man I am.
SG: You are dickmatized, we see it.
JL: Listen, your girl loves men. Okay? [laughter] I always want the best for men. Okay.
CB: So going back, what was the… Really quickly. Lisa, what was the Eddie Murphy Saturn return thing?
LC: Oh. He said on Marc Maron and so we don’t have an exact date, but he stopped doing comedy at 27. There’s a doc at the bottom that has just a bunch of info about him with dates. He definitely fathered his first children during his Saturn return and took a big gap from performing, and then again on Marc Maron he said he was coming back to standup. This is right before COVID happened so he wasn’t actually able to, but it would have been around the time of his second Saturn return. So I think it’s interesting to take that big of a break, have this thing happen, you know? He’s getting on stage, people are yelling out, “Do this! Do that!” He’s like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” And then the next Saturn cycle comes back and it’s like, “I think I want to try it again.”
SG: Truly one of the biggest stars in the world in his era. Did he have a Taurus Midheaven, too? I’m thinking of his iconic red jacket looks.
JL: Well, he also has that Uranus in Leo like Jim Carrey of star power and culture-changing persona, where he’s both in standup but also starring in movies. Thinking of Leo being the very actor-performer archetype, too.
CB: And he was so young when he did some of his biggest specials in the ’80s. He was only in his early to mid-20s or something, wasn’t he?
SG: Yeah.
JL: Yeah. I do think that that– we talked about Bo Burnham, too– I think that he has that, we call it the ‘Cap trap.’ And I think that there also… Maybe it’s something about youth and quickness to that Uranian influence there, but I think something that’s interesting about Bo Burnham and we see that then reflected in his Saturn return and Inside too is that he is one of the first comedians who has been completely in control of his own creation and distribution for all of his career unlike other comedians, who was really able to capitalize on having ownership and that vertical monopoly on both the creation and posting. And then that being, I would say, absolutely indicative of why he was a wunderkind rise to success.
SG: Which is hilarious looking at this chart, too, because we’ve talked so much about Mars and then you just see this Taurus-Mars away from everything else being like, “And actually, I’m going to do it at my own pace and in my own style.”
LC: Singing.
JL: Singing and doing mostly video. And not that he’s not a live performer, but he’s not someone that you are seeing out at clubs all of the time that very much likes to create in an insular way and on his own pace doing his own things. He’s also doing other people’s projects, but I would say it’s a much slower pace than say traditional standup.
LC: I also think Inside– I assume we’ve all seen it, I don’t know– but it is just this, “Oh, I can’t go outside? You’re coming inside. You’re gonna see what’s in here in my house.” And it’s like, “Whoa, okay. That’s such a quick solution, no one else came to that.” I don’t know. I’m sure it took him a long time, I’m not saying he just made it happen right away, but that is a huge piece of art.
CB: Yeah. And that special, Inside, that he recorded during the pandemic and during the lockdowns, it was a great example of Saturn return because it was very introspective and self-reflective, and that’s a very common thing that you go through during the Saturn Return. It’s like sometimes looking inwards and thinking about all of your flaws or all the parts where you don’t meet up to a certain expectation or something like that. And you go through this phase and then eventually– sort of a dark night of the soul phase– and then eventually at the end of it, you emerge from it into this new 30-year cycle having closed down the first 30-year cycle of your life. And that reminds me, there was another Saturn return that was famously like that, which was Donald Glover who has a Saturn in Scorpio and he went through… He actually reminds me a lot of Bo Burnham’s chart because Bo Burnham has that Mercury in Virgo in the 10th house. And there’s something about Mercury in Virgo sometimes are very prominently placed Mercury where they can have many different skills or really excel in several different areas or several different fields. And Donald Glover certainly has that where he has Virgo rising and Mercury on the Ascendant in Virgo. He’s just somebody that has excelled and found success in several different fields in comedy and in skit writing…
SG: Directing.
JL: Music, acting.
CB: Yeah, directing, music. What else? Yeah, it’s like the modern equivalent of somebody that’s like a– not like a renaissance man, maybe that’s taking a little too far, but somebody that is skilled in multiple different professions.
JL: Well, I think it’s interesting for both of them too being people who were largely successful from a young age to having a Saturn return where they’re having to contend with, not necessarily the way that I think a lot of people have their Saturn return where it’s like this is the first time that they’re receiving recognition or reaching some sort of pinnacle or getting to a next step. What happens when you have reached all this? Where do you go from there? And I think that often has to be very deep and more personal as opposed to professional.
SG: I think once they got so famous and palatable– I’m thinking of Donald Glover with Community. It was Community, right? Like network star and then being like, “Actually, here’s the This is America music video.” And Atlanta is a very… It’s high art. It’s like, “No, don’t. I can do this and I can be very liked,” but also valuing that sort of art and not being so expected. He could easily just go on path and do so many corny roles, right? He would have been ‘offer only’ you know? Like, “Easy, sure, you got it.” But he was just like, “Oh, I have this base same with Bo Burnham with eighth grade and now directing all these other different things.” It’s like, “Oh, cool, I have the base and now I can take this and do what I maybe ‘really want to do.” I’m making an assumption there, it’s really what they want to do. But probably.
JL: Well, and helping other comedians to producing other people’s work and being like, “I’ve made… I can make anything I want. What does someone else want to make that I can make possible with my star power?”
SG: Totally.
CB: There can also sometimes during the Saturn return be a process of pulling back, like sometimes pulling back from or disappearing a little bit, which is interesting. Because I remember during Donald Glover’s Saturn return, he sort of disappeared off the radar for 10 months or a year or something so that there started being articles written about why did he disappear and where is he and what is he doing? And then he suddenly started posting on social media again and he was posting all these really introspective reflections and stuff. But one of them that he was he posted was, “I hope people don’t continue to judge me for some of the jokes or the bad skits that I did in the past.” Because he had some skits that were like YouTube skits with his comedy troupe originally that were a little edgy at the time but they didn’t age very well. And that’s an interesting topic in terms of sometimes Saturn transits and people coming to terms with mistakes from the past and how they want to move forward after that. But it was like once he came back from that into the public light, then he dropped one of his first albums and then he really started becoming successful as a musician not long after his Saturn return.
LC: Bo Burnham’s Inside has that, too. He has an apology song. And definitely, Eddie Murphy’s Saturn return that’s his only gap. His first Saturn return and his IMDb, there’s a gap. And I mean, some of the other stuff is voices and cartoons, not necessarily big picture and huge production films that he’s starring in or anything. But that is like a ga- Of course, he had kids. You know, you have to at some point take time off. But yeah, he has a little gap there as well.
SG: I’m gonna say I’m sure all these folks have stuff that did not age well at some point in their career in some way or another just like most humans because hopefully everyone’s learned and grown. But also when you have so much light on you and spotlight, I think it’s really cool to even do that to even acknowledge like, “Yeah, that shit I made, that’s not really me anymore and here’s a new reintroduction to myself.”
JL: Many of us were fortunate enough to work out our early material in rooms where no one was recording anything and where it was just your fellow comedians, and I think now some people intentionally like Bo Burnham who put things on YouTube and doing all of that, but so much stuff can be archived and saved and is dedicated to recording in some fashion that I think this is going to be a trend we’re definitely going to see for people going forward. And it is just something to consider and not necessarily good or bad, but just a reality of the landscape now. Someone who has a Saturn return coming up is Chris Rock, which I think is interesting.
CB: With him, we have to be a little careful because my friend Patrick Watson just told me today because I wanted to use him. But there’s some question about his birth year or there’s debate about it. It’s probably still roughly going to be his Saturn return but it’s just something to be careful about. Because there’s some performers– this is an issue actually with Eminem as well– where sometimes when somebody’s really young, their managers will either put their birth year to make them older. Or if they’re a little bit too old for the age group that they’re marketing to, I think with Eminem they said that he was actually younger than he was. So, that’s something to be aware of sometimes with certain birth data research.
JL: Interesting.
SG: Yeah, that makes sense with the entertainment industry in general, too. I remember Alexa Demie from Euphoria, not a comedian but her age was really blurry and then people were like, “I have the yearbook. I can prove I graduated in this year.” [laughter]
LC: I love that.
CB: One of the things that came up, though, that seems like just a constant thing now in any comedy podcast or at least in certain comedy podcasts, which is in the recent climate, a lot of comedians are pushing for things like free speech or seem to have a thing about wanting to have the ability to be free to make jokes about anything or to say anything and the ability to not have limits on comedy. I’ve been trying to understand where that archetype is if it’s a Mercury thing of just freedom to speak, if it’s a Mercury-Uranus thing in terms of not wanting to be restricted or something. But it seems like it’s a major discussion amongst comedians these days.
LC: Do you mean that comedy is a spooky haunted house? Julia laughs] Whitney Cummings said that on Twitter as a defense of free speech that ‘this is supposed to take you on a ride’ kind of. I’m making it sound more eloquent. [laughs]
SG: I thought Chris was gonna pull up a clip of our podcast for a second. I was like, “I’m getting scared.” [laughter]
CB: He would be like, “Stand by this. Yes or no?” “No.”
SG: And I was like, “No, I’ll go a no.” Are we talking about Rogan? We must be a little bit.
CB: No. Well, yeah.
JL: I think it’s… Honestly, I think it’s more Saturnian if I’m being honest. If I’m being honest, I don’t know why I said it like that for this. Stevie laughs] But I think we have had Saturn in Saturn signs and there have been real consequences for things people have said in a way that there never was before. And that is both by the format that has allowed people to exponentially grow their platforms that now there are people that are seeing them and judging them that were not explicitly in an audience to see them or something, and there just are different consequences for what you’re saying. Instead of an art form that has largely been if you weren’t in the room, you didn’t hear it, and you could kind of get away with saying more outrageous things. Or, also, I also think that there’s this idea of it being like, “We’re comed… We’re joking. Don’t take anything seriously.” But anything taken out of context or seeing something– not to say that that’s right or wrong– but I think that comedy is not seen in the same context that it usually is, which was very much on purpose with an intended audience or in the moment. And I think that that’s that Sag-Gemini to me of like saying whatever you need to to get what you need in that moment. That’s very that. But I think that there’s just consequence, and things are literally written and archived that’s very Saturnian to me. But also people saying like a kind of a scolding… I don’t know, getting in trouble in this sort of way. And I think that it’s less that comedy is like, “People also still can say whatever they want. None of these people have been de-platformed. These people, in fact, have the biggest audience anyone has ever had! Anyone has ever had at any time. It has never been more lucrative to be someone saying…”
SG: Free speech, you’re not getting arrested, you’re not getting jailed.
JL: Yes. If we want to talk about someone who was ‘free speech’ and wanted to stand for that, let’s talk about George Carlin. These people that are talking about…
SG: Lenny Bruce
JL: Yeah, Lenny Bruce. People who literally got arrested for saying things, on principle, for saying “These are things that we are not allowed to say legally.” They literally changed the legal system of the United States with their comedy. These are people that want to say things like, “Oh, you can… We can… We can say we don’t…” Like what you said, either make it funnier or don’t say it.
CB: So, George Carlin’s thing was he had a bit or an act about the words that you’re not allowed to say, and he got arrested for that at one point or something like that. Right?
JL: Mmh. This was based on Lenny Bruce being arrested for the same thing about 10 years prior. And I think George Carlin was there, allegedly, when he was arrested. But he said the seven words you can’t say on television, it’s documented on a comedy album called Class Clown. And he was arrested at a live performance of this in a Milwaukee Summerfest.
SG: I love Summerfest. [laughs]
JL: Yeah. So he performed- He opened…
SG: Oh, the Wisconsinites were not having it. You know that for sure. Maybe I can say Midwesterners, they are barely saying heck, you know? So I imagine that really moved the needle. Shout out to anyone who’s listening in the Midwest.
JL: I don’t even think he necessarily did the bit. He just was using profanity and they said this was a family event and so you can’t do that. And so he was arrested but it went on to be part of a Supreme Court case. Let me find this. Pacifica Foundation? FCC vs. Pacifica. Eventually, it took years, obviously, but legal precedent was changed. His album is in the national archive for historical significance because these are the seven words and it led to these landmark cases. It’s still something that’s argued today, I think it actually is maybe not even decided. There’s several articles about this that I skimmed. [laughter] [inaudible]
CB: That’s interesting, though, in terms of the bounds of comedy and what’s permissible in a comedic context in certain times or places or cultures or timeframes versus what’s not. And also the nature of what’s in good taste being somewhat contextual, as well as… I know even today there’s different comedians, like, it’s sometimes remarked upon how Seinfeld prefers not to curse in his comedy. That he does a quote-unquote “a clean act” in terms of not using curse words. And when asked about that once, one of the reasons he gave was he said that it felt too easy for him. That it’s too easy to get a joke or a laugh out of a curse word, whereas it’s much harder if you don’t do that and use it as like a crutch was part of his rationale.
LC: I’ve seen Seinfeld live. And I wasn’t a huge fan or whatever, I watched the show. I know he’s one of the greats. But I was blown away. He ran on stage, did an hour and a half, and ran off. He had so much energy. And he was 61 when I saw him. And he made an effort to the first hour just be all Seinfeld-style observation, and then the last half hour was a little bit more loose, still not profane in any way, still clean, but about his family and about observations within his personal life. Which I thought was just a really fun thing to watch someone actually, “Oh, yeah. You want to give me a challenge? Yeah, I’ll take it.”
SG: I’m curious where in the chart is his anti-hugging stance? He’s very anti-hugging. [Julia laughs] There’s a great clip of Kesha trying to give him a hug and he’s like, “No. No. No.” [Julia laughs] So I’m curious where his no-touching policy, well, which we could talk about on a different level.
JL: I think he’s earthy, to me, and I think there’s an efficiency in terms of he works very hard and admittedly, in terms of crafting jokes, working on that, and to have it be something that can then go from stage to screen and can be performed anywhere, why would you adjust yourself? And that’s also very Taurus to me.
LC: Taurus, too. “It’s my comfort.” You know, it’s his comfort level.
JL: Mm-hmm. There was a quote, too, of something about Taurus being simple and…
LC: Succinct.
JL: Yeah, all of that, where I think that whatever you feel about cursing, it does elicit responses in people that’s different. It is also distracting from the material, potentially. Sometimes I think it’s more punctuation and this. And it fits the comedian, but I think Jerry Seinfeld cursing, we’d all go like, “No, we don’t like it.”
SG: And also the money. You’re gonna hit a wider audience if you can perform anywhere and if your material works in any space and kids can understand it, adults will also enjoy it. Not that I’m saying he’s like a children’s comedian by any means. But financially it makes sense, too. [crosstalk]
JL: He’s ready to work. And that’s very Taurus to me, too, of that. It’s like, “This is stuff that works.”
CB: That brings up other things. One is issues of luck and fortune and timing, and sometimes people just being in the right place at the right time at the right place and being incredibly lucky. Like Seinfeld, to a certain extent, with just landing that show with Larry David and the way that they were able to get that and then become wildly successful and eventually have the most popular show in Hollywood or on television. And then also other themes like when a person hits the peak of their career or sometimes peaks– and occasionally there’s people that are widely like Seinfeld, for example, hitting the peak with that in the 1990s with his TV show and being widely applauded. Versus sometimes it’s interesting seeing a person like a comedian hitting the high point in their career and being the most successful or the most widely recognized but also having some of the greatest hardships at that time. For example, I think of Carlos Mencia who was accused of joke-stealing during that time, or Dane Cook for example who even though he was selling out stadiums and stuff, he was being heckled by other comedians as not being good or something like that.
LC: Yeah. I think part of it for Seinfeld, at least for me– and this came from my mouth and I heard it somewhere– I’ve heard that Larry David and Jerry won’t sue people for the use of the logo. Don’t go make a bunch of stuff because I said this.
SG: No, make it in the style of The Astrology Podcast and then send it to us.
JL: Oh my god, yes.
LC: They’re cool about it. Where I think with Dane Cook, it’s like he was very ego-forward. And I don’t think he would have let you use his image or anything like that, so maybe there’s a bit of that happening. I don’t know.
CB: Sure. And with him, it was weird because sometimes there can be this alignment of everything happening at once in a person’s life. And with him, it was like he hit the high point of his career in terms of selling out audiences and making millions of dollars. But then in very quick succession, it’s like both of his parents died I think in the same year and his brother ended up– who was his manager or business accountant at the time– ended up ripping him off for all of his money or for millions of dollars. And he ended up having to… His brother went to prison as a result of that and that ended that relationship.
SG: Oh, I didn’t know this. Can we see the chart?
CB: Yeah, I’m trying to find it right now.
JL: I know we don’t have a birth time for him. I also think that something with Dane Cook– or maybe you do, Chris, I don’t know your sources– [laughter] I think Dane Cook also was trying to be cool and a successful comedian, too. And while you can be cool for being a comedian, I think that you can’t also be a hot celebrity. You’re still a clown at a certain point. And I think that Dane Cook was more like, I don’t know, he was on different red carpets and kind of in this more celebrity way. Which I think is also a symptom of the time that he was famous to, he can’t help that. It was peak tabloid culture too, but I think he was more in the mix of… I think there’s more hate about the echelon of society that he was allowed access to that comedians kind of aren’t supposed to that’s getting comedian hate, and then also a higher position to be judged from. Whereas Seinfeld is on his TV show playing Seinfeld, being Seinfeld, being kind of himself through and through, making tons of money being successful, creating a great show, but he wasn’t trying to then be like a hot heartthrob. [laughs]
SG: There’s a thirst with Dane Cook, that I think he knew exactly who… Like if they said jump, it’s like, “How high?” And his base was very particular and I don’t think he had that wide reach that Seinfeld did have, being a way more neutral sort of party.
CB: The other thing is that he actually… I think part of the criticism from other comedians with Dane Cook is that he came up way too quick and he didn’t go the traditional route. He didn’t have to grind as much as other people did, because he was one of the first comedians who really utilized social media. [crosstalk] He got into MySpace really early on and what he did is he had this really fascinating strategy of adding hundreds and thousands of people onto his Friends list. So he’s one of the first really successful comedians to use social media to just explode his following very early on or very quickly. That’s why he was able to start selling out all of these, you know, Madison Square Garden and things like that through his use of social media. And then also, he got a little bit of hate because he had more of a physical comedy in his delivery style, where it was his mannerisms and his appearance and the way he would move on stage instead of just the jokes themselves. Sometimes it wasn’t that it was a well-crafted joke, but it was the way he delivered it was kind of unique or funny at the time.
LC: Can I say a secret on this podcast? I love Dane Cook’s comedy. I loved it. [laughs] And I think I would still love it.
JL: [laughs] I could quote so many Dane Cook bits one hundred percent.
SG: What was the hand thing?
LC: Is it this, or this? I don’t know. It might be this.
JL: I was like it’s this.
SG: It was very teen boy, but also, as a teen girl at the time, loved. Because I was just like, “Yes, I want to be around these shocking sort of like blargh…” Sort of Bart Simpson-ey, but way more extreme.
JL: To be to be fair, he also was– I don’t want to say he was cool, but he was cool in a young pop culture kind of way. Which is something that people always dismiss and say isn’t as important. Again, versus say a Seinfeld who is…
SG: Wasn’t cool. [Laughs]
JL: Yeah, adult-friendly, institutionally recognized there. I do know that Dane Cook has his Mercury-Uranus opposition in, I think, Aries-Libra. Which I think is interesting thinking about like, “It’s not fair that he got this thing,” instead of it being like, “Oh, no, he was an innovator in this way and took advantage of the platform afforded him via MySpace that anybody could have done it.” I also think that that’s an argument to make for anybody where it’s like, if you could have been Dane Cook, you would have been Dane Cook.
CB: Right. So he has Mercury at 15 Aries opposite to Uranus at 17 Libra, and I think that’s both relevant in terms of his use and leveraging of technology, but also on stage. His quick jerky movements and mannerisms remind me of that as well with that placement.
LC: And he has Taurus Moon, it’s so interesting to compare him to Seinfeld with the Taurus Sun.
SG: Well, no, he’s a Pisces and now I’m like, “Oh, okay.” [laughs]
JL: He did have his voice. It’s that it’s not necessarily the traditional comedy voice. Again, I think that Mercury in Aries kind of being quick, being childlike if you will. Not childlike but appealing to young people. And yeah, that Neptune-Saturn opposition too of being in that Gemini-Sag. Again to me, that also would be like, oh, yeah, not getting the kind of approval that he would want from comedy writ large. Being an outlier that way. And I also think that that Jupiter in detriment again is super successful, but not necessarily for the thing that you want or having something be highlighted and it’s your climbiness. It’s your willingness to be the biggest instead of the respect that you want.
SG: And then your brother just takes all your money while you’re not looking. That’s wild. What a tale.
CB: So that’s a whole thing. And that just brings up, because sometimes it’s interesting listening to comedy podcasts nowadays because you hear not just about reflections on jokes and different areas in the person’s career and how they put together bits, but also sometimes their personal lives and how that’s run in parallel or influenced different periods of their career. So Dane Cook, that brings up another thing of differences between comedy styles of things like physical comedy and delivery. And other types of stand-up comedians like that who use… Like Carrot Top, for example, who used prop comedy and that being like a genre. Or there’s others I know in our notes, one of you mentioned Gallagher who would smash watermelons and stuff. So that’s a whole other sort of genre as well of physicality versus something that let’s say is just a highly intellectual joke or something like that.
SG: Yeah.
JL: I think it’s all going to be a matter of what we… Haters are gonna hate. [laughter] Maybe it is not traditional standup comedy, but again it’s like a tool that someone decided to use to be successful.
LC: I mean, no one’s ever gonna say that Lucille Ball isn’t a comedian. And she wasn’t a standup intellectual like that type, she was a clown. She was a different type of comedian. And I think it is interesting to see, I think there are people that process externally and I think Gallagher is a great example of smashing something outside. And there are people like Robin Williams who had issues with substance abuse and destroy internally, you know what I mean? And you don’t see that necessarily as easily. They’re not similar stylistically at all, but I just think that that is a process for some people.
CB: Here’s Lucille Ball’s chart.
SG: Wow. Yeah. Leo-Sun, Cap-Moon, and then that Uranus in Capricorn as well. And then Mars with Saturn. [crosstalk]
CB: She’s got a lot of Earth placements just like the Moon, Uranus, Mars, Saturn, Mercury and Venus all distributed between Capricorn and Taurus and Virgo. And there’s something about Earth signs and the notion of physicality or materiality that I think is really relevant.
JL: Well, she also was such a pioneer. They created television technology for her for their show, they owned a studio. Even the day-in-day-out performance level of her starting in radio and then the sitcom itself is such a grinding output schedule.
LC: They changed the way we record sitcoms. I mean, that’s pretty phenomenal.
JL: Yeah. And then also just the scope of her success in terms of the show itself being super successful, to me, it’s very earthy in measurable numbers, money, influence. It’s not like… She wasn’t like a critical darling– not to say that she wasn’t critically acclaimed as well, but it was like, “Oh, no, this is butts in seats.” [Stevie laughs]
LC: Talking about pioneering, we still struggle to find diversity in film and television today. And we had an interracial marriage on stage, that is incredible. You know?
JL: And very much like her, and being like, “This is my real… We’re performing together, you get us both or we don’t do this. Period.”
SG: Mmh, ride or dies.
CB: Right. That brings up a really important point, which is comedy, especially standup comedy for a long time was a male-dominated field and to some extent still is, versus women breaking into that field. And I know partially, we can see a result of that just by searching through Astro-Databank for timed birth charts. I can see that we have way more time charts for men than we do for women. But I don’t know if there’s any other women that maybe we should mention. One I wish we had at birth time for is Whitney Cummings who unfortunately we don’t have a birth time for but is really a good example of a standup comic that’s become very successful over the past decade in that field. Yeah, and maybe just glancing at the chart really quickly, if we could talk about maybe some of the reasons for that.
SG: Yeah. And I’m gonna, before I forget to, if we have Ali Wong, I would love to see it. Because I’m curious about the pregnancy standup of her life. But we may not have the time.
LC: I don’t think there’s a rising but we do have a chart, I think.
SG: We can go back to Whitney, but I just wanted to say that before I forgot about Ali Wong because she’s also… I just saw that trailer for Beef that looks so good. I’m excited to see that she’s kind of back after her divorce and, you know, back at it. But yeah, I saw something-
JL: Whitney has that… I was gonna say that zero degrees Sag-Aquarius, to me, is very much like a moment in capturing something and having a quick ascent, too. And I think that that’s something that, you know, people are always going to criticise how women achieve anything. [Stevie laughs] But I think that too, of it being… There’s something too about it being like a show with her name, and that broad, big idea, sort of thing.
LC: I liked the Scorpio stuff. I think with Scorpios and comedy, we see a lot of other people’s stuff. We see a lot of like Ben Bailey Cash Cab, like other people’s money. We see Russell Peters’ joke theft conversation and things like that with Scorpio. And I think for Whitney, we can see it- She’s a Scorpio rising, I’m sorry-
CB: It’s a noon chart but she does have Mars and Jupiter in Scorpio.
LC: Mars and Jupiter in Scorpio. And I think being on Chelsea show, on Chelsea Lately on E!, I think definitely helped her rise to success. I don’t know, I could see Scorpio as also being kind of talking about those more feminine topics a little bit. But she does it in that Mars cutting way. She’s not soft and cutesy when she talks about stuff. But it is those things of talking about women’s stuff or whatever, the taboo of discussing pop culture in those things.
JL: Agreed.
SG: Yeah, I think she doesn’t look– not to say like she looks like not what you’re gonna hear, but there is that Scorpioness of like, “Oh, I’m going to overturn the rock and show you the bugs and the weird stuff.” Even though she has this just seeing her Leo-Venus with the Leo Midheaven too. She gives a pageant energy. She’s very polished and pretty and put together and then you’re like, “Oh, you’re weird.” Which I think, you know, men hate that typically.
JL: She was a model too before comedy, or maybe simultaneously at that. Yeah, but I think that’s also another thing too that can be partially a benefit to success. Because people will be like, “Oh, you’re a beautiful person. I want to put you on TV. Of course, you belong on TV.” But that, also, is the thing that makes it harder to be taken seriously as a comedian or be… Oh, we don’t… Yeah, it makes us even more mad when you’re talking about something awful or taboo or whatever or criticizing. And I think that that Virgo-Sun, too, I think that hearing someone as critical of anything, especially coming from a beautiful woman, is not something that people love.
LC: I know, too, that when her show aired, she was grieving her parent. I’m not exactly sure exactly when the parent died in relation to the show. I don’t know if it was during filming or at the release of the show, but that is another example of those outward inward maybe like a Saturn moment type of thing.
SG: I think too, with Virgo, I feel like they’ve been the underrated champ across the research. Because I do think it’s natural to go to Gemini– the Mercury of Gemini and quickness and silly– but then Virgo does just have that natural… [chuckles] We did it on our latest podcast, what was the book that was like to love a Virgo is to let them worry, and just to allow them to observe how everything is awful. And then they can regurgitate that back to you because it’s very humanizing because it’s like, “Oh, I feel that way, too. Climate change stresses me out as well.” These are things that are universal stressors. Or maybe sometimes it goes back to something a little more individual with their personal experience, but I think Virgos I’m just gonna picture them as the underrated champ of the comedy world universe that I’ve seen so far in this research.
JL: Critical of how things work, how systems work, but also self-critical in that way too that’s very indicative of comedians of being able to notice your own flaws, talk about your own problems, talk about what you would wish-
SG: Like, “I know I look like this, but…”
JL: Yeah, having an accurate assessment of yourself but also being able to turn that into something funny that people can enjoy. I think that is very Virgo.
LC: I did a show with Whitney and she, afterwards… I mean, I was brand new in comedy, I showed no business, you know? And I was like, “Oh, you’re so funny.” And she was self-deprecating. She wasn’t super like, “I hate myself,” or anything like that. But she was like, “Really? Oh, thanks.” She was self critical. She was not like, “Oh, my god, I’m great.”
CB: Yeah, that’s something that comes through a lot in her podcast that she is very aware of her flaws. And I think that’s coming from the Sun and Virgo placement. But she also with that really strong Mars in Scorpio with Jupiter, I think that gives her more of the drive and the ambition and also the willingness to go there with certain topics or to put herself forth and be assertive in a way that probably has helped her despite it being more, especially let’s say 10 or 20 years ago, the male-dominated field to find success and to, I don’t know, fit in or find a place for herself in comedy.
LC: Totally.
SG: I’m glad you mentioned Chelsea Handler too, because I think, especially with the recent news post she did of being a happy childless woman– which you can Google this yourself if you want to go on this deep dive– but yeah, just a good mention of a person that’s still really shaking people up in terms of-
LC: She’s a Full Moon on the Pisces-Virgo axis. Yeah, and she’s a Virgo rising too.
SG: Yeah.
CB: I actually have a birth time for Chelsea Handler. And just describing the chart, she has Virgo rising with the Moon conjunct the degree of the Ascendant at five Virgo opposite the Sun at six Pisces. And then the ruler of the Ascendant is Mercury in Aquarius at 11 degrees and it’s kind of broadly squaring Uranus at two degrees of Scorpio. And I think that’s kind of interesting she’s willing to go there and kind of rile people up sometimes.
SG: And Saturn-Cancer, too, just back to that recent childless thing with Cancer-Saturn being like, “And, fuck off.” [laughter] And I think even her rise to fame was really controversial because wasn’t she dating an executive who literally gave her a slot? And she was like, “Yeah, I did. I slept my way to the top. Who cares?”
LC: I believe so. [crosstalk] Or at least there’s a story of that. I don’t really know whatever exactly happened.
SG: And I say without any judgment. She was like, “Yeah, I slept with the right person. It works out that way sometimes.” [laughs]
CB: I remember during that timeframe in the late 2000s also. She would do spots on E!, I think on the E! network. She would do little bits and they were really funny. She was really good at really quick biting comedic humor that fit that format really well, where you have to say something really witty in a very short span of time. And I think it was through that that she started getting more prominence through doing those slots on TV and then eventually getting her own show and everything else.
SG: Mmh, yeah.
JL: And I think those short essays, too. She had all those books, [unintelligible]. And that self-deprecating “I’m sharing my own… I’m a mess.” That Virgo-Pisces. Like, “I can talk about me being a mess so you don’t have to. It’s funny and I’m aware of it and I’m having a great time. And I’m living my life doing what I want and you can, too. It’s okay to be a mess and it’s hilarious.”
SG: She’s like the first goblin-mode person or the embracing of goblin energy.
CB: It’s interesting that you mentioned that because I just did the Pisces episode last month and Austin Coppock who’s a Pisces, he said that one of the things he associates with Pisces is the messy genius. And he mentioned both Einstein as well as Rihanna as examples of that. So it’s interesting that you bring that up here.
LC: She definitely skis naked, you know? [Stevie laughs] And she was always smoking weed on Instagram or whatever. I also think that seventh house Sun and partnerships, we know all of her… Like, who she’s dated. We know all of her… Her brother has been on her show. And I guess that’s the Saturn-Cancer stuff too where it’s like we know her dogs. We know her partnerships.
JL: I think that’s also a very mutable quality, too, which is obviously changing from moment to moment. But it is just like the essence of somebody. It’s that thing that you can’t pin down. It is her ideas, but it’s also the way that she delivers them. And it’s also just the way that she lives in exists and is, and that’s very mutable to me.
SG: I have a pitch pivot, which let me know if you all are open to this. The chart of Saturday Night Live launching. Because I think that that’s just been such a constant staple in comedy and who’s come out of SNL. So I know we’ve been talking mainly about people’s charts, but I don’t know if we want to look at an actual show. We don’t have to, but it’s-
CB: What’s the data?
SG: It’s on Astro. Let me pull it up here. I’ll put it in our chart here. It’s October 11th, 1975 11:30pm when it always comes out in New York, New York.
CB: October 11th, 1975, when?
SG: At 11:30 at night in New York City.
JL: Interesting fact. George Carlin, the first host of SNL.
SG: Oh!
CB: Oh, wow.
JL: Once again, very Uranian, very on the precipice of a lot of cultural relevance. And a lot of his clips have been reshared. He has Uranus in Taurus natally and then with this most recent move of Uranus and Taurus, there’s been a lot of resharing, “Oh, we’re still dealing with these same things. This is still relevant.”
LC: Eddie Murphy too went back to SNL in his second Saturn return after leaving. So that’s another SNL story.
SG: Yeah. When I was looking at SNL stuff, there’s a lot of articles and debate on which era is the best. And everyone is like, “The first five years are number one.” And then of course we had the 90s renaissance and I thought it was really interesting because I think Julia referenced it earlier when we had that Cap of what we call the Cap Trap. The cluster of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune too is when we had Chris Farley’s first premiere in September 29th, 1990. And I just thought it’s interesting because we had Lorne Michaels go away for a bit and then came back and then talked about how he was basically– this is a quote from the Chris Farley documentary, I think it’s called I Love Chris, I have it written down somewhere– but it was basically said that he was like Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Or it’s a child they didn’t have. So then this sort of second coming and fitting a new generation and it’s, you know, just the endurance of SNL is just kind of wild for like… I don’t know what the longest show is in general, maybe Simpsons. No, SNL must be at this point. This has been on so long.
CB: Yeah, so that brings up… Also Lorne Michaels, the sort of showrunner, has been in charge of it for so long and he has been like an unspoken kingmaker of comedy through either having people on or not having people on, and he has made so many careers as a result of that of different comedians.
SG: Yeah, I was just saying it’s like looking at Jupiter and Aries in the 10th house for the chart of SNL is just like breakout stars as well. It feels very in that solo Aries way. And then even this Gemini-Mars in the 12th of movies and spin-offs, if we think of the 12th house as maybe the screen or a medium or something like that, there seems to just… I like that it’s also Mercury retrograde for the launch. [crosstalk]
LC: -fourth house and in the home. We were watching it live from home and I feel like that was a new… Sorry to say, I’m not old enough to know if it was new, but it feels like it might have been new.
JL: I think too that, I of course go to Uranus, Uranus in Scorpio and it being not for primetime sort of thing and this being stuff that you… Again, it’s Late Night, it’s also with that Scorpio north node of this being sort of taboo stuff, this is more critical, this isn’t… I don’t know. And also laughter in there, too, I think is very-
SG: And the Cap-Moon.
JL: Yeah, the Cap-Moon. That, to me, is the enduring quality there. But even then Scorpio too of staying fixed in the culture. Changing the culture and then becoming a part of it, and being a place where you go to to see what– I mean, I don’t think this is how we would describe SNL now. It’s a long-running program on a major network that is largely successful, it’s not necessarily taboo or cutting edge the same way that it was when it started. But I think definitely when it started, it established itself as a thing that we were going to see things that you wouldn’t see anywhere else on TV. You were going to see artists, musicians, comedians who were going to be talking about subjects that you weren’t talking about anywhere else. And seeing that on network is pretty radical.
SG: You didn’t get to always see it like 12 of the funniest coked-up people gather in one [Cinemart] in [unintelligible] [laughs].
JL: And even the idea of Jupiter in Aries of it being live performance. This is happening live, you can see the mistakes, you can see this too. This isn’t a cut, edited script. I mean, it is scripted, obviously. But, yeah.
SG: Yeah. Well, now the digital bits are so much more prominent now to the pre-recorded stuff where… I think Leo-Saturn was in the second house, too, which also feels kind of like a sustainable moneymaker.
CB: That reminds me, also… Go ahead.
LC: The Jenny Slate F-bomb moment is really loaded too. I mean, there’s so much happening. We don’t have to take a look, but as an Easter egg if people want to. It’s insane to look how much is happening not just in the sky, but actually happening in transit to her natal charts.
CB: That might be a good subtopic. So we have a birth time for Jenny Slate. What was the date of the event you’re talking about?
LC: Let me get the exact date. September, for sure.
SG: Also, we need a paywall these notes. This doc is just off the charts. I can’t wait to read through. [laughs]
CB: This could be a book or something. The amount of different comedians and birth times and everything that you three compile.
JL: Oh, it’s September 26th, 2009.
SG: And also, I’m writing that down, Chris. We had in first, the Astrology Comedy book. Don’t steal our idea., we’re posting this out. We say this all the time on our podcast. We give away business ideas all the time.
LC: I’m not sure if you do 8:00 when it airs, or I don’t know how exactly that would work.
JL: I thought 11:30 is air time.
SG: 11:30 Eastern, for sure.
LC: I don’t know if they still do it at 11:30, do they?
JL: Mhm.
LC: Oh, did not know that.
SG: I think sometimes it’ll change depending on if it’s like Oscars or little things. But…
CB: Okay, so here is Jenny Slate’s chart. Set up the context, what is the event we’re talking about?
LC: So she famously, there’s this sketch and she is having to say the word ‘friggin’ a lot. And it’s kind of her personality. It’s her character trait, the funny part of her character. And she slips the F-word.
JL: This is also her premiere episode.
LC: Yeah, and you see her face and she kind of goes like, “[puffs cheeks]” and then she blows her cheeks out and then it cuts away from her. But she can tell in the moment that she effed up literally. And they cut away and I’m sure she’s heartbroken.
JL: She also only had one season on SNL. And it is not said that she was fired because of this reason, but definitely that led to speculation of going, “Okay, this is not a strong first episode and it’s not surprising that she did not go on to stay with SNL and have one of those SNL careers that we know are myriad.”
LC: There were also precedents of other performers having curse on accident and losing their position. Not for that reason. Obviously, they don’t say it’s for that reason. And Jenny Slate has gone on to have a storied career. So I think it’s an easy example because she just was Oscar-nominated twice. She’s doing fine. But I do think it’s just such a huge moment. And of course for the viewer to be like, “Whoa, she did it!”
CB: Right. So it’s on network television so she can’t use curse words, they were supposed to use a euphemism. And I think SNL can actually get fined lots and lots of money when a performer does accidentally slip up, especially because it’s done live and it can’t be edited out. So here’s her chart on the inner wheel with her transits on the outside. What’s the key thing that we’re looking at? Or just describe it for the audio people.
SG: Let’s see. Well, Mars on the Ascendant, right on the Ascendant. And Cancer.
CB: Her Ascendant is at 16 degrees of Cancer and transiting Mars is at about 19 degrees, so it’s passing right over there. And it’s actually interesting because you can see the transiting Moon on the other side at 14 degrees of Capricorn. So there was a forming Moon-Mars opposition that night. She also has the North Node at 19 degrees of Cancer so Mars was exactly conjoining it.
SG: Yeah, and then the nodal opposition happening too on the South Node transiting her North Node and vice versa since the nodes are traveling in duos, too. That just feels a little bit like, “Whoops!” I don’t know, it just feels like a sort of time portal.
LC: Jupiter conjuncting her natal Venus at 17 degrees of Aquarius, a big oopsie.
JL: And then the eighth house.
LC: And also with Neptune out of orb but, you know, it’s hanging out nearby so a little bit of missing something.
SG: Yeah.
CB: It’s funny Mercury was retrograde at that time so there’s a Mercury retrograde element to it. And her natal Saturn’s at 20 Libra so transiting Mars was squaring that. If the transiting nodes are moving through her first and seventh house, that means she was having eclipses for an entire year and a half timeframe during that timeframe. So this must have been a huge break for her getting cast on SNL and being on it and having that sort of prominence during that timeframe. But eclipses can have, like we said earlier, that chaotic energy sometimes of major beginnings and major endings. And we see transiting Uranus for that matter was going right over her Midheaven.
JL: Yeah. Also, the Sun square Pluto on the Descendant, too. That zero degrees Capricorn, to me, is very institutional retribution-like reaction. And also just that, I don’t know.
SG: Uranus is up on her Midheaven too.
CB: So that’s really… Oh, go ahead.
SG: It feels like, and this is true assumption hour, but I’m wondering too because I think Uranus was in Pisces up on her Midheaven. I wonder if she was beating herself up more than maybe everyone else was, and maybe it’s like a headspace even that’s hard. I’m truly speculating. We’ll never know, unless… Danny, if you hear this, let us know what was happening on this.
LC: Think about rehearsing that scene over and over where you’re going like, “I get it, it’s supposed to be this. I get it, it’s supposed to be this. Don’t eff up. Don’t eff up. Don’t eff up. Don’t eff up.” And then it’s like the word is in the thing, it’s too much.
SG: Well, and it was Virgo-Mercury too retrograde, back to some Virgoness of the precision being a little undone in a retrograde time.
CB: That’s really good. So there can sometimes be singular pivotal moments in a comedian’s career for better or worse. And that could be a whole study in and of itself as just studying the transits of those moments in time in order to understand the broader context of when a person’s life changes or when something really important happens and what the nature of that was. And that, of course, makes me think of a year ago when one of the most notable things happened, which is when Will Smith at got up at the Oscars and slapped or almost punched Chris Rock for telling a joke, and then some of the things that have come out of that since that time. That’s another instance of something where you would want to study or it’s been studied and talked about a lot in terms of both Chris Rock’s chart as well as especially Will Smith’s chart.
SG: Look, Will Smith’s just not a comedy fan. [laughter] You know? We display that in various ways and he’s a little more Martian. I was gonna say Will Smith has also had a very long comedy career. Also wild that he went on to give a Best Actor-winning speech after it. All of that moment is just truly iconic.
CB: Yeah. Well, that was really wild because it was a good example. Because he was having extremely positive transits and extremely negative transits all at the same time, and that was a perfect example of that as somebody literally hitting the height of their career of something he’s been striving for for decades at that point; to win an Oscar and reach the highest point in his chosen career field as an actor, especially during dramatic roles, and in which he had made multiple shots at that in the past and those roles hadn’t been recognized. But then at the same time, to do something and to commit an action at the same time that kind of ruins it simultaneously, it was a really interesting study in terms of what that looks like to have simultaneously good transits and bad transits.
SG: Yeah, you just don’t see celebrities often lose it like that, too, so it felt very throwback to in early aughts when people didn’t feel as monitored or social media. It was almost like being transported just to a different era, even. Not to say that punching at the Oscars happened before, but that just felt something very un… Like, it was only them in this room, which I think also was so wild about the slap.
CB: Right. Well, it also brought up a lot of issues for comedians because it seemed like most of the comedians were outraged because it broke a line in comedy of ‘comedians want to be able to tell jokes and that you’re not allowed to assault somebody for a joke’. And then fears surrounding whether that would open the floodgates to other comedians getting assaulted. For example, whether a few months later somebody jumped up at a Dave Chappelle show and tried to attack him. And whether that was partially based on or had anything to do with the precedent being set with the Will Smith incident and everything else.
LC: I think that we talk about the fourth wall in performance and not just in comedy and drama, and I think everyone present at the Oscars knows that that exists. It’s an invisible barrier that we’ve all agreed is there, and maybe that’s very Neptunian or something but crossing that feels like a intentional thing. I know I recently performed at a comedy club that had the wands, the metal detector wands, and it was going through everybody. It’s a large club and it made me feel so much safer. And I never knew that that was something I wanted or cared about, but it’s just so interesting with the way things violence these days. [chuckles] So, you know, they are making changes in order to protect performers.
SG: I just say tell better jokes. [chuckles] You know, you might not get some hands if… I’m joking.
JL: I think they’re also in the… Well, in the Oscars specifically, I think it’s a little bit different than in an audience where there is a different kind of power dynamic between performer and audience. And whereas at the Oscars, I think everyone is kind of appear in a way– and not to say that anyone is right to do that.
SG: Yeah, it’s like a work event. [laughs]
JL: Yes. Yeah.
SG: It’s a very sober work event where you’re like, “Oh, my god, [laughs] this just went down.” And then also the context of Jada with hair loss, it was the perfect storm of… And then of course Jaden will have a very public, unique relationship. So it was just the perfect storm. And then the fact that Chris Rock just continued was also very speaking to the entertainment industry of like, “And don’t break. Don’t acknowledge something very wild that just actually happened to you.” And now they have crisis teams. They did also change how the Oscars works now. I don’t know what the crisis team does, I guess they wear a jacket to say, “If something like that happens again, we’ll do something.” Because no one did anything and I think that was the other very strange part of the whole ordeal.
JL: Well, it’s surreal. I mean, you don’t know too. Like, was this planned? Is this part of the bid? And I think everyone was like, “Wait, what is happening?” [laughs] But I think that like Lisa said, too, it’s good that they’re taking safety precautions for people because that just is a reality of the world that we live in now where it seems like more danger in public spaces, not necessarily just for comedians, but for anybody. And to be aware of each other’s fragility as humans all of our mental and physical well-being and wanting to protect that I think is a net positive. I don’t think that everyone is going to be Chris Rock getting slapped. But I also think that to say that there isn’t also increased response to people’s words is also not true.
SG: And a fun fact, I don’t know if it’s fun at all, but the Oscars because of COVID, that was the first time ever they had an Aries season. It’s normally in Pisces and Aquarius season. They can flip-flop in early February, but it was later. I don’t think we can pull it up but I know it was
JL: March 27th.
SG: Yeah, it was in primetime Aries season. So that’s also kind of unique if we get into the Aries stereotypes of back to Mars. Yeah.
JL: And I know we don’t know Chris Rock’s chart, but he did have Mars conjunct his Sun in the chart that we do have for him on on the Oscars day.
CB: Let me see if I can pull it up.
SG: The stars are saying, Chris, brace thyself. [laughs]
JL: Well, and then he did his live event almost like a year exactly after. And I think that that’s an interesting response to another live event. Their having a live performance of comedy is kind of like taking back your power, so to speak, or showing your prowess as a live performer both in that instance when you had to handle something you weren’t expecting and also going, “Here’s how good I am when I am trying to perform.”
LC: Imagine an Aries at the end of that live performance and the way he spikes that microphone. [laughter]
CB: Yeah. And there was so much buildup because everybody wanted to know… Everyone knew Chris Rock would eventually address this in his standup and everyone wanted to know what he was going to say. And he was quiet for many months and he didn’t say anything publicly, so there was so much anticipation built up to that special when they finally live-streamed it just like a month ago or in the past month. And then yeah, at the very end he has five or 10 minutes where he talked about the Will Smith thing finally.
SG: Yeah, I think all we knew right away was that they weren’t gonna get into lawsuit mode. He was like, “It’s fine.” Like I say, air quotes it’s fine. And then the buildup of hello, Chris Rock’s chart.
CB: Yeah, so it’s again not for sure, but this is the best we think it is. We think it’s February 7th 1965. I’m not sure if this time is where this comes from, I don’t remember offhand, but this may roughly be the chart. And it’s interesting one of the things I was thinking about when he did that special is it was right about the time Saturn was about to go into Pisces or did go into Pisces and he had just began his second Saturn return right now.
JL: Yeah. There also was a- I want to say Mercury was in Pisces as well. Hang on, what’s my note about this? Oh, yeah, Mercury was in Pisces when he recorded the transiting Mercury and it was opposite his Uranus-Pluto conjunction, I want to say. And one of the things that he noted about that is that he flubbed a punch line. And I just think Mercury in Pisces whereas not as strong, he has natal Mercury in Aquarius as we’ve noted for several comedians. Which is, you know, Mercury is exalted there and it’s very strong and he’s very deliberate with his words and really establishes his premises and will often repeat himself which I think is very Mercury in Aquarius, that’s fixed like, “This is the idea we keep coming back to, I’m going to say it over and over and over again so you know what I’m talking about,” and kind of variations on that theme. But then having that Mercury and Pisces transiting, having it be a little bit more loosey-goosey not for the whole special obviously, but when the emotion kind of kicks in and when he’s dealing with this subject matter that’s a little bit more, you know, that we’re all waiting for.
CB: Yeah, that was tough that he flubs his main joke at the very end of the set. I felt really bad for him.
JL: But then that, to me, speaks to the Saturn return starting, too, of it being like coming back to performing and establishing himself again as a prolific performer. And also that being part of the live performance, that’s the risk that you run when you are proving yourself as a live performer that so many people are not doing in their standup for good reason. But having that and be like, “Yeah, that is something that can happen because it’s live and I’m showing you that this is happening in real-time, you know, warts and all.”
CB: That’s really interesting because that reminds me then Saturn was in Pisces in the mid-’90s. So his first Saturn return must have been him… Some of those specials in the ’90s that became so popular of his that really put him on the map must have happened around that time period.
LC: Mm-hmm. Totally.
CB: All right. All right, so we’re about two hours into this recording and I could keep talking. I could keep going on but I know you each have some time restrictions. [laughter] Is there anything we wanted to talk about or that we’ll be kicking ourselves that we didn’t mention or any example charts that you want to throw out really quickly?
SG: Right. I don’t know why, maybe it’s just because his name popped in and I feel like he’s legendary and now I’m just curious, but I think we might have lightly mentioned Richard Pryor. I feel like he also had a very wild life and story, but I don’t know if we want to dig into one more chart before we wrap it. I mean, we’ll just have to come back and chat comedy some more because there’s just so much juicy stuff to dig into.
JL: I think he does have a good example chart of all of the signatures that we’ve been talking about, which is the tension of the opposition but also these tight conjunctions of planets including Mercury-Uranus and Venus-Mars.
SG: I was gonna say, do we have a thesis we’re studying?
CB: Yeah, I can bring it up if we have specific things that we want to say about it. Here it is.
SG: I’m just curious if there’s any throughline from a lot of the stuff that we’ve talked about. Of course, there is.
JL: Yeah, absolutely.
SG: Just with like Mercury. I think this Mercury in Scorpio with Mars and Venus, especially Richard Pryor, I mean, where’d he grow up? Correct me if I’m wrong, too. Mom was a sex worker, grew up in a prostitution house, lit himself on fire, beat his drug addiction. But also I feel like yeah, been through the depths, but then also can bring it back in this funny way somehow. Like, things that would probably destroy the average person but can turn this into this very lovable jokester, right? I think I saw some like Taurus placements too if we can pull it back up.
JL: I would say he’s also largely responsible for– someone might disagree with this but I would say that comedy material as personal material. Personalizing talking about yourself and your life and your upbringing as your subject matter, I think, is something that he really innovated that people weren’t doing before. And while even someone who would, I would say another kind of greats in the conversation like George Carlin is still talking about ideas and social structures and these kind of big picture things, I think Richard Pryor is really talking about his personal experience and I think that that Venus-Mars conjunction opposite Jupiter-Saturn and that Scorpio that you talked about. Scorpio-Taurus of what’s nice versus what’s true and what’s beneath all of that is very Richard Pryor. He also has that Gemini-Virgo square. Not in the same personal planets there, but just in his chart for being a comedian-defining comedian.
LC: I think, too. The roast of Richard Pryor is one of– I see it playing in bars sometimes, you know? I think people love that. Talking about Scorpio energy and roasting earlier, he has Mercury in Scorpio. And I know Julia, you also share this placement. It’s something that you’re very talented in doing, even though you’re not like always on a roast battle or whatever. When I have something I need to write if I need a roast joke, I’m coming to you! You have such a talent for that. And so I do think Mercury-Scorpio, definitely. And definitely in response to something, which I think roasting often is; at you and at me or whatever. And I think Scorpio is known for that kind of responsive. Especially in a Mercury position, I find that interesting.
SG: You know what’s wild to think about Scorpio especially with Scorpio-Mercury is roasting or dragging someone or hitting them where it hurts is going below the belt, but then also making that ‘below the belt’ not where you are like, “That was just too mean. That didn’t work.” You want to find what’s below the belt, which is very Scorpio with the genitals and blah blah, sexual sort of things. And then bringing it back into something that’s palatable too.
CB: There’s an invisible line of like you go low, but not too low.
SG: Yeah.
CB: It’s interesting you mentioned that because I had Jeff Ross’ chart, which we have a noon chart, we don’t have a birth time. But he has this Mars-Neptune conjunction in Scorpio and sometimes it seems like he’s successful in finding… Like, roasting is his thing and he had a podcast at one point about roasting as well as developing a formula that West Coast comedians used for doing roast battles that then started being emulated in the New York Comedy scene at one point. Finding that right balance between something low that is hitting a spot that’s true– because I think that’s part of it about a roast is that sometimes it’s hitting something that’s actually true and it’s getting to the bottom of something in a comedic way, but it’s also hitting that right note that’s not too low or is not too distasteful or what have you.
LC: It’s about knowing your opponent too, which I think is a very Scorpio way to approach a fight or any sort of thing.
CB: Totally. Doing your research.
JL: In a roast battle you have to be able to both attack and defend and have comebacks for knowing what someone else might say about you. And I think that that’s a very Scorpio introspective, knowing your own flaws and shadow self, and this is what someone else might use against me.
CB: Right. That’s great. So, knowing your own weaknesses just as much as you know the others and therefore also being able to sidestep or defend yourself if you know your weaknesses to some extent, versus not having that self-knowledge.
JL: And how well you’re able to maintain while being attacked in that way, too. When someone is saying the potentially most– not necessarily shameful because I think a lot of it again is personal appearance and that sort of thing– but can you hold your head high and not only endure those things, but also come back and say like, “I might be this, but you’re also this. At least I’m not that.”
LC: People lose roast battles for having a reaction. It happens and that’s definitely something. Trying to keep it even, that’s tough.
SG: I’m thinking of someone– this is just like a side tangent, again, maybe for another pod– but I’m thinking of someone like Jimmy Fallon who always breaks. Scorpio is very opposite energy. And God, if he has tons of Scorpio placements then we can talk. But I’m just thinking if that would not work well for a rose. You gotta not break every time someone says something about you. Even though that’s totally his style. He’s like, “Hehe, he broke.” He’s so endearing and is always laughing at himself.
LC: I do think he’s a Scorpio-Moon so maybe it’s that.
CB: And the opposite is like the blank expression of the Sun in Capricorn like Anthony Jeselnik that doesn’t break at any point or has that just completely calm exterior even when completely dismantling someone?
JL: Yeah.
SG: Yeah. And then… Oh, God, now I’m just like on a Google hole of now I’m thinking about Sam Kinison in terms of such opposite wild energy, and then I’m seeing a Capricorn-Moon yet again and Scorpio-Mercury. Anyways.
JL: Punishing. Okay.
CB: So I think the final thing to wrap this up and just to leave people with some questions is one of the things that’s really interesting that astrology might provide an interesting access point also is just, why do some comedians sometimes become more eminent than others? Or why do some comedians become legendary? And what does it mean to have on the one hand, let’s say, financial success as a comedian versus what does it mean or what does it look like astrologically to have success amongst comedians within your field and to be respected as a comedian, as part of the craft, as opposed to let’s say, as opposed to notoriety or financial success or what have you? As well as the distinction that we’ve kind of gotten at a little bit here in some occasions of, you know, why [do] some comedians peak earlier than others and at young ages or at middle ages or eventually, sometimes very late ages? And when does that happen in terms of the timing and seeing that the astrology also can potentially speak to that through things like the transits or other timing techniques? There’s a lot of interesting stuff there. I know me and Catherine Urban in the episode on the Secondary Progressed Lunation Cycle did a whole discussion where one of the charts we talked about was Dave Chappelle and the different eras in his career that seemed to match very well like the secondary progressed lunation cycle. So, that could be a whole separate topic at some point is we could get more into the actual timing of some of this, and that might be interesting for another episode.
SG: Yeah, there’s definitely some undoings that have come about in comedy.
JL: Well, I think it’s just like anything. I think that there’s your intention when you start out as a comedian for what you want to do and how that lines up with timing and how that lines up with your life experience and the choices that you make. And then there’s also people that will never be discovered the same way that there are people in other fields that will never be discovered in that same way. Not never, but because it also is like a, I don’t know, a rare and small field as much as there’s a long lineage of these people. I mean, how many people get to achieve the biggest success? There’s not that many people that achieved those heights, too. And what is that for anybody? It always is an intersection of hard work, experience, timing, luck. All of these things. I think the study of astrology in and of itself is that you can see things that are clear. When you look at someone’s chart, you go, “Oh, that makes total sense.” But we only know that with hindsight. And with these things combined and all that, there isn’t a way to necessarily predict who’s going to be a comedian’s comedian. Who’s going to be the next big huge star? Because we don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world and there’s so many other people like television executives and casting and these sorts of things that come to a thing. I don’t know, it’s the magic of it, too.
LC: I think, too. It can… Go ahead.
CB: There might be some way, though, in which with some of these comedians, we’ve seen how there has been some parts of their chart especially with the houses or certain aspects that have shown things that have given them a leg up in the field or that they’ve been able to utilize in their career, whether it’s through relationships or through leveraging technology or having a friend that helped them out, having a parent that was already in the industry, through a sibling and something like that. It’s like there’s so many different things that sometimes are described in the chart where if somebody came in to see you who would later be a famous comedian like Jerry Seinfeld or something, you might see some indications, especially some of the ancient techniques or eminence. But even beyond that, you might see that a friend or a business partner will be really important to you in the shaping of your career. And that could be accurately describing the fact that he would later partner up with a friend in order to create his most famous television show.
JL: Oh, yeah.
LC: There’s people we can even just study singularly their chart to see. Someone like Bobcat Goldthwait who I think has embodied both things, who has had meteoric stardom and also is known as a comedian’s comedian. And I feel like comics are able to get a hold of him or get him on shows. He’s very generous and I do feel like he’s one of the people that people come into the room to watch. Maybe not necessarily young audience members who’ve never been to a comedy show before, but the comics are gonna come in and watch him. You know? And so I think there is the opportunity for both. I haven’t studied, obviously, all of the transits in his natal chart but that’s just an interesting look.
SG: I think another one too that comes to mind is Marc Maron who is definitely a dude’s dude but also was, in his own words, a loser in terms of seeing all of his friends rise to stardom. And then What The Fuck with Marc Maron was the turning point for him to have that experience in the comedy world. And maybe he didn’t achieve the comedy success, but then have it through living a comedian’s life and having access to these people and all that stuff. So I think everyone’s journey and path how they get there is so unique and I’m glad you brought up nepo babies, Chris, because that is definitely part of some people’s story.
CB: Right. I was thinking of Pauly Shore being the son of Mitzi Shore who runs The Comedy Store and therefore, he kind of had a leg up in terms of having a family connection, and then eventually being able to use that to have a successful career for a little bit in movies or as a movie star. And then there’s other people who were very promising rising stars but whose lives were cut tragically short, like Chris Farley, for example.
JL: I think it’s just like there’s something in everyone’s… There is something you can use in your chart. And it doesn’t necessarily guarantee a meteoric rise, but we’re not all, I don’t know, everyone’s different. And if you are open to following something that you like doing– and I think comedy, if we haven’t established, it’s grueling. And you have to do it a lot and it’s the thing that takes time to get good at. And I think even people that maybe have a meteoric rise early on still have to continue to get good. And where do you go from there? I think it’s not done. It doesn’t end there. Even if you’re successful now, you are navigating that– like we’ve said with some of these examples– in front of everybody with an expectation that maybe you don’t have if you weren’t there. But I think that there’s a bunch of different ways to get there and there’s a bunch of different forms that comedy and success can take. And if you are kind of aware of what’s available in your chart and are true to what’s there in your experience, I think that is something that’s universally successful for people. Again, you might hit some walls on the way there with timing. But when you are honest and using what you have, your life experience, that’s where comedy comes from. It’s from your point of view, from your experience, from your tension within your chart, and being aware of how you might be able to leverage that with things like technology or something too. You don’t always have to take a traditional path, and looking to your chart for ways that you might be able to deviate and leverage that I think is cool.
CB: Yeah. Maybe that’s something that can be really useful for comedians using astrology is using it to find your strengths and weaknesses. And it almost seems like through all these charts we’ve looked at that there’s something about the process of living authentically and finding yourself during the course of your life and your journey through comedy. And to the extent that astrology can help or can complement that, it might be a useful tool.
JL: It is that thing of astrology too where it’s like, even though we can all have generational planets that are the same, you never see the same chart for someone. And so really, your only job is to live authentically and to be yourself. And I think that that’s like true for no matter what you’re doing, the more you can kind of find and be yourself, at least the happier you will be, hopefully.
SG: I think, too, at least what I’ve taken away from what we’ve been talking about is coming in, I’m thinking Mercury, right? How we’re communicating, how we’re processing. And then some mention of Venus with the things that we care about, and those feel just very intrinsic to us. But what’s now got me really excited and I think if you’re a performer or someone that’s trying to create art or be seen on a more visible level, I think where your energy is best served with Mars has been a really fascinating point that keeps coming up in our conversation. Where you’re leaving your mark with Pluto feels very, very, on the nose with a lot of these prominent Pluto placements. And then I think Uranus where you’re willing to go there. Like, where can you surprise yourself? And I think you’ll always have how you speak– which some people can put on a voice or change things so it also can be fluid and flexible– but I think there are other signatures in these charts that were a little more… I was a little more surprised by how much Mars, Pluto, Uranus was coming up as we were discussing. I think those, typically in charts, people get afraid of those planets. It’s like, “Uuh.” I’m thinking just very pop astrology sensibilities like, “Mars, I don’t know, am I gonna get cut?” Or like, “Uranus, it’s gonna fuck up my life and Pluto is death.” But it’s also like you’re making a statement, you’re marked in history. Even going back to George Carlin’s stuff of changing laws, that’s huge. So I think being open to the scary parts is very comedy as well, you know, the tragedy of life. And if you are in that lull or dull time, we’ve all been there. That sucks. It’s material, babe.
JL: It’s all material, baby.
CB: Yeah, it seems like we found a way throughout the course of this which was actually really interesting. I’m glad we had this journey where almost every planet played a role in comedy in some way or what it contributed looking at each comedian’s charts. You know, the Ascendant to one’s appearance and physical mannerisms, to Mercury in their communication style, to Venus and maybe their aesthetic sensibilities, to Mars and their ability to assert themselves but also sometimes to go against the grain or just say the thing that might be caustic. What else, too?
SG: I was gonna say Jupiter was probably our least talked about planet overall.
CB: Which is funny because you would think that… I think that was maybe an oversight on our part but there’s probably something we were just not picking up there.
JL: I don’t know. I think that there’s a misconception because I think Jupiter is that… I don’t know, Jupiter feels more beloved to me. And I think that comedy, there’s a misconception of while you’re making people laugh, again you’re saying things that are potentially controversial or potentially mean or things that people don’t necessarily want to hear. And I think that that Jupiter benefic expansive sort of thing is– I don’t want to say a detriment to comedy, but it’s almost the highest position sort of thing. And I think comedy is about taking the not necessarily the underdog position, but it’s you against other people. And I think Jupiter maybe is coming in in an inflated sense of self or purpose or success financially and success commercially. But-
SG: Save it for the politicians, you know what I mean? [laughs]
JL: Yeah, I think it is that. I don’t know.
LC: I think with Jupiter, what you’re talking about being in the highest position is that punching down is never really fun. So we’re trying to figure out a way to put ourselves, even if we are in a high position, to show ourselves in this way where we’re not punching down.
CB: Yeah. Well, there’s also different types of comedy in terms of some comedy might be done more at the detriment of somebody else, but then there’s other types of comedy that might not be done at the detriment of somebody else. It just makes me think, recently I just thought that Adam Sandler was given the Mark Twain award for comedy or something like that. And I know he has Jupiter in Cancer in the sign of its exaltation and there might be something relevant there in terms of his style of comedy or what have you.
JL: Or maybe big-budget movies and large successes like a comedic performer, but not necessarily like standup. And that doesn’t matter, it’s not necessarily what he wants to do. Even though he’s returned to it and has had these moments of it and I think is a good standup but he’s beloved in this way that, I want to say, loses a little bit of an edge. I don’t know.
CB: He’s really stuffed. He had some audio recordings I used to listen to in middle school that were really funny way back in the day.
JL: Piece of Shit Car and We’re All Going to Hell is-
LC: Longest Pee, anyone? [Stevie laughs]
JL: Yeah, absolutely hysterical. I absolutely love it.
SG: I love Adam Sandler. But when you said… I only bring up Jupiter just because I think Jupiter of course is going to play a part, but it just wasn’t naturally organically at the top of our combos. But you mentioned Chris Farley and I was thinking who’s more Jupiterian than Chris Farley? And of course he’s got Jupiter-Aries conjunct his Midheaven and I think the other thing we hear a lot in comedy is those who end up overdoing and going really big and wanting to be liked and wanting to say yes to everything, that can sometimes take a tragic turn a lot of the times where it’s a lot of that “Say yes, Jupiter. Go big or go home.”
LC: He’s so big and so seen, too. And I think with Sandler’s Jupiter in Cancer, we see him creating this film family. This family of people that you see in all of his movies that is a whole thing. Its his own individual thing.
CB: Yeah. And that’s one thing they say about him in his filmography over the past 10 or 15 years. While it’s not regarded as being the best comedy, he’s just getting together his friends to go away on a vacation and do a movie. And then they make a bunch of money from it and it’s great. So while it might not be the height of whatever comedian’s comedian’s comedy, it’s sort of an excuse for him and he’s enjoying his life and is being successful in that. So, it’s what success actually is that’s actually an interesting point that’s going to be different for different people throughout the field.
SG: Yeah. Well, and the authenticity of coming back to Dane Cook getting that sellout vibe and being a comedian’s comedian. I think everybody loves the Sandman, you know? Adam Sandler is just a beloved guy and it’s because he… Yeah, I think you can feel that in his movies no matter how… Like, comedy should be dumb. We’re here to be a bit dumb. We’re here to turn our brains off a little bit.
CB: Right. Or to have sometimes wacky or zany humour like Conan O’Brien, for example, and what his show was like in the ’90s and how different that was compared to earlier shows like Johnny Carson or something like that, and the types of skits that they would do. That brings us also into that realm of Uranus, but also of timing and stuff. That was a really good example of somebody who kind of got screwed, you know? Because he got The Tonight Show, he finally achieved this dream of his to get The Tonight Show. But then in less than a year, it was ripped away from him and he lost it and had to come back from that. And it’s been interesting seeing him complete his second Saturn return over the past few years, which has been him… He launched a successful podcast several years ago but I think he sold it for millions of dollars or something like that in the past year or two. So this was truly him sort of coming back from that and redefining himself in that space.
SG: Yeah. Well, and he has such a… I love Conan, but what a classic? Went to Harvard, part of the boys club… He had that very ‘if you do this path, you’re gonna get a role on The Simpsons.’ Like, you’re gonna have this very… I’m not discrediting the work he’d done and that Late Night stuff was very messed up with how that all went down with Jay Leno being like, [imitates Leno] “Actually…” No. That was a pretty good Jay Leno impression I just did, actually. [laughter] That kind of came through. That came through. But yeah, I don’t want to discredit it but I think that’s another part of when we get into nepo babies, the very obvious White dude route of comedy that can come up with Harvard and whatnot.
CB: Yeah, he was working as a comedy writer in The Simpsons and then his first Saturn return is interesting because of how random it was that he ended up getting the Late Night show and how tenuous it was at first and how criticized he was early on.
JL: Well, and what you’re able to do when you are an underdog given a position, kind of. But not by chance, because obviously you’ve been working and you’re a capable comedian in your own right, but not necessarily on track to inherit this thing and how the risks you can take there are different than someone who was given a ready-made Late Night spot and the conventions that you have to contain to. And then how that then gives your own style and people are rooting for you because you do these kinds of innovative things. But then if you want to pivot and the changes that you have to make to make that late night and then those timing things, too. But nothing’s in a vacuum and it all lends its own thing to each other and creates good comedy.
LC: I think that can transition us towards Saturn, too. Because with him having his Saturn return now, and he’s definitely a comic who does ‘Conan O’Brien presents’. He uplifts other comics and I find that a very second Saturn return type of energy. But also, I could see with having what happened to him in Late Night, he could have really gone the other way of like, “It’s doggy dog, fend for yourself.” But no, he’s chosen to uplift other people. And I know from people who’ve worked for him that there’s zero turnover at Conan, or it was, or whatever. They’re there forever, they want to work for him, he’s a great boss, he treats you well. So that passing along the torch thing is interesting in that second Saturn return.
SG: One of the few Late Night tapings I’ve seen too was Conan and I was shocked how he was acting like it was the first. The pep, the energy, the excitement, being friendly with the audience… I was just like, “You’ve been doing this for so long. You do not have to be… Most of these people are this nice and this excited to be here.” So yeah, Conan has a– I don’t mean this in that lovable loserness, which is also a kind of archetype in comedy as well, right? I mean, start talking about self-deprecating. He’s always like, “I’m disgusting.” [laughs] It’s like, “Aww. Oh, Conan.”
CB: He has that early Virgo rising with Uranus, which is the unconventional or the zaniness conjunct the Ascendant, but also Pluto there on the Ascendant, which can be very intensely introspective and aware of one’s faults. But it’s interesting mentioning his relationship with employees and stuff, because he has the Moon and Saturn in Aquarius in the sixth house in a day chart. And yeah, that was one of the things about the sixth house as traditionally the place of employees. And when he lost the Tonight Show, one of the things that he did was to go on a tour immediately afterwards. And part of his motivation for that was not just that he wanted to do that, but because it wasn’t just him that was fired, but his entire crew which had been set up with the Tonight Show also just lost their jobs so he was concerned to keep everyone employed. So that sixth house placement and having the Moon there was just a nurturing significator and having actually a concern for one’s employees or what have you.
JL: We’re seeing that Pluto on the Ascendant too and it being not necessarily the self-undoing, but that zany quirkiness that makes you beloved is also maybe a reason why outside forces would go like, “Oh, actually, we’re gonna stick with this guy that we know works. We don’t want this cook coming in and whatever.” You got to stay true to you. Because we don’t want Conan straight, that’s not Conan. That’s also not why we love him and why we all wanted him to take over that spot. And it’s like, you’re gonna give up that for this other thing and be someone else? You can’t.
SG: I think that Aquarius-Moon with Saturn, too. I think we hear so much with Aquarius energy especially in the Moon spaces. This cold kind of detached or whatever, but then there’s also that reminder of Aquarius and community and being the example. And I think it’s so easy– going back to Dane Cook. Sorry, Dane. I don’t know, we can talk. Come here and defend yourself. But I think, too, to have that not selling out and not cashing in. Because a lot of people do sign away, and this may be on a different note, but with like music. Like the rights to what they own, or who they are, or those sorts of things. And it seems like he really stuck with himself and what he felt was right. That’s not always the easiest thing to do and most people don’t do that.
CB: For sure. Go ahead, Lisa.
LC: Oh, I was just gonna say I thought I saw some Capricorn stuff of Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop. I don’t know. That was all I had.
SG: Sustainable king.
LC: Oh, it’s Virgo stuff that I was looking at. So, Can’t Stop, Capricorn North Node at 24 degrees, Can’t Stop.
SG: I think that Leo-Mars in the 12th, too, is very coming back to that self-deprecating. Cause you think of Leo-Mars as like there’s such a confidence in his deprecation as well. You don’t feel like… I know he’s being real about this but it’s also like, “Come on, Conan. You’re clearly loved, but go off King.”
CB: I like also his Venus. It’s very well placed. It’s exalted in Pisces in the seventh house and he actually met his wife while doing a skit where he went to an ad agency and got them to make an ad for a mattress store or something like that. And one of the women working there that was a writer, he met and they hit it off. And then later, they’ve been married now for 20 years or something like that. So it’s interesting seeing things like that of different areas where even comedians have success or failure or different things that happen sometimes showing up in the chart, or areas of ease and difficulty and things like that. But a lot of it has to do with sometimes just chance and fate and circumstance and sometimes being in the right place at the right time.
JL: Well, again, that’s being true to who you are. You’re someone who has a quote-unquote “successful relationship” with someone who met someone and hit it off and that. And I think that that can be where some of that confidence comes from, too, where it’s like yeah, you can be self-deprecating because you know that you have someone who loves you or whatever, and not trying to fight that and using that as a strength. Being yourself, I mean.
LC: And while it is a solo art, you need the people, you know? You need back to butts and seats, you don’t want to be doing stand up to an empty room.
CB: Right. Yeah. [crosstalk] [laughter] Also, that’s actually a really good example that can be our final point. But because he has Uranus and Pluto on the degree of the Ascendant, I’ve noticed sometimes people that have outer planets on an angle or very closely aligned with personal points in the chart, sometimes that generational influence or significations of the outer planets can mean that the person somehow represents generations of people, or it can be tied in with generational differences in generational shifts. And that was one of the differences between Conan primarily becoming successful with college-aged kids in the 1990s and forward, and that generation of people continuing to be his fan base. As opposed to the older generation that didn’t really get his comedy and that was one of the reasons he struggled later with things like the Tonight Show with that first year of ratings, where he was trying to then jump up to speaking to the older generation when his base had always been younger people. That might be another interesting thing to explore at some point, which is just generational differences and different comedians that come to stand out in terms of different generations of people.
JL: Absolutely.
SG: Aries are cool, you know? That’s also been a dividing line we’ve seen. Some people are cool, and then some people are more for the establishment, whether that is a wider audience or something more digestible or what have you. And, yeah. Even though Conan will be like, “I’m cool?” It’s like, “Yeah. Yeah, you’re cool.”
LC: I think talking about those generational and the rest of the planets out to Pluto generationally, I think we see obviously with culture, we’ve seen a rise of female comedians alongside the #MeToo movement and talking about sexual assault and all of those kinds of things in the news, but also in the comedy sphere. And so I do think there’s a reflection of those things both ways. Obviously, it can get down to individual houses and signs and all of those things but I do think there is a cultural shift that happens with comedy.
JL: Absolutely.
CB: For sure.
JL: And now that we’re recognizing that we need more and that diversity is lacking in all areas of culture, why would comedy be different? And now that we’re encouraging that to see what comes of that is exciting to be a part of.
CB: Yeah, and one of the things on that note is that astrologers, based on their interests and their own background, tend to seek out the birth charts and the birth times of people that they follow. And there’s a lot of shifts, like we said earlier in this episode. of having only certain demographics represented. And I think as astrologers now of younger generations that have different interests in people, it would be great if astrologers these days went out of their way to ask some of their famous and favorite comedians what is their birth time, so that we can have a more representative cross-section of people when we’re able to look at charts and stuff like this since so many of the charts that we have right now tend to be from previous generations where it was more male-dominated. But that’s something I’m excited about and a lot of the charts that each of you contributed today really showed a much better representation, but I hope that’s something that continues to improve as we move into the future.
SG: I think that’s a good point to say because to lean into plugs, at the end of when we have guests episodes on What’s Your Sign we always play Marry, Fuck, Kill. If you don’t know, it’s a game where you play with three celebrities. One you’ll marry, one you’ll kill, one you’ll fuck. We’re a comedy podcast, have a sense of humor. It’s okay, no one’s actually dying or getting fucked or getting married. But that’s something we’ve come across, too. It’s like, “Wow, there’s a lot of White dudes who we have their time! This is just so disproportional of a celebrity we can play with or what have you.” So yeah, just echoing that, too. And if you want to hear who Chris M, F, or Killed, definitely listen to that. [laughter] Definitely listen to his episode, he played with us.
CB: I was very sweating and nervous about getting canceled when we played that game. [laughter] But an interesting point about that with the data selection that’s weird is when I was thinking about that and when we were reading through our lists of times that we had and looking through Astro Databank and wondering– because one of the things is while we mainly have male comedian birth data at this point that was collected by data collectors over the past several decades, in astrology still for the past couple decades, most of the practitioners of astrology have been women. So it’s actually been interesting that even the data collectors have been women, so it’s been interesting seeing that even with the field of astrology being dominated by women, sometimes maybe their collection tendencies have been towards male comedians. Or maybe it’s just because the field of comedians has been so dominated by men up until relatively recently, and thinking what the cause of that is or how to balance that.
JL: Well, I think it’s remembering that we are actively taking a role in creating astrology and the data that we have. And I think a lot of times it can feel like because it is an ancient tool that has these established things and we must just have this database that exists that we refer to or whatever, but it’s also like we get to keep making that and storing that and feeling like we are taking an active role and that we have a part to play. That’s not necessarily something that I always think of for myself, but this is a good reminder to go like, “Yeah, if you get someone’s birth time, let’s put that there so people can see it!” Because I think this is a problem of culture in general, where it’s like we can only learn from what we have to learn from. And if we want more diversity and more examples and greater things so people can know that those people exist and that there are references, then we get to also help create that.
LC: Ask in every green room. [Stevie laughs] I know that there are people in comedy spaces too who love astrology and probably a tonne of them are listening. I know I recently did a show at a club here in LA and one of the people that was a photographer there was wearing a full Zodiac outfit. And I was like, “Oh, look, here’s a friend.” It’s always nice to see it when it’s not… You know, I’m not going into every comedy club being like, “Do you guys like astrology?” [laughs] It’s cool when it shows up for you.
SG: Oh, yeah. If you Google astrology jokes, let’s just say it ain’t good out there. [laughs] It’s not very good out there. It’s very rarely pro-astrology, let’s just say that. But yeah, if you got a famous cousin, get that birth time, plug it in. If you’re listening, DM your favorite celebrity that doesn’t have a birth time right now and maybe they’ll respond. You never know.
CB: Yeah, I like that because that’s part of an empirical tradition that astrologers have been doing for over 4000 years now. It’s just observing the correlations between people’s birth charts and what happens in their lives. And that’s how we learn and grow as astrologers and this has been a really interesting exploration of that today in a probably really underresearched area. So yeah, thank you all for joining me today. This has been amazing. Where can people find out more information, or tell me a bit more about your podcast and where people can find it and how frequently you do episodes and stuff like that.
SG: Totally. Well, we are What’s Your Sign?, and astrology podcast for lovers and haters. Yes, we welcome skeptics. We have new episodes every Monday, you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. We are also on YouTube, so you can watch video episodes as well. @whatsyoursignpodcast in most social media platforms besides Twitter. It’s really besides Twitter because they have weird character limits and that’s just something that really should-
JL: I mean, let’s not even open the can of worms that is Twitter [laughter] and it’s tenuous existence as of now.
LC: If you like comedy and you want to come see standup, Chatterbox Comedy Night is every Sunday at 8:00 o’clock and it’s at the Chatterbox in Covina, maybe potentially growing to other locations soon as well.
JL: Yeah. But if you want to see– not necessarily comedians we discussed because most of the comedians we discussed are dead– but your new favorites and some of the best people that are working today, I think that we have truly some of the best lineups that you don’t see anywhere else and we really pride ourselves on that. And it’s a fun show, we’ve been doing it for over 10 years. And, yeah.
SG: The Chatterbox rocks, it’s a fun time too. So if you’ve been feeling stuck home in your astrology books, come on out, hang out. And I should say too for What’s Your Sign, episodes typically will be about maybe current transits that are happening. Sometimes it’s more general topics on say, just the Moon as a concept. We’ll have guests on in both the astrology realm and comedy realm, Chris was a past guest. And yeah, we have a little fun over there. Come hang.
CB: Well, awesome.
SG: And we were just talking, because we were all hanging out last night, we were just talking like “2018 needs to be…” because that was the year we launched and I felt like that was such an astro renaissance and we were talking of friends of like… I think we’ll see the waves of astrology being “popular”. But yeah, we definitely launched during a boom time whether we knew it or not.
CB: Yeah, that was literally when astrology just started getting really popular, I think slightly before that or just slightly after that. Because right around that time, a bunch of articles started coming out in the media. The media was like, why is astrology getting so popular?
SG: It’s like, “We’re lost, we don’t know what else to do. [laughter] Help us, God.”
JL: Because it rules, that’s why.
SG: Yes, that too. And it builds community and I think too, “Oh, this is what I’ll plug.” Also if you end up loving us, which I know you will, we also have a Patreon at patreon.com/whatsyoursignpodcast. We have a Discord community, we have monthly bonus episodes for the New Moon and Full Moon. Also, if we have live events which we’ve had in LA and we’re based in Los Angeles, we’ll hit you up and let you know things. But I think what we’ve learned, which I don’t think we knew we were gonna learn from starting the podcast, was you learn a lot by kind of what we did today. It’s just like, “How does that Capricorn Moon feel? How does it feel being a Taurus rising? Just sharing lived experience, which I think that kind of folkloric verbal sharing stories sort of way is a great way to learn astrology, of course, you know? There’s the books and you should know what the planets and houses and aspects and all that, but I think also just sharing your life is a great learning tool for astrology too.
CB: Yeah, and sitting around with friends and just talking astrology. And I think that’s the thing the three of you are able to recreate the best. You know what that’s like to have other close friends that are into astrology that you can just chat about stuff with. So yeah, I think people should definitely check out your podcast. I’ll put a link to your website in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website in the entry for this episode. But yeah, I think that’s it. So thanks a lot for joining me.
EVERYONE: Thank you so much.
JL: This was so fun.
CB: All right. Thanks, everyone for watching or listening to this episode of the Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
SG: Bye.
CB: A special thanks to all the patrons that helped to support the production of this episode of the podcast through our page on patreon.com. In particular, a shoutout to the patrons on our Producers tier, including Thomas Miller, Catherine Conroy, Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandi Rae, Angelic Nambo, Issa Sabah, Jake Otero, Mimi Stargazer, and Jeanne Marie Kaplan. If you appreciate the work I’m doing here on the podcast and you’d like to find a way to support it, then please consider becoming a patron through our page on patreon.com. In exchange, you can get access to bonus content that’s only available to patrons of the podcast, such as early access to new episodes, the ability to attend the live recording of the monthly forecast episodes, our monthly Auspicious Elections Podcast or another exclusive podcast series called The Casual Astrology Podcast, or you can even get your name listed in the credits at the end of each episode. For more information visit patreon.com/astrologypodcast.
If you’re looking to get an astrological consultation, we have a list of recommended astrologers at theastrologypodcast.com/consultations. The astrologers on the list are friends of the podcast that have been featured in different episodes over the years, and they have different specialties such as natal astrology, electional astrology, synastry, rectification, or horary astrology. You can get a 10% discount when you book a consultation with one of the astrologers on our list by using the promo code ASTROLOGYPODCAST.
The astrology software that we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows, which is available for the PC at Alabe.com. Use the promo code AP15 to get a 15% discount. For Mac users, we recommend a software program called Astro Gold for Mac OS, which is from the creators of Solar Fire for PC and it includes both modern and traditional techniques. You can find out more information at astrogold.io, and you can use the promo code ASTROPODCAST15 to get a 15% discount.
If you’d like to learn more about my approach to astrology, then I’d recommend checking out my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune where I go over the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, taking people from beginner up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. You can get a print copy of the book through Amazon or other online retailers, or there’s an ebook version available through Google Books.
If you’re really looking to expand your studies of astrology then I would recommend my Hellenistic astrology course, which is an online course on ancient astrology where I take people through basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There’s over 100 hours of video lectures as well as guided readings of ancient texts, and by the time you finish the course, you will have a strong foundation on how to read birth charts as well as make predictions. You can find out more information at courses.theastrologyschool.com.
And finally, thanks to our sponsors, including The Mountain Astrologer Magazine, which is a quarterly astrology magazine which you can read in print or online at mountainastrologer.com. Thanks also to the StarScribe astrology and journaling app, which is currently running a Kickstarter campaign through April 22nd, 2023 to fund an exciting new mobile app for astrologers. Find out more information at starscribe.co. Finally, thanks also to the Northwest Astrology Conference, which is happening May 25th through the 29th, 2023 just outside of Seattle. This year’s conference is going to be a hybrid conference where you can either attend online or in person. Find out more information at norwac.net.