By Molly Claire Goddard
12:27am PDT, Oct 24, 2025
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If anyone knows what it's like to navigate the sometimes dangerous world of comedy, it's
Heather McDonald. In the wake of
Jimmy Kimmel's suspension from his late-night talk show over jokes he made about the assassination of
Charlie Kirk, the stand-up chatted exclusively with
Wonderwall.com about how to survive political comedy. She also dished on her new podcast, "
Juicy Crimes with Heather McDonald," and the longevity of her original "Juicy Scoop" podcast.
Keep reading for the highlights from our chat…MORE:
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After years appearing on Chelsea Lately and traveling the country for various stand-up gigs, Heather McDonald knows that things can get tricky when comedy becomes political. "There's no way you're going to please everybody," she says. "It's either you lean into your side and you gain those people and lose the people that don't [agree with you] — or you don't go political. You'll never win over everyone. There's people who can agree to disagree and there's people who just won't." Things are especially tricky when it comes to big TV shows: "When your product is coming from a big corporation, you are at risk of them not keeping you on the air," she says, referencing Jimmy Kimmel's recent Charlie Kirk scandal and adding that "people should always be concerned about censorship." That's why "it's very important that we don't get rid of TikTok and that X is less censored now," she notes.
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Heather McDonald is expanding her podcasting empire with her new "Juicy Crimes" show, a spinoff of her popular "Juicy Scoop" podcast. "I have someone come on who is an expert in the crime — whether they've done a long-form podcast themselves that someone then can go and binge or it's happened to them," she says. "It has to be juicy. Sometimes it can be gruesome, but the thing that always interests me is when somebody has a life that seems similar to yours in many ways — maybe they're married, have kids or whatever — but they just make the wrong decisions and now they're awaiting trial. Whether it's an affair that went bad or turned deadly, those are the kind of crimes I like to get into."
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Heather McDonald digs into numerous cases, but there's one that especially fascinates her: She'd love to get in touch with "anybody in the Betty Broderick world," she says of the mother of four who killed her ex-husband and his second wife in 1989. "I know that's an impossible get because she doesn't have any remorse and doesn't want to do interviews. But I'd love to interview any of [her] kids. To live as this normal child and having your life go off the rails to the point where multiple movies are being made and you're being portrayed… I don't think enough people think about how weird that is for someone." (Amanda Peet portrayed Broderick in a 2020 miniseries.)
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With a decade behind the mic on "Juicy Scoop," Heather McDonald has proved her staying power. "It's not for everybody. When you see who sticks around as long as I have, it's a certain kind of talent and person with a certain kind of skill set," she says. "It's comedians, it's journalists, it's storytellers — that's who finds success."
