Comedy’s Garfunkel Goes Solo With Songs About Middle-Aged Sex

Riki Lindhome spent her twenties and thirties as one half of the musical comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates. Now that she is solidly in her forties, the comedian is finally going solo with a debut album that tackles the unique challenges of being a “middle-aged” woman, as she put it.

In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Lindhome breaks down the process of turning real-life struggles into comedy songs and shares what it has been like to perform music for the first time without her longtime bandmate Kate Micucci. She also talks about the surreal experience of attending SNL50 as a “plus one” with husband Fred Armisen, the moment in her career where she had to choose between pursuing Saturday Night Live or sticking with Garfunkel and Oates, and how bizarre it was when the first movie she ever appeared in won the Oscar for Best Picture.

When Lindhome set out to write the songs for her album—No Worries if Not, out this Friday, April 4—she says she was “just trying to do an honest examination of my life,” asking herself “what’s funny to me now” after turning 46 this spring. While a lot of the songs she wrote with Micucci were about dating, now she’s a “married mom” who is focused more on fertility issues (“Infertile Princess”) and parenting fears (“Don’t Google Mommy.”)

The lead track on the album, “Middle Age Love,” is at least partly inspired by her relationship with Armisen, 58, who she started dating in 2020 when they were both filming the Netflix show Wednesday in Romania and then secretly married in 2022 just after she welcomed their son, who was born via surrogate.

It was around that time that Lindhome says she started feeling “middle-aged” herself. “All of a sudden, I had bursitis, I was in physical therapy for more than one thing,” she explains. “It was taking a long time to get over things, and I was like, this is kind of funny.” On top of that, she adds, every person she dated “had a whole list of things they could no longer do” in the bedroom. “We all had riders,” she says, referring to the “lists of non-negotiables” that artists typically request for their dressing rooms on tour.

The song, which includes lines like “Come closer baby, so I can hear you over the sound of my tinnitus” and “You can come inside me, it’s OK, I’m infertile,” is all about entering a time a life where you still “want to have sex” but there “asterisks everywhere,” as she puts it.

The themes have aged from her best-known work with Garfunkel and Oates, the name of which she just recently discovered was a joke on The Simpsons years before she and Micucci formed their group, a fact Lindhome chalks up to “parallel thought.” But her dedication to explicitly sexual lyrics sung with a sweet smile and poppy melody remains the same.

Fans still come up to Lindhome to tell her how much they love what has become Garfunkel and Oates’ most famous song, “The Loophole,” which describes a certain method for Catholic school girls to preserve their virginity in the eyes of the Lord while still having fun (“Since I’m not a godless whore, he’ll have to come in the back door”).

“That is the one that people come up to me about the most,” Lindhome says, revealing that even a priest once told her he thought it was “hilarious.”

Remarkably, they got “way more backlash” for a song called “Sports Go Sports,” which is simply about women who don’t enjoy watching athletic events. “People were very angry that we were making fun of sports,” Lindhome says, adding that it prompted “the most death threats” of any music video they put out.

It’s now been about four years since Garfunkel and Oates put out new music together—seven original songs for the Michelle Obama-produced Netflix children’s series Waffles + Mochi—but Lindhome says that despite going solo, they have not “broken up.”

“We never ended it,” she says, comparing the band to other comedy music groups like The Lonely Island or The Flight of the Conchords, who go do their separate projects and then come back together to collaborate from time to time. She decided to go it alone because she “missed performing” but readily admits that it’s “not as fun.”

“It’s fun to laugh with your friend and travel around,” she says. “There’s a slumber party vibe to it. It’s more. It’s more of a professional job now. But also, you have to grow on your own a lot faster. You have to really bring it every night, and you can’t rely on someone else having a good show while you sort of hang back, or vice versa. It’s just you. So it’s been a real growth experience. But I would say, not as fun.”

Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.