Anyone who doubts Scott Aukerman’s funny chops should listen to the Doug Loves Movies from a week or two ago where he, Jimmy Pardo and Some Other Guy play. Scott’s pretty hilarious all the way through (an early joke about the unsatisfying end of Super 8 nearly caused me to crash) but it peaks when he tries to shame everyone into playing a second round of the Leonard Maltin Game by wagering everything.
I definitely agree with the second part. “Peaks” is putting it kindly, though. It gets downright embarrassing.
Also, um…Jimmy Pardo. Why? I could say a bunch of mean stuff but I’ll just jump to damage control:
Ignore his brain-dead dismissal of Margin Call. Please. I beg you. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.
-xtien
“Fuck normal people.”
Part of Pardo’s whole schtick is that he has terrible taste in pretty much everything. He has talked for hours about how much he loves the band Chicago, for example - and we’re not talking about first-couple-albums Chicago, we’re talking modern day Chicago.
Pardo is much funnier on Never Not Funny where he is the alpha dog.
Aukerman seems like a very nice guy and clearly has his fingers in a lot of pies but he is always going to be the straight man to me.
Aukerman is a much better facilitator of comedy than he is a practitioner.
I’m about 20-25 minutes into the newest CBB, and yikes, it’s lame. He’s taken more breaks than usual at this point in the show, I think because it’s just not going anywhere.
A quick roundup of the last couple of weeks in Comedy Podcasts for me.
The Good: The new Superego is amazing. Who wants to hear HR Geiger read his version of Twas the Night Before Christmas? Everybody? I know! But the bits with Patton Oswald hosting the Family Feud are packed with the insane, absurdist humor for which I really love Superego. Sublime.
The Bad: Goddammit Kevin Smith, sometimes just tell the story and shut the fuck up. You’ve actually got a really interesting story about a submarine stoker surviving a mine in WWII and instead you go off on a long tangent about him being raped by Greek goat herders. I get that you have a hard time rising above jokes about fucking. In that case, let Scott read the damn story. He’s the smart one anyway.
The Ugly: Anyone heard the two hour Doug Loves Movies from Austin? Most frustrating episode ever and Doug wasn’t even stoned. Well, not so stoned he couldn’t function. I’m rarely one of those people who flips because guests don’t know the rules, but the guests he was hosting, a gaggle of boorish and unlikeable DJs from the Austin area, were all so singularly stupid that even Doug started to get frustrated with their inability to comprehend what is a pretty simple goddam game. The two morning zoo douches? Ugh. The English chick that I can only assume is their afternoon drive time girl? Ugh. The only high point was the guy who sounded like a more ridiculous French Stewart and even he wasn’t regularly great.
Thank god it’s not just me. I actually recognize some of those people because Dudley and Bob were on the radio even back when I was living there, and they were just as excruciating then. Of course, my natural semi-old man inclination to hate anything that was even remotely popular with teenagers when I was one of them leads me to loathe 101X on general principles (also, every time I go back there and end up on that station, they invariably do something that I hate), so maybe whasserface I’ma say box a bunch just so you can see how British I roll was already behind the curve for me from the point that she admitted that she was from there.
She was definitely the queen of assuming that when a joke didn’t land it’s just because no one heard her say it.
Thanks for the warning about the Austin DLM. So far I haven’t even synced that one to my Ipod. TOTALLY agree about Superego - it’s one of their best.
I’m banking some podcasts for my 5-hour holiday drive to visit the folks, but I’ve started in on the CBB that was released yesterday. So far so good.
Superego struck gold with their DJ and the line, “Simply having a wonderful Christmastime. Impossible to do after listening to ‘Simply having a wonderful Christmastime.’”
Though he definitely gave me the best laugh of the episode when he kept coming back to the baby performing cunnilingus. Not worth listening to the whole episode for that though.
I have to say, between those bad Dallas episodes and all of the mini-car episodes which have run their course for me, less may be more on the DLM front.
Superego fans: Shunt, Mutt and the Journeyman have a Christmas song out. I’ll try to post a good link in a minute.
EDIT: This is a download link. You can also hear it on Facebook if you “like” Superego.
This just showed up on my phone today, so that’s a third way you can hear it.
Also, I’ve been really digging Jordan Jesse Go lately. Here’s what I like about maxfun: it’s a podcast network that Scott Aukerman isn’t around to shit up.
Well, I like Scott Aukerman and find Jesse Thorne to be a human tumor.
So I guess your primary pro-maxfun argument isn’t going to be much of a booster for me.
Jesse Thorn is an exceedingly divisive creature. I’m not sure why, because I don’t have any hate reflex and I hate almost everybody all the time, but I can’t begrudge anybody for not liking him. Maybe it’s because you can hear his voice smirking so hard that his head should split in half?
However, there are other podcasts on the network that are at least worth a single try. My Brother My Brother and Me features two people you’ve heard before on Joystiq podcasts (Griffin and Justin McElroy) and their somewhat less funny brother Travis doing a fake advice show with occasional input from Yahoo Answers, and you’ll only have to sit through an occasional promo for one of Jesse’s shows at the end.
Stop Podcasting Yourself is just super duper Canadian. It is the Canadianest thing that I have put into my body since I finished those Smoky Bacon potato chips that now I seriously want again. They’re the only one on the network my brother is still listening to.
The Sound of Young America isn’t really supposed to be funny. It’s just Jesse interviewing creatives.
You know what’s funny, but not ha-ha funny? I used to loathe Jesse Thorn for this exact reason. It was all I could do to slog through The Sound of Young America when it was a guest I was really, really interested in. But I recently worked my way through most of the backlog of Judge John Hodgman, where Thorn is featured but in a diminished role, and I felt like I got to know the guy a little and actually started to really like him, to the point that I keep downloading more and more old episodes of JJGO.
So anyway… yeah, definitely can’t begrudge anyone for not being able to stand Jesse Thorn. I still can’t understand people liking Scott Aukerman, though; put him on a podcast with five or six hilarious people and you’ll still wind up with a mostly-unlistenable turd. The guy is just unparallelled when it comes to sucking all the funny out of a room.
Yeah I don’t think Aukerman is funny, but he isn’t annoying by a long stretch. Thorn is unfunny and wildly annoying.
He still pops up on the Sklar Brothers podcast to do a recurring unfunny, very annoying and smarmy “fantasy report” where he makes up fantasy leagues for things like dog breeds and antique furniture just so he can say things like “malamute” and “ottoman”. The Sklars pull a hamstring every one of his appearances trying to help him out, but its a lost cause.
What makes it worse is if Thorn is on, Chris Cox isn’t doing one of his great characters (Racist Vin Scully, Jerry Jones et al).
I went through almost this exact same arc with JJGO. I think Thorn’s major problem is initially you can’t tell when he’s making fun of himself, which is often, so at first you think he’s just a smug asshole.
But goddamn, Jordan Morris is fucking hilarious. I’m OK with Thorn, especially after hearing so many JJGOs now, but Morris consistently cracks me up.
Oh, speaking of MaxFun and Canada, I never got the answer to this question from the podcast itself so now I’ve got great big question blue balls over it, so maybe some of our Canadian folk can help (side note, I blame all of you for the fact that I just ordered eight bags of smoky bacon these, which I specify because the link defaults to dill, which I make no judgment on, but you can totally get those in stores here, and anybody who hasn’t had them should too, because they will change your life).
How the hell do you tip strippers in Canada? Since the smallest denomination bill is a 5, do you just, like, basically throw loonies at them, or do they try to find some way to discretely put a jar down on the stripper display area into which you insert your gratuities - which seems kind of impersonal to me but whatever, or do Canadian strippers just have to work it five times as hard as American ones or what?
If she’s doing a fair job, just slide in a few Timbits, which are nationally recognized as currency. If she’s doing a great job, you can up it to a cruller.