Comedy Podcasts?

Anybody who hasn’t yet subscribed to I Love Movies needs to listen to the most recent. Adam Carolla and Patton Oswald almost made me crash my bike on my home commute.

I had heard a lot about Keith and the Girl, and so I listened to episode 1000 a couple of weeks ago. I thought they were completely obnoxious and unfunny. Was 1000 just an oddball episode, being the thousandth? Were they belligerently drunk or something?

I’m a big fan of the Adam and Joe podcast, on BBC 6 music. It’s won a fair few awards, and can be extremely funny. One or two listens will probably tell you if you the style appeals to you, rather than my hamfisted attempts at describing it. Song Wars, where they each write a song on a given topic, is usually pretty great.

I haven’t heard the 1000th episode so I can’t say if it was typical Katg or not. I would guess not. It’s such a milestone they most likely had a ton of guests and booze and whatnot that would make it anything but typical. They may not be for you (nothing is for everyone) but I would definitely give them another try. The 1019th episode I mentioned is a great one if you like stand up comedians.

There style is kinda “morning talk show” where they talk about the wacky current news, personal stuff, and usually they have a guest on (often comedians) to talk about anything. They have an intersting dynamic: he’s a rowdy guy from Somerset Pensilvania who moved to NY to get away from the small town life. She’s a 2nd generation Israli Jew from NY. Like most radio shows it can take a little while to acclimate because there’s people and in-jokes you may not be familiar with yet. It’s not my favorite podcast and I don’t listen to it all the time regularly but they’re funny and interesting. My only beef is that they can be a little too self-promotional but I can’t blame people for trying to make a buck.

Man, me too. I would pay money for a Patton Oswalt podcast.

Some other comedy podcasts I’ve been digging:

Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist 'cast is fantastic. It’s a very loose format - basically, he has a guest on from the comedy world and they shoot the shit about whatever for an hour. What interesting about this is a) Hardwick’s been in the comedy scene for quite some time, and so has lots of funny friends, and b) so far, the guests have been really open about the horrors of the comedy biz. A good place to start is the one with Drew Carey - not a dude I ever thought was super funny, but in-between stories about being on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and working on Price Is Right they degenerate into about a twenty-minute long segment where they try to remember the dirtiest jokes they know. And I’m here to tell you, Drew Carey knows a lot of dirty jokes.

Superego: Unlike most of the podcasts I listen to, which are pretty much the shoot-the-shit variety, Superego is an actual comedy troupe. The show is totally improvised, and then judiciously edited down to a tight half-hour or so. It has a bit of a heady concept - subtitled “Profiles In Self-Obsession”, it supposedly chronicles patients at the Superego Clinic For Analytical Pscience - but it’s definitely some of the weirdest, funniest stuff I’ve heard in a while. At it’s best, it pushes into Firesign Theatre territory, which is high praise coming from me.

I’m enjoying Tweet Me Harder. I’m not entirely sold on David Malki, who I think has a habit of beating jokes into the ground, but Kris Straub is one of the funniest guys working in webcomics, and I say this despite the fact that I don’t actually like his comics all that much. He himself is just a hilarious guy.

Loving Smodcast. It’s more regular these days now that they have a sponsor (Fleshlight) for the podcast and their site. Last week’s episode featured a harrowing conversation where Kevin discussed using their new sponsor so he could feel good about shilling for them. While I like Kevin, the real star of the show for me is Scott Mosier, who has a really understated hilariousness about him that plays off of Kevin’s over the top stoner persona perfectly. The whiteface to Kevin’s auguste and quite often the reason I listen.

And of course I Love Movies continues to be the only format in which I don’t hate Sarah Silverman.

Speaking of Smodcast, they are now a network, so if you have liked their guests in the past, they now have some of their own shows. I still have yet to punch a new wave of audio entries into the download list in rcFeedMe, but I’ll be adding whatever else they have on their site at that point.

Yeah seriously, just get the entire back catalog of the Ricky Gervais Show, and when you get to the end, start over at the beginning. It’s all you need.

Thanks for pointing this out. I just listened to the Drew Carey episode and it was hilarious. :)

Not even the first scene of The Way Of The Gun?

You mean the short film Way of the Gun, which is one scene long and doesn’t have anything else after that one scene? Yeah, she’s okay in that, too.

Aside: Sarah Silverman was a bright spot in Jeff Garlin’s I want Someone to Eat Cheese With, a flick I’d recommend to any fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

As for comedy podcasts, I listen to Adam Carolla’s podcast. But I really think Dave Dameshek’s newly launched podcast is going to eclipse it. http://www.adamcarolla.com/DNDBlog/

Attention Kids In The Hall fans! Dave Foley’s on this week’s Comedy Death Ray, along with Paul F. Thomkins. They’re usually pretty good about getting the CDR up on iTunes fast, so look for it on the weekend.

Another recommendation here for Adam Carolla’s podcast. They recently changed the format to make it more like the old radio show which I’m loving, as I think Carolla does better when he has some sidekicks to play off of.

I may love the Daves of Thunder podcast more though.

Daves of Thunder is cracking me up, I can’t get over the way Dameshek talks. Anyways I definitely recommend Carolla’s podcast as well.

Anyone here listen to “Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show”? I’ve tried out a couple of them and they’re not really working for me. Not very funny so far and I don’t think Kevin Pollak is a very good interviewer (after listening to Tom do interviews on the games podcast it’s pretty painful actually).

I ask this not to rip the Pollak show but to ask if I should bother grabbing any specific episodes or work my way back at all. They take so freaking long to DL.

-xtien

I want to know what the potentially libelous story Elisabeth Shue shared about Kevin Bacon on the latest I Love Movies was. Well, I’m assuming it was Kevin Bacon.

“I didn’t know this was on iTunes!”

That was an awesome moment. The whole podcast was full of gold. Hearing her goofy laugh was fantastic. Although all that flirting with Adam Scott filled me with jealous anger. Conflicted jealous anger, since I heart both of them. Sigh.

My impression was that the thing she regretted most was something about Verhoeven. It was actually about Kevin Bacon? Hmph.

[Actually, a look at this thread here reveals Doug saying while she regretted a lot of stuff on the podcast, she really requested he bleep something disparaging she said about a director.]

-xtien

Ah, Verhoven makes more sense. I guess I was just hoping it was Bacon, cos he always struck me as a potential creepster.

And yes, I want Elisabeth Shue’s laugh as my new ringtone. Hwah hwah hwah… hwaaaah.

Rob Huebel’s story about trying to interact with people involved in Piranha 3D was adorable.