Vital stats:
Format: three brothers doling out comedic advice
Duration: 30m-60m
Frequency: weekly, usually
Archive available on iTunes: all
Podcasting’s gotten to where, if you want to get a bunch of dudes on Skype on the regular, you need a good reason. The McElroys, Justin, Griffin, and Travis — how about that for a suite of Gen-Y names, by the way — are already brothers, so that’s a head start. Even without a podcast, maybe they’d be holding the occasional Skype-ference call anyway. (They’re not called Skype-ference calls.) But lo, they’ve also got themselves some server space, an RSS feed, and, most importantly, an angle.
My Brother, My Brother, and Me [RSS] [iTunes] is the result, a weekly meeting of the McElroy minds meant to solve the world’s problems. Though I realize they must have existed since the dawn of the medium — I think Savage Love may qualify as a pioneer — this is actually the first advice podcast I’ve heard. While this seems like the natural next step in advice media, I still feel as if the problem of advisor authority has never really been solved.
In short: how does an advice columnist, advice radio host, advice blogger, advice podcaster, etc. establish and maintain credibility? It’s not even clear how the form’s titans, such as history’s various Ann Landerses, have done it. Is it just about giving advice for a long time, then pointing to how long you’ve been given advice? Is there some independent evaluative board that periodically checks your advice’s effectiveness? The brothers McElroy wisely steer around this thorny issue by somehow establishing their advice-giving authority through their lack of advice-giving authority. It’s credibility through non-credibility.
Or maybe three non-credibles make a credible. Theoretically, three minds addressing a question are better than one, and any especially incorrect impulses on the part of one McElroy could be balanced out by the other two. On the flip side, they might just egg one another on toward the worst possible solution to their supplicants’ problems. But I’m not sure how often this actually happens. For brothers, they all sound and act surprisingly different — not that I can reliably tell which one is which yet, though it helps that the oldest has some kind of odd regional accent — so the danger of groupthink is minimized.
Yet, on a show like this, sometimes groupthink, bad answers, and eggings-on are exactly what the advice columnist ordered. Besides the authority inherent in non-authority and in sheer numbers, the McElroys also aim to establish the kind of sacred advisor-audience trust that only hilarity can build. This process is greatly aided by the way they get their questions. It seems like a mixture: some are submitted by members of the audience, while others are apparently gathered from such other non-podcast founts of wisdom as Yahoo! Answers.
You probably won’t remember the bulk of the questions themselves, since so many lie along the how-do-I-know-he-likes-me/should-I-make-out-with-my-buddy’s-girlfriend/what-is-sex spectrum. But the way G., J., and T. McElroy tag-team them will stick with you. And as comedically focused as the show is — if you need a rule, I wouldn’t recommend following the bothers’ dictates — they sometimes bust out surprisingly useful insights, especially if you need to how how you know he likes you, or if you should make out with your buddy’s girlfriend, or what sex is.
And actually, some of these questions, the ones that put an extra challenge to the McElroys, are memorable. I’m thinking specifically of the guy who requested a list of the most useful kicks. He already knows about front kicks, side kicks, and roundhouse kicks.
[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas, the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]