Vital stats:
Format: two comedians walking
Episode duration: 45-70m
Frequency: six-monthly-ish
Archive available on iTunes: all
New media give rise to new forms — or at least that’s the hope. Six-ish years after the invention of podcasting, a medium that strips nearly all conceivable restrictions from audio entertainment, most of its practitioners still pretty much work with modified and/or improved radio concepts. I don’t mean to knock podcasters who do that — I do it too — but it makes me value exercises in the truly new all the more. I consider Walking With Michelle [RSS] [iTunes] one such exercise.
And — prime the rimshot — I do mean exercise. At least I mean exercise if you happen to be one of those people who, having a spent an unusually large fraction of the day traveling on foot, declare yourself to have “gotten your exercise in.” Michelle Biloon and her guests two-birds-one-stone it by simultaneously getting their exercise in and their comedy on. No need to break a sweat, though, since both she and those with whom she walks have backgrounds in the stand-up comedic arts. Since all this walking needs places to happen, you might say the stone takes down a third bird as well: finally visiting popular attractions too tacky, dorky, or inconvenient to have approached under any other circumstances.
So she and Jimmy Pardo drive around with a Map of the Stars’ Homes [MP3], she and Samm Levine go to the Getty Villa [MP3], she and Dave Holmes go to Universal Studios [MP3], and so on. All the while, they talk about life, they talk about careers, they talk about the crappiness of the Simpsons ride, and they talk about their compulsive peoplewatching — i.e., whether they should play a round of “retarded or ugly.” The ever-shifting geographical territories give rise to ever-shifting conversational territories, from Biloon and a reflective Tom Scharpling having an insightful lunch discussion about coming up in the comedy game to Biloon and Doug Benson, stoned (if you can believe it), gawping at a cluster of skimpily dressed seven-year-olds singing “Bad Girls” for Scientology.
For a cornucopia of reasons, this show could’ve only happened in podcasting. One is the legendary infrequency — eight episodes in over four years — which has become the first thing people mention about the show. Another is the content: few play “retarded or ugly” on the radio, and even fewer take pot pills on it. Yet another is the technology involved, which only in recent years began to offer the combined affordability, portability, and recording quality to record a couple of comedians wandering museums, miniature golf courses, and New Jersey all day long.
I gather the fruits of these recording sessions put the editor’s craft to the test; they must, since the resulting episodes tend to clock in at around one hour. From what I can tell, Biloon engages the services of an outside tradesman to cut the material into shape and separate its segments with one of those strummy musical micro-stings so fashionable in comedy podcasting. She even has a producer. What with a staff, practically, and all the travel required, Walking With Michelle really feels like some kinda production; no wonder we get one an average of every six months. Besides, I hear Biloon’s spending much of the year in Vienna these days, so that must throw a wrench into these things. Then again, I’d like to hear an episode recorded on those very cobblestones. I guess she’d just need to find an Austrian comedian for that. Are there such things as Austrian comedians?
[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]