Vital stats:
Format: short-form slacking, usually with musical accompaniment
Duration: 2m30s-20m
Frequency: erratic
Archive available on iTunes: all
Now, I don’t know the man or his work, but this podcast is either the absolute best or absolute worst way to get acquainted with Steve Agee. The Wikipedia tells me he’s a 41-year-old California dude with Riverside roots who acts, does comedy, and appears regularly on The Sarah Silverman Program. Other credits include The Andy Milonakis Show, Superego, and a Twitter stunt. Not as credentialed as some comedic podcasters, sure, but way more credentialed than most.
In fact, you might call his show Uhhh [RSS] [iTunes] the work of a pretty well credentialed comedic podcaster which inhabits the form of the show of a viciously uncredentialed comedic podcaster. Representative content of its episodes, which range from two and a half to twenty-ish minutes, include Steve Agee freestyle rapping to pre-made beats with whomever he happens to be hanging out with, Steve Agee making up ridiculous songs as he wanders the fretboard of whatever instrument he happens to find nearby, Steve Agee talking through the most irritating vocal filter possible for eight straight minutes, and Steve Agee belching.
There’s a certain admirable improvisatory quality to all this. Is “Dada” too strong a word? “Dada” is probably too strong a word. But still: some podcasters passively let their podcasts grow slack and purposeless, but Steve Agee is fiercely committed to actively exploring the slackest, least purposeful territory in the entire medium. This is much more entertaining than it might sound, owing in part to the show’s sometimes extreme brevity. (In at least one episode, he reveals that he started the podcast in reaction to all those other medium-to-long podcasts out there.)
Surely the setup, such as is, also comes off better than you’d expect because Steve Agee is a bona fide Famous Person. Here’s a real-life celebrity, a guy who does movies and TV, sitting at home at 10:00 in the morning and burping on mic just like you and me. Having originally come to L.A. as a musician, he also brings musical talent to the arena, only a small measure of which (I assume) is on display on the podcast. Tip of the iceberg. I mention these qualities to keep as many anonymous Basement McQuarterlifes out there from listening to Uhhh, laughing, then getting ideas about replicating its model. You probably can’t. What works for Steve Agee I can’t see working for anybody else, since it so suits his particular qualities. I could say the same about the creators of all the best podcasts.
Yet as better than us as Steve Agee is at firing off a few half-remembered bass riffs and rembering aloud his Jane’s Addiction fandom, he still has the edge of what I’ve come to think of as the L.A. Podcasting Crying Clown. As with a show like WTF, you’ll hear the host and his compatriots occasionally lapse into the moaning anomie that apparently afflicts nearly every Southern California comedian with a copy of GarageBand: “Fuck, the rent is due soon,” “Fuck, here I am, a fat fuck,” etc. I mean, jeez. You guys are, like, on a whole bunch of screens! Aren’t you living the dream or something?
[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.]