Podthoughts by Colin Marshall: Life Lessons with Jim Carolla

Posted by Maximum Fun on 27th December 2010



Vital stats:
Format: psychotheraputic and meditational explorations
Duration: 25m-50m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

Followers of Adam Carolla’s major radio and podcast enterprises haven’t gotten a particularly positive image of his father, Jim Carolla. According to Carolla fils’ memories, Carolla père was always too busy with divorce, depression, cheapskatery, and an overwhelming tendency against activity of any kind to be much of a dad. Even today, the elder seems unable to remember or even acknowledge the accomplishments of the younger. (Offered a $10,000 check for a correct answer, he couldn’t spell or cite the dial position of the station that carried Loveline.) Having established his own content-hungry podcasting network, Adam nevertheless gave Jim the opportunity to host a show of his own.

Even as a reasonably enthusiastic Adam Carolla fan, saying I didn’t know what to expect from Life Lessons with Jim Carolla [RSS] [iTunes] puts it mildly. I’d heard Adam mention that Jim was some sort of psychoanalyst, so I figured that would influence the show’s content. I guess I was aware that he also played the trumpet professionally, but hearing him bust it out here came as a surprise. As for his soaringly comedic lounge singing and the presence of Adam’s high school buddy Ray Oldhafer… well, some things are unforeseeable.

Those same Carolla fans who’ve built up strong advance suspicion about Jim can’t be much more charitably inclined toward Ray. In the vast majority of Adam’s many, many tales of adolescent and adult tomfoolery with his “idiot buddies from the Valley,” Ray comes off as the maniac among maniacs. And to be a clear as possible about the context, we’re talking about a bunch of dudes who didn’t think twice about urinating on one another in the car. (More recently, and for reasons that remain oblique, he put a turd in Jimmy Kimmel’s desk.) Perhaps he’s just the sort of troubled soul who’d have spent the past fifteen years undergoing therapy sessions with — you guessed it — Jim Carolla. Doubling his role as Jim’s real-life patient, Ray does the job of his co-host on the podcast.

The complicating factor is that, on Life Lessons, neither of these guys come off as dumb or even very weird. One is a middle-age builder from a chaotic immigrant family, plagued by a weakness for beer and cigarettes, and can’t quite get out of his own way; the other is a near-octogenarian therapist from a chaotic immigrant family who’s found a means of holding it all down, in his way, with heavy doses of reflection and meditation. A larger discussion about the struggles of existence they have in common runs through the episodes, framed by terms like “the power of attention” [MP3], “the archaeology of the self” [MP3], and “a higher level of consciousness” [MP3]. Knowing only what Adam’s said about Jim and Ray, it’s hard not to come away favorably impressed with their calm articulacy and good humor (even if Jim often fails to get Ray’s jokes).

Still, you can’t deny that Ray is a bit of a screw-up and Jim a bit of a goof. Ray openly acknowledges his screw-uppiness, though — that’s why he’s on this couch in the first place — and Jim embraces his own persona, which allows for the use of words like “podcasters” (meaning the podcast’s listening audience) and “computerize” (meaning to send an e-mail). Combine this with all the Freudian-type talk about concepts whose very names sound discredited and you get a hard affair to take seriously. But like those times David Lynch starts going on about transcendence, it’s also hard to take unseriously. Ray’s probably right to seek out solutions to both his self-destructive impulses and his irritating minor twitches; Jim’s probably right to raise his awareness to help him find them. We’re lucky they’ve chosen to do this on one of the most interestingly bizarre podcasts I’ve ever heard.

[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.]