From Max Funster Chet_Friendly, iandividual (who is possibly the same person) and maybe a couple others comes Boiled Dinner [iTunes link], a comedy podcast of initially indeterminate genre. Indeterminate, that is to say, unless described as follows: You Look Nice Today. That’s about as dialed-in as it gets, since sharing a genre with YLNT means that Boiled Dinner also shares such qualities as:
- Three dudes
- Goofy nicknames
- Preposterous statements (and the deadpan utterance thereof)
- Anecdotes about life’s daily degradations
- Strummy bumper music between segments
- Twitter accounts
But by no means is it a slavish YLNT imitation. Unlike Merlin, Scott and Adam, Wilfred-Dale the Robot, Chet Friendly and Jesse Pruden — one strongly suspects pseudonyms — record not over a Skype conference call but (apparently) together in a physical room. And that physical room is in Calgary. Broadly speaking, though, the similarities outnumber the differences, and in listening to any YLNT-like show, one comes to appreciate just how tough it is to mine comedy gold from its format. There’s got to be not just a three-way rapport between the hosts — all podcasters worth their salt have that — but an ability to strategically and consistently add Jenga blocks of humor to the Jenga tower of absurdity that grows, slowly but steadily, through each segment without collapsing into a demolished Jenga tower of scattershot meanderings and/or own-joke laughter fits. Jenga.
Though the Boiled Dinner boys do a damned respectable job of this, they don’t quite hold the all-important poker faces maintained by their predecessors. (And perhaps they aren’t even trying to — for all your Podthinker knows, Jesse, Chet and Wilfred-Dale may never have even listened to YLNT, though that’d make for one hell of a creative coincidence.) When one of them scores bigtime humor points — and these moments of hard-hitting hilarity come satisfyingly often — all of them tend to crack up. The effect is perhaps best described as YLNT hybridized with a standard, much more casual just-guys-chillin’ podcast, which doesn’t seem like an unpromising niche to fill, nor have Boiled Dinner‘s first six episodes constituted an unpromising start toward filling it. For days now, your Podthinker has, in solitary moments, been muttering “Pruddly! Pruddly! Pruddly!“, “This is the first [x]… with a black president” or “Our son’s gonna make a woman of us” and then collapsing, like a failed game of Jenga, into hysterics.
Vital stats:
Format: You Look Nice Today
Running since: November 2008
Duration: 30m-50m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all
From Max Funster HijackedFlavor comes The News Cruise, another exercise in the flat expression of the ridiculous, but with a current-events flavor. It’s one of those shows that’s not just a podcast, but a college radio broadcast (on the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s WUAG). Your Podthinker happens to have a college radio background, and he reports with some confidence that The News Cruise is a pretty darn sterling example of what’s become, in the 21st century, a badly debased medium.
Even though the full extent of their preparation seems, at times, to consist of a single crumpled sheet of lined paper bearing synopses of the week’s wacky news items and a handful of unusual songs to play, at a very low volume, under comments on them, co-hosts Chris Berg and Megan Wallrichs still bring an A+ game compared to most of today’s college broadcasters. Modern standards of college broadcasting excellence would appear to demand little more than showing up, jacking one’s iPod into the board, hitting “shuffle” (which makes the playlist “eclectic”) and then falling asleep in the lobby, but this show delivers at least half an hour of chuckle-inducing late-night chat about the world’s goings-on: the cancellation of TRL, Englishmen hell-bent on proving the existence of space aliens, the ruination of the world’s largest sandwich and something about an election. It wouldn’t be terribly innacurate to call the material essentially Le Show stripped, mercifully, of Harry Shearer’s unhealthy Dick Cheney fixation.
The program guards the flame of an all-but-forsaken sensibility of college radio, no doubt, but that’s not to say that it isn’t enjoyable in its own right. Whether by design or by happenstance, Chris and Megan create an entertainingly intimate sound and feel, which — here it comes again — evokes exactly what’s most appealing about college radio. Your Podthinker has, alas, put college behind him, but he can easily envision himself having spent his Thursday nights ignoring classwork, flipping on his radio, dicking with the antenna (college stations’ typical wattage being what it is) and settling in as these two kids read off Kwame Kilpatrick’s embarrassing text messages.
Vital stats:
Format: news-themed comedi-chat
Running since: September 2008
Duration: 35m-1h10m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: none, which really bites
[Podthinker Colin Marshall is available to talk about college radio 24 by 7 at colinjmarshall at gmail. Discuss Podthoughts on the forum here or submit your own podcast for the next by-Max-Funsters column here.]