Standing Upright Podcasting, Performance, and Alternative Comedy

ABSTRACT

Within the Los Angeles stand-up comedy scene, the podcast has become an increasingly popular communication medium for alternative comic performance. Comedians Jimmy Pardo of Never Not Funny (NNF), Scott Aukerman of Comedy Bang-Bang (CBB), Jesse Thorn and Jordan Morris of Jordan, Jesse, GO!, and Doug Benson of Doug Loves Movies (DLM) have been using the podcast as an artistic outlet and tool for self-promotion over the last several years. These podcasters have each forged distinct places for themselves within this community, and their use of this upstart medium represents an important case study in the shifting cultural dynamics that the podcast introduces. The podcast medium allows this group of comedians not only to skirt FCC regulations and produce content not indebted to advertisers, gatekeepers, club owners, or executives, but also to feel empowered that their content will reach their most ardent fans in the most direct, intimate way.

Within the Los Angeles stand-up comedy scene, the podcast has become an increasingly popular communication medium for comic performance. Comedians Jimmy Pardo of Never Not Funny (NNF), Scott Aukerman of Comedy Bang-Bang (CBB), Jesse Thorn and Jordan Morris of Jordan, Jesse, GO!, and Doug Benson of Doug Loves Movies (DLM) have been using the podcast as an artistic outlet and self-promotional tool over the last several years. NNF began in 2006, Comedy Bang-Bang (formerly Comedy Death Ray) began in 2009, Jordan, Jesse, GO! began in 2007, and Doug Loves Movies (formerly I Love Movies) began in 2006. All four podcasts share similar guests and are tied to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (UCB), the small Los Angeles theatre located just north of Hollywood Boulevard that has become the hub through which many of these podcasters travel. The podcast medium allows this group of comedians not only to skirt FCC regulations and produce content not indebted to advertisers, gatekeepers, club owners, or executives, but also to feel empowered that their content will reach their most ardent fans in the most direct, intimate way. The comedy podcast has certainly found an audience. Podcasts such as Marc Maron’s WTF, which began in 2009, generated 20 million downloads in its first two years in operation, while others such as Scott Aukerman’s CBB podcast receive 175,000 downloads per week.¹ Overall, comedy podcasts account for most of iTunes’s top-10 podcasts each week.² While the podcasts have been particularly effective for mid-level comics who are aspiring to acquire more fans, an appearance on a popular podcast can also rejuvenate a floundering career or jumpstart a nascent one.³

Many of these podcasts complement the UCB Theatre, whose small confines and intimate seating arrangement make palpable the energy that flows between the audience and the stage. In this way, the podcast provides a sense of continuity between physical places, like the UCB, and the virtual community of fans who have embraced this medium. I call this scene “the UCB alternative comedy scene” because its members have been principled in drawing distinctions between their style of comedy and the more staid, traditional schools of improvisational comedy, such as Chicago’s famed Second City. The UCB alternative comedy scene differs in performance style and venue from the established improvisational schools, and it is clearly rooted in a physical place. It also is using an intrepid, nontraditional medium. These podcasters have each forged distinct places for themselves within this community, and their use of this upstart medium represents an important case study in the shifting cultural dynamics that the podcast introduces. Each podcaster’s own biographical profile offers a few possible explanations as to why comedians have taken to this medium so passionately.

Despite their separate identities, and the divergent personalities at their helm, these podcasts are nevertheless linked to one another through shared comedic sensibilities and a shared talent roster that each of them taps. These podcasts are further linked together by their shared commitment to live performances at the UCB Theatre. The revolving cast of familiar voices that turn up on these podcasts ensures that these comics retain a core identity. However, the individual personalities build the shows, and ultimately the differing comedic styles shape the content. It is in this way that the podcasts are an empowering medium for the comics and perhaps the most direct means to engage their audience.

Such artist empowerment has been felt in the broader new media environment as well. As demonstrated in books by Phyllis Caddell, Guy Hart-Davis, and Henry Jenkins, promotion, marketing, and branding have increasingly become do-it-yourself enterprises.⁴ Rather than rely on publicists or marketing companies, most of these UCB podcasters have embraced this do-it-yourself mentality, similar to the participatory culture that Jenkins has described. Third-party intermediaries are eliminated in this scenario, and the comedians using these podcasts have seen the resulting immediacy, intimacy, and direct relationship forged between artist and fan contribute to an ever-broadening fan base that drifts fluidly between physical and virtual places. These comedians have made an attempt to shape technology rather than have it determined for them. As Wiebe Bijker and John Law argue, “technologies do not evolve under the impetus of some necessary inner technological or scientific logic”; rather, technology is “pressed into shape” by those who use it—that is, users are the people who determine the trajectory of our technologies.⁵ In this sense, these comedians have become technology shapers by understanding how the properties of various media can be used to their benefit. In Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, these comics are attuned to the fact that often the “medium is the message.”⁶ Moreover, this technology-shaping comes from a group of comedians who value their alternative label but who are also in some way beholden to large, commercial, and mainstream industries to provide them with some semblance of monetary stability. Such competing demands create an interesting dynamic and produce a tension that is negotiated in the discussions and interviews between comedians that make up a substantial part of podcast discourse.

As Steven McClung and Kristine Johnson note, much of the academic research that has been done on podcasting has been limited to tracking the motives of the podcast user, the rate in which podcasts are being downloaded, and how podcasts are being used in educational and business settings.⁷ The uses of the podcast in education have been an especially prevalent research topic in a number of scholarly articles.⁸ While this particular research is useful and gives much-needed definition to often intangible concepts, there nonetheless exists a significant void in inquiry into podcasting that transcends these genres. Podcasting studies can benefit from the considerable amount of new media research that details the ways in which the Internet and other digital communication technologies have fundamentally altered notions of fandom, artist-fan co-creation, online community, and the participatory nature of contemporary artistic creation. Jenkins, Nancy Baym, and Cecilia Hiesun Suhr have described in detail how cultures of media convergence are participatory and transformational in the ways that fans and artists relate to one another and how consumers themselves are adding their own creative touches to the media they consume.⁹

An often overlooked critical approach, however, is the engagement of these texts as inherently important and as exceptional examples of the inventive use of new media from the perspective of the artist. The dynamics of the artist-fan relationship are profoundly influenced by the content itself. If the user feels compelled to participate with media he or she consumes, then something must exist within these texts that makes engagement with them attractive to those who seek them out. By turning a critical eye to new media texts as rhetorical discourse for a situated audience, I illuminate the form of the podcast medium while developing and building on previous research on the dynamics of communication technology. These comedy podcasts function as a unique space for comedy performance, oftentimes featuring absurd characters and stream-of-consciousness wit. My analysis shows that the UCB community of podcasters has used the freedom of the medium not just to perform their craft, but also to comment specifically on that craft—to situate it in a cultural context, to define the parameters of alternative comedy, and to comment on how to maintain artistic integrity. I conclude that these functions are the defining characteristics that structure the UCB alternative comedy community. These comics are tied together by place (the UCB), but they are also tied together by the style of the comedy and by the tenor of the conversation within the podcast medium. What seems to be a wholly unpredictable medium has a characteristic style for a situated group of artists, and this style reinforces the ways the comics identify with each other. That is, the medium helps to define the community as much as the place defines the community.

Podcasting and New Media Technologies

For this subculture of UCB alternative comedians, the podcast medium presents a useful case study that weaves together several strands of media theory. Jenkins’s book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, which places new communication technologies and artistic work into a broader cultural context, traces a move from “medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels.”¹⁰ This convergence culture—one animated by a participatory sensibility—makes for “more complex relations between top-down corporate media and bottom-up participatory media.”¹¹ Rejection of the “definitive, authorized version” of media content has led to the corresponding ascendancy of media communities, whose members have sought out and developed new collaborative spaces that reject, at least in theory, the commercial logic of mainstream popular culture, even while operating within its constraints.¹² In the UCB comedy community, the battle is not so much between top-down media and bottom-up media as a struggle between the use of a folk-culture, do-it-yourself medium such as the podcast and the broader popular culture context that these comedians are always negotiating.

Understanding the formal components of the podcast medium—its time-and place-shifting abilities along with the ways in which it is biased in favor of certain uses over others—is critical to understanding how podcasting functions within this artistic subculture. Ian Hutchby’s “affordances” approach to medium-centered criticism holds that “affordances are functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object”; affordances are thus the “third way between the [constructivist] emphasis on the shaping power of human agency and the [realist] emphasis on the constraining power of technical capacities.”¹³ Hutchby’s theory is useful in describing how podcasts’ affordances offer relational frames that differ from other media. For example, the podcast is quite different in some respects from a traditional radio comedy show. In fact, three of the most popular comedy podcasters—Adam Carolla, Marc Maron, and Jimmy Pardo—were all formerly radio-show hosts who had grown frustrated by the medium’s limitations.¹⁴ The podcast is an asynchronous medium. It can be experienced anywhere and at any time. A listener need not “tune in” to a podcast at a specific time, nor must a listener expect the podcast to have a predetermined duration. Podcasts are not governed by structured commercial breaks, nor must they follow any discernible format. While some guests appear on the podcasts for the express purpose of promoting a book, comedy special, or live event, these are only briefly mentioned, and interviewers like Marc Maron and Pete Holmes tend to focus their interview topics on issues such as career frustrations, sex/relationships, and spiritual questions. Having listened to over 1,000 podcast episodes, I have found these conversations and performances to be largely freewheeling, unstructured, sporadic, and spontaneous. Comedy podcasts are also not subject to FCC censure for profanity and vulgarity. Because these podcasts are so indecorous in their language use, the lack of FCC oversight allows a freedom of expression impossible on traditional radio. Moreover, while some podcasts do accept advertising, it is not required. A podcaster need not be dependent on a steady revenue stream or constrained by the watchful eye of advertisers to stay afloat.

Podcasters can broadcast their message from a basement, a garage, or even a kitchen using a small and unsophisticated setup. This setting engenders a sense of trust and intimacy among those engaging in conversation and performance. The comic Marc Maron has credited the setting of the podcast itself with allowing him to get such a revealing interview with stand-up comic Robin Williams (April 26, 2010).¹⁵ With a few notable exceptions, these podcasts are audio only. It seems likely that if Williams had felt video cameras pointed at him he likely would not have been as forthcoming in his interview. In this sense, a YouTube video, for example, would not be an appropriate medium for this type of interview. The presence of cameras would likely ruin the absurdity of podcasts like Scott Aukerman’s (CBB). If viewers were able to see comedians performing their characters, it would ruin the mystery that the theatre-of-the-mind provides. We are never really sure who is performing which character, and oftentimes these performers move seamlessly among multiple characters within a single episode.

These affordances, to use Hutchby’s term, give the podcast a set of relational frames that are uniquely conducive to the sort of entertainment that this community provides. My argument is not so much that the podcast content itself is a unique rhetorical form, but rather that these relational frames allow comedian podcasters to find niche audiences who are drawn to the podcast’s form and function. Such audiences can then subscribe to the podcast, allowing the comics to gauge how their audience is growing. In turn, this information allows the performers to build one-to-one relationships with their audiences, forming networks of fans who support the comics at their live performances, book signings, or by downloading their comedy specials online. Podcasting thus grants some degree of agency to both the fans and the artists, as the latter are setting the terms under which their fans can find them and interact with their comedy in this newly constituted community.

Defining the Community

The podcasters in this scene are all professional comedians or comedy writers roughly categorized under the umbrella of “alternative comedy,” a term popularly applied to a community of Southern California comedians tied to the UCB. Alternative comedy is hardly a new concept. Andrew Stott states that the early alternative comedians “rejected the easy racism and the fast delivery of the gag comic” and were often “overtly political from the start” and informed by a punk rock aesthetic.¹⁶ The idea that alternative comedy might be informed by a countercultural sentiment is certainly applicable to this group of comedians. These UCB comedians have been identified as alternative in some part because of their relationship with legendary comic pioneer and 1960s counterculture icon Del Close, whose long-form improvisational style proved influential in shaping the early comedy careers of UCB founders Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Adam McKay in the early 1990s Chicago comedy scene.¹⁷ Eventually Besser and Roberts were joined by Amy Poehler and Matt Walsh, and the team formed a UCB sketch comedy group that had a brief three-season run as a sketch comedy television show, Upright Citizens Brigade, on Comedy Central from 1998–2000.¹⁸ In 1999, Poehler, Besser, Roberts, and Walsh opened up the first UCB Theatre in New York City. The New York theatre holds 150 people and doubles as a sketch-comedy and improv training school, in addition to a comedy performance venue.¹⁹ In 2005 the group opened up a second UCB Theatre, this one only seating 95 people, in Los Angeles. All of these podcasting comics bring their own comedy style to this alternative comedy, and their ascendancy within alternative comedy dovetails with the increased popularity of the UCB Theatre venue. Each has individual reasons for embracing the medium, and each enjoys a certain stature within the community.

Jimmy “the shooter” Pardo has made a decent living as a touring club comic, but his mainstream breakthroughs have been glancing (he once hosted a program on the decidedly under-the-radar Game Show Network). At the UCB Theatre, however, he regularly receives standing ovations. His NNF podcast remains one of the most popular comedy podcasts on iTunes, second only to Ricky Gervais’s podcast in popularity.²⁰ NNF is so popular that Pardo has hired an audio/video production crew to help him offer both video and audio versions of his podcast. Because NNF began in 2006, in the infancy of podcasting, it is considered a pioneering effort and is credited with popularizing this medium and this community. Pardo regularly hosted the monthly UCB live shows Running Your Trap and Match Game and currently makes frequent appearances on the Writer’s Room live show. As the proverbial “comic’s comic,” Pardo has garnered the admiration of many within the UCB alternative comedy scene.

Jordan, Jesse, GO!’s (JJGO) 34-year-old Jesse Thorn started his podcast as a college radio show and after graduating and finding himself jobless, continued offering the podcast as a free download. His other radio show, Bullseye with Jesse Thorn, was eventually picked up by National Public Radio and now is broadcast in several dozen markets. Thorn comes to podcasting from a noncomedy background. While he did perform in college in various sketch comedy groups, Thorn’s resonant radio voice, quick wit, and perceptive intelligence have won him more respect as an interviewer of comedians than as a comedian himself. His co-host, 33-year-old Jordan Morris, is a product of the UCB training school, an adjunct institution that teaches improvisation, sketch comedy, and comedy writing. Morris and Thorn have both become integral to the community. Thorn pioneered the MaxFunCon, an annual summer camp-style event at Lake Arrowhead, California, that has featured many of the stalwarts of Los Angeles alternative comedy.

Doug Benson of Doug Loves Movies and Scott Aukerman of the Comedy Bang-Bang podcast each has a special relationship with the UCB Theatre. DLM is taped weekly live from the UCB stage, and Aukerman’s CBB podcast was a companion to a live stand-up UCB showcase that was also called Comedy Bang-Bang. Aukerman was a writer on the HBO sketch-comedy series Mr. Show, while Benson has made a living as a touring comic. DLM offers the podcast listener a glimpse into the wild unpredictability of a typical performance at the UCB Theatre, and Aukerman’s CBB gives the UCB performers the chance to try out new characters and to promote upcoming appearances at the theatre. In this way, these two podcasts are crucial in forging the identity of the scene because they anchor the podcasts to the physical location that is the audience’s reference point.

This community of comedians has received considerable attention from the Los Angeles-area press. The Los Angeles Times ran an extensive article in April 2009 detailing how this subculture operates both inside and outside of the Hollywood superstructure that surrounds it, as many of its pioneering stars like Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifianakis, and Sara Silverman have broken into the mainstream American consciousness. Journalist Gina Piccalo described the community this way: “It starts in the small theatres of L.A., places like the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, Largo at the Coronet and ImprovOlympic . . . where a comic playing to small crowds can quickly end up reaching millions of fans on prime-time TV and the cineplex in one exhilarating ride.”²¹ One of the defining characteristics of this group of UCB-centered comedians is their aversion to traditional comedy clubs. This is not to say that these comedians eschew all mainstream comedy outlets, as many of them have parlayed their podcasting successes into television and book deals. However, as so many of these podcasters reveal, traditional radio and traditional comedy clubs did not allow the creative freedom necessary to practice comedy in the style in which they feel most comfortable.²² Moreover, podcasting has not yet proven to be lucrative enough to sustain podcasters by itself.²³ For example, Oswalt, Galifianakis, Brian Posehn, and Maria Bamford’s well-publicized “Comedians of Comedy” tour in 2004 shunned comedy clubs completely, instead favoring indie-rock clubs as comedy performance venues. The tour eventually culminated in a brief six-episode Comedy Central television show and a series of DVDs.

The type of humor in these alternative comedy venues, like those on the Comedians of Comedy tour, has a certain aesthetic style. Piccalo describes it as “scathing, scatological, darkly ironic, and subversive.”²⁴ The UCB Theatre and its comedians have received considerable media attention outside of the Los Angeles and New York City press circles. The A.V. Club of the satirical newspaper the Onion described the UCB-style humor as “witty, irreverent, and conceptually ambitious.”²⁵ Paper Magazine called it “goofy, hip and subversive,” and the Austin Chronicle described it as “a combination of subtly clever intellectual comedy and slapstick nonsense.”²⁶ Given their comedic style, it is hardly surprising that these UCB-anchored comedians have so readily taken to the podcast as an artistic outlet. If the style of humor still navigates along the periphery of mainstream sensibilities, a medium for which there are no content regulations seems particularly suited to carry this content.

This analysis focuses on two podcasts, CBB and DLM, chosen because they are both anchored to a specific place, the UCB Theatre in Los Angeles, the unequivocal epicenter of the scene. Both podcasts show clear ties to the scene’s most active club.

A few of these UCB-related podcasts have over one hundred episodes, and attending to other media associated with them would be an impossible feat. One average week in the life of this comedy podcasting community, the week of April 16–23, 2010, when each of these two podcasts had at least one episode, represents a typical week for artists, podcasters, and the audience. During this week, DLM had one episode featuring Martin Starr, Ken Marino, and Adam Scott of the television program Party Down (2009–2010). Comedy Bang-Bang had two episodes: episode 49 with Adam Scott, UCB founder Matt Walsh, actress June Raphael, actor James Pumphrey, and stand-up comedian Chris Fairbanks; and episode 50 with stand-up comic Paul Gilmartin, sketch performer Mookie Blaiklok, and the cast of the Thrilling Adventure Hour sketch comedy group.²⁷

The Comedy Performance Function of the Podcast

Because the podcast is similar in many ways to conventional radio, as an auditory medium biased toward private listening experience, podcast comedy is likewise provided to us with what McLuhan calls “a cloak of invisibility.”²⁸ Of the podcasts discussed here, Scott Aukerman’s CBB is the one that utilizes the “cloak of invisibility” most effectively. More so than DLM, CBB frequently has “guests” on the show who are not really guests, but comedians trying out new characters. The scenarios are clearly planned, but the dialogue and the interactions among characters are improvised. The UCB Theatre has always been known for its absurdist tendencies and for being simultaneously “gross and smart.”²⁹ The long-form comedy training that these performers receive is rooted in these principles, but it also champions the importance of sticking together as a team no matter how unhinged and crazy the improvisation might get. In this way, the skills of the performers are uniquely honed to capitalize on the lack of temporal parameters, decorum, and other considerations that might limit their ability to practice this style of comedy. Similar to a long-form improv scene, these podcasting performances can be any length and can be as delightfully weird as the performers wish them to be. This is the spirit that undergirds CBB.

While the name of the podcast alone might hint that these characters are not real, Aukerman has stated that some CBB listeners actually do contact him believing that some of the characters are real people. To the untrained ear or the novice listener, the performers’ characters seem like real people. On the April 23 CBB podcast, for instance, comedians June Raphael and UCB founder Matt Walsh play a married couple, the McDowells, who are also self-help authors of the fictional book Perfect Marriage. They are welcomed onto the show as if they were real people with an actual book to promote. Aukerman’s co-host for the episode, Adam Scott, greets them cordially, and Aukerman explains that he really enjoyed reading the book. Walsh then explains that the book is based on the premise that in a marriage the man and woman should not change, sacrifice, or compromise anything for the other person.

Walsh:

For example, Kath and I had a pre-nup agreement before we were even married.

Raphael:

It was an emotional pre-nup. If I opened up my heart in any way . . .

Aukerman:

Then your husband could sue you?

Raphael:

Yes.

Walsh then explains that the two never travel together because Walsh likes to read and would not want to be interrupted by his wife, who might want to have a conversation. Further, Walsh explains that the two have feedback sessions with each other after having sex in order to see what went right and what went wrong. Walsh states that this is “much like a focus group, but it’s a focus group of one.” The discussion becomes increasingly bizarre with Walsh explaining that the couple never tell each other that they love one another because it creates “gender confusion.” Further, Raphael not only states that Walsh will circle parts of her body in red ink but also reveals that the couple’s son performs in a Marilyn Manson cover band that Walsh states is “empirically bad.” The performances are played with sincerity and are made more authentic by Scott and Aukerman’s frequent quizzical interruptions. The entire sequence is set up as a type of audio trick, a way of transferring listeners into a performance space unwittingly or unknowingly and forcing them to discern reality from fiction, comic performance from staid personal interview. In this way, the podcast medium lends itself to an “extension,” to use McLuhan’s phrase, of the auditory senses as the listener has nothing else to go on in making judgments of the content. It is theatre of the mind in the truest sense, and the comedy podcast medium as practiced by these comedians induces the listener to remain active in deconstructing the material. It is also representative of Jenkins’s notion of the new participatory culture that demands more engagement than traditional media from the media audience.

Another example of the aesthetic dimensions of the comedy podcast performances occurs on the April 16 CBB podcast featuring comedian Paul Gilmartin. The first thirteen minutes of Aukerman and Gilmartin’s conversation are relatively straightforward as the two discuss Gilmartin’s stand-up career, his battles with alcoholism, and his struggles to acquire a management team that will actually find him work. Suddenly, however, the tone shifts dramatically as the sound of a vinyl record being played backward interrupts Aukerman mid-sentence. Aukerman then asks, “Whoa, what was that? There was a sound and a big flash of light. There’s actually a man here in the studio. This never happens.” Aukerman goes on to tell the audience that the man in the studio is wearing a straightjacket and chains. The man then asks Aukerman to check the chains to ensure that they are real, as the listener hears them clanking around. The man then slips out of the chains and, to the astonishment of Aukerman, declares himself to be Harry Houdini. The man announces that he is the “world’s premier debunker of made-up horseshits.” Aukerman then goes on to have a conversation with Houdini until the backward record noise again signals a shift to a new character. Aukerman describes the character as wearing a “Captain Crunch-esque military uniform. I’m pretty sure he’s British. He just used the word darlings.” This new character, Colonel Tick-Tock, cautions Aukerman against punching Houdini in the stomach and killing him. Suddenly the sound of a smoke bomb going off is heard, and Houdini vanishes while Colonel Tick-Tock continues discussing the nature of time paradoxes and the “tough customers” that he has to take back to their rightful places in time. Then a theme song plays as Colonel Tick-Tock exits the imaginary stage that Aukerman, playing the role of the narrator, has constructed for the podcast listener.

The cycle of characters is so bizarre and arresting that a stunned Gilmartin is heard on microphone saying, “You don’t even need acid,” to describe the scene that has just unfolded. While this sequence is played for comedic effect, it appears to have been only superficially rehearsed as such and exists outside any type of scripted context. The music, sound effects, and appearances are all integrally woven together, but where the scene goes from there is solely up to the ingenuity of the performers. When Aukerman asks Colonel Tick-Tock what historical figure was the most difficult to send back in time, the performer playing the character pauses and stumbles before replying “Freud,” giving the audience the impression that this was not choreographed beforehand. In a traditional radio context, this lack of formality (Gilmartin and Aukerman often laugh out loud during the sequence) might not make it on-air because of its lack of professionalism or its lack of any coherent narrative flow, and would certainly be edited for vulgarity. Within the context of the podcast, however, such attributes become expected norms and are what draws subscribers to the content. An audience familiar with the UCB Theatre and other L.A. alt-comedy venues would listen to the CBB podcast expecting to hear a certain type of comedic sensibility and performance style. The UCB trains performers in the art of improvisational comedy, and Aukerman’s podcast style reinforces the inherent anxiety that comes with unscripted comedic performance.

This unscripted style of comedy has exploded into mainstream consciousness, thanks to half-improvised and half-scripted television shows such as The Office (2005–2013), Parks and Recreation (2009–), and Whose Line is it Anyway? (1998–2013–2014–). Within podcast discourse, however, the improvisation is defined by conversational context rather than from a set idea that has been suggested by an audience member, such as occurs in typical live improv performances. Nor is this type of comedy performance defined by any specific type of narrative arc, such as those that occur on television situation comedies. On CBB, for example, the lack of visual cues makes it impossible for the listener to expect to be thrust into such a fantastical sequence of events. Someone watching Whose Line Is It Anyway?, for example, knows that the show is premised on improvisational comedy and is aware of when it will happen. CBB listeners will be familiar with UCB-style improv, but they have no way of knowing at what time and in what context they may be confronted with it.

As Pye argues, comedic analysis should “consider the relationship between implausibility and anxiety,” as doing so will “allow for an understanding of the destabilizing function of the comic.” Such an approach, Pye argues, “focuses the debate about the subversive potential of the medium.”³⁰ As is customary for the CBB podcast, this scene abruptly interrupts what is a fairly mundane conversation about Gilmartin’s career to engage the listener in a series of absurd situations. If Pye is arguing for a better understanding of the centrality of the implausible within comic narrative, this scene suggests that within podcast discourse absurdity and anxiety are paired with one another in an obvious form-function relationship. The listener is jarred from a familiar radio-style interview into a world where magician Harry Houdini is forced into conflict with a fictional character named Colonel Tick-Tock. The uneasiness of the improvisational form thereby reinforces the absurdity of the situation, as Aukerman and the characters riff back and forth, frequently breaking character and chuckling.

In this case, we have an actual alt-comedy performance style, perfected and taught at a physical location, being interpreted and infused with a comedic style familiar to the listening audience. Absurdity and anxiety are what make the UCB tick. As Jerry Palmer states, one of the biggest reasons that many comics flounder is their inability to match their aesthetic choices with the expectations of a given audience.³¹ In the case of the podcast, the audience is not present but imagined, conceived of only as someone somehow aware of Aukerman or the UCB Theatre. Such is part of the artistic appeal of this medium. There is no discernible physical audience for the performers and no way of accurately gauging their immediate response to the material. In a way, their absence is also liberating, as the performers have free creative license and a tacit reassurance that the material cannot be rejected outright. With such uncertainty comes some assurance that the audience is predisposed to liking this style of comedy. In many of these podcasts, performers express reluctance at performing in traditional comedy clubs because the audience is too often just going to see comedy and is attending the event simply because they have been given free tickets or are trying to find something to do on a date. As expressed in so many of these podcasts, part of the appeal of the alternative comedy performances spaces is that the audience is already familiar with the comedian’s material and in tune with the sensibility of the UCB performance style. The podcast’s general lack of mainstream visibility as a medium is not detrimental, but rather, podcasting is especially well matched to fulfill the needs of what is still a niche community of comedy fans.

Alt-Comedy’s “Sense of Place”

The comedic interplay that exists in the CBB podcast is consistent with Joshua Meyrowitz’s claim in No Sense of Place that electronic media have “increasingly encroached on the situations that take place in physically defined settings.”³² Physical setting and social situation are to some extent divorced from one another, as the environment of these character-driven scenes is largely a construction of Aukerman’s own narration and of the imagination of the individual listener. However, the nature of the comedy performances described above does give the listener a “sense of place.” Performers like Matt Walsh, June Raphael, Paul Gilmartin, and Scott Aukerman are all tied physically to UCB Theatre as founders, bookers, or frequent performers. They are intimately tied to the place, and that link is reinforced by the natural intimacy of the audio medium and the style of the comedy. Meyrowitz suggests that “electronic media weaken the significance of physical place as a determinant for social situations.”³³ This is largely true in the case of a telephone conversation where the interaction between people is divorced from a physical place but is still an obvious social interaction. However, the alt-comedy podcast derives its appeal and generates its audience by defining itself through its association with a physical place.

For example, consider comic actor Matt Walsh. Walsh works to hone his improvisational skills at the UCB Theatre’s Sunday night improve show, ASSSSCAT. Walsh then might use some of those skills, or even some of the characters that he has developed in those shows, on one of his podcast appearances. Likewise, Walsh might also use an idea or a character developed in a podcast performance for a live performance. In this way the podcast and the UCB demonstrate a two-way directionality. A performer need not pass an audition at the UCB to appear on a podcast, nor must a performer demonstrate competence as a podcast performer to appear on a live show at the UCB. Performers are chosen for both live and podcast performances on their ability to conform to the comedic sensibility that informs both types. Other performers, such as stand-up comic Greg Proops, might appear on the DLM podcast (recorded live at the UCB Theatre and distributed as an audio podcast) to promote a stand-up special that he is distributing on his website. Doug Benson, the host of the podcast, sees Proops as someone whom his audience will know based on their past associations, even though Proops has never taken improv classes at the UCB’s training school. In fact, it seems likely that many in the audience at the DLM show on which Proops appears would know him based on his own podcast, The Smartest Man in the World. As such, the UCB is the hub in this alternative comedy network, and that network travels between podcasts of all sorts. Because the UCB anchors the community, these podcasts merely provide a new outlet for a specific style of comedy and a specific style of conversation.

Doug Benson’s DLM podcast illustrates the significance of physical place, in this case the UCB Theatre, to the functioning of the L.A. alt-comedy scene and to the podcasts that help define it. The DLM podcast is an actual weekly live show broadcast directly from the UCB. It is typically recorded on a Tuesday directly before the CBB live show (not to be confused with the CBB podcast), and it is usually available for download Friday night or the following Monday. Here the podcast listener actually has the benefit of experiencing a completely unedited, largely unrehearsed full UCB show, whether at home eating waffles at the kitchen table in New York City or pumping iron at a gym in Butte, Montana. For those who cannot experience the UCB firsthand, the podcast is an especially intimate bit of eavesdropping onto one of the scene’s most popular shows. A listener will get to peek into the conventions of a typical UCB show. He or she will notice that Benson starts each show with his habitual “Hey, everybody” greeting, that each show consists of movie-related games, and that the comedians will be paired with audience members who will win prizes if their comedian wins the game. Losing participants will get to choose whom Doug gets to call a “shithead” at the end of the show.

The April 17 DLM show featuring Adam Scott, Martin Starr, and Ken Marino demonstrates how this particular podcast links the UCB performance style with the generic expectations of the medium. The spontaneity that is present in both the CBB podcast and the UCB improvisation style contributes to the aesthetic of the DLM podcast. As is the case with a few other UCB live shows, the audience is never told ahead of time who will actually be appearing. In this way, the spontaneity of the style of comedy is mirrored in the booking of the guests themselves. This makes the UCB live shows feel less choreographed and more impromptu. As Aukerman recently told the Onion’s A.V. Club, this is actually part of the UCB’s strategy: “The energy from the audience is part of their [the comedians’] performance, and is directly impacting the performer . . . I prefer it when the audience is directly stacked on top of each other, and the performer is playing off that.”³⁴ In the performance environment that the UCB has cultivated, there are few barriers between performer and audience, a choice that is evident in the fact that the UCB seats only 95 people. When Benson announces comic actor Adam Scott to the stage the crowd cheers loudly, but the podcast listener can still feel the intimacy of the setting because these cheers are audible without a microphone.³⁵ This lack of space between performer and audience gives the feel of a social engagement rather than a comic performance, a feeling further reinforced by the style of the live show itself. The comedy is built out of the absurd, the impromptu, and the unsavory and is a natural fit for the unstructured podcast medium. Another guest on the April 17 show, Ken Marino of the sketch group The State, disregards Benson’s question related to the movie game they are about to play and instead directly addresses a strangely dressed audience member.

Marino:

I wasn’t listening to you [talking to Benson]. I was listening to the guy in the Star Wars awesome cool thing. He’s got some kind of edible wristband on. He’s got two bananas in his hands. This guy’s fucking awesome.

Starr:

Are you on ecstasy? [asking audience member]

Marino:

He’s got his pants cuffed up twice.

Starr:

I think he might be on ecstasy.

Marino:

He’s got one of his shoelaces undone. He’s got sunglasses on. It couldn’t be darker in here, and he’s got a hat on that has some kind of tribal [trails off ] . . . and it looks like it’s never been worn.³⁶

This sequence lasts for several minutes of the 45-minute show. Eventually the performers determine that the audience member is from South Dakota, and in Starr’s words, “the riddle is solved.” Shortly after this sequence, Benson spills water all over the place onstage because “there were a couple of people nodding off.” A few minutes later Marino interrupts Benson again and says, “Do you have a theme song for this part of the show?” After Benson replies that he does not, Marino begins singing a game-show style ditty. Benson then advises the audience, “That could happen. Or some guy could talk to a guy about his bananas for ten minutes. You don’t know which way it’s going to go when I say it’s time for the Leonard Maltin game.”³⁷ It is important to the functioning of this UCB alternative comedy scene that this podcast is recorded directly from the UCB Theatre. The interactions among Marino, Benson, and the live audience make the listening audience feel the presence of the place that gives the community its identity. It also exposes them to a carnivalesque performance style.

Doug Loves Movies and the Carnivalesque

The DLM sequence is funny and is a completely unstructured piece of what is a completely unstructured show. This lack of formal structure is a marker of not only DLM, but of nearly all the podcasts used by the alt-comedy scene. Other than the aforementioned Leonard Maltin game, a movie guessing game that Benson invented based on critic Leonard Maltin’s movie reviews, DLM has no formal arrangement other than some ancillary discussion of recent movies. In the same comedic spirit that informs Colonel Tick-Tock and Harry Houdini’s mysterious appearance on the CBB podcast, DLM’s comedy relies heavily on the stream-of-consciousness wit of the performers and their perceptive recognition of the ridiculous. Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque seems appropriate in an analysis of the creative atmosphere developed by these comedians and podcasts. Bakhtin describes the carnival as a “pageant without footlights and without division into performers and spectators.” Further, “the carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it; they live by those laws as long as they are in effect.”³⁸ In this context, the standard conventions of theatrical performance have undergone some type of warped convolution. The UCB in this envisioning would be the “carnival square,” and the “mode of interrelationship” that percolates within this environment would certainly conform to the “half-real and half-play acted form” that Bakhtin describes as existing in carnival.³⁹

When Starr stops to ask if the audience member is on ecstasy, the exchange is played for comedic effect but comes across as an actual half-true question by Starr. When CBB is having a relatively mundane conversation with Paul Gilmartin about the arc of his comedy career before being interrupted by a Harry Houdini impersonator, the tenor of the program is anchored to both real and fantasy worlds. It is an NPR-style radio interview sporadically interrupted by events that are completely fantastical. While the Leonard Maltin game on DLM is conducted as if it were a legitimate game show, the performers also interrupt it to spill water on the audience, make comments about an audience member’s attire, and even to have a brief conversation with another audience member about the possibility of making a sequel to the movie Private Parts. As Bakhtin describes, the carnivalesque is characterized by the dissolution of distance.⁴⁰ The participatory and freewheeling nature of the CBB and DLM interactions reinforces this collapse of distance. The intimacy of the venue and the interactions between audience and performer also disrupt, to some extent, the hierarchy existing between fans and the artists they admire. This disruption is also a consistent characteristic of Bakhtin’s carnival. The elimination of hierarchy and the blurring of distinctions between audience and performer also have an attendant feature: they make the carnival of CBB, like Bakhtin’s, “not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces everyone.” In this sense, the comic reality of the carnival becomes the reality. As Bakhtin describes, the “pattern of play” within the carnivalesque makes ambiguous the “borderline between art and life.”⁴¹ There seems to be no discernible structure, and the quality of the comedy is solely dependent on the flow of ideas—ideas that are given maximum freedom in an environment that nurtures the rhapsodies of the absurdist. Thus, the boundaries between “serious” interview, playful improvisation, and skillful audience participation become ambiguous, crossing between the borderlines of art, comedy, and reality.

The podcast provokes a tapestry of different uses from its users and provides an audio presence for a scene previously defined by its proximity to the UCB Theatre. An analysis of podcast discourse is an object lesson in the way that emerging media are giving identity to subcultures, reinforcing the characteristics that define them while providing a forum for reflection and critical insight. These podcasters have adopted their uses of the medium to match the characteristics of a place, the UCB Theatre, and have used the podcast medium as a way of reinforcing that identity. The comedy performance function is certainly shrouded in the cloak of invisibility, but the conversational aspect intermittently lifts that cloak to reveal what it is that makes this community different from or similar to mainstream tastes. It is as if the comedy podcast is entertaining the listener with its often ludicrous comedy, but then attempting to show what this comedy means economically, aesthetically, and socioculturally. It is a constant process of revealing and concealing—revealing the insights and wisdom of the comic while simultaneously concealing his or her identity behind the cloak of the invisible audio medium.

Ultimately, the idea that these comedians have somehow miraculously circumvented all the trappings of commercial logic seems at best insincere and at worst self-delusional. The alt-comedy podcast does give the creative person hope, however, that the control of content is indeed moving back into the hands of the content producers, that the large media establishment’s grip on artistic distribution is becoming unclenched, and that the new media future is one for the artist’s taking. By understanding the properties of this new artistic medium, these comics have transported the intimacy of an in-person comedy performance in Los Angeles to the ears of listeners across the country, providing a sense of continuity to a burgeoning comedy community and its adoring fans.