You are, once again – unless this is your first time – listening to Succotash, the Comedy Podcast Podcast. (Or the Comedy Earfruit Earfruit. Ever since my chat with Superego's Matt Gourley, I’ve become obsessed with renaming the generic podcast with something. What do you think of earfruit?) This is Succotash Epi99! The penultimate episode of Season One. That’s right. Episode 100 will be the final show for our first season.

But that’s next time.

THIS time we have a helluva show for you with not one but TWO interviews that I did when I was at the 3rd Annual LA Podcast Festival at the end of September.You’ll hear my chat with Todd Glass of the Todd Glass Show and with Matt Knudsen from the Grabbing Lunch podcast. (Or earfruit.)

I’ll also be playing clips from both of their podcasts PLUS clips from Picking Favorites, a new podcast on the new Wolfpop Network, the Angry Old Man podcast, Denzel Washington is The Greatest Actor of All Time PERIOD, and Today We Learned teaches us all a little something about the dumbest laws in the United States.

We also have a DOUBLE dose of our Burst O’ Durst segment with comedian Will Durst, a classic Henderson’s Pants commercial, and a musical track from our Associate Producer Tyson Saner that is featured on Combat Radio’s First Christmas Album, which is a great way to help out friend-of-Succotash Ethan Dettenmeier’s Christmas Event for Homeless Children Benefit. You can find out order the album and find out more about the benefit by visiting OUR homesite, http://SuccotashShow.com, and click on the album cover on the right hand side.

Wish Us A Happy 100TH Episode!

If you’re a comedy podcaster or just a regular old listener, there’s still time to get us your “Happy 100th Episode Anniversary!” message for us to play on our one hundredth show. You can call one into the Succotash Hotline, at (818) 921-7212, or email us an MP3 or WAV file to marc@SuccotashShow.com. (Not to throw a challenge out there, but in this episode I'm playing a great 100th episode message in from the guys over at Illusionoid and I’ve got to say that I really appreciate the extra effort that went into it.

PodBay's Top 10 Comedy Podcasts

It’s been TWO months since Stitcher has updated their Top 100 Comedy Podcast List. Not sure what’s going on over there. (Heck, given the nature of technology, maybe my browser is screwed up.) But I’m not able to track podcasts through Stitcher’s site these days so rather than NOT do our Top 10 Most Active Shows On Stitcher's Top 100 Comedy Podcast List, I hopped over to PodBay’s site to harvest their list of the most recent Top 10 Comedy Podcasts according to the live iTunes rankings. (PodBay, by the way, is a GREAT podcast app on iOS and Android, so be sure to check it out if you want a super duper podcast experience!)

1   With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus
2   Psychobabble with Tyler Oakley
3   Welcome to Nightvale
4   WTF with Marc Maron
5   The Joe Rogan Experieince
6   The Nerdist
7   The Adam Carolla Show
8   How Did This Get Made?
9   Bill Burr’s Monday Morning Podcast
10 Not Too Deep With Grace Helbig

A Little Christmas Music

Our own Tyson Saner wrote and performed an instrumental tune that he did for the First Combat Radio Christmas Album to help raise money for Ethan Dettenmeier’s 4th Annual Combat Radio Christmas Event for Homeless Children. You can donate to the Combat Radio Christmas Event at http://www.gofundme.com/ACombatRadioChristmas and get the album for a suitable donation OR go to the right-hand side of our homesite, http://SuccotashShow.com, and click on the Combat Radio Christmas Album. Tyson’s cut is entitled For Christmas and feature in during this episode both under our Tweetsack mentions and then in its entirety at the end of the show. 

The Clips

Denzel Washington is the Greatest Actor of All Time PERIOD
Last week on Splitsider.com and HuffPost Comedy I reviewed this new podcast, one of Wolfpop’s new shows, hosted by recent Succotash special guest W. Kamau Bell and Kevin Avery, a soon-to-be guest on this show. Both of these guys spent a lot of their formative funny years as San Francisco comedians, then Kamau got his own show, Totally Biased, for a while on FX and FXX. Kevin was head writer on that show and, when it got cancelled, he found a place on the writing staff on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO. The two of them decided to put together a podcast about one of their favorite people, Denzel Washington, to let everyone know what a terrific actor they think he is.

The Todd Glass Show
I was glad I got a chance to sit with Todd Glass at this year’s LA Podcast Festival. I know him a little bit from the LA comedy scene and he’s played in Northern California during the past couple of years and we got to hangout just before he started HIS podcast, the Todd Glass Show. Before I get to our chat, I wanted to play a little piece of a recent epi of his show, one featuring guest Patton Oswalt.

Picking Favorites
If you were a fan of NBC’s series Chuck, about a nerdy big box store employee who get a computer stuffed into his noggin, you know Zachary Levi, the star of the show. David Coleman was the propmaster on that show, kind of the Q of TV comedy spy show, if you will. Together, they started a business called The Nerd Machine and now they have this Wolfpop podcast, Picking Favorites, started with the help of a comedian who goes by the name Razzle Dangerously, who also host a show on the Nerdist network called Today We Learned, which we’ll be playing a clip from momentarily. Then they drafted Tyler Labine, a hilarious actor from shows like Reaper, The Sons of Tucson, and the movie Tucker & Dale vs Evil. Picking Favorites starts with three topics each episode and the hosts and guests go round-robin style, naming off their favorites of whatever the topic happens to be. In the second show, their guest was Adam Baldwin, another Chuck alumnus (and also one of the stars of Monster Makers, a movie I wrote for the Hallmark Channel.)

Today We Learned
Associate Producer Tyson Saner grabbed the previous clip and this next clip, which comes from the Today We Learned podcast, featuring Razzle Dangerously (as heard in the Picking Favorites clip), and Dan Casey. This Nerdist show says that the hosts bring you “the latest and greatest and sometimes weirdest facts and trivia the world has to offer.” In this clip, from their Epi62, the hosts and their guest Jacob Soboroff talk about dumb laws in the United States.

Angry Old Man
We clipped The Angry Old Man podcast quite a while ago – Episode 53, I think – so it’s high time we hit him again. All I know about the ringmaster for this podcast is that he goes by the name Robert Q, and that he does all the voices on this thing. Tyson grabbed the cold opening from Angry Old Man Epi 90 so have a listen…

Grabbing Lunch
I was first introduced to Matt Knudsen, host of the Grabbing Lunch podcast, at the most recent LA Podcast Festival when Christine Blackburn (of the Story Worthy podcast) dragged him into the Podcast Lab and told me, “You have GOT to interview Matt!” I really enjoyed our chat and I love the premise for his podcast. Simple. Filling. Grab two people who listeners may or may not have heard of before, sit ‘em down to lunch and turn the mics on. This clip is from his Epi52 – at one episode a week, that’s his one year anniversary. And his guests were actress Helen Slater from things like Supergirl and City Slickers, and her husband Rob Watzke, a Hollywood editor and improviser.

Join us next time for Epi100, the last show of Season 1! Until next time, thanks for passing the Succotash!

– Marc Hershon

Oh, hey – it’s your old pal Marc Hershon. Unless this is your first time listening to Succotash, the Comedy Podcast Podcast, in which case it’s your new pal Marc Hershon. Either way, this is Epi98. Just TWO episodes away from our Epi100 and the end of Succotash Season 1.

In regards to that, we’ve been tweeting requests for podcasters and listeners to call in "Happy Episode 100!" messages to the Succotash Hotline – (818) 921-7212 – and so far we’ve got nothing.

I was planning to do a big live episode for number 100 but with such an underwhelming response to the show’s Season 1 finale, I think we’re going to go back into Studio P with our engineer/producer Joe Paulino, announcer Bill Heywatt, booth announcer Kenny Durgis, and just do a slam-bang highly produced extravaganza. (Unlike this week’s episode, which was recorded in Studio F - my Fiat - while parked in my driveway in the middle of the night.)

Incidentally, this episode is NOT brought to you by SquareSpace, Nature Box, Cards Against Humanity, Dollar Shave Club or any other legitimate paying advertisers but we are sponsored by Henderson’s Pants and YOUR kind donations, merch purch, and/or clickthroughs on our Amazon.com banner at the top of our http://SuccotashShow.com homesite.

We’ve got a big old sweaty handful of clips from comedy podcasts around the interwebs, many of which were harvested by our Associate Producer Tyson Saner. Also on tap this episode is not one but TWO of our Burst O’ Durst segments with political and social comedian/commentator Will Durst, a fresh Henderson’s Pants commercial and the Tweetsack is back! (I pushed it off last episode because we were running so long but we’ll be mentioning a few notes we’ve gotten this time around as well as a bunch of kind folks who have been passing the Succotash via social media.)

What we also have in store for you in THIS very show, this Epi98, is an interview I recorded over Skype a few days ago with Matt Gourley, who many of you may know as ¼ of the Superego podcast. He also co-hosts the James Bonding podcast with Matt Myra. But his main reason for dropping by, virtually speaking, was to talk about his newest podcast AND the new network that it’s helping to launch.

Just this past week, the Wolf Pop podcast network started. It’s a spinoff of sorts from the Earwolf Network, home of many fine comedy podcasts such as Comedy Bang Bang, Affirmation Nation with Bob Ducca, Nerd Poker and many others. Wolf Pop is going to feature more shows with a pop culture bent, under the stewardship of the very funny Paul Scheer, whom you may know from the How Did This Get Made? podcast, his appearance on TV’s The League and many other endeavors.  Matt’s new show is called I Was There Too, and features Matt interviewing different guests each episode, guests who were connected to a famous scene or moment in a movie but just as a bit part player or an extra on the film.

For instance, his guest on the first show, which dropped this week, is Paul F. Tompkins, who was in There Will Be Blood and was in a scene with Daniel Day Lewis. We feature a clip from that premiere episode on this show, along with my chat with Matt. (I also review I Was There Too this week for This Week In Comedy Podcasts on Splitsider.com and for Huffington Post Comedy as well.)

Coming Soon: Season 2!

If you missed me talking about what Season Two of Succotash has in store, I’m going to be splitting the show into two different flavors which will both be available in the regular show feed. We will have clips-only episodes under the subtitle of Succotash Clips and then we’ll have interview shows subtitled Succotash Chats. And, occasionally, we might still mix those offerings for a serving of Succotash Clips n’ Chats.

No More 10 Most Active Shows In Stitcher's Top 100 Comedy Podcast List?

It seems that Stitcher has been updating some hooha in the jezzleneck because of a defective framus and their numbers have been all kablooie since the middle of September. Now I was planning on maybe scapping this feature anyway after Epi100 so maybe we’ll just let it quietly crawl off and die in the bushes.

The Clips

Tomefoolery
Twice a month, comedian Cody Melcher invites a couple of funny friends on his Tomefoolery podcast to talk about a really, really weird book they've all just read. Comedianne Stephanie Hasz co-hosts this epi and guests include Chris Geiger, Mary Beth Smith and Claire Friedman from "The Nerdologues", a CHicago sketch group. The book for this episode is called A Christian Response to Dungeons and Dragons, written by Peter Leithart and George Grant in 1987. (Our Associate Producer Tyson mentioned that, “This is not something I knew existed and I'm almost sure that my Dad would have mentioned it as he came from a religious background  and is NOT a 'Satan Worshipper'.” This clip is of the folks re-enacting a famous "Chick Tract" called "Dark Dungeon" that is anti-Dungeons and Dragons. That "Chick Tract" has since been made into a film that was funded by Kickstarter. They want $5 bucks for the film online, which looks like it cost 5 bucks to make. Here's the trailer for it if you want to spend YOUR money on it…

Transformers 1986
As if to test the modern axiom, “There’s a podcast for everything”, Podcast Squared’s Andrew Johnstone has unveiled the Transformers 1986 podcast. To bring his audio vision to life, he’s assembled a roundtable of podcasting podcasters — Jason “The Angry Ginger” (7 Days A Geek), Ben Tippett (Titanium Physicists), and Jim Chipley (Bizz and Chips), along with comedian Joe Starr. The first epsiode uses the nerd minds of the panel to deconstruct the first 20 minutes of this animated “classic” motion picture. So far there is only the first episode of Transformers 1986 so there’s plenty of time to jump aboard!

Pizza Beer Revolution
This is a segment-driven chatter show featuring Mike Pullano (host of the New York Rangers’ Blue Shirt Buds), Chris Ippolito (lead singer of Chapter Five) and ex-pro snowboarder Joe Maffei that appears on YouTube as a multi-screen videocast as well as an audio podcast. Their guest this segment – they frequently have interesting guests popping in – is Samantha Quintas of SModcast’s The Sam And Ming Show. And they’re talking – more or less on topic – about their favorite TV theme songs.

Hillbilly Nerd Talk
Hosted by Hank and Petra – no last names – who describe themselves as “educated hillbillies”, the Hillbilly Nerd Talk podcast hails from “deep in the hollows of rural Appalachia”. This is an amazing find from Tyson and features a charming married couple who chew the fat on a variety of subjects. This sample features them tossing around a list of the perils of Facebook from Men’s Health magazine.

Done and done. That’s Epi98 in a podshell. It’s not too late to record a special message for the Succotash Episode 100 – you can do it by calling into the Succotash Hotline at (818) 921-7212 or by sending us an MP3 or WAV file to marc@SuccotashShow.com. We continue to appreciate getting your reviews and rating on iTunes, your Thumbs Up on Stitcher, and your donations by clicking the Donate button at http://SuccotashShow.com.

Until next time, thanks for passing the Succotash!

— Marc Hershon