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Succotash


Succotash, the Comedy Soundcast Soundcast, was launched 12 years ago (April, 2011) with the idea of promoting comedy soundcasts in what was then a marketplace still trying to find its way. By featuring short clips of shows being produced by funny folks both known and unknown, we like to feel that we maybe had a little tiny, eeny weeny, itsy bitsy bit to do with helping to ignite the torch of soundcasts across the globe! (But then we've always had a rather high opinion of ourselves...)

Original show host and executive producer Marc Hershon, along with co-host Tyson Saner, booth announcer Bill Heywatt, engineer/producer Joe Paulino, musical director Scott Carvey, and booth assistant Kenny Durgis have been keeping the flame alive o'er these many years.

Sep 21, 2014

Just four more shows after this one and we hit Epi100, the last show of the first season of Succotash, the Comedy Podcast Podcast.

Seasons in podcasting seem a little silly to me, so I figured after almost 3 years and 100 ‘sodes, we’ll make THAT the end of season one.  (I’m still trying to figure out if I have it together enough to do a live show somewhere for the 100th episode. Don’t know. We’ll see…

I’ve also been talking with our Associate Producer Tyson Saner– or messaging him, more precisely, about a couple of format changes that Succotash is in for in the second season of the show. I’ll tell you more about that soon. Nothing major in terms of what you hear, just going to tighten up the struts on this rust heap a little bit and see if we can’t keep it flying a little longer.

We only have a few comedy podcast clips to share with you this episode because the main attraction is my interview with comic–magician The Amazing Johnathan. He recently announced his retirement from performing live on stage and we find out during the interview.

I had heard Johnathan on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast – a great interview, by the way. If you didn’t hear it, think about tracking it down over at WTFpod.com. But because I’ve known Johnathan for years, I figured it might be neat to get him on here to chat and we’d no doubt find some other things to talk about. Which we did…

He's had an interesting career, starting out trying to do stage magic in Michigan, then street magic in San Francisco, before finding his unique "punk magician" spin on an act that has always been more about the laughs than the magic. Johnathan talks about those early days on the street - competing for sidewalk space with the likes of Harry Anderson and A. Whitney Brown. We also find out how a bet he made with a friend ended up keeping off Late Night with David Letterman for years after he made his debut.

And once upon a time I was the head writer on a short-lived game show called Ruckus for Merv Griffin. Johnathan was the host and we talk about some of that craziness, too.

We talk at length about Ruckus, actually and one of the things we bring up - in fact, something I did in this particular segment Johnathan uses to kick off and close our chat - was a gag called The Ultimate Blindfold. I came on stage as a"stooge", pretending to be a member of the theater audience, which was where we pulled our contestants from for each episode. That bit lives in perpetuity on YouTube, so I figured I'd slug it in the blog here…

 The 10 Most Active Shows on Stitcher's Top 100 Comedy Podcast List

Nowhere else in Podcastland are you likely to hear a list featuring the 10 most active shows on any list. But we have it for you here! These are the shows that moved up OR down the most in the past week on Stitcher’s Top 100 Comedy Podcast List. (Some weeks we get big, massive swings in the numbers. Some weeks, not so much. Mostly single digit moves this week with a couple of exceptions.)

AT                                                                     MOVED
8   SModcast >> Tell ‘Em, Steve-Dave!                    + 6
22 The Bugle                                                         + 8
26 Judge John Hodgman                                        - 10
32 Bertcast’s Podcast                                            +10
46 The Christopher Titus Podcast                           + 6
47 Off The Air – Chick McGee                                 - 7
68 Sawbones: A Marital Tour…Misguided Medicine   - 7
81 U Talkin’ U2 To Me?                                          +30
90 DVDASA with David Choe and Asa Akira              -12
95 By The Way: In Conversation with Jeff Garland  - 7

As much as I kind of get a kick out of this feature, we may need to trim some fat if we move to a shorter show in a few episodes so this could be on the chopping block. Do YOU like the 10 Most Active? Enough to keep it in the show? Call into the Succotash Hotline – (818) 921-7212 – and let me know.

Other Stuff In This Episode

We have a fresh Burst O' Durst with our resident crankpot, comedian and social commentator Will Durst, who's talking about the new iPhone 6. This episode is sponsored by Henderson's Peer Sucker Pants. And we've got a few things to talk about in the Tweetsack.

Clips

Greg Proops’ Film Club
This past week I reviewed Greg Proops’ OTHER podcast for the This Week In Comedy Podcasts column on Splitsider.com, then I shaved it off and put it up on Huffington Post, just for good measure. So I’m not talking about his The Smartest Man In The World podcast. This is his Greg Proops Film Club. It’s a once-a-month movie screening of something that Greg likes – and the most recent one film was The Man Who Would Be King, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine at their most dashing but, in the segment we’re about to listen to, Proops goes off on a tangent about spending teenage nights at the local drive-in movie theater.

P.F.’s Tape Recorder
We recently got hit up to revisit the P.F.’s Tape Recorder podcast, hosted by P.F. Wilson and to check out a recent episode featuring the Sklar Brothers – very funny comedians and hosts of the Sklarboro Country and Sklarboro County podcasts. P.F. wanted us to pay particularly close attention to his It’s Facebook NOT Factbook part of that epi, so that's what we do.

The Geek Generation
I saw on the Independent Podcaster Association page on Facebook that The Geek Generation podcast hit its 200th episode. Congrats to host Rob Logan and his co-host Mike Volpe. These guys love talking about movies, TV shows, video games…pretty much anything their audience enjoys geeking out over. Our snippet is from their big Epi 200 where they get into…Oreos.

Hitting The Road

I'll be on the road later this week, heading to Los Angeles and the 3rd Annual Los Angeles Podcast Festival. (This year, BTW, for the first time they're offering a "virtual ticket" to the PodFest - for $25, you get to watch their "livestream" of the entire event online.)

I'll kick off my Southland visit by dropping into the big "partycast" being thrown by Chillpak Hollywood Hour hosts Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness Thursday night. So I may toss a Succotash "halfisode" up online between now and Epi96.

Thanks for passing the Succotash!

— Marc Hershon