Jul 6, 2021
Hello, friend-o! As our announcer, Bill Heywatt, says, I AM Marc Hershon, your every-other-weekly-host of Succotash, the Comedy Soundcast soundcast. And this is Epi260, clocking in just as we pass the half-year mark for 2021. Here in the US we’ve got COVID-19 on the run, except for those pesky variants. If you are elsewhere in the world, here’s hoping for the best for you and yours.
Before I get into the comedy soundcasts that I will be featuring clips from this week, let me check in and ask if you were able to catch last week’s installment, Epi259, with my alternating co-host Tyson Saner, in which he featured snippets from Self Esteem Party, Conversation For Adults, and Comedy Bang Bang. You can catch that show, or any other past ‘sode, at our homesite SuccotashShow.com. You can also get pretty far back at Apple or Google Podcasts, Spotify, Sticher, and even SoundCloud will let you flip back a few weeks.
For the shows I’m clipping this week, I just kind of took a scattershot look through a number of comedy soundcast lists for 2021 and snagged a couple from some I heard recently and a couple I hadn’t even heard of until this week. We’ve got samples from Better Off Better, BHHcast, Play With Pain, and Plumbing the Death Star. I also have a brief moment from a bit I contributed to from The Los Angeles Breakfast Club: On The Air, a soundcast hosted by Phil Leirness that I serve as the announcer for. This episode is sponsored by Henderson’s Pants new Space Pants – Henderson’s, where no pants have gone before!
Before
we get to the clippage, I wanted to give a recommendation to a
pretty bold comedy-slash-psychological experiment currently on
Netflix. If you haven’t caught Bo Burnham’s
Inside special, you might want to check
it out. Don’t be expecting to see him enteraining a crowd of people
in a theater, though. This is way different. Very unique. It’s his
exploration of his comedy during the pandemic, where the entire
show takes place in one room and he’s apparently doing all the tech
himself. Lots of talking to the camera and to himself. There’s
music, confessions, and tears. I found one of the songs, “White
Woman’s Instagram” from the special up on YouTube so I thought I’d
throw it in here. The lyrics are amazingly on-tone but you should
check out the video from the special because Bo’s
visual interpretation of the subject in question is
fantastic.
I found Inside pretty powerful and totally captivating. And just a tad claustrophobic. If you’re up for something different, whether you know Bo’s work or not, check it out on Netflix.
Alright, let’s get into THIS show now, and onto the clips!
Play With
Pain
Full
disclosure before I continue: I am not a sports fan. Never have
been and likely never will be. I’m not sure why, but watching games
live or on TV has never grabbed me. Football, baseball, basketball,
soccer, the Olympic events – just not my thing. The pity of it is
that there are a lot of comedy soundcasts that are connected to
sports, either directly or just because the hosts and guests are
into them. Like the Monday Morning Podcast with Bill Burr.
I love Burr. He’s one of the funniest humans around today. But as
soon as he goes into a sptry about sports or having watched some
game or another over the weekend, I’m lost. But I hereby resolve to
better. For YOU. And I’m going to start with Play with
Pain with Chet Waterhouse. Now
Chet is a character, an old play-by-play sports announcer, as
created and played by comedian Jeff
Cesario. He usually has a comedian on as a guest,
someone else who’s at least somewhat into sports, and they kickk
around a lot of the sports news of the day. We’re clipping a recent
show with guest Paul “Sully” Sullivan but he was a
little audio glitchy on the show so I’m just featuring Chet’s
sports update, a regular feature on the show.
Plumbing the Death
Star
I
am rarely surprised any more when I find a soundcast that I think
no one else knows about and then find out it’s a pretty big hit and
has been for a while. The soundcast world is just too damn big now
to get that lucky. But I’m glad I found Plumbing the Death
Star. Out of Australia and the wonderfully named Sanspants
Radio Netowkr, the show features Joel L.
Zammit, Jackson B. Daly, and another
Joel, Joel
Duscher. The loosely-wrapped premise of the show is to
bring logic into the worlds of fantasy and sci-fi and pop culture
in general. Our featured clip is from their recent episode entitled
“Is It Ethical to Bust Ghosts?”, which means it only took them
until now to get around to an almost 40-year-old movie. Although
with the new Ghostbusters: Afterlife supposed to drop this
Fall, maybe it couldn’t be more timely.
Better Off
Better
Touting
their show Better Off Better as “a comedic, cut-throat
journey to self-betterment”, hosts Chris K. Daniels, Jenny
Whipple, and Sam Caswell are constantly
challenging each other to get better and, well, being better.
Called “The best comedy podcast of 2021” by their moms, each
episode features a new wrinkle in how to make oneself better. At
least in theory. For their recent 50th episode, the trio decided to
go hairless down south of the border by using a couple of
“experimental hair removal” techniques: Sugar Waxing and Sandpaper
Shaving. How did it all come out? Or off? We don’t have time to get
into the whole thing on our show, but here’s a taste…
BHHcast
The
“Bah-cast”, which is actually spelled BHHcast, features
hosts Jamie Bendall, Adam Haigh, and Jamie
Hernan, interviews comedians and other guests with, as
they put it, an incredible backstory. The kickoff to their Season 5
a little over a month ago, an episode entitled “Tandem Skydiving”
featured comedian and family man Paul Virzi. Reflecting what I was
saying earlier in this show, the BHHcast seems to dip heavily into
sports and I listened diligently, although our clip gets more into
a show that Paul had a little while back called Gun To Your
Head, where he would force his guests to make tough decisions
based on the premise there was a gun to your head so you HAD to
answer. The gang decides to play a little of that game
here…
The music I’m using under the TweetSack listings this week, by the way, was composed and performed by my buddy DJ Knifeketeer. That particular number is called “Rocket Hat on the Run” and you can find the entire Rocket Hat soundtrack on YouTube by subscribing to DJ Knifeketeer.
If you were hoping for more of episode 260 of this show, I’m afraid that’s our time. You may, of course, listen to it back again as many times as you like. And if you hang out in this same feed next week, you’ll be treated to my compadre Tyson Saner and his newest selection of soundcastd clippage for you. Special thanks to our announcer Bill Heywatt and our amazing producer/engineer Joe Paulino, not to mention booth assistant Kenny Durgess, our secret weapon and the hardest working man in soundcasting next to Paul F. Tompkins.
Enjoy your summer while you can, check out some if not all of the soundcasts we’ve sampled for you here today, and if anyone ever asks if you’ve heard anything good lately, please be sue to pass the Succotash, won’t you?
— Marc Hershon