Podcasts are great, but are there simply too many of them?
Tig Notaro’s Live was one of the best comedy albums of 2012: a short, achingly bittersweet journey through the comedian’s battles with breast cancer and her rapidly failing relationships. Her weekly podcast, Professor Blastoff, has the comic talking with friends about similarly weighty themes — religion, scientific theory, philosophy — under the guise of trivial topics such as cars or polyamory.
Notaro will bring the popular podcast to the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue on Sunday. She is not the first to take a podcast on the road: Community creator and (former) embattled showrunner and writer Dan Harmon has brought his boisterous Harmontown to cities across the country, while Kevin Smith has toured widely in support of his lucrative SModcast.
But with the arrival of yet another stellar, comedian-driven podcast, it must be asked: Have we reached comedy podcast overload?
If it’s a question of quality, the answer is a resounding “no.” There is no shortage of excellent, deeply funny content on iTunes or Earwolf: Michael Ian Black and Tom Cavanagh continue to build layers of inside jokes on Mike and Tom Eat Snacks, Sklarbro Country and Nerdist put a fun spin on the talk-show format every week, and Marc Maron’s WTF remains essential listening for anyone even remotely interested in stand-up comedy.
But therein lies the (sort-of) problem: Right now, there is just too much high-quality content being produced for someone to dive in without drowning. Even for experienced podcast listeners, the form can be daunting. There have been well more than a hundred episodes of Scott Aukerman’s essential Comedy Bang! Bang!, for example, and the show has built up its own complex history, inside jokes and recurring narratives over the years. Diving in can be overwhelming, but anyone who admits to not listening risks getting cast out of the alt-comedy community. It’s a lose-lose scenario.
And as podcasts continue to boom in popularity, they run the risk of becoming staid and formulaic. These days, if you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all: One well-known comedian (Doug Benson, Chris Hardwick, Matt Besser — take your pick) invites on a panel of friends. The group riffs off of one another and discusses a central theme (bad movies, cooking, the news, whatever). Everybody checks Twitter. Rinse. Repeat.
This formula — and its burgeoning profitability — has not gone unnoticed by the very megaliths that forced comedians to take to the Internet in the first place. Initially a chance for comics to break out of the workaday world of sitcoms and build up an audience without a Comedy Central special, the podcast form is now being brought to television and commercialized: Hardwick’s Nerdist was adapted for BBC America, Maron will soon star in a WTF-inspired sitcom on IFC, and Comedy Central’s (admittedly excellent) The Jeselnik Offensive takes on the now-standard panel format first popularized on the podcast circuit.
That is to stay, underground comedy isn’t so underground anymore. And that’s all right, but it can be frustrating.
Take Notaro as an example. Part of the beauty of Live was its spontaneity, the sense that Notaro was truly opening up and creating something in the moment onstage. And though her podcast is silly, thought provoking and undeniably entertaining, it will never reach those glorious heights, confined as it is by what has now become a standard, almost rote format.
The Internet has offered comics an almost unlimited creative license, but the result is a handful of tried-and-true talk or panel show templates. Notaro may take her talk show on the road, but it can’t reach the cathartic genius of a perfect stand-up set.
That is to say, podcasts may still be silly, but are no longer subversive. They have become reliably good, but may be starting to lose their ability to be transcendent.
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