Hey Listen to All This Shit

HEY! Listen.

-Ben Sollee is a Cellist, he’s quite good! He’s a singer-songwriter who basically sings stuff that would be tired and a bit annoying if it was a dude with an acoustic guitar but sounds pretty awesome with a cello. He’s pretty neat! I’d check him out by clicking the thing below here:

-In Case of Emergency is a podcast! It’s cute! That’s really the main drive of my continued listening. In Case of Emergency is several of your friends having a silly conversation in the background of a party. It rarely gets me rolling on the floor, but the presentation and topics manage to consistently entertain and just generally feel like a cup of cocoa. It’s completely worth listening to all of them! All of the premises are equally funny, which is impressive! You’d think they would run out. Check it out here: http://icoecast.libsyn.com/

-Comedy Bang Bang is both a show and a podcast! But the podcast is something you can listen to immediately, so you should! It’s so good. I highly recommend finding any and all that include Paul F. Thompkins as a guest because he’s fucking amazing. The premise of the show is basically one actual guest, and one fake-person guest played by a comedian. They’re long, they’re consistently both in-character and out of character funny, and it’s just a good time to be had. It’s a great way to be introduced to a wide variety of comedic talent as well! Give it a listen at http://www.earwolf.com/show/comedy-bang-bang-podcast/ and in the meantime look at this clip from the show, it’s awesome.

-The Alex Bellegarde Trio is cool! They play well, also there’s a regular jam session thing that I guess I got to see without having any fucking clue what was going on. I distinctly remember being in the bathroom thinking “jeez, the sax is really loud” and coming out to find someone practicing right outside the door, getting ready to go on stage! It’s cool, you should go. Be more respectful than I was! I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have, I didn’t really understand it, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Check them out at: http://www.myspace.com/alexbellegarde Also check out a neat thing on the Jam Sessions! It’s got a lot of music too.

That’s it! Listen to a bunch of neat stuff, have fun you crazy kid.

My Brother, My Brother and Me is a Great Comedy Podcast

So I’m a comedy fan. Like comedy, like laughing. But I never really bothered finding comedy podcasts because I am lazy and it always seemed like amateur hour, you know? If the professional goddamn comedians on SNL can manage to be that dire, I wasn’t interested in seeing what the dregs of the internet were producing in their spare time. The exception to this was always The Bugle on account of John Oliver being the cutest.

I don’t remember how I found My Brother, My Brother and Me but thank you whoever showed it to me. It’s so fucking good. I need to share it with you.

Here is how it works: the three McElroy brothers, Justin, Griffin, and Travis take questions from the audience and from the venerable and insane Yahoo Answers service and provide advice. Sometimes that advice is within the realm of usefulness, many times it is either physically impossible or grossly illegal. But it’s always very goddamn funny.

They manage to keep a good pace going throughout their hour-long episodes in large part due to a semi-formal system by which real honest-to-goodness questions are interspersed with a sprinkling of Yahoo Answers questions. This means that whenever some comedy bit is flagging they can always just pull out a question like “I think I am in love with a goose?” and get both an instant laugh and a new direction to take the discussion. The fact that there are three of them also helps, as any brother speaking is giving the other two a second to think of something interesting to say as well as providing goof ideas. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re just genuinely charming guys.

When they do attempt to actually for-real help people, the fact that it’s a comedy show first and foremost actually really helps out. They get to, for instance, just straight up laugh at people for asking shit like “My girlfriend is moving away and didn’t tell me, bad sign?” I mean they don’t just make fun of the guy, but as their remit is joke-making they get to really dig into the fact that for fuck’s sake yes that is a hilariously bad sign. Just give up, man. They’re friendly, but they aren’t your friends. They’re allowed to give you some amount of shit for the stupid questions you ask. And that’s not to say they’re always mean, either. They’re usually very understanding about shitty high-school situations or troubles with long-distance relationships or other genuinely annoying shit, with the overriding message being that it’ll probably all work out so let’s laugh a bit. They may not give the most considered answer to every serious question they get, but they’re usually able to act as a sanity check for questions that maybe people don’t feel comfortable asking friends and they get some jokery out of it at the same time to help the medicine go down.

They’re really funny dudes, and I feel like you’d be well served by checking out their stuff. With over 100 hours recorded, you could get a hell of a lot of mileage out of enjoying them! Here are a couple of sample tracks to test the waters:

The Sampler:

Cake Boss:

Comedy! My Brother, My Brother, and Me is a Comedic Podcast That Is Actually Pretty Good.

So you’re into comedy. Maybe you watch it on The Cent (as we in the know call Comedy Central) or you’re super into some British thing that you insist is great but then again who can tell when each season is 13 minutes long and primarily consists of awkward pausing and tooth decay?

Maybe you listen to podcasts, but probably not. Because podcasts are the castoffs of comedy. There are a thousand of them, and you don’t have the time in your busy day to go around making certain each and every one is actually just the worst thing. You’ve got stuff to do.

But you’ve got me! And I’ve got fuck all to do. So, after having reviewed all podcasts in their entirety over the course of the past week, I’ve brought you the single best comedic podcast: My Brother, My Brother, and Me. I will abbreviate to MBMBaM, pronounced “muh bim bam”.

What is MBMBaM? Well, as they put it:

My Brother, My Brother and Me is an advicecast for the modern era featuring three real-life brothers: Justin, Travis and Griffin McElroy. For roughly five-sixths of an hour each week, with new episodes dropping every Monday, the brothers McElroy will answer any query sent our way, each fielding questions falling into our respective areas of expertise. We operate like a streamlined, advice-generating machine. It’s both terrifying and humbling to behold.

If you’ve got nerdy or boring parents, you’ll remember listening to Car Talk on NPR. It’s like that, but instead of cars they tack more to Dear Abby sorts of advice. Also, their jokes make someone other than themselves laugh on occasion. The brothers alternate between questions sent in by readers and Yahoo Answers questions asked by terrifyingly out of touch people in need of a lot of help.

The Brothers McElroy have a pretty good vibe going. The three of them have gotten comfortable riffing off questions, and using intervals of decent advice as a way of pausing to think about something that would be a much dumber and funnier course of action to advocate. They also have the good sense to actually plan ahead instead of relying entirely on bullshitting, which gives a bit of structure to the experience. Griffin has become the designated question-asker, and over the 65 extant episodes has become adept at pinpointing the down-slope of the riff track and cutting it off with a new question.

It’s the sort of humor that you can’t really pinpoint lines or quotes from all that easily because it’s just a flow looking for local minimums of humorousness, but it’s left me actually crying with laughter several times. It’s a bit like MST3K in that regard, but obviously much worse. I don’t want them getting big heads.

Anyways! I’ve got the sample track for you to listen to, and you can head on over to their website for more, with a new update each week!

Oh, and feel free to ask them questions too:

If you’re in desperate need of a bit of advice, don’t be shy! Simply send an email to mbmbam@maximumfun.org, or post on twitter with the tag #MBMBaM and we’ll take care of that for you.