I’ve written about the Good One podcast before when I described how Gilbert Gottfried saved America. This podcast is a pretty simple concept. A comedy journalist named Jesse David Fox interviews a comedian. The interview is structured around one joke that the comedian does. Fox then does a deep drill down on the joke, deconstructing it as he goes.
Fox has been doing it for years. He’s done enough now that the show has become somewhat hit or miss. He’s branched out beyond strictly comedians and has talked to people who do things like sketch comedy or that write comedy shows. In my opinion, these episodes aren’t as interesting.
If you get a chance, take a look at the older episodes. The Gilbert Gottfried episode is hilarious. They discuss the old joke known as The Aristocrats. If you don’t know it, it’s a very basic joke that allows comedians to be as lewd and crude as possible. I’m not a huge fan of Gottfried, but listening to him laugh uproariously as Fox asks him about how he made the subtle choice of deciding to include a rabid gerbil being anally inserted was worth the price of admission in itself.
The live interview of Anthony Jeselnik is also pretty awesome. Fox deconstructs Jeselnik’s baby drop joke. For those not aware, Jeselnik has a stage persona of being aloofly arrogant. In private life, Jeselnik apparently is a kind hearted person. Fox conducts the interview in front of a live audience. Listening to Jeselnik fight the urge to lapse into his onstage asshole personality and occasionally failing at the attempt is pretty humorous.
When you think about it, stand up comedy is a very simple art. Someone takes the stage with a microphone and talks into it. One of the things that I find most interesting about the podcast is the wide variety of approaches that comedians take. For example, Whitney Cummings writes down every joke, word for word. During her act, she concentrates on creating the best presentation for the jokes that she’s written. For others, like Nate Bargtaze, they write on stage. They come on stage with at best a vague idea of a story. Onstage, they work out what sections of the joke do and do not work. By the time that they’re ready to produce a special, their jokes have become honed.
My favorite thing about the show is how seriously the comedians take their jokes. Fox asks in depth questions with deep subtleties about either the meaning or the delivery of a joke and the comedians answer with equal depth and subtlety. They clearly obsess over their material and treat it with great seriousness. This is true of every comedian that has been interviewed.
This brings me to the inspiration of this post. I just listened to Bert Kreischer. For those who have not heard of Kreischer, he’s what would be charitably defined as a bro comedian. He comes on stage and usually immediately strips off his shirt and is naked from the waist up for his entire act. He bellows. His stories are usually about his drunken, crazy antics. If you picture a cerebral comedian like Marc Maron, Kreischer is pretty much the exact opposite.
The story he chose to write about was, probably inevitably, The Machine. It is by far his most famous story. I first heard it probably close to ten years ago. Some five years ago, he released it and it went viral, making him one of the more popular comedians in the country.
If you’ve never heard the story, keep in mind that it is nearly completely true. He was, in the 90s, infamously anointed by Rolling Stone magazine as the country’s biggest college partier. While attending Florida State, he managed to take four Russian language courses without learning a word of Russian. Told that he could get a minor in Russian by going on a trip to Russia, he jumped at the chance. While in Russia, he partied with the mafia and things go, to put it mildly, a little crazy.
I enjoyed the story ten years ago, but now I’m in a much different place. I’m at the age where comedians like Bert Kreischer, Dane Cook, and yes, even Kevin Hart, are just not my cup of tea. There’s just a little too much testosterone in their comedic cup of bro.
I decided to listen to just the first couple of minutes of the episode. I ended up listening to the entire hour and forty-five. Behind the blustery bro-ness, Kreischer is a very careful comedian making smart choices. He talked about how he thought he could never adapt it for the stage. It was such a long story that he could never condense it down to the twelve minutes or so required for a set. He talked about the choices that he made in ruthlessly cutting out parts that were very funny but were no longer important to the story. He discussed sections that he took out as his own views matured.
It was a fascinating discussion and I came out with a fresh respect not only for Bert Kreischer but also for the craft of comedy.
dorkenstein 