Yelling About Pâté: The worlds of standup comedy and culinary greatness overlap in more ways than you might expect. Both are marked by strange office hours, stereotypical “misfit toy” identifiers, to say nothing of the wannabees suffering for years in thankless trenches in order to inch their way upward in their respectively rigid systems of ranks. On the exquisitely titled new podcast Yelling About Pâté, Joel Miller and Karl Hess bring a guest on each week to explore the ins and outs of both those disciplines, with expectedly bawdy brio. Miller, the executive chef at LA’s The Wallace, and Hess, a standup with a list of credits that include MTV, VICE, and TruTV, have an incredible chemistry and always manage to make even the deepest of nitty-gritty details interesting. Their offbeat guest list so far has pulled evenly from either side of their chosen profession, but they have yet to land any white whales. To be honest, though, the potential of someone like Aziz Ansari or Anthony Bourdain stopping by seems too on-the-nose for Miller and Hess, who seem more than happy to embrace the talented but under-exposed fringes of their worlds. They’re 10 episodes in as I type this, and each installment surely holds some new revelation for the steadily expanding ranks of hip comedy foodies.
Truu Stowray (Feral): The “recap” podcast format is far from a new idea and usually not something worth getting super excited about. But when the show in question is old-school seasons of The Real World, and the hosts are Dave Holmes and Mike Doughty, you’ll have to pardon if I get all “only '80s kids will understand” here. The first season of MTV’s proto-reality show, which premiered in 1992, established the tightly produced formula for unscripted success that’s been the blueprint for literally everything that’s come after, so going back and excavating the show from its foundations on up is certainly enjoyable from a culture-vulture perspective. Hosts Holmes, a runner up in MTV’s Wanna Be a VJ contest, and Doughty, former lead singer of two-hit wonder Soul Coughing, are an inspired pairing as hosts. Both have deep ties to the so-called Music Television Network and offer entertaining and illuminating anecdotes accordingly. Of the three episodes released so far, my only complaint is that the pace of conversation tends to move along too quickly, leaving deeper conversational depths sorely unexplored. It’s a problem that I hope will be resolved as their rapport gets better and better.
Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air (The Ringer): How do you follow up stepping into Stephen Colbert’s shoes — and finding that they don’t quite fit? You start a podcast. Just ask Larry Wilmore, whose dearly departed Nightly Show was the 11:30pm follow up to The Daily Show for a year and a half before being replaced by Chris Hardwick’s less-than-accurately-titled @midnight. Wilmore, a 34-year veteran of network television comedy, rose to fame as The Daily Show’s "Senior Black Correspondent" under Jon Stewart, and he has capably turned those talents towards a new show for Bill Simmons’ new media venture The Ringer. Here, he’ll have to fill the void left by Keepin’ It 1600’s Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, who left to start Crooked Media. Wilmore, whose comedic instincts are only matched by a pronounced depth of measured empathy, has no dearth of hot takes on the news of the day, and his interviewing skills, honed by hundreds of “Keepin' it 100” roundtables on his former show, are exhaustive and energetic. With a tone that balances farther-left points of view with moderate sensibilities, it’s a great show to add to an already overloaded slate of political pontificating.
From the Pod Morgue:
The Fogelnest Files (EarWolf): Jake Fogelnest could have ended up a “that’s so 90s” pop culture footnote as the hip teenage host of New York City public access television show Squirt TV. But in the decades since then, he’s managed to carve out quite a multifaceted niche for himself. It’s been almost five years since he launched his podcast, The Fogelnest Files, where each week he would take a guest on a guided tour through remarkably well-curated collections of archival video clips. With high-profile guests brought in through his professional connections at The Onion, Upright Citizens Brigade, Saturday Night Live, and The State (among any number of other, considerably less reputable institutions), Fogelnest consistently revealed himself as a walking encyclopedia of all things oddball and outlandish, an eagle-eyed sleuth hot on the trail of good old-fashioned strangeness. For two solid years we got to listen as Fogelnest abused and amused his famous friends and co-workers with a wide variety of nonsense, but he got too busy with various writing projects and the show has been “on hiatus” now for longer than its original run lasted. The whole backlog of episodes can be found behind the subscription paywall at EarWolf.