Comedians having podcasts has been bad for several reasons, but I’d like to focus on two of them.
First, it often ruins their stand-up act. I don’t mean that it cannibalizes their material. Instead, it shows their inchoate thoughts are not especially interesting or insightful. Their completed on-stage material has generally been ironed out, group tested and tinkered with long enough to give it all polish. Through that process, the central idea underpinning their jokes becomes a clear-eyed, trenchant observation. By contrast, their podcasts often reveal middling intellects routinely trafficking in remarkably moronic conversations. The work of any artist or writer is bettered with editing, but until comedy podcasts became ubiquitous, the quality drop off between their finished act and the ideas powering their podcast talk wasn’t so clear. Now it is and it’s substantial enough to call their entire body of work into question.
Second, and more importantly, they’re lackeys to power. Comedians like Joe Rogan or Andrew Schulz have presented themselves not merely as alternatives to mainstream media, but superior choices. Their pitch has been they aren’t encumbered by the biases that plague corporate media and can offer more broad-based conversations and relevant nuance in often difficult or taboo topics. That isn’t wholly without merit, but what’s also been revealed is how deeply credulous and incurious they are. Powerful actors in society are gaming the PR system by electing to go on their shows because there is virtually no pushback. Where a journalist with a modicum of training and spine might challenge dubious claims made by a politician, low-information comedians on their podcasts roll over and accept virtually every claim uncritically.
This is why Andrew Schulz complaining about Donald Trump’s behavior and official acts during his second term is difficult to accept. As I explain in this video, Schultz and his cohosts had Donald Trump on, never asked once about Jeffrey Epstein, voted for him and now can’t understand why Trump would want to bury this story. They seem confused how we got to this place, but the truth is very simple: Trump and his team saw these podcasts not just for their audience size, but their hosts’s capacity for being suckers. Powerful people know they can say virtually anything they want on shows like this without challenge and do so to large audiences. Is it any wonder, then, that Trump and his team were so eager to make use of the comedy podcast circuit?
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