The main room at Bloor Street’s Comedy Bar is packed on a Sunday evening in November. Greg Proops, the San Francisco-based comedian and star of the wildly popular Whose Line Is It Anyway? television franchise, emerges on stage to applause. Proops, sipping a beer, thanks the audience and informs them that the taping is about to start.
Proops will not be doing stand-up comedy tonight or performing any improv. The gathered crowd has paid to see Proops record his weekly podcast, entitled The Smartest Man in the World.
Each week in front of a live audience, Proops riffs on the news of the week, offers opinions on the various cities he travels to, relates anecdotes about his life and career and answers questions from the audience. It’s a comedic performance, but just not in a traditional medium.
Though the ability to podcast has existed for years, the medium only hit the mainstream in late 2004. Credit for the advent of the comedy podcast is normally given to Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office, for his The Ricky Gervais Show, which was distributed by The Guardian starting in November of 2005.
In the last two years, however, the comedy podcast has experienced a boom. Proops offers an easy explanation.
“I think it’s what people really respond to right now. I know that it’s the thing that I’m enjoying most as a comedian because I can extemporize it and it’s in the moment,” says Proops. “And I think people really get it that way. I think that they know that it’s not a corporate venture, it’s personal.”
Scott Aukerman’s Earwolf network has played a large part in the rise of the comedy podcast. In 2009, Aukerman, a writer and actor on HBO’s Mr. Show with Bob and David, began a radio show in Los Angeles called Comedy Death-Ray Radio.
Months later, the show evolved into a weekly podcast (now called Comedy Bang Bang) featuring comedians and performers like Paul F. Tompkins, Jon Hamm and Patton Oswalt, sometimes in character, being interviewed, debuting new material and playing ad-libbed games.
Starting with that first podcast, the Earwolf network now boasts a roster of 16 shows hosted by well-known comics such as Paul Scheer, Brett Gelman and the Sklar brothers. In October of this year, the network ran “The Earwolf Challenge”, the first ever reality podcast competition. Elizabeth Laime’s The Totally Laime Podcast emerged victorious.
Laime, who has written for Saturday Night Live and is a member of the famed Upright Citizens’ Brigade Theatre, now has close to 100 podcasts under her belt, interviewing comedians and writers like Ken Marino, Charlie Day and Aubrey Plaza. Never really seeing the true reach of the medium, Laime’s entry into it was fairly innocuous.
“I’m a comedy writer and performer, but I was stopping performing and focusing on writing,” says Laime. “I missed the performance side, but I didn’t want to put tons of energy into it and my husband is a record producer, so he had all of the equipment, and he listens to podcasts, so we just kind of thought ‘What the hell? Let’s do it.’ It’s been awesome. We never expected it to turn into a real thing.”
Proops thinks that the grassroots nature of most ventures is what attracts the audience to them.
“I think we’re inundated with advertising all the time and we can smell the (corporate) meeting when we watch a movie or see a TV show,” explains Proops. “I think with podcasts, you’re getting it straight up from the comedian. I think people really appreciate that kind of forthright honesty. I know that’s what I’m trying to do.”
Toronto morning mainstays ‘Humble’ Howard Glassman and longtime partner, Fred Patterson, recently started a podcast of their own. No longer on terrestrial radio, Humble and Fred now produce a daily podcast on their website. After doing a radio show for as long as they did, podcasting has brought with it a learning curve for the duo.
“I think the biggest difference in how we do the show (now) is that we’re able to be, basically, more ourselves versus the type of version of yourself that you do when you’re doing a radio show,” says Glassman, a veteran comedian. “We thought on radio that we were closer to ourselves than most people, which is why people liked us, but because we have so much time to go off on a tangent or make a thoughtful point and not worry about having to rush to get commercials because we’ve gotta get nine songs in an hour, there’s definitely a liberation or freedom that comes with it that we didn’t have when we were doing your regular radio.”
Still, Glassman concurs with Proops’s assessment of authenticity at a podcast’s core.
“People at their core crave content,” says Glassman.
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