📬 Mailbag 📝 Good One's Jesse David Fox 😂
💌Podcast The Newsletter is your weekly love letter to podcasts and the people who make them.💌
Bonjour!
The old mailbag is getting really heavy, so I decided to pull out a reader letter and answer it. If YOU have a podcast-related question, email it to lauren@tinkmedia.co.
Dear Lauren, I listen to so many podcasts that all of my anecdotes start with the phrase, “I was listening to a podcast, and…” I think this makes me sound one-dimensional. Does it? What can I do to make it sound like I have a life? —Was Listening
Dear Was Listening,
Of course this doesn’t make you one-dimensional. You and I both know that someone could literally listen to only podcasts all day and be the most cultured person in the entire universe. In fact, I think that any activity that derails from my podcast listening makes me a less interesting person—including hanging out with family or eating meals. Unfortunately, the podcast boom is rather young, and not everyone is quite as advanced as you and I. So until the rest of the world catches up, it might be good to blur the lines when you’re making conversation. (At Podcast The Newsletter, we never say lie.) Feel free to say, “I read that…” (there is probably an article or book somewhere about what you are about to say, I dare anyone to object to this,) “my friend told me that…” (I’m sure you are closer with some podcasters than many of your friends,) or “I just had this original idea and I’d like to share it with you.” (Again: blurring the lines.) This also solves the problem that, unfortunately, sometimes when you say “I heard it on a podcast,” people will automatically devalue what you’re about to say. These are people who don’t understand what a podcast is and their opinions don’t matter. But to be safe, go ahead and play their game. Anyway, everyone is narcissistic and 85% of the people you are talking to probably aren’t listening. I am usually not listening when people give me anecdotes, because I am listening to a podcast.
Thanks for writing in! I know that everyone reading this newsletter has the exact same problem.
xoxo lp
ps If you are pleased with Podcast The Newsletter, please spread the word!
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Good One’s Jesse David Fox
Jesse David Fox is the host of Vulture’s Good One. Follow him on Twitter here. Follow Good one on Twitter here.
Kindly introduce yourself and Good One!
My name is Jesse David Fox. I’m a senior editor at New York Magazine’s entertainment site, Vulture, where I focus on comedy. On forms I say I am a writer, even though only a small part of my time is spent, you know, writing words. Mostly I host Good One: A Podcast About Jokes. Each episode a comedian (or comedy writer or comedy director) comes on to play a clip of one of their jokes (or sketches or funny scenes) and discusses how they wrote it and how it fits into what they are trying to do with their comedy. I’ve found there are two types of listeners: People who typically listen to serious podcasts and this is the funniest thing they subscribe to or people who typically listen to comedy podcasts and this is the most thoughtful thing they listen to. I love both groups equally. I haven’t sat down to count, but I’ve done almost 100 interviews.
What has interviewing people for Good One changed how you feel about comedians?
Before I started the podcast, I idealistically believed comedians to be special, and that good comedy comes from deliberate, thoughtful work. The most rewarding thing about the podcast is how every episode, this belief is affirmed. My feeling about comedians didn’t change, but it was solidifed. I always felt comedy should and could be taken seriously, but I wasn’t sure if comedians would participate in letting me do so. I’m forever grateful they’ve trusted me not to ruin the joke. So, if anything changed, it’s that I now feel closer to comedians.
One of my favorite episodes was with Gilbert Gottfried about the joke The Aristocrats. I started listening thinking I wouldn't like it, but the episode actually gave me HUGE appreciation for Gilbert Gottfried and the joke. Was that your intention, here? Is that always your intention?
Thank you! That’s nice to read, as broadly that was my intention. Though, if you’ll indulge me, I tend to be a bit more romantic about it. My intention with that episode, like all episodes, is to not only have the audience leave with an appreciation of the comedian, but also show them how they should appreciate them. My goal is to try to fall in love with the guest (not in a romantic way, or familial way, but a sort of warm, close obsession) in the research stage and then, in the interview, try to convey to the audience what I love about this person, by asking questions that I believe will result in answers that showcase specifically what makes the person unique, special, themselves.
Gilbert was an interesting case, because I knew he was fascinating, but I also knew how deep he is into his persona. So, really I was trying to tell a story about this persona and how and why he uses it. tried to go deeper into what drives him to make a joke “too soon” after a tragic thing happens. It became clear, he can’t not make a joke about it because being this persona is how he copes with and confronts the harsh realities of life. It’s a true compulsion. I’m not necessarily trying to defend any of his jokes. I just want to try to convey the person as they are and allow the audience to make their own judgements.
Are there any comedians you would never want to interview on Good One? (You don't have to be specific.)
Yes.
Are there any comedians you are dying to interview on Good One?
Yes, so many. I always say Tina Fey, Chris Rock, and Mel Brooks are my dream guests. I don’t say Steve Martin and Albert Brooks, as it seems like they just don’t talk about comedy anymore in interviews. It seems like Adam Sandler is doing interviews again, but I’d feel so much pressure since I wrote 20,000 words about him. I recently interviewed Chelsea Peretti, who I have been dying to have on since I started the show. This is fun to think about, so here are some more people: Cecily Strong (maybe with James Anderson), Adele Givens, George Wallace, Rory Scovel, Ron White, Hannibal Buress, Paul F. Tompkins, Randy Newman, Lorne Michaels, Marlon Wayans, something with The Simpsons. My dream of dreams is to find and interview whoever wrote the joke “Pokemon Go to the polls” for Hillary Clinton.
Women podcasters are often criticized for their voices. What is your relationship to yours? How would you describe your voice?
Fans criticize how I speak about once a quarter. Usually it’s about how I say things like “sort of” or “insomuch” too often. For a while they made fun of how often brought up the movie The Prestige. Recently I got that I laugh too much. Someone once complained about how my intros were awkward and stilted and that I should try writing them out ahead of time. Little does he (I’m sure it was a he) know, I write them to sound like that on purpose. I mention all these laughably minor critiques of my whatever voice to underline how grotesque and indefensible the treatment of female voices is. I am very privileged in that from the very beginning, Ira Glass normalized a type of voice as a part of the vocabulary of podcasting - nasal, stammery.
Before I had a podcast, I interviewed John Mulaney for like, 90 minutes. It was a nice time. About an hour in, I heard his publicist and our photo editor laughing. Later I learned, they were making fun of how we sounded the same. John’s voice is a little higher and is more extroverted, and mine a little lower and introverted, but we have similar pacing and lilts. So it’s that, mixed with Ira Glass, I guess.
Are there too many podcasts?
No. I believe people are overwhelmed by the choices, but I do not blame quantity. The problem is podcasting is an incredibly new form and people need more and better help understanding what they like and how to find it. For example, there are so many more songs than podcasts, but people have so many tools at their disposal to understand why they like what they like, so they can find more things in that vein. I think the work y’all and Nick Quah are doing to create a vocabulary for podcast criticism and journalism will be a game changer, because right now mostly there are just broad genre categories, Apple’s algorithmic lists, and certain publications’ subjective lists.Take Good One, the podcast I know best :) I think it makes more sense as a recommendation to people who listen to Invisibilia, and other shows that feature psychology-driven storytelling, than The Joe Rogan Experience.
🚨If you only have time for ONE of my weekly recommendations…🚨
…make it Articles of Interest! It’s back! Oh god, here’s a show that is so good I feel like I don’t deserve it. Avery Trufelman tells stories about something I love thinking about, the importance of what we wear. The first episode of the new season, A Fantasy of Fashion, tracks down a collection of miniature fashion dolls who were commissioned by the French Government in the wake of World War II, as a means to preserve France’s hold on high-fashion when resources for couture was scarce. It’s a well documented, beautifully presented piece—the storytelling almost feels visual. The second episode, on knockoffs, tells the incredible story of Dapper Dan. (PS read The Bello Collective’s interview with Avery here.)
💎BTW💎
🎙️Are you smarter than Encyclopedia Brown? Mike Schubert’s Meddling Adults, a whodunnit game show for charity, is here, where two guests go head-to-head in a contest of solving children’s mysteries from kid mysteries like Encyclopedia Brown, Scooby Doo, and Nancy Drew. There’s a twist: the winning contestant earns money for a charity of their choice, and this prize pool grows with the help of the show’s Patreon account, which will cover the show’s expenses. (All proceeds will go directly into the prize pool for charity.) The first episode reviews some mysteries from Encyclopedia Brown, and I had SO much fun listening to it, I listened to it twice. Mike is hilarious and positive and listening to him analyze Encyclopedia Brown with sincerity points out how strange this book series really is. When I was a kid I could NEVER crack these mysteries, it was so frustrating!! I would always cheat and read the solution and think, “arghhh, I knew it!” Almost thirty years later, I still can’t keep up with Encyclopedia Brown. But now, at least it’s fun to fail, and I feel a bit less alone because the guests can’t figure it out either. But I promise you this: a good time is had by all.
🎙️The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe got a tip that that the CIA wrote the song Wind of Change and gave it to Scorpions, a heavy metal band from West Germany, in order to spur on the fall of the Soviet Union. The podcast Wind of Change is a documentation of Patrick’s ten-year investigation to find out if that’s true. It’s a truly bizarre history story and examination of pop culture, packed with jaw-dropping facts about the CIA and how much the government is watching us. Wind of Change becomes the soundtrack to the peaceful revolution sweeping Europe and one of the biggest rock singles ever. Is it the song that ended the Cold War?
🎙️Oh and if you can’t get enough CIA craziness, I hope you are listening to the wonderful mini-series of Endless Thread, Madness.
🎙️On Decoder Ring’s Gotta Get Down on Friday, Willa Paskin does the in-depth investigation of Rebecca Black’s viral music video, Friday, that we didn’t know we wanted or needed, BUT WE DO. If you remember this song, you owe it to poor Rebecca Black to hear how she became, as a 14-year-old, the most hated person on the internet. (She jumps in on the episode to explain it herself.) And why exactly this song made the world so very mad. It’s a story of the internet, music, and online bullying.
🎙️I’ve been appreciating Bad Gays recently, an academic show that tells the stories of evil and complicated queers in history, and asks the question: Why do we remember our heroes better than our villains? Each profile presents a complicated, compelling figure and proves the multi-dimensionality of some of our best-known queer fixtures in history and culture. I started with the people I knew the most about (loved the Andy Warhol and Aileen Wuornos episodes) but have been running through the whole collection, learning lots with every listen.
🎙️When I saw the new episode of Imaginary Worlds, The Curse of the Curse, pop up in my feed I said HELL YES and saved it for a special time and it was truly a delightful time. Eric goes through the history of things going terribly wrong on horror movie sets, and the idea that horror films can be cursed. It’s a fun, movie-nerdy, myth-busting ride that’s also a little unsettling. In a good way.
🎙️If you love Revisionist History, you’ll love a new podcast from Pushkin, The Last Archive, which gives historian Jill Lepore the space to ask: Who Killed Truth? It’s a somewhat academic look at true crime—Jill goes case by case, pouring over evidence, proof, and knowledge, to discover what we know about events in history and why we really know it (vs. other things, aka the truth.) Jill is an expert in this field but the show is great because she brings the listener along for the ride. It’s excellently produced yet still feels raw and real. On episode one, Jill goes back to a murder in northern Vermont in 1919, comparing what people believed at the time to what we can believe now, truly looking at all of the facts. PS I love the artwork for this show.
🎙️Some Noise is a show about silent revolutions, and a new episode addresses something I’ve been thinking about a lot. What do spiritual people think about the pandemic? How can a just god let this happen? We Too Shall Pass gives the Muslim perspective, beginning in the greeting card aisle, where all the sympathy cards are sold out, a reminder of death that surrounds us. But this is not the first time humans have been put to this test, or even dealt with a pandemic. A conversation with Imam Zaid Shakir (a famous Muslim-American scholar who gave the eulogy at Muhammad Ali's funeral) talks about how the pandemic is doing exactly what is is supposed to do—reminding us of our mortality. COVID is a messenger that reminds us of death. When we get back to “normal,” how will we react?
🎙️I feel like I often say, “I’m not a true crime person, but…” and then talk about a true crime show I love. Why is this? Am I embarrassed to admit I love true crime? I am not embarrassed to admit I’m entranced with The Missionary, a story about a young missionary named Renee Bach who started a malnutrition program in rural Uganda, which sounds quite nice, but she ended up masquerading as a doctor and is tied to the death of hundreds of children in her unlicensed clinic. Projects like this are always so jaw-dropping and feel juicy, but this show raises questions about morality and the role of missionaries in third-world countries. The reporting is excellent.
🎙️I just discovered The Dark Histories Podcast, and it’s doing a great job igniting my love for history. Host Ben Cutmore digs deep to find weird, historical mysteries and stories, and presents them in a compelling, informative way. Listening, I feel like someone is telling me a very good bedtime story, but of course it’s all well-researched and true. Oh my gosh start with the one I started with, an episode about the Benandanti (Italian anti-witches during the inquisition!!!) Christ this shit is wild! I am so excited to go through the archives! There are four seasons! So many exclamation marks!!!
🎙️Double Threat is a really absurdist show hosted by Julie Klausner and Tom Scharpling, and it feels like a gift. (Julie has been guesting on Tom’s show,The Best Show, for years, so the chemistry the two have has been tested and is authentic.)The show is technically supposed to be “a weekly journey through the worst of everything” which makes me feel like Julie and Tom don’t know what Double Threat is about, either. They’re figuring it out, and I’ll allow it. I laughed throughout the many episodes I listened to, did not want to stop listening, and thoroughly enjoyed the segment in which they try to fix-up other podcasts. They DO discuss terrible things on the internet, that is not false advertising. And it’s all pretty terrible/wonderful.
🎙️Throughline is a show that looks at our past to better understand the present, and The Mask is a beautiful story about how two people from opposite sides of the globe (Malaysian doctor Wu Lien-teh and Sara Little Turnbull, a designer and design consultant) who contributed to the N95 respirators that are saving our lives today. It’s a story about so many things, like medicine, design, and the history of how we have protected ourselves against diseases.
🎙️This Is Love’s new season focuses on animals, and in Prairie Warbler Phoebe Judge talks about birds but also interviews Drew Lanham, who has dedicated his life to birding, about why black people don’t always feel welcome in nature. Pursuing his dream of a career in birding forced Drew to ditch a technically-promising career in engineering, and confront racism in surprising places. I love this conversation because a) this is fucking interesting b) Drew has sweet stories about lying down in a field and playing dead, just so he could get a glimpse of vultures flying over him and making binoculars out of toilet paper rolls. And c) Phoebe also seems to have a personal connection to birds and hearing her talk about them feels special. (Maybe in part because she shares a name with a type of bird.)
🎙️Save episodes for Make My Day for times when you’re feeling stressed or depressed. These things are better than Lexapro, and host Josh Gondelman probably deserves a Pulitzer Prize for his work as host. Josh plays a game show with funny guests that puts a positive spin on the news, where points don’t matter, everybody wins, and the whole goal is for the guest to make Josh’s (and your) day. Josh and the guest present a pep talk at the end. You can listen to “happiness” or self-help gurus all you want, but this is the shit that will truly be effective in boosting your mood.
🎙️Can you imagine waking up every day, coming to grips with the limits your ALS has put on you, and thinking, “Not this again?” That is the reality of Angelina Fanous, a 34-year-old in Cleveland, Ohio who can’t walk, talk, or live independently, and doesn’t know how long she has to live. She moved in with her parents, who help her smoke weed, which eases the pain and allows her to speak more clearly. This episode of Bodies is an audio diary from Angelina, which we have thanks to the help of her caretakers. (Allison did this episode remotely, which is impressive.) Angelina talks about finding happiness, traveling, and using a vibrator in secrecy, with an openness and sense of humor I’ve never heard before.
🎙️Planet Money’s episode 999 (wow, congratulations!) The Restaurant From The Future introduces us to a restaurant owner who is expanding his business amidst a global pandemic, which may seem unusual, but he is thinking of the dining experience completely differently, really revolutionizing it. One of his tricks is looking at China to see how Chinese restaurant owners are adjusting, and what lessons he can learn from them.
🎙️The audio drama Believer is telling a very creepy story about a woman who used to believe in ghosts, but no longer does, and sets out to investigate the mysterious disappearance of her ex-partner, something that nobody in the town seems to want to acknowledge or talk about. The latest episode came out this week, and I actually relistened to the entire series, because it’s really the MOST fun if you listen to it all at once. I’m mystified and really excited to see what happens next.
🎙️If you loved the famous Reply All episode The Case of the Missing Hit (about a man in California haunted by the memory of a pop song from his youth) you’ll be similarly enthusiastic about Brian vs Brian, which is another musical mystery. Brian hears a Christmas song he recorded and uploaded to YouTube years ago in the bathroom of a Krogers, and Alex and PJ try to track down how Krogers got a hold of it. We end up learning a lot about how grocery stores curate their song lists, which is harder than you’d think, and why Christmas time is particularly challenging for grocery store music DJs.
🎙️Zombified is a show about the things that hijack our brains, from microbes hijacking behavior, to humans influencing each other, to our brains being taken over by social media. It’s fun but academic. Host Dr. Athena Aktipis is a Psychology Professor at ASU and the founder of the Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Alliance and she brings so much intelligence to random forces that pull at our human nature day in and day out. The new episode, The age of ascension, talks about the manipulation of internet memes.
🎙️On The Scardey Cats Horror Show, Reply All’s Alex Goldman forces PJ Vogt to watch scary movies (alone, at night, without covering his eyes) in an effort to break him into enjoying being scared. This episode recaps Nightmare on Elm Street with screenwriter and horror fan Katie Dippold and film director Rachel Talalay. It’s a great conversation about horror and PJ and Alex could talk about anything that I’d love it—their chemistry is electric and makes me feel like I’m in on the jokes with them. Next up for The Scardey Cats Horror Show: Alien. PS I SUPER love the artwork for this show.
🎙️ I already love The Secret Room, where Ben Hamm empathetically listens to guests tell their most shocking secrets. I had my husband listen to the new episode, Veiled Conception (Susan reveals what it was like to be the secret daughter of a famous pastor) and he instantly became hooked on the show, bineging old episodes. So if you aren’t hooked on The Secret Room yet, this might be the episode to get you there.
🎙️This American Life just won the very first Pulitzer Prize ever given to audio journalism, for a worthy episode called The Out Crowd. Required listening!
🎙️Marc Maron gave a heart-breaking tribute at the top of a re-release of his Lynn Shelton episode, which happens to be the first time the two ever talked. Lynn, Marc’s partner at the time of her death, passed away over the weekend.
🎙️Listen to Election Profit Makers. I dunno, that’s kind of it. Just do it.
🎙️I love you!