chesterdouglas

I'm very sorry to hear about the tragic death of Ryan Gaul. I didn't even know that he was sick.

This was one of the thinnest premises for an episode yet (and that's really saying something), and yet the resulting nonsense was nothing short of delightful.

This was a very funny episode. It makes me think that I should give the Throwing Shade podcast another try.

"Not at all" might be a little generous.

I would also love to hear Wild Horses show up during cross-over month. But, I -- for one -- do not want to focus only on that issue to the exclusion of expressing appreciation for how amazing this episode was. I've always enjoyed Big Grande's almost fanatical commitment to indulging in utter lunacy, and this lived up to my (already high) expectations. Simply put, these guys are very, very funny. I really like how they jump into the realm of the surreal almost immediately, yet there is somehow always a kind of insane logic underlying everything that keeps it oddly grounded. It's very impressive stuff, and Paul fit in very well (as he almost always does).

This was a very funny episode. I really enjoy the work of all of these improvisers, and I wish that they were on the show more (although, unless I'm mistaken, Gavin Speiller is ordinarily based out of New York). Anyway, though, the scenes in this episode must have been recorded in an order other than the one in which they were broadcast, right? I say this because in one of the earlier scenes, Chad Carter plays a guy who is confusingly overpricing cookies while working the line at a cash register, but that comes before the now serialized, ongoing Case Closed segment toward the end dealing with the old man being outraged over being overcharged for cookies at Subway. This this led me to wonder about how often this sort of thing happens on the show. There is obviously a degree of editing that happens -- usually a musical interlude or the robot voice comes in at the end of a segment before anyone actually says "...and scene" -- but I'm just curious about the degree. I know that it's been mentioned on the show before that scenes are sometimes edited out entirely because they don't really work (and sometimes this is even evident when one of the improvisers clearly makes a call-back to a highly specific idea/character/event that never shows up elsewhere in the episode). There are obviously very talented editors/sound engineers working on the show, so if things are frequently being cut out or re-sequenced, it's likely that most listeners would ever know about it (I mean, Jesus Christ, as anyone who regularly listens to the musical episodes knows, Brett is so insanely talented that he routinely churns out sound quality that would rival many major-label recording studios). Anyway, listening to this episode just made me curious about this issue.

This was a very funny episode. It never ceases to impress me how quickly Lauren is able to come up with very witty things to say when she is playing this type of fast-talking, unhinged, raving character. It's genuinely amazing.

I think you must be referring to Lew Alcindor.

I can't even remember the last time that they played Would You Rather on the show (personally, I miss it). But, for what it's worth, it's @CBBWYR on Twitter. Good luck!

Maybe we're all over-thinking this. My theory is that Stephen King was on some sort of epic bender one weekend around 1990 and somehow came across the Natassja Kinski/Malcolm McDowell "erotic horror" film Cat People. So, he watched the film in a semi-blackout state, retaining only the loose knowledge that the film involved human beings transforming into beasts, the consumption of people for food, heavy themes of incest, and -- you know -- cats. Later on, he forgot all about having seen Cat People, believing the burgeoning ideas in his mind to be solely of his own design. He then tossed the aforementioned elements into some sort of mental blender and churned out what he believed to be an original screenplay, but was actually the product of a loosely tied-together fever dream derived from half-remembered elements of another movie. And there we have it: Sleepwalkers was born.

This is the best live episode that I've heard in quite some time. Everyone involved was fantastic. Also, am I the only one who finds it a little odd that Dan Deacon (whose music seems to be very much oriented around electronics) apparently spent quite a long portion of his life not owning a car, a cell phone, or a computer? Was that due to some sort of Neo-Luddism, a lack of disposable income, or something else? Anyway, that's one enigmatic dude....

Yes, that photo is a bit disturbing. My best guess would be that this is somehow supposed to be a visual representation of their "LapCox" comedy partnership. Either that, or Lauren Lapkus' story about being "gone filming a movie in England" for several months was just a ruse to hide the fact that she was actually having her lower torso removed for reasons passing all human understanding.

My vague dislike of bathroom humor made me a bit less enthusiastic about this episode than I have been in the past about these four (though there is still certainly a lot to like here). But, nevertheless, my love for the Wild Horses is very much like their stated motto: it cannot be broken.

The return of this show fills a gaping hole both in my weekend podcast listening schedule and in my heart.

Well, that was just one hell of an episode. The musical harmonies were genuinely lovely, several of the scenes were stone-cold fantastic (especially the Xbox, stage patter, and telekenisis scenes), and I always enjoy John Gemberling's proclivity for imbuing his characters with dark and nefarious intentions. Hell, there was even a god-damn post-credits sequence, for Christ's sake. Not much more you could ask for.

Wait, did this guy just casually toss off the fact that one of the reasons why he had to flee to Israel was that his mobbed-up life experiences had led him to know too much about the Kennedy assassination??? If ever there was a statement begging for a follow-up question, surely that was it.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Jessica McKenna is fantastic.

I always loved Hal Holbrook in The Magnificent Seven. He doesn't get nearly enough credit for that performance.

I know that it was played out as a comedic premise and everything, but I really do think that intentionally destroying all of one's money might actually be just about the most punk rock thing I've ever heard of.

Anthony Atamanuik effortlessly pulling out the name "Laurence Luckinbill" as the actor who portrayed Spock's half-brother in Star Trek V was a truly impressive example of obscure recall. Laurence Luckinbill: RIPossible?

For me, one of the most astounding things about this episode is that it featured a final scene that ultimately had to be shut down by Ian Roberts because it was headed in such a horrifying direction, but that -- despite his presence on stage -- the aforementioned vile horror was not being primarily driven by John Gemberling. Who would have ever seen that coming?

This was pretty great. The greeting card writers' room scene was particularly inspired.

This is the sort of thing that reaches the level of high art. Bravo. Also: Christmas dildo.

Despite the fact that I was a Literature major, I continued to believe that the (decidedly singular) German author Goethe was actually two different people until well after I had graduated from college. In my mind, one of these people was a prominent German author whose name was pronounced "Gerta" (roughly the way that this name is correctly pronounced) and the other of whom was a different famed German author with a name pronounced something like "Goath" (which was based solely on my reading of the written word). This idea went relatively unexamined in my mind until one day when I realized that these two people were somehow credited with writing the same piece of literature. Even though that one is a little obscure, still to this day just thinking about it elicits in me a genuine sense of shame.

Is it just me, or is Andy Daly preternaturally good at improv comedy? That's what I think, but I've been wrong before.