Pants Masterson

It's a minor note, but "The Marina Del Ray... Chronicle?" "That's a reputable institution" exchange cracked me the hell up.

I don't have much to suggest other than to repeat improv4humans for overall comedy excellence, and Mike and Tom Eat Snacks as having a surprising amount of build and callbacks. If you want something that's both comedy and has a consistently building narrative, the Thrilling Adventure Hour is amazing.

I feel it is time for a more somber examination of plugs. man-CBBPlugs-serious-64kbs.mp3

The fact that this is compact enough to fit into a board post is good, right? THINK OF THE BANDWIDTH YOU WILL SAVE.

Your posts in these forums are generally pretty awesome, and we seem to agree on most stuff, Justin -- I'll check that out for sure, and keep an open mind. But I'm definitely in the "on-topic" camp, especially when you consider how what happens if everyone starts riffing like that. I've got a 80,000 word unpublished novel that I think is pretty funny, but I'm not going to start dropping it in here in chunks.

My best guess is that somebody can't get enough attention on their own blog and through the strength of their own writing, and fancies themself a "comedian", so they hijack forum posts. Supplemental guess: somebody who cut their teeth on Adult Swim cartoons and think being "random" is an acceptable fallback when you can't actually be witty. It's not quite trolling, but the standard "don't feed the troll" rules still apply. Ignore it and it will go away.

When Jesse (tb,m,s) Ventura said that the President would be the last person thrown out of the ring, I got a bit excited because he had unwittingly created a loophole in which the President would be the second strongest person in the ring, and almost inevitably this would result in Ventura standing alone in the ring experiencing the crushing disappointment of thinking he was now President and then belatedly realizing that no, the person he had just thrown out was the President now, because one cannot throw oneself out of the ring. I put too much thought into these things.

I'd love to see Michael Ian Black and Tom Cavanaugh as "Mike and Tom", their amped-up personas from Mike and Tom Eat Snacks.

I didn't mind the one-on-one thing, but I'm in the majority camp that prefers the default format. I don't think anyone here is being a dick about it – we’re all here because we love the podcast, and if there's a recent trend (infinity more 1-on-1 "serious" interviews for the whole show in the last two months than ever before) happening, I don't think some gentle pushback is out of place. Passing notes: • Holy crap, is Seth Rogen affable. • Does he laugh that much in regular casual conversations in real life? Was he nervous in the presence of Aukerman? • I... actually prefer one-man Would You Rather in some ways, which is unexpected • I sort of wish they didn't have the guest photos on the main page or in the podcast header – it's basically a spoiler that this is really going to be a one-hour one-on-one, instead of the awesome Oswalt/Richter eps

I don't see how a shirt can possibly do the CBB Season Two image justice. If I can get that in at least 300DPS, I'm going to have it done as a full-on Yakuza-style back tattoo, as it deserves. More seriously, I love it but I'm having a hard time seeing how it works as a shirt, designwise. I guess it's going to be a big colourful square in the middle of a white shirt? It's a bit hard to express this, but my taste in t-shirts tends really, really heavily to art that's cut to conform to the design and that "floats" on the shirt (the My Wife shirt is a perfect example of this) instead of the "here's a rectangular picture with right-angle borders and we happen to have put it on this shirt" style. Don't get me wrong -- it's flamin' gorgeous, and flat-out one of the best things I've seen ever. It just doesn't seem to lend itself to a shirt design.

Any time somebody makes a strong absolute statement – positive or negative – about something that's inherently subjective, people are going to get pissed off. If I stand up and say the Beatles are the best/worst band of all time, when their music is something that you either personally dig or you don't, somebody's going to get angry about it. I've managed to complain about CBB bits on these boards, and bat around .500 between people generally accepting my criticism of the show and people kind of freaking out about it. It has a lot to do with knowing the room. Obviously, this is a forum for huge CBB fans, some of whom are pretty fanatical about it, so I'd frame an objection to an episode here a lot more carefully than I would in a general comedy forum, for instance. I'd love it if people on the message board were (a) sensitive to their framing when they bag on the show, and (b ) less inclined to completely lose their shit when somebody expresses an opinion that doesn't align with theirs.

I think your chances of having them bring Fryvault back would be vastly improved if you had some way to make it easy for them to remember that they should bring Fryvault back. Some clever way of ensuring that when they hear "bring back Fryvault!" they will know exactly what that means. No idea how to go about this, though.

It has become endemic. At home, at work, wherever, I now respond to anyone saying "my wife" with a knee-jerk instant "mah wife!" My wife (mah wife!) has no idea why the hell I keep doing this. It's even gotten me trouble in work. CLIENT: So my wife and I went to -- ME: Mah wife! CLIENT: What? ME: What? Oh. Nothing. Just -- sorry. Nothing! Carry on. CLIENT: So my wife and I went to -- ME: mah wife

"An error occurred: You have reached your quota of positive votes for the day" I AM COMING BACK TOMORROW YOU SON OF A BITCH

Awesome. Thanks!

I'd have agreed with you off the top, mrg, but I think three things have happened: - The other players, some of whom aren't "performers" in the same way as Brian and Blaine, have gotten more comfortable and are getting more active and engaged on the mic; - Blaine has indeed dialed it back a bit; - His sense of humour is growing on me. It doesn't bug me nearly as much as it did. Now he's kind of at the level of a friend who is great 90% of the time, and 10% of the time you sort of wince and think he's really working too hard at it, but the 90% is still awesome so you just live with the 10%.

Something for Daddy, Wipeout, and Time Bobby were my ports of call to get my wife into CBB. She is also a big Patton Oswalt fan, so the two-parter with Cake Boss was a pretty good way of getting her into the vibe of the show. All of the above are pretty straight-up Scott hosting, straight-man "celebrity" guest, and Daly or Tompkins improv character. That combo is pretty much my go-to recipe for classic CBB.

And Dalton Wilcox lives on (and on)... Through the site MetaFilter, I participate in a twice-annual international mix CD exchange, where people burn old-fashioned CDs, make album art, and actually snail-mail mix CDs around the globe to total strangers. This time out, I decided to make a mix with CBB clips interspersed with the music, telling the sad, wild tale of the Poet Laureate of the West (self-declared). I can make this available to anyone who PMs me. May your wives always have at least as much jewelry as your horses!

I don't have cable, and I don't even know if IFC Canada will carry the CBB show anyway -- their programming is different than IFC USA. Hulu won't stream to Canada. Anyone know how I can legally watch this show and support the Saucerman?

I don't get it. Scott and Jeff started the episode and then there's a break and then when they come back it's just them talking to each other like there's somebody else in the room, and then these prolonged silences as though they're listening, and then they react to the silence like somebody's talking. I like the improv and all, but the whole "talk to somebody and then leave just silence where that person would respond" thing -- they lost me. Sorry.

Am I the only one who honestly convinced himself it was called Kroll Space, and then felt a little let down?

What a great conversation. I'm late, because I've been catching up on past eps, but at the moment, Nancy is the only character I think I would actually campaign not to have back. I’ve been the minority voice on these boards before in not feeling like the Tim Heidecker anti-comedy shtick fits well with the program, so I was honestly a bit surprised to see that people that don’t dig Nancy seem plentiful. That said, I think Scott’s question is legitimate. I was actually wondering the same thing when I was listening to the episode and trying to parse why I have such a strong dislike for the Nancy character. Here’s where I landed: 1. I’m not a big fan of the “struggling comedian character”, in the same way that I’m not a big fan of movies about how hard it is to make movies, or books about authors. It feels like an attempt to score easy self-deprecation points instead of pushing any limits. 2. I’m not a big fan of anti-comedy in general; see the not-a-big-Tim-fan thing above. I have inconsistencies, like a fondness for the Foam Corner, but even then it’s the reactions to the unfunny that I love, not the “jokes” themselves. 3. Nancy is a bit too convincing as a person with legitimate mental problems that I feel like an invitation to laugh at her is kind of shitty. This dovetails with the anti-comedy thing as well, but unlike some "anti-comedy" characters who are so amazingly over the top it’s breathtaking, Nancy just feels like a pathetic, poor, mentally ill person. “Hey, here’s a self-proclaimed Cowboy Poet of the Plains, who thinks random people are vampires and/or mummies and has been on a decades-long killing spree is funny, let’s laugh at him” is a wayyyy different experience for me than “Hey, here’s a dirt-poor woman who seems to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, let’s laugh at her”. I fully expect pushback on point 3, because it’s super subjective. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t really have a solid leg to stand on other than “this is how it made me feel, and I didn’t like it.” I’m just saying how I felt while listening, and how I reacted, and I hope nobody who felt differently or reacted differently takes this as me sitting in judgement or something. So I’m fairly comfortable that I’m not coming at this from a sexist place, but I think there’s something interesting to unpack about when a character strays too close to feeling like a genuine person who has genuine problems, as opposed to somebody so over the top that there’s no question of confusing them with a real human being. Nancy Cooper hit a lot of bad buttons for me by seeming just real enough that I felt sad for her, and a bit pissed off that I was being asked to laugh. Is anyone else in that boat? Or am I just off in left field?

There was an thread of pure gold running from Scott cutting Harris off at the goddamn knees with stony silence when Harris tried to kick off a “joke” about people overpronouncing "Wheat Thins" ...and then rolling right from Foam Corner into an Audible ad based entirely around Scott's overpronunciation of Whispernet.

I agree with pretty much everything Lukas said above (except I'm a little less concerned with how the podcasts synch in iTunes). But as long as the quality is high, an enthusiastic yes to more variety and more content.

HOORAY