Kickpuncher

Kate Micucci is not impressed! This was totally the face I was picturing when the "Kate Face" was brought up, though I think it should be a little more wide-eyed "Well, that just happened" than "not impressed". The vocal impression was a delight. Fun episode overall (particularly the Ruffalo/Jackee summit), and I was sort of amazed that they hadn't had Riki on until now.

OK, then it WAS INTENTIONALLY funny! (Still totally not making light of schizophrenia.) PS, I don't know if it had already been recorded at the time, but I asked Kulap and Howard (on Twitter) to ask you about this episode if you do Tooch this week. Mostly I just want to hear their thoughts on the subject since each will surely be fascinating in their own way.

Right. To be clear, "funny" was a bad choice of words on my part. I definitely didn't mean to make light of schizophrenia itself, just that revealing it at the end sort of makes me look at the preceding 45 minutes in a different light.

I just watched it and thought it was pretty good. It seems like an odd oversight that Justin didn't mention that it briefly features a song composed by none other than LALW himself.

Yeah, my initial (admittedly somewhat crazy) reaction was that I didn't like it, but thinking a bit more, I like it both for the change of pace factor and because it seems pretty clear that he's taking the show seriously and doing some real prep work.

"I am a diagnosed schizophrenic" might have been the most unintentionally funny line in Earwolf history. Or maybe not even funny, but one hell of a twist ending.

I just watched the Nickelback LL Cool Jason Alexander video. It's pretty astounding.

LL Cool Jason Alexander was brilliant in the Broadway adaptation of "Any Given Sunday". I remember the guys on Forgive This Intrusion raving about it at the time. I loved the episode, but have to admit my disappointment that the discussion of Mike's New Jersey/Italian accent and WTF didn't lead to a classic "MARC MA-RON!"

Cool show. It felt like a big departure from the usual Earwolf fare, more due to GLP's polished hosting style than the non-comedy subject matter. Good mix of talk and performances, like the short running time.

Despite a general distaste for Carolla and his brand of humor, and all the negative comments (which I pretty much never read in advance of listening to shows, but was curious about this one garnering far more comments than a typical SBC), I went ahead with my normal Sunday morning Sklarbro routine, and the show was pretty much what I expected, both good and bad. I'm glad that the Sklars addressed the elephant in the room, and while I wish they would have been a little tougher on Carolla, I can understand the need to be cordial hosts and not ruffle any feathers. I also agree that Carolla has the talent of a very funny guy, and I think the "if only he would use his powers for good" sentiment is spot-on. And the sound quality really wasn't that bad. Having said all that, Carolla deserves every bit of criticism he gets, and his defense against it is really weak. It's not like I took notes on the show or anything, but here are some things that stand out in my memory as being somewhere on the scale from "grating" to "outright offensive": - Constant use of "chick" and "brother" - The aforementioned Old Navy flap. Made worse by the fact that one of the Sklars presented a more logical, less offensive answer (outsourcing) and Carolla just steamrolled it in order to continue with his homophobic diatribe. - The idea of "I'm not an asshole, so I'm allowed to act like one." Translation - "I'm not a shitty person, just a shitty comic." Also, this was probably covered in the earlier tolerance discussion (which I admittedly only skimmed), but no one is saying he's not allowed to do anything, particularly given that his main platform is a self-produced podcast, but obviously we're allowed to not think it's funny. Also, as mentioned above, the assumption that everyone thinks this garbage and he's one of the brave few with the balls to express it. - Regarding the Old Navy and Hostess outlets, I cringe anytime a millionaire takes issue with how regular people choose to spend their money (not to mention the self-centered idea that just because these places are apparently a little off the beaten path from his neighborhood of fellow millionaires, any idiot going there must be driving a long way). Made worse by the "tough shit if I'm alienating the poor dirtbags" response to "don't complain about first class".

I haven't seen/heard these discussed anywhere, but I just noticed some changes to the front page of the Earwolf Productions forum. EDIT - OK, that showed up a lot smaller than I expected, and clicking on it doesn't seem to enlarge. Anyway, the new sections are "Nocturnal Emotions with Har Mar Superstar" and "Shortwave with Grant-Lee Phillips".

Trish AND The Royal Wie!

I don't have a whole lot to add to the discussion, just wanted to say that it's great to see the guest pop in and participate in a good, thoughtful thread.

WERNER HERZOG! PFT has completely ruined certain people for me in that I can't see/hear them without thinking of his characterizations and laughing. Then again, Herzog is pretty funny on his own. Glad to see more clips from this show, both were excellent. One of my favorite things in improv is when the performers manage to needle each other without really breaking character, like when Jason talked about Jessica pointing to Lennon (which she may or may not have actually done).

Did any of you listen to Jason on You Made it Weird? Really good show overall. The reason I'm bringing it up here is that there were two areas of overlap between that show and this one (not sure which show was recorded first) which I found pretty funny. 1) There was a discussion involving an ice cream parlor, and a joke about using something gross as a mix-in. 2) Jason told a story involving some major fecal blowthrough.

One of my favorite episodes ever. The "Trish" stuff literally had me in tears.

I found it really funny that yesterday saw the release of this episode, featuring Jason playing a political candidate named Gary Marshall ("Not the director."), and an episode of Louie featuring the real Mr. Marshall ("Please, call me Garry!").

Great performers who have great chemistry with each other is a formula for pure improv magic. Awesome episode.

Yeah, the Buffy movie was the first thing I thought of as well. I'm glad Howard continued his streak of using the phrase "____-'em-up" in nearly every episode lately. This episode was fine, but it could have had the exact same content and been 20 minutes shorter if Dave Hill were capable of fluidly saying a sentence.

So I guess this was one of the banked pre-cancer-diagnosis episodes? I kind of cringed when Tig was talking about the plane scare and jokingly said something like "My mother dies, I get C-dif, and just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, now I'm going to die in a plane crash." Kyle's impressions were great...luxurious, even.

I don't know if Scott works for the movie studio or if he's a freelance PR guy, but if he works in the music industry, he'd be an ideal candidate to promote Rodney Ogg's next album. Great episode, but Scott (Aukerman) missed out on a golden opportunity for a call-back to "My wi-fi!"

Me likum this episode.

Favorite barely-audible-and-unacknowledged line of the week: "You're the king of metaphors." "...aaand similes."

Agreed. And I say that despite generally disliking Smith. I thought the stories were interesting (and relevant enough) and there was still plenty of time for discussion of the movie.

"Huey Lewis isn't punk, but The News is punk as fuck." (And for the record, "Mickey" by Toni Basil was the least punk song in the compilation.) Really fun show.