Succotash Epi260: Pickin’ Clips at Random

Hello, friend-o! As our announcer, Bill Heywatt, says, I AM Marc Hershon, your every-other-weekly-host of Succotash, the Comedy Soundcast soundcast. And this is Epi260, clocking in just as we pass the half-year mark for 2021. Here in the US we’ve got COVID-19 on the run, except for those pesky variants. If you are elsewhere in the world, here’s hoping for the best for you and yours.

Before I get into the comedy soundcasts that I will be featuring clips from this week, let me check in and ask if you were able to catch last week’s installment, Epi259, with my alternating co-host Tyson Saner, in which he featured snippets from Self Esteem Party, Conversation For Adults, and Comedy Bang Bang. You can catch that show, or any other past ‘sode, at our homesite SuccotashShow.com. You can also get pretty far back at Apple or Google Podcasts, Spotify, Sticher, and even SoundCloud will let you flip back a few weeks.

For the shows I’m clipping this week, I just kind of took a scattershot look through a number of comedy soundcast lists for 2021 and snagged a couple from some I heard recently and a couple I hadn’t even heard of until this week. We’ve got samples from Better Off Better, BHHcast, Play With Pain, and Plumbing the Death Star. I also have a brief moment from a bit I contributed to from The Los Angeles Breakfast Club: On The Air, a soundcast hosted by Phil Leirness that I serve as the announcer for. This episode is sponsored by Henderson’s Pants new Space Pants – Henderson’s, where no pants have gone before!

Before we get to the clippage, I wanted to give a recommendation to a pretty bold comedy-slash-psychological experiment currently on Netflix. If you haven’t caught Bo Burnham’s Inside special, you might want to check it out. Don’t be expecting to see him enteraining a crowd of people in a theater, though. This is way different. Very unique. It’s his exploration of his comedy during the pandemic, where the entire show takes place in one room and he’s apparently doing all the tech himself. Lots of talking to the camera and to himself. There’s music, confessions, and tears. I found one of the songs, “White Woman’s Instagram” from the special up on YouTube so I thought I’d throw it in here. The lyrics are amazingly on-tone but you should check out the video from the special because Bo’s visual interpretation of the subject in question is fantastic.

I found Inside pretty powerful and totally captivating. And just a tad claustrophobic. If you’re up for something different, whether you know Bo’s work or not, check it out on Netflix.

Alright, let’s get into THIS show now, and onto the clips!

Play With Pain
Full disclosure before I continue: I am not a sports fan. Never have been and likely never will be. I’m not sure why, but watching games live or on TV has never grabbed me. Football, baseball, basketball, soccer, the Olympic events – just not my thing. The pity of it is that there are a lot of comedy soundcasts that are connected to sports, either directly or just because the hosts and guests are into them. Like the Monday Morning Podcast with Bill Burr. I love Burr. He’s one of the funniest humans around today. But as soon as he goes into a sptry about sports or having watched some game or another over the weekend, I’m lost. But I hereby resolve to better. For YOU. And I’m going to start with Play with Pain with Chet Waterhouse. Now Chet is a character, an old play-by-play sports announcer, as created and played by comedian Jeff Cesario. He usually has a comedian on as a guest, someone else who’s at least somewhat into sports, and they kickk around a lot of the sports news of the day. We’re clipping a recent show with guest Paul “Sully” Sullivan but he was a little audio glitchy on the show so I’m just featuring Chet’s sports update, a regular feature on the show.

Plumbing the Death Star
I am rarely surprised any more when I find a soundcast that I think no one else knows about and then find out it’s a pretty big hit and has been for a while. The soundcast world is just too damn big now to get that lucky. But I’m glad I found Plumbing the Death Star. Out of Australia and the wonderfully named Sanspants Radio Netowkr, the show features Joel L. Zammit, Jackson B. Daly, and another Joel, Joel Duscher. The loosely-wrapped premise of the show is to bring logic into the worlds of fantasy and sci-fi and pop culture in general. Our featured clip is from their recent episode entitled “Is It Ethical to Bust Ghosts?”, which means it only took them until now to get around to an almost 40-year-old movie. Although with the new Ghostbusters: Afterlife supposed to drop this Fall, maybe it couldn’t be more timely.

Better Off Better
Touting their show Better Off Better as “a comedic, cut-throat journey to self-betterment”, hosts Chris K. Daniels, Jenny Whipple, and Sam Caswell are constantly challenging each other to get better and, well, being better. Called “The best comedy podcast of 2021” by their moms, each episode features a new wrinkle in how to make oneself better. At least in theory. For their recent 50th episode, the trio decided to go hairless down south of the border by using a couple of “experimental hair removal” techniques: Sugar Waxing and Sandpaper Shaving. How did it all come out? Or off? We don’t have time to get into the whole thing on our show, but here’s a taste…

BHHcast
The “Bah-cast”, which is actually spelled BHHcast, features hosts Jamie Bendall, Adam Haigh, and Jamie Hernan, interviews comedians and other guests with, as they put it, an incredible backstory. The kickoff to their Season 5 a little over a month ago, an episode entitled “Tandem Skydiving” featured comedian and family man Paul Virzi. Reflecting what I was saying earlier in this show, the BHHcast seems to dip heavily into sports and I listened diligently, although our clip gets more into a show that Paul had a little while back called Gun To Your Head, where he would force his guests to make tough decisions based on the premise there was a gun to your head so you HAD to answer. The gang decides to play a little of that game here…

The music I’m using under the TweetSack listings this week, by the way, was composed and performed by my buddy DJ Knifeketeer. That particular number is called “Rocket Hat on the Run” and you can find the entire Rocket Hat soundtrack on YouTube by subscribing to DJ Knifeketeer.

If you were hoping for more of episode 260 of this show, I’m afraid that’s our time. You may, of course, listen to it back again as many times as you like. And if you hang out in this same feed next week, you’ll be treated to my compadre Tyson Saner and his newest selection of soundcastd clippage for you. Special thanks to our announcer Bill Heywatt and our amazing producer/engineer Joe Paulino, not to mention booth assistant Kenny Durgess, our secret weapon and the hardest working man in soundcasting next to Paul F. Tompkins.

Enjoy your summer while you can, check out some if not all of the soundcasts we’ve sampled for you here today, and if anyone ever asks if you’ve heard anything good lately, please be sue to pass the Succotash, won’t you?

— Marc Hershon