Welcome to Another Brand New Episode Of
There's a meme that goes around periodically that says something like, "If I'm too much, then go find less," and while I agree with it in theory, I struggle with it in practice. I've written before about constantly feeling like I'm too much. I feel it all the time. My therapist tells me often that I'm intellectualizing things and I should try to connect with them on a more visceral level, but what he doesn't know is that I do this because otherwise I would drown in my feelings. Everything is very big, very immediate, very loud and forceful and overwhelming, and if I can't express it in the moment, I think I'm going to die. It lives in my body, this need to get out the things that dominate my emotions. My hands shake and my heart races and my muscles tense for flight when I try to repress things and bottle them up.
If I love you, it's a wild, overpowering love and you need to know about it. If you've hurt my feelings, I'm devastated and I won't be able to recover from it until you understand exactly how big the pain is. If I'm excited about something, I want to scream about it and jump up and down and get the zoomies like my cats do in the middle of the night when I would love to be sleeping.
I don't let this part of me out very often because I have learned to feel self-conscious about it. I have learned to view it as a character flaw, something to downplay and apologize for. Sorry I'm like this. I know I'm a lot. It's okay if you can't deal, I don't blame you. I don't want to deal with myself most of the time. Etc etc. I offer people an out when I feel like I've been too real with them and they surely don't appreciate it for the gift it is. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable with my too-much-ness.
This is why I have said, countless times over the years, that I wish I were a funny person and instead I'm just embarrassingly sincere. I love funny people. I'm drawn to them inexorably, most of the time to my own detriment because funny people have a tendency to be assholes. I'll forgive them anything, excuse any bad behavior, if they make me laugh. I want so badly to be one of them, because humor is a deflection. It's a wall between you and the rest of the world, one built of jokes and flippant dismissals and self-deprecating comments to let your audience know that you know you're ridiculous. I do know I'm ridiculous, and by inviting other people to laugh at me, along with me, I can mitigate the hurt of realizing that I'm a joke I didn't know I was telling.
People have assured me I am funny, and listen, I have my moments. I've consumed enough comedy to have gotten a basic feel for the rhythms, and I know what I, personally, think is funny. But I'm not quick with it. I think and overthink and then, for a little spice, I overthink about overthinking, and this means that real time verbal conversations are very difficult for me. I'm better in writing and always have been. Here I can edit, rearrange, reword. Here I can delete something if I decide I don't want to say it or can't say it correctly. Here I don't have to worry about anyone's immediate reaction and the feelings that will swamp me when I hear it. None of this applies to the kind of comedy I like best, the kind that happens in the moment and feeds off of other people's responses and builds on shared in-person energy. I am a walking raw nerve and all I can be is who I am.
But I can appreciate the ability of others to be funny in this way, and the primary way I do that is through podcasts. I've already written about All Fantasy Everything, my absolute favorite podcast, hosted by my ultimate celebrity crush, Ian Karmel. I don't know if he actually qualifies as a celebrity, but he was on TV on a very famous show and he's written a book and he feels famous to me. He's loud and silly and whimsical and kind and he loves his friends so much and he's a wonderful writer, and, above all, he's very, very funny. His book, T-Shirt Swim Club, is finally out in the world and I'm still working on reading it, because his sister's sections are less interesting to me, but his parts are as delightful as I knew they would be.
This isn't about Ian Karmel specifically, though. It's about his podcast, which I listen to every week and, even when there aren't new episodes, I replay my favorites each morning as part of my wake-up routine. This podcast lives with me and I cannot recommend it enough.
How Did This Get Made is the podcast I've been listening to for the longest amount of time, since 2014. A whole decade of Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, and June Diane Raphael watching terrible movies and then dissecting the plot and reading 5 star Amazon reviews and answering audience questions when they do it live, which they do more often than not these days. Unfortunately, this is the only one where the whole back catalogue isn't available anymore, but they regularly put out old episodes again, and the new ones are still phenomenal. They recently did the Fifty Shades series and I laughed until I couldn't breathe. Jason is my other celebrity crush. I have a type. This podcast got me through some very rough times, during and just after a breakup that felt earth-shattering when it happened, and now Paul Scheer also has a book out, called Joyful Recollections of Trauma. I don't love it quite as much as I love ian's book, but it is still very funny and sweet and admirably honest.
I love horror. We all know this. And so when a woman from OkCupid told me about Teen Creeps, I downloaded it immediately and haven't looked back. That was probably in 2020, and even though I no longer talk to that woman because she ghosted me, as people on dating apps are wont to do, I'm grateful to her for introducing me to one of my favorite podcasts. Kelly Nugent and Lindsay Katai are hilarious and smart and they love trashy teen horror as much as I do, and sometimes they also cover genuinely good books, and sometimes they have guests like Omar Najam, a third podcast crush, and Oscar Montoya, their film correspondent who joins them to talk about movies. They've done Scream and The Craft and the Fear Street trilogy and M3GAN and so many more, and they've covered all my R.L. Stine favorites and Lois Duncan and Grady Hendrix and on and on. They go on a lot of very long tangents that have nothing to do with the thing the episode is about, so be warned if you don't like that, but they're so funny and sometimes they're about farmersonly.com.
And lastly, Good Christian Fun. It's a terrible and misleading name for a podcast, but I promise that you don't have to have any familiarity with Christianity to enjoy it. In fact, it might be better if you don't, because Kevin T. Porter and Caroline Ely take irreverent to a whole new level. If you're actually looking for some good Christian fun, this is not the show for you. There's so much swearing and so many sex jokes and so much skewering of evangelical Christianity. I got into it because I knew Kevin from Gilmore Guys, a podcast that saved my life during some of my darkest mental health days but which has since ended because they watched the whole show, and I followed him to his next podcast venture. I'll follow him anywhere, including down the aisle if he ever learns that I exist and realizes we would make the perfect couple. My parasocial relationships with these people are strong and delusional. this is another one that has made me laugh until I'm wheezing, and it's one, along with AFE, that I've forced Elijah to hear so much about even though he's not a podcast guy despite my best efforts. Sometimes I just have to talk about my besties in my phone who don't know I exist, because I can't be normal about the things I love.
I can't be normal about much, really, and that's why I listen to comedy podcasts. For an hour and a half, or two hours, I can laugh and immerse myself in something that isn't my own life, and I can listen to people who are also a whole lot find ways to express their too-much-ness that draw people in instead of repelling them. I don't like stand-up most of the time because it's just one person on a stage screaming jokes into a microphone. I want the interplay between two or more hosts who are friends and who love each other and who make jokes because they know I need them. Because they also need them. Because we're all so much and we're just trying to get through life as unscathed as possible and laughter helps.
I support all of these podcasts on Patreon except for HDTGM because they don't have one, and I recommend them with my whole heart. Honorable mentions go to Mortified and the early episodes of Punch Up the Jam with Demi and Miel, which are no less wonderful but which I can't go into detail about because my God this is long. I'm sorry. I love you. Even my newsletters are too much, which feels on brand. Here I am, and here you are reading what I write, and here we are together making whatever this is, friendship, love, appreciation for the inherent too-much-ness of everything. I hope that, even if I can't be a funny person myself, you'll accept this gift of other people who can and are as a peace offering for everything else I throw at you.