The Best Comedy Podcasts of 2017
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It’s a complicated time for the comedy community, as it is for the entertainment industry at large. Old guards are collapsing as fans are looking more and more to fresher voices with a better grasp on the current moment. You know: let the past die! You know: kill it if you have to! Even in the relatively young medium of podcasting, this has proven to be true. In general, the best podcasts of the year counted themselves among the stellar debuts and young shows ascending in status. Here are ten of the best.
10. My Dad Wrote a Porno
Not many podcasts can sustain such a unusual concept for as long as My Dad Wrote a Porno has. For three seasons, Jamie Morton has read a new chapter from the series of erotic novels his father has actually written, with cringe-inducing results too graphically horrible to get into here. The podcast’s surprising longevity is in-part thanks to how Morton and co-hosts James Cooper and Alice Levine has capitalized on the show’s celebrity fanbase, resulting in equally entertaining “Footnote” episodes with the likes of Nicholas Hoult and Mara Wilson.
9. 12 Hour Day
The only podcast to make this list despite only airing one episode this year, J.D. Amato and Connor Ratliff’s 12 Hour Day continues to be the only podcasting experience of its kind. It’s the rare show that is so goddamn long, mistakes truly don’t happen. If the hosts get bored, or off-track or actively aren’t enjoying hosting their own show—that only fuels the next few hours of discussion or meditative silence moving forward. Reoccurring technical difficulties only lead to increasingly creative workarounds. Still, it was satisfying to see the hosts take a simple approach to their first episode in seven months, retreating to an apartment for twelve long hours like an endless, existential, hopeful ‘80s sitcom.
8. Don’t Get Me Started
We lost a great podcast on its own terms this year, as Anthony King and Will Hines decided to quit Don’t Get Me Started—in which they invite writers, actors and comedians to share their obsessions outside comedy—while they were ahead. Still, they made their last year count, with a genuinely moving goodbye episode, an insightful rule-breaking episode with Matt Walsh on improv, and an immediately iconic podcasting moment when Search Party’s Charles Rodgers revealed he was the creator of the fictional Brooklyn Podcasting Festival and had sent them the invite to a panel on “Comedy and Race” that had been stressing them out during his episode on brilliant long-form pranking.
7. Bitch Sesh: A Real Housewives Breakdown
I still haven’t started watching any of the reputable entries in the Real Housewives series, but that hasn’t prevented my enjoyment of Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider’s Bitch Sesh an extreme and dedicated bit of fandom that far outruns its own nominal “recap” status. Wilson and Schneider’s real coup is in using Real Housewives as jumping-off points to their own thorough discussion of their own relationships with others, making Bitch Sesh essential listening in an age when we’re increasingly using what we watch to define who we are.