Mike Schmidt: The 40 year Old Boy Podcast

Mike Schmidt, unnecessarily angry comedian

We are undergoing what I would like to call the Third Golden Age of Comedy without defining the first two Golden Ages (maybe the "sick comedians of the 1960's- Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, etc and the everywhere a brick wall and a microphone boom of the 1980's) Please try to enjoy this Comedy Renaissance festival. The shear volume of great stand-up comedy going on right now may be unequaled. Todd Barry, Maria Bamford, Brian Regan, Patton Oswalt, The Sklar Brothers, an on and on.

The podcast format would seem to be perfect for comedy. Most ventures into it seem to be doing radio imitations or are poorly produced panel discussions. Of those to leap above the fray, Jimmy Pardo's Never Not Funny, which is kept on the rails by Pardo's unrelenting focus on comedic quality, and Mike Schmidt's The 40 Year Old Boy.

Schmidt approaches his podcast as a roughly 45 minute monologue- no guests, no music bed, just mano on microphono. He is a motormouth, spitting more words in a podcast than I utter in a week. He is unflinching honest, disturbingly so. Many of his topics can be boiled down to "Am I a good guy?" and frequently the answer is, not so much. He is your asshole friend, tons of fun but embarrassing in equal amounts.

American Hamburger Club

"Drunk on the kind of applause / That gets louder the lower you sink"
Mark Eitzel with American Music Club from "Gratitude Walks"

The new Neil Hamburger ...Sings Country Greats mixes comedic country songs with a few covers, John Entwistle's suicidal "Thinkin' It Over" and American Music Club's "The Hula Maiden". While I could see Hamburger having a few solo Who 8 tracks piled up by his console stereo, his selection of "The Hula Maiden" shows a certain amount of self awareness. He admits he is not actually a just a struggling comedian doing a country album in a jokey "I can't sing" sing-song style but that he is a guy who could and would select and sing an obscure indie rock number from a very obscure release from quite a number of years back. This may be the first instance of Hamburger winking at the audience. We now know that he is also "in on the joke."

Neil Hamburger's lifetime of misery illuminates the song from the inside, it also submarines the Mark Eitzel sad clown image in a way that all the funny lyrics Eitzel has written couldn't do. But do we want Eitzel to remain a person and Hamburger a character? Can Neil Hamburger be taken solely as a humorous creation? I think a certain amount of empathy has to be formed. Aren't we rooting for him to pull it together and become a successful comedian? Because he can't sink any lower than he has.

Neil Hamburger also sounds a lot like Doc Dart throughout this disc and the more melodic leanings of the Crucifuck's Wisconsin album- a masterpiece. Doc Dart (nie 26) sings country greats is a concept I could get behind.

Neil Hamburger - The Hula Maiden mp3