Chapo Stakehouse is more complicated than Tom thinks....

[Krokodil_Gena]

Alright, so there is the "dirtbag Left" podcast Chapo Trap House which is Will Menaker, Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, Virgil Texas, and Amber A'lee Frost. The trick is, CTH is related to the faar filthier Nick Mullen-Stavros Halkias-Adam Friedland podcast Cum Town inasmuch as Menaker and Biederman were guests and Mullen lives with Frost. The last leg of the tripod is Red Scare, hosted by Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, and there is some connection between Adam Friedland and Dasha Nekrasova. The reader needs to understand that everybody I've mentioned lives in New York, and so they run into each other.

If you want to know what it's like to be young and trying to do stand-up comedy in NYC, Cum Town is where you go. Nick has a million stories of the insane jobs he worked before doing stand-up (the GameStop story is hilarious but not safe for work, obviously.)

If you want to listen to people with media backgrounds nail the press-political nexus and conduct decent interviews, Chapo Trap House* is a good place to go. The snippet of them talking about the Democratic National Committee is a good introduction to their podcast style. Donald Borenstein and Matt Honor filmed their 2016 Election Night live show, turning it into the short documentary I'm Actually Laughing (2017). That one is good because you get to see the faces James Adomian does while doing his Chris Matthews impression, also it's a good example of what happens when reality flips the script on a group thinking that they would have to deal with Madame President and instead they got President Dorito-dust.

Red Scare is the smallest and it feels like a less-cussy, smarter version of Cum Town mixed with CTH's interviews.

Some mention should go to Whale Vomit, the defunct Sam Kriss-Amber A'lee Frost podcast hosted by The Baffler. Also, Champagne Sharks should get some love.

_______

* The name comes from how Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán was in the news when they started and a "trap house" is street slang for a drug house; it doesn't mean anything, but it's evocative of a lot.

[fonpr]

[Bull Shannon]

I subscribed to Chop House steak podcast for a few months. I liked it okay; it was a pretty decent source for some deep-dive political talk. But half the time I didn't know quite what they were referring to, and they feel like those upperclassmen who are pretty smart but think they're so smart that they're above everything and think its sucks to care.

And every clip I've heard from Cum Town involves the hosts crapping on other members of their comedy community. Doesn't sound like a fun listen.

[gogurt]

Adding to the links in original post, Steakhaus boy Will Meneker has stated that one of his biggest inspirations to start the show is Street Fight Radio http://www.streetfightradio.com/  an actual weekly radio show out of WCRS in Columbus Ohio.  If they didn't define the term "dirtbag left", they certainly embody it.  I dip in once in a while, good stuff in general if you think current systems are f'd.

[Krokodil_Gena]

I subscribed to Chop House steak podcast for a few months. I liked it okay; it was a pretty decent source for some deep-dive political talk. But half the time I didn't know quite what they were referring to, and they feel like those upperclassmen who are pretty smart but think they're so smart that they're above everything and think its sucks to care.

And every clip I've heard from Cum Town involves the hosts crapping on other members of their comedy community. Doesn't sound like a fun listen.

Chapo is like a window into being extremely online, especially with Twitter (Felix was one of the early big people of "weird Twitter")....Will has a background in the NYC magazine world - his father is Daniel Menaker, who used to edit the fiction section of The New Yorker.

Cum Town is always a crapshoot....some of their dickishness is just jokes, some of it is just NYC toughguy BS. I linked to all this stuff for completeness.

(I find it weird that nobody has said a thing about Champagne Sharks.)