I'm a longtime fan, almost 10 years, though I hadn't been listening as much lately, having my plate full with some other podcasts. I come back and listen to this short Bests ep #117 (12 min) just now. It starts up as a solo Tom bit. It's going strong, I'm enjoying myself, man I've missed this guy. He starts taking callers, a few guys getting on and joining in on the joke, keeping it moving, keeping the bit rolling down the highway.
Then around the 6min mark a lady caller gets on with Tom the trucker. Her convo starter on air is just like "how are you doing tonight", then asking "what's the topic?" She has no idea what's going on, like is not even listening. She procedes to just grind the whole bit to a halt, completely kill the momentum, just dead air...and Tom just lets it happen, god forbid he should ever hang up on a woman caller. So after 5 minutes of good Tom, then two minutes of a wet blanket, I have to stop and can't even finish the 11 minutes of total content. Then Tom includes this as a "best"...he could have just edited this dud caller out for a Best.
It's so weird the way Tom handles women on air, especially women who are bad callers. He would not give this type of caller the time of day if it was a dude, but if it's a woman and she's bad somehow he ends up letting her sit on the line extra extra long, and it's so annoying. I know he means well and wants to be inclusive, but in effect he's making women look unfunny by giving the bad ones all the time of day, and on top of that not making it funny by making fun of them or any of his normal funny treatment of callers. This kind of thing really started annoying me a while back and def contributed to me listening less, and it sucks that right when I come back to the show after a little break, it only takes 5 minutes before I run into an egregious example of it.
Yeah I know how I probably sound to a lot of people, I probably sound like I'm hating on women. I'm not anti-women or anti-women-in-comedy though, I'm just anti-making the show worse for any reason.