I'm curious how you think the Maximum fun Podcasts fit are part of the "liberal cronies making faux-racist jokes all the time." Not a loaded question or anything, i'd just love to hear your perspective on it.
Asked by
legospaceship
That’s a good question, and definitely my parenthetical vitriol needs expansion.
For one, Jesse Thorn was recently on Boing Boing’s podcast, and Coulton was on Thorn’s TSOYA podcast (responding to a Planet Money podcast that characterized Coulton fairly well, I think — of course, neither he nor Thorn could handle NPR saying he got any sort of help by having a baked-in programmer audience). Thorn is friends with Lonely Sandwich, from You Look Nice Today, which had a two episode run with John Hodgman and his pal Coulton. Hodgman was Thorn’s mentor. They’re all sort of left coast friends (not Hodgman, ofc.), I get the impression. ANYWAY — I’m just trying to establish the connection. (Yes, I listen to a lot of podcasts.) (Also, this ignores the way the extremely funny and talented Merlin Mann connects this group of people to the more hard-core tech people who are THE WORST via Dan Benjamin and 5by5.) (Yes, still, I listen to a lot of podcasts.)
Jordan Jesse Go frequently features racist jokes. In JJGO Ep 207, Jordan Morris was gobsmacked that his “Thai lady boys” twitter joke was poorly received. Then, they played a listener call that celebrated racism, and they thought it was HILARIOUS. Their guest, Merrill Markoe, who’s an actually talented funny person was like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?” but more polite. I’d have to literally go back and listen to 200 episodes of JJGO, but there’s not a month that goes by where I don’t have a WTF moment and have to pause or delete the podcast because of their love for liberal-racist jokes. I have a similar relationship with certain podcasts as I do with Bill Simmons. Yes, I am a person who needs to let go of negativity and be too blessed for to be stressed, etc. I’m working on it.
Anyway, yes. The Max Fun podcasts, I believe, really cater to the white and nerdy crowd that I’ve mentally mapped to Boing Boingers, so-called “makers”, readers of Reddit, and comedy nerds — which are not implicitly bad people, certainly. I am a huge comedy nerd. But there’s a strain in it, I think, of meritocratic-nerd-outsideryness that lends itself to denying privilege in off-putting ways. As a panacea to all that, I have nothing but good things to say about The Pod F. Tompkast and Super Ego. (Thorn and Morris are once-time guests on the latter.)
