I Don’t Have Time For Podcasts: “You’re gonna f-cking buy me the corsage”

2 min readMay 20, 2017

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The show

In April, Emily Bell tweeted that there are four podcast genres: “Men going on about things”; “Whispery crime”; “Millennials talking over each other”; [and] “Should be 20 minutes shorter.” This week’s pick, a comedy chat show called “Off Topic,” meets all of those criteria except “whispery crime,” but I’ll let that slide. Hosted by a group of gamer-comedians from Rooster Teeth, and routinely clocking in at two hours or longer, it’s the mindless entertainment I watch when the rest of you are watching reality TV. And yes, I said “watch”: This is the newsletter’s first video podcast.

The episode

You can drop into “Off Topic” pretty much anywhere — the show turns Seinfeldian “talking about nothing” into an art form — but my personal favorite episode is last year’s “That’s a Hard No.” Recorded in Austin shortly after Uber and Lyft (temporarily) left town, the hosts talk about ridesharing, Harry Potter houses, “Game of Thrones” and what happened when one of their fans invited the show’s regular host, Michael Jones, to her high school prom.

How to listen

If you insist, you can listen to an audio version of “Off Topic,” but in my experience generally — and especially for this episode — the video is better. You can watch it on YouTube here.