The Little Dum Dum Club #310

So, word filtered my way late last week that the boys from my favourite American history podcast The Dollop had been guests on another of my favourite podcasts The Little Dum Dum Club.

A confession, however. I’ve not been listening to the “hastily edited grab bag of stories and general dickheadery” of late. In fact, my podcast listening has dropped away remarkably. I put it down to my real job, and… footy finals. Why not, right?

So, to kill 2 birds with one stone – I plugged the earbuds in as I mowed the lawn today. I hit play on episode 310 of The Little Dum Dum club featuring Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds and immediately, I’m confused.

Karl Chandler delivers an opening spiel that is best described as wooden. Not like them. I mean, I know I haven’t listened for a while, but dude – how bad have you gotten?

This starts to make sense pretty quickly though, as it turns out his opening monologue has been written for him. By none other than Ronny Chieng – who it seems is sponsoring this episode, because Tommy and Karl didn’t have the money to fly to Sydney to interview Dave and Gareth. In return for Ronny’s dollars, it seems Tommy and Karl have to do live reads for him. This is a theme that continues throughout the episode, and has the boys plugging everything from Dyson Airblades to Tsingtao Beer. And of course – all the ads are written by Ronny.

But back to the show. Dave and Gareth are in Australia to do a couple of live Dollops around Australia with an Australian flavour (I listened to episode 205 straight after I listened to this one – featuring Wil Anderson), and the Superpals have flown up to Sydney to do a podcast, literally an hour after the boys from the Dollop have got off the plane.

The opening basically revolves around Axl Rose and his appearance. Dave Anthony: “he looks like a leg that has gout, with hair.” Gareth: “It looks like a ghost ate Axl Rose” Special attention is paid to Axl’s dress sense – apparently wearing a flannel shirt tied around the waist isn’t cool.

Then again – he’s hanging around with Angus Young who dresses like a 70 year old schoolboy. KC: “That looks like someone mic’d up Halloween”

And then we segue to the main topic of the podcast. Karl Chandler’s dress sense. Around 9 minutes in, Karl makes the horrible mistake of telling everyone he used to do standup comedy wearing pyjamas.

What follows is approximately 45 minutes of Karl having shit hung on him. I won’t go too into detail – you really should download the episode and listen. It is actually hilarious to listen to Karl attempt to justify his terrible stand up career in the midst of some brutal belittling from the other 3.

DA: “The great thing about it, is that it doesn’t work at all”
GR: “OK, let’s not interrupt. You were doing standup, reading from a night time story book, in lady pyjamas…”

Oh yeah – he wore lady pyjamas.

DA: “And this all made perfect sense to you…”

Other topics that get a run for the rest of the episode include: The Japanese Suicide Forest, The Bruce Wayne story becoming part of the school curriculum, a dating experience Karl had, some more laughter at Karl’s pyjamas, and finally, the reason Karl no longer wears pyjamas on stage.

An hour in – the podcast wraps up. But don’t switch off. There’s additional epilogue material, as Tommy talks us through the pain of missing a flight.

Definitely go and download this and have a listen. It’s a very good episode, lots of laughs, and plenty of self-deprecating humour.