Jesse Thorn, America’s Radio Sweetheart, is the man behind Public Radio’s The Sound of Young America, where he interviews wonderful creative people such as Jonathan Katz (the man behind Dr. Katz, professional therapist), Swamp Dogg, Sa-Ra Creative Partners, Ira Glass, The Upright Citizen’s Brigade, the drummer from Deerhoof, Steve Albini, Brendan Small, They Might Be Giants, etc, etc, etc. Yet, as great as The Sound of Young America is, even better is Jordan Jesse Go, Jesse Thorn’s rambling, aimless podcast which basically functions solely as a vehicle for witty banter between Thorn and his former TSOYA co-host, Jordan Morris, boy detective. But don’t take my word for it!
Jonathan Goldstein is hilarious. I think. He’s got a dry sense of humor that is at times hilarious, though he’s constantly interrogating why exactly what he does is funny. He does this through a number of tropes, most regularly the tried and true “witty banter from a self-deprecating Jew” mode that made Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen so popular, but the format in which he does it is, I think, the most original thing about his material.
Jonathan Goldstein hosts a radio show on CBC Radio 1 and Sirius Satellite Radio called Wiretap. Basically the show is made up of a series of pasted-together audio snippets consisting of narrative monologues (most notably, Jonathan has done a number of hilarious versions of bible stories, including one in which David’s real reason for killing Goliath is because he didn’t like Goliath’s anti-semitic comedic stylings and thought killing him with a rock would be a laugh riot that would put both the Israelites and God in stitches), interviews with people who have strange occupations or goals, but mostly just recorded phone conversations between him, a number of his friends, and even his parents. There’s your run-on sentence for the day.
Before doing Wiretap, Jonathan worked on This American Life, which is where I was first exposed to him. He’s also written a wonderful book called Lenny Bruce is Dead that I would recommend to any Goldstein fans interested in reading his material as well as listening to it. Unfortunately, however, unless you’re a Sirius Satellite radio customer (I’m not), there’s no way to listen to his show in the states legally (unless CBC has begun podcasting it, which last I heard they were not), though if you do some googling you can find websites with illegal podcasts of the episodes.
To give you an idea, here’s a video featuring Jonathan and one of the regular guests, Howard:
