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: