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The Dollop with Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds · All Things Comedy

152 - The Past Times with Knowledge Fight

·1 hr 25 min·5 clips
Dan and Jordan reveal why Tucker Carlson's laugh is worse than Alex Jones' angry growl.
The Dollop opens with a promotional segment for the March 2026 national tour, including dates in Buffalo, Syracuse, Boston at the Wilbur, Bridgeport, New York's Gramercy Theater, Albany, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Washington DC at the Lincoln Theater, plus an announcement that Dave and Gareth will be watching the film Cats live on their YouTube channel to raise money for the Hollywood Food Coalition on November 24th, with listener Stu already donating $10,000. The episode proper is a Past Times crossover, a recurring Dollop spinoff format hosted by Gareth Reynolds where a newspaper from a random historical date is opened cold and the panel reacts to the headlines without preparation. Guests are Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes of Knowledge Fight, a podcast dedicated to exhaustive analysis of Alex Jones's InfoWars program over multiple years of episodes. The pre-game conversation establishes that Dan and Jordan have been mutually aware of Gareth and the Dollop for years but have had almost no direct contact, with a running gag about a Chicago lunch that Gareth failed to attend. Jordan is now entirely off social media and largely off the internet, which he describes as a self-imposed restraint after recognizing his inability to disengage from Twitter arguments. The newspaper-reading segment, which is the core of Past Times, involves the hosts cold-reading headlines and items from the selected historical date, connecting them to historical context they know while improvising comic angles on the more absurd stories. The dynamic between Gareth's rapid improv style and the Knowledge Fight team's habit of close reading produces a contrast that the episode plays with throughout.

As heard by us

A grim story that turns stranger, then funnier, without losing its bite.

This episode turns the grim story of Giovanni Quaranta into a sharp, ugly piece of comic history, with Leonard's Pond, a heavy pipe, and a fractured skull doing most of the work.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a murder mystery turned into a deadpan comedy pileup, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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