Koppen With Comic

Brian Koppen runs a comedy interview show with a fixed shape and a loose interior. Each episode opens with a greeting, a guest's name said twice, and a run through their Twitter and Instagram handles. Then the conversation starts, and it tends to go where the guest's actual life is. Chicago comics make up most of the guest list. Darrick J calls in from a mild winter and talks about the joke he considers his best, one about him and his daughter, and about how material on a nine-to-five works only because everyone shares the same complaint. Mike Pickerl writes sports satire on a freelance basis and explains why sports suits the form, since caring that deeply about something is already funny. Paul Farahvar talks about broadcasting a position on marriage as a way to sort who comes toward him and who stays away, and about preferring to improvise a show over writing one. Sara Dirks explains a whiteboard calendar she erases and redraws each month with colored markers, and Koppen chases the detail until it becomes a bit. Zack and Kiki lean into the entitled framing of their Instagram and then say something plain about money — one of them the eldest of six, no parents to call, no home to return to if Chicago stops being affordable. Kevin Heisinger comes in from Los Angeles and describes a podcast built on watching bad movies on purpose. Koppen is a fan first, and it shows in what he asks. He wants to know which parts of a life an audience will sit still for and which parts they will not. He wants to know how the writing happens, where it gets written down, and what gets sacrificed to make room for it. The register is casual and salty, with swearing throughout and no attempt to smooth it over. Digressions are welcome — a film reference, a nickname's origin, a photo that needs explaining. The interviews run long enough for guests to contradict themselves and correct course. Nothing here is packaged as advice for aspiring comedians, though a listener could take it that way. It plays more like overhearing two people in the scene compare notes. The closing beat is always the same: the handles again, a thank you, and out. With more than two hundred episodes, the show works as an informal record of a comedy scene told by the people doing the shifts.