Last Friday, stand-up comedian Duncan Trussell recorded an episode of his podcast “The Duncan Trussell Family Hour” live at the Majestic, in a fascinating fusion of the worlds of podcasting and performance.
Joining him onstage was Daniele Bolelli, a professor of history and fourth-degree black belt who hosts his own successful podcast, “The Drunken Taoist.” Their conversation touched on many topics, but mainly focused on psychedelic drugs and their potential for psychological healing.
As someone who has never taken hallucinogenic drugs, the deeper points of their conversation were lost on me, but I found their perspectives both poetic and insightful.
Unlike many comedians, Trussell does not focus on superficial differences between men and women and make silly quips about nothing. A practicing Buddhist, Trussell addresses questions of meaning in the vein of spiritual lecturers like Alan Watts and Terence McKenna. When the conversation gets too heavy, Trussell deploys his stand-up sensibility to work the room and expertly lighten the mood.
An example of this occurred when Trussell was deep in a comparison of one’s inner monologue to a radio station. Trussell claimed that if you are listening to a channel where everything is bad and the future is hopeless and you are always doomed to fail at anything you try, you can change the channel and choose to see things differently.
As an illustration of a negative state of mind, Bolelli mentioned a Madison cab driver who spent their entire ride outlining all the ways in which Gov. Walker is ruining the state. The cab driver was so passionate that “I automatically started hating the guy too,” said Trussell.
Before they could draw the connection between this anecdote and the larger point, the audience erupted with shouts, inflamed by the mere mention of Gov. Walker’s name. “He actually does not like people,” cried one furious audience member.
“I don’t doubt that he dances with the skeletons of babies in the infant section of graveyards and sneaks into retirement homes in the middle of the night to [violate the elderly],” said Trussell. “But I think you’re missing the point.”
Overall, the translation of the podcast from studio to stage was quite smooth. Podcasting is, generally speaking, a solitary art. Podcasters record conversations, edit them into finished products and upload them to the web without leaving their homes. Fans download the recordings and listen to them alone through earbuds. What little discussion there is about the episodes takes place online via message boards.
This format had to be adjusted to accommodate the live audience. For instance, each episode of “The Duncan Trussell Family Hour” begins with an opening monologue based around some theme, which Trussell often spends days recording and editing together. However, in the live show, it was improvised on the spot based on the audience suggestions of “Terence McKenna,” “roller coasters” and, fittingly, “using LSD to treat depression.” When Bolelli emerged, these themes became the basis for the entire conversation. At the end of the show, Trussell and Bolelli engaged the audience once more by dedicating 20 minutes to answering questions.
By allowing the audience to dictate the thematic content of the entire show, the hosts emphasized the importance of community in the podcasting world. However, this did have its drawbacks. Though Bolelli possesses considerable knowledge about a wide range of subjects, from martial arts and philosophy to Eastern Religion and American Indian culture, he did not seem particularly opinionated about the subject of hallucinogenic drugs, and thus spent much of the show sitting in silence as Trussell waxed poetic.
Early in the show, Bolelli stared at his hands and said, “I may have just made a big mistake. There was a plate of brownies backstage and I ate, like, a lot of them.” Perhaps this had more to do with his silence than anything.
