Bestcasts asks podcasters to discuss the most memorable episodes of their podcast.
Only in the upper echelons of audio programming does a podcast generate a sort of meta-commentary about its own project—and Las Culturistas picks up that buzz like burrs. While other series might enter the news cycle because of something a celebrity revealed about themselves during the interview (remember when that One Tree Hill actress said she was in a cult?), the most recent Las Culturistas clip to go viral featured guest Tina Fey warning host Bowen Yang that he’s now “too famous” to give unvarnished movie opinions on his own podcast. It was a fascinating glimpse at how a podcast must continually evolve to suit both the listeners and the creators at its center.
Since 2016, comedians Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang have hosted Las Culturistas, a series about the influential pop culture that moved their lives (and the lives of their guests) into an artistic direction. Each guest is asked, “What was the culture that made you say culture was for you?” and their answers range from local commercial jingles (Aidy Bryant) to The Little Mermaid (Mandy Moore). Long before the show started booking A-listers, the hosts would often enlist their friends and colleagues to chat on mic—and across nearly a decade, those friends, along with Rogers, Yang, and the podcast itself, have risen steeply in fame and success. Can two pop culture superfans still candidly appraise an industry in which they’re increasingly key players?
So far, the answer seems to be yes. As detailed in Yang’s New Yorker profile, there have been blips in the podcast’s production as the duo navigated living on opposite coasts, pursuing divergent paths as performers, and becoming ever more entrenched in the world they once viewed as outsiders. But according to their recent Vulture interview, they’re both committed to figuring it out. Sometimes on mic, to compelling results.
With a catalog of well over 400 installments to choose from (roughly half of which have been a production of Will Ferrell’s Big Money Players Network), Rogers and Yang set to the task of selecting three iconic episodes that newcomers can download to get the full Las Culturistas experience.
Date: August 14, 2019
Matt Rogers: We’ve chosen episodes with our dear friends—I guess the unifying link is chaos. [laughs] These are people that represent where we came from, which was the queer community in New York, people that really were at the fringes of what was “happening” in comedy at the time, but were so undeniable that they came forth. We believe that our podcast, humbly, was a space to all match our freaks together.
What’s so great about this episode is that it’s become a refrain with our Readers [the term for Las Culturistas listeners] is that “you can barely hear what anyone’s saying.” It’s just a runaway train of four people who really enjoy being together. This is one of those episodes that feels like everyone hanging out together. They are our favorite people to hang out with. They are the funniest people in the world.
Bowen Yang: There is a spirit of full continuity in the cacophony. It is just four of us all talking over each other, but it is sustained all the way through in a way that I don’t think is exhausting for the listener. The through-line for these three episodes is friendship. These are community members in the comedy world, but also just true friends we’ve seen through different seasons and different chapters in their lives.
Josh and Aaron, they are this fun analog to us as well: Who is the Matt, who is the Bowen, and among us, who is the Josh, who is the Aaron? We also come up with a fun little dog whistle in that episode, too, where people still call Josh, Aaron, or us “Dod.”
MR: That episode gets its name, actually, from the same porn series that we had all seen, irrespective of each other. There’s this British couple: One is a really hot older British dom, and he’s got this young, twinky lover who, during intercourse, would call his partner “Dod.” Like “Dad,” with an O. A British father. A dod. That came up and we couldn’t stop saying it, and so it earned the “title of ep” distinction. See? [Las Culturistas] is not just pop culture niche interests, it’s also porn niche interests.
BY: And porn is pop culture.
The A.V. Club: These are the types of inside jokes that would arise in any friend group, but in this case, we all hear it live on mic. That is a very unique situation to be in with your friends.
MR: We obviously understand that if the Readers had their way, the episodes would be like this all the time. We get a lot of requests for Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson, Pat Regan, Sudi Green, Patti Harrison, sometimes weeks after they’ve already been on the show. I recently went on Cat Cohen and Pat Regan’s podcast and joked that our Readers love us a lot, but I know they would be happier if [Cohen and Regan] were on the episode every week. Baseline, they’d be happier if our guests were just a rotation of five people.
AVC: Is there any calculus or cadence to that? Are you thoughtful about when friends come on the show?
BY: Especially now, it’s more of a location thing. It’s whether Matt and I are in the same city. Matt is here in New York for a bit, we are knocking out some really exciting episodes. We just did our 400th episode special—our deferred, delayed 400th episode special. The hard line, though, is that we generally don’t want guests to be on Zoom. We need that spatial, shared thing.
MR: I don’t think anyone would want to hear me, Bowen, Josh, and Aaron on Zoom, either, because that would be really hard to get a word in edgewise. Our poor editor.
Date: May 1, 2019
MR: [laughing] I’m reading the episode description: “In an Aaron Schocking episode, Cole Escola joins Matt and Bowen to discuss Bowen's status as a white bitch, Cole's forthcoming memoir How Do I Do It At 71?, Matt's narration of a straight porn, and the year of the destination hookup!” So, yeah, we had a lot of porn on the brain there in 2019. I don’t know exactly what was going on there, but I can guess. We were just feeling a little horny these months. It was the beginning of summer, you see.
BY: We have travel in there, with the destination hookups, we have Aaron Schock…
MR: It’s a time capsule. It’s also the beginning of the narrative—well, my conspiracy theory—that Bowen is a white—
BY: Bitch.
MR: A white bitch. I believe that Bowen is Asian for clicks. I’ve been saying it for years, since I met him. Something’s just not tracking.
BY: That’s the next reveal in the “Backstage” sketch: I’m straight, and white, and a bitch.
But this is another great example of the inside jokes being sort of broadcast out. Cole is someone who, there’s always this “play” that is at play. I don’t feel that talking to Cole is just a constant barrage of bits. It’s more like we’re having a really nice, flowy conversation, where one person is being funny and setting the other person up for success. Cole certainly does that, and I aspire to that. I think that’s evident in the episode.
There’s a famous line from Cole in this episode where they say, “My finances are none of my business.” A classic.
MR: It’s definitely a classic. One of the great things about all of these guests is that these episodes all took place in 2018, 2019. And since that time, Josh and Aaron have released their Dicks: The Musical film, and it went on to win awards in Toronto. I don’t think I need to tell anyone that Cole Escola is the toast of Broadway. We just heard that Oh, Mary! extended again, and to see the words “historic” and “groundbreaking” attached to Cole is so unsurprising when you realize just how brilliant they are.
And the thing about all of Cole’s episodes on Las Culturistas is that there’s nothing intimidating about how funny they are. It’s thoroughly welcoming and entirely coming from a sense of collaboration, which I think speaks entirely to their success. You look on stage at Oh, Mary! and you see that's a community. Those are people that are really having fun playing together.
They always say, you know, “Do you have advice for people younger than you trying to make a career for themselves?” The one thing I would say for sure—and Bowen, would you agree?—is that you’ve got to find the people that make you feel comfortable, powerful, funny, confident, excited, and enthusiastic about the feeling in the room, and follow that.
BY: Matt asked if I would agree. I don’t. I think everyone does it alone.
MR: [laughs] Typical white fucking bitch answer. Proving it second by second.
AVC: It seems like as your star has collectively risen—these guests, as well as the two of you—a strong sense of community is what allows Las Culturistas to still sound like just a bunch of friends shooting the shit. If not for those values, it might sound instead like a bunch of people competing for the spotlight.
BY: Totally. I mean, the core of the podcast hasn’t really changed since the beginning. Obviously, realities have shifted and opportunities have grown and changed. The subject matter is maybe in a slightly different circle. But at the end of the day, that candor is still what we aspire to. Even if we have a guest on who we don’t know but are a fan of, there’s a goal, at least, of trying to reach that candor.
AVC: Do you ever have difficulty achieving that candor with guests?
MR: To be honest, if we have any doubt that we’re going to be able to deliver a good episode of Las Culturistas, they just aren’t booked on the show. Unless it's a situation where you have to roll the dice because you can't believe you got the opportunity. There are some white whales out there that have somehow got caught in the net, and then we just try to wrestle that thing to a place of comfortable, fun candor as best we can.
We've been so lucky to receive so many amazing requests, now that the podcast has reached a certain level of notoriety and people genuinely want to be involved in the show. We just always, first and foremost, want to make sure that the experience is good for the Reader at home, and for us, to feel like the integrity of the show is still there.
We’re pretty wary of being a press stop. When it first became a possibility for us to have who we wanted on the show—which was crazy, considering where it came from—we definitely surfed that a little bit. But I think we’ve landed in a good place.
BY: It also just helps when the guest, even if they’re a bigger name, so to speak, has some familiarity with the show. It’s a mutual arrival. Tina Fey coming on and doing the best “I Don’t Think So, Honey” ever is a matter of her familiarizing herself with the show. It felt like she was shooting the breeze with us, even though she is someone with so much esteem in our eyes.
MR: I think it was two years ago, we got a guest request for Julianne Moore. I was like, we would love to have Julianne Moore, if she knows what the fuck this is. Because if she doesn’t know what the fuck this is, don’t put Julianne Moore in that position! That’s what I would say to all publicists. Especially Julianne Moore’s publicist.
Date: May 2, 2018
MR: This may have been one of the first landmark great episodes of the show, to be totally honest. We started the podcast in March 2016, and by the end of the year, we had done like eight or nine episodes. Bowen and I absolutely started this with no intention for it to be a thing—we really rolled the dice. Like once a month, I would say to Bowen or he would say to me, “Oh, I think we owe [original podcast network] Forever Dog an episode, we should go in and do the podcast.” Very thrown together. And then once we had done our live shows and realized that there was actually a community forming around the show, we started to go weekly in 2017, but it was still pretty rickety.
Then 2018 rolled around and Patti came in. We did this completely insane episode in which Patti tells a very long story about a battle she had with Ellen DeGeneres at her concert. Entirely improvised. Just completely absurd, and so core to who Patti is that it became this weird lore.
BY: It had this life to it after the recording, in that Patti ended up going on one of the final episodes of the Ellen show. [laughs] And it was this wild, really bizarre thing. We had the same response that a lot of Readers had, which was like, “Oh my God, what are we watching? Did this actually happen, considering their ‘history’?”
MR: But that was, I think, the first time that people really started referencing an episode of ours again and again and again, and pointing people to that episode. I don’t know this, but I would imagine that if people are listening to back episodes for comfort, this is probably one of them.
AVC: What’s it like knowing that people turn to you for comfort?
BY: Matt and I are pretty new to this. We’re new to having our output feel either completely disposable or like something that has some resonance and permanence to it, if we can even say that at this point. Right, Matt? I’m reckoning with the idea that the projects I’m involved in, I don’t know how they’re going to be received, and I don’t know how they’re going to be looked back on in 10, 20 years’ time.
And I think now, we're really starting to get the sense that with the podcast, what we thought was a disposable thing—it’s really pretty off the cuff, there's minimal editing, no transitions, no episode briefs, they’re so extemporaneous—it’s really heartening, and it’s really meaningful that people would even have these little recordings of conversations as things worth returning to.
MR: When I think about people returning to an episode for comfort, or for laughter, or as some salve, that really is why you do what you do. It makes me emotional and very happy to think about, because it’s like Bowen was saying: This comes to us so joyfully and so naturally. The fact that people can find some consistency in that, or joy, or inspiration—I just go back to that place where I didn't feel super seen or super heard, and then I would listen to my favorite comedians and they would make me feel happy. Margaret Cho and Sandra Bernhard, Saturday Night Live, The Lonely Island, Tina Fey.
These people were safe places for me, and made me feel better after I interacted with what they did. And to know that’s something people feel about our work, and about our podcast, is very moving. I’m eternally grateful. It keeps us doing it.
