Radio, Comedy and the works of Stephen King

The worlds of radio, comedy and writing have a lot of crossovers as creative industries. With writing being a much older craft, a lot more has been said about it, but i find that a lot of these truisms can be applied across all creative medium. The internet is awash with memorable quotes, truisms and soundbites from a whole host of famous writers about the craft and most of them are various different messages about writing for truth, for joy and most importantly writing often. But one of the most interesting things that I've come across is something that somebody (I believe wrongly) attributed to Stephen King, which is to read 5 times as much as you write. Arguably not something that you necessarily need to apply to every trade, I wouldn't demand that a blacksmith watches 5 times as many forgers as he does himself.

Blacksmithery is the next entertainment industry

But this is something that is interesting to apply to comedy as well and easy enough to accomplish as a stand up because you'll watch 6 other comedians at any amateur night you go to and it's so popular on TV at the moment. But as a radio broadcaster, podcasts similar to what we are doing here at the lock in are things that you have to actively seek out and tie down. It's easy enough to subscribe to plenty of different shows, particularly when they are all available to download for free, but when you have hours upon hours of unheard shows sitting in your podcast library it can be quite daunting to make a start.

The 5:1 ratio is not a standard I can say that I live up to, come close to, or even may be physically capable of achieving. If you consider the fact that from recording to the finished product each lock in podcast represents at least 15 hours of my life (4/5 hours recording and at least twice that post production), each one should demand that I've listened to 75 hours of extra-curricular podcast research. Even just the recording of the show itself would by this rule be the product of 25 hours of podcastery, which is over a solid day of listening. But the very fact that it seems impossible, is perhaps an advantage of the rule. I'm almost certainly never going to be able to achieve it, but at least this way, I always feel like I should be listening/watching/reading more than I am.

I have it on good authority from an artist friend of mine that all of the best artists in the world are thieves at heart. Stealing ideas, techniques and style from their contemporaries and their predecessors unashamedly. But this is widely accepted as true and nobody should complain about it because it's just the way that new ideas and trends are born - from the shoulders of what came before it. So hopefully through my newly enriched passion for other radio podcasts i can find some great ideas to steal and improve. Not to mention that we're always looking for ways to sound more professional and slick when it comes to post-production.

At this point it seems appropriate to mention that I've never actually read a Stephen King novel, on the flawed logic of "It's popular, I probably don't like it". But I've heard a lot recently about what a workaholic he is and it's given me a new found respect for him (one that will eventually manifest itself in the picking up of one of his books). However, in preparation for this post, I made sure to also read at least 5 other Stephen King quotes and though wrongly attributed earlier, he does seem to agree with my argument:

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." - Stephen King

Also he can be quoted as saying "We came here to fuck shit up" so it turns out he's kind of a bad-ass

New banner!

Hi readers,

Today we are doing some general housekeeping with this page and can proudly introduce our new banner.

That's right, the pale blue blank text that you knew and loved is now history and is being replaced by these trendy designs. We've gone for the basic grey but there was a choice of grey blue and red as seen below:

This is just a rough design thrown together by my brother that we are very grateful for. It's small incremental improvements like this that will slowly make this blog, our show and everything we're doing look better and be more enjoyable. It's like making a small deposit in a savings account every time we upload a radio podcast, do a blog entry or make some other kind of progress with the medium and the show that we love.

In that spirit tonight I will devote some time to examine how we can improve the aesthetic quality of this blog, we all know people only like to look at pretty things.

Hope you like the banner. Tomorrow will feature another post telling of another one of our choice radio favourites and professional podcasters.

Tom

Stereotypes and Irony in Comedy

Hi everyone,

Here's something a little bit different for you today. It's not specifically about 'The Lock In' or our wonderful podcasts, but it is an interesting point about the nature of stereotypes in modern day comedy. If you're interested in comedy in the hugely nerdy way that both myself and Ryan are, you'll appreciate the debate. It might not come into play much on our show, but considering Ryan and I both perform stand up as well, it's interesting to look at how comedy is changing particularly when it comes to debates about boundaries, political correctness and offence.

I believe, to an extent, stereotypes are necessary in certain types of comedy, often simply as a shorthand for a large group of people that it would otherwise be impossible to address. At this point, the educated and cultured among us believe (as the twillight zone once taught me) 'people are the same all over'. There are good/bad, smart/stupid, friendly/mean personalities in every group, subculture and organisation you can name. But when it comes to the basic storytelling structure, it's impossible to talk about a group of people without painting them all with one or several similar characteristics. This is so that you can set them up as the fall guy of the joke or the enemy that we're supposed to hate so that we can root for the hero. A simple example of

this is a left wing comedian arguing and ultimately outsmarting or quipping against a conservative or right wing person/figure of authority. We ignore the fact that this person could be a fire-fighter or a mother or any number of wonderful respectable things because for the purpose of the story they need to be represented as evil.

Now, today I like to think that many of us understand that it's wrong to group people together and to judge their character based on their belonging to that group in any real-life situation. What this means for comedy is that if you want to do offensive or prejudice based material to a multi-cultural world you have to do it with a sense of irony. Often the joke is about how stupid the character is to be a prejudiced. A good example of this is Cartman from Southpark an openly racist and offensive character. But the inflammatory things he says are acceptable because it is all done under the knowledge that he is unintelligent and ignorant in comparison to Stan and Kyle. His racism is just an extension of his low intelligence, it's a classic idiot clown joke

because he doesn't understand the society that he lives in and makes obvious logical fallacies based on prejudice.

But this is not always played out in the correct or safest way and it starts to raise questions about the birth of the joke and its origin. It can usually be easy to see when the origin of the joke was based on prejudice and the author then had to craft and manipulate until it became acceptable. I think I found a good example of this the other day on a comic strip I found online:

The comic strip from what I can tell comes from balderduck.com and this comic as well as the rest of the comics on the site are fairly generic and wouldn't look too out of place in the back of a daily newspaper. However, this one has one important difference that I believe marks out a different period of comedy for the modern day. Now, this strip is about male female stereotypes, the entire humour comes from the characters assuming that women can't park. Just a few years ago, this strip could have existed as it is without the need to add the caption 'stereotypes are bad'. At no point in the 2 panel strip does it imply that stereotypes are bad, the only thing the caption seems to add is to let us know that the author recognises that prejudice is a bad thing. To me it seems to reek of lazy 'ass covering'. The content itself is sexist, the caption might as well just read 'I'm not sexist, gender doesn't actually affect parking ability'.

This comic could potentially say a few things about stereotypes in comedy at the moment. Do we now, as an audience, need to be reassured that the author himself isn't prejudiced before we feel that we can enjoy a sexist joke? I think this removes all type of free thought or scope for different interpretations. An audience member should be allowed to come upon this joke and appreciate it for what it is, whether you agree that the stereotype is true or not. Or is it arguably a joke about stupidity? We're supposed to recognise that applying the assumed gender rules we live by to a cat would be ridiculous. That would align it with my Cartman paradigm and in doing so relieve it of any offensive undertones by my own argument. But my problem with it is that it seeks to leave us with a positive message even though the fact that stereotypes and prejudice are bad is something that everyone already knows. The caption adds absolutely nothing to the joke; it only serves to make us aware of the intent of the author in a very lazy way. In a painfully overly simplified way, it's like ending an episode of 'love thy neighbour' with the post script "don't be racist".

A joke is a joke and should be able to stand by itself without us having to know the intention of the author. This isn't the same as removing a joke from its context and in doing so accuse it of offensiveness like they often do in scandals or campaigns by the media. Offence is often a tool used to tell us things about a certain character like the ignorance of Cartman or the bitterness and nihilistic detachment of the stage persona of Jerry Sadowitz. What is said by the character is not the whole joke, the history of the character and the context at the time all go in to making the joke what it is. But with this comic, as far as I can tell, the entirety of the joke is there contained in the two panels and the caption (I even did some brief research to try find out whether it was part of a series or a recurring character that I was missing).

An ironic joke or script will carry the message it needs to without needing to tack it onto the end. This is why it is so satisfying to hear an author defend their work against those who misjudge it by pointing out the glaringly obvious subtext or satirical intent. If you write a joke that could be perceived as sexist, it undoubtedly will be, you just have to hope that the joke is well written enough that the intended audience will understand what you were trying to do (assuming that sexism wasn't your intention).

I almost certainly have more to say about this subject but at the moment I feel unable to articulate my argument with sufficient accuracy. When you start talking about offence in comedy it can very quickly become a huge discussion, but this has been a fairly untidy spiel sparked by the sight of that particular comic and I hope that you've found my tired over-analysis of the joke entertaining or at least interesting.

We will occasionally post things like this as and when they come to us, so please keep re-visiting the blog like a rich businessman would with a high class escort service [prostitution is bad].

Tom

The growing list of influences

Hello readers,

If you're sitting around on boxing day wishing that you had some more lock in podcasts to enjoy, you could take the time to look at some other podcasts made by people who make money and everything. With that in mind, we thought we'd start to write a few posts about our influences and some of the people that we admire in radio land.

One of the latest radio shows that i've started to enjoy is a show called 'the best show' on WFMU. Being a show called 'the best show' you could understandably assume that i enjoy it for the faux-arrogance of repeatedly claiming that your show is the greatest thing to don listeners ears.

It's a public call-in show from America presented by Tom Sharpling. It seems like a peculiar choice, but it appears to have been picked up and thoroughly endorse by an elite group of the American comedy scene such as Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifinakis and Robert Popper all of whom have appeared as guests. A lot of the best moments for me come from Tom's incessant petty bickering with the people that call in, but he also has plenty of recurring characters and special guests as we mentioned. It's interesting to hear how different American radio can be from what we produce over here just in terms of style and tone.

There are over a hundred podcasts of the show available here: http://wfmu.org/playlists/BS  if you click on the intunes button you can get them all in your podcasts folder.

You'll hear more from us very soon with some of our favourite players in alternative radio comedy

The lock in

A Christmas Message

Merry christmas everyone,

We thought we'd just send you a quick yuletide message, hope you're having a wonderful festive season.

Lockin studios is well and truly shut for a few days and so i'm afraid we haven't got any new juicy bit for you. The good news is that we both received the recording equipment that we need to help us bring you some more laughter and joy in yet another medium hopefully through sketches or short videos and inanity. So look out for those in the very near future, they'll be posted both here and on our youtube account thelockinvideos

Have an excellent little holiday and we'll be back with some audio-presents for you to enjoy in the near future. And if you're looking for a low budget alternative to the docotr who special or michael macyntire's christmas blowout, then why not check out our latest podcast - http://soundcloud.com/thelockin/the-lock-in-podcast-6

Yule hear from us soon
Sincerely
The lock in elves

A Christmas Gift From The Lock In

Hi blog followers,

We thought, seeing as it's christmas eve that we'd gift you with another podcast from the radio show you love to love.

It can get quite boring sometimes at christmas time, sure there's the manic rush of presents and food and everything else, but there's also a distinct lull in the evening when you've opened or eaten everything and there's nothing left to do but enjoy each others company. So this year, if you're feeling a little bit overfed and bored, gather the whole family round the fireplace and listen to the latest podcast from the lock in.

It'll be just like being back in time when families would gather round the wireless, except now it comes with the modern twist of the internet and some added dynamism from the contemporary comic duo.

Think of it as an alternative to the queens speech:

http://soundcloud.com/thelockin/the-lock-in-podcast-6

Speak to you soon readeners have a good christmas

We have a youtube...it's just not very good yet

Hello again,

Well with the flurry of work and time that we've been putting into the lock in recently, it should come as a surprise to no one that we have another medium through which you can enjoy our humourous asinine conversations.

That's right, we now have a youtube account that will feature all of the lock in podcasts as they are published as well as our archive of old podcasts. (Hooray! we finally have a sensible place to store old stuff online). Seeing as it's youtube, the format will be as a video, but it will be more of a rolling slideshow of pictures of us, along with the audio podcast that you came for.

Our youtube channel will also feature the occasional little juicy video or sketch or stupid thing from one of us or if you're lucky both. We'll post it here as well, so it's worth keeping your eyes peeled.

What's great is that youtube are now allowing users to upload videos longer than ten minutes as long as we double pinky-swear that it's not copyrighted material. In fact, the only step we had to take for them to allow us to post longer videos was to give them my mobile number. We assume that this is because if we post anything that's copyrighted, they plan to prank call us every night at 3am until we take it down.

So here it is, our very first youtube video podcast thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlz1iQ97oXc
It's not very good admittedly, the slideshow is both a bit boring and a bit broken, but we plan to fix that very soon, and hey, it's a start, right?

Speak to you soon lock in readers

We've Discovered Soundcloud is Great!

Hi everyone,

We hope that you've enjoyed listening to the Arthur Smith podcast so far, it was a lot of fun to make, and even surprisingly pretty fun to edit this one.

Sine we've got a little xmas break at the moment from all of the various other things that happen in our lives, we're using the opportunity to catch up on some much needed lockin admin. I know admin doesn't sound very exciting, but it turns out it totally is!

One of the major problems we have is with content hosting. Being both poor and talented can make for a rough ride when you've got hours and hours of great material but no good free hosting site to make it available on. Since we started doing podcasts we'd been using podbean.com as i'm sure you know. Unfortunately, when it comes to industry standards and portfolios and things, the professional opinion of podbean is '.....what's podbean? everybody uses soundcloud" So with that in mind, we've moved out content hosting over to soundcloud now and it's pretty much excellent. We haven't discovered all of the minute details of it yet, but it looks much more slick and professional, plus it makes it easier for you to download or stream your favourite comedy fun.

The only problem with it (we experienced this with podbean too) is that you can only upload a limited amount. The limit on soundcloud is about 120 minutes, which should just about cover this arthur smith interview plus two podcasts. But once we've done that, we're going to have to start deleting stuff, meaning there'll be no place online to find the lock in archived back catalogue.

So with that in mind, we'd really appreciate it if an anonymous donor could sponsor us 500 euros so that we can afford to buy Soundcloud Pro for a year and enjoy unlimited content uploading.

Thank you

Yours expectantly
The lock in

P.S. Here's the Arthur Smith soundcloud link. Even if you've listened to it once it's worth trying this too, the experience is much funnier when you enjoy it through a better online media player:

  -  http://soundcloud.com/thelockin/arthur-smith

Arthur Smith has Landed

Hello lock in listener/readers,

The (largely) un-edited version of the Arthur Smith interview that we conducted on the 9th of December is now present. Listening through it, i can't say what elements of a traditional interview it has going for it, but it was a lot of fun as a first attempt. We hope for this to be the debut of our new prolific series 'The Lock In Interviews...'

The interview certainly seems to have our personality stamp on it. Whether that's to its benefit or not is up to you to decide, but it should make for some pretty enjoyable listening.

We intend to revisit this recording to edit it more throughly and see if we can extract a more factual, professional interview out of it, rather than the light-hearted discussion that it is at the moment. We'll also almost certainly include an updated version where we talk before and after about some of our thoughts about our very first interview and meeting the man himself.

Here's the link to podbean, though we'll almost certainly find a better way to host content soon:
http://thelockin.podbean.com/

Enjoy

The promise of things to come

Here at Lock in HQ we tire ourselves out constantly to keep up with the many many broken promises that we make on a weekly basis. By this I mean promises of podcasts and youtube and soundcloud and many other different facets through which to enjoy your favourite asinine radio fun.

Unfortunately up until now we have failed on nearly every account of staying true to these promises. However, I am writing to you today, loyal lock in listeners, with a new promise, a promise of a new age of lock in workload and output. Where you'll be seeing regular podcasts, photos, new mediums and even some videos that take you deeper into the twisted psyche of your two charming hosts.

This blog is the place to be for all this and more. Expect daily updates about what progress we're making towards striking it big, along with extra little treats for you along the way. Things to look out for in the very near future include the infamous first episode of our new sub-series 'The lock in interviews...'. This debut episode featured none other than alternative comedian and famed grumpy old man Arthur Smith. As well as the terrifyingly funny 6th lock in podcast! - I know 6 is a small number, I told you we were lazy.

On an interesting and related note, I found out recently that keeping a daily blog can really help to boost your google search engine rating. So hopefully if we can keep up with this when you google 'the lock in radio show' you should be able to find us closer to the top of the first page. The way it was explained to me was something to do with google having robotic spiders that crawl all over your writing and grab the key words (an explanation I've almost certainly misunderstood). So hello google spiders. Help yourself to some snacks from the kitchen and feel free to build a comfy web on the best blog in town.

That's all for now. See you tomorrow listeners/readers (and robo-spiders)