I don’t know if Paul F. Tompkins (PFT hereonout) is the funniest guy in the universe, but I know he always makes me laugh. It seems that a lot of people are more charmed by his haberdashery than they are actually impressed by his comedic sense; well I dress better than he does, and I am here to tell you: the man is all hilarity. BUT: his stand-up shows? Ehh. I would entirely agree with you that if you saw his specials and didn’t think he’s the greatest. And I think it’s the format: stand-up specials are kind of a highlight reel, a sampler platter of a comedian’s potential – so you will dig deeper and check out his appearances in movies and the such.

Luckily for everyone, Paul F. Tompkins is a beast of burden with the podcast thing, which gives you a pretty wide array of funs from which to choose from. Starting with the Pod F. Tompkast: probably the most sensible thing to start with if you just want to get acquainted with what Tompkins does, because it’s entirely his. Well, there’s Eban Schletter too, a particularly petulant pianist performing the musical accompaniement to the entire show – really co-hosting it with musical notes, but the two are working in parallel. The Pod F. Tompkast gathers everything that PFT does, from improvising stories to writing stories, from being himself to being other people, from talking to himself to talking to others. The Tompkast is centered around “The Great Undiscovered Project,” where PFT voices the likes of Ice-T and Buddy “Cake Boss” Valastro as they attempt to complete a movie choreographed by Andrew Lloyd Weber.

And you and I both know how lame impersonations are, BUT PFT’s characters are more real than the real ones, and it works because he puts them in hyperreal situations: characters acting out of character make for outlandish caricature. The Tompkast also has irregular guests and extracts from PFT’s variety show at Largo, and phone calls to his friend Jen Kirkman. And some will tell you these are not the funniest; I’d say they’re right, because funny these days means making fun and often hurting people: slapstick, as it were. The humor in Jen Kirkman’s comedy stems from her disarmingly easy-going attitude about even the worse shit, and taking in stride whatever the world throws at her with the help of PFT. Generally speaking, I would say that this is a trait of the comedy of PFT, and the Tompkast especially: a light-hearted approach to the world’s heaviest matter.

Another distinguishing feature is the literary referencing, which appears more saliently in the rest of his podcast work – I guess because when you put a bunch of nerds in a room, they’re going to do nerd things. The Thrilling Adventure Hour is a stage show for the radio; so there’s an announcer and old-timey music, and it’s theatre, except the handful of actors are reading their parts straight from the scripts, and they over-enunciate and ill-time everything for good decorum. It’s serialized so you kind of have to listen back to the beginning if you want to understand what is going on in any given episode. You have to listen to these in the same way that you watch TV, and it’s better to listen to each in one sitting if you ask me (episodes are typically half an hour long) BUT the first episodes are slowly becoming unavailable (?) so dig in the crates now if you want to be able to keep up.

Even more nerdy, there’s The Dead Authors Podcast, where PFT is a time-traveling HG Wells who likes to bring in other famous (dead) writers to discuss their career in retrospect. These are more or less enjoyable depending on how well you like to relitigate with the lifework of said authors (PFT keeps the conversation moving by asking questions about factoids from the internets) and how well the characters will deviate from their real history to bridge with the modern world. Try Carl Sagan or JRR Tolkien for size.

What’s more, PFT is a recurring guest at Comedy Bang Bang, where the comedy gets incepted as Scott Aukerman plays the role of Scott Aukerman, who provides equal parts stage-dorkery and riff-prodding to match the debauchery of being in-character for too long. The result? Andrew Lloyd Weber adopting a lost child, Cake Boss singing a hair metal christmas carol and Ice-T is exploring the possibilities of his TV career. As a counterpart, you can regularly hear PFT improvise upon his characters in longer form on the Superego podcast since the second half of season two – it’s only available one season at a time, so it’s kind of on-demand in a way.

So what have we learned today? That Paul F. Tompkins is funny. And Silly. He’s not trying to hurt no one. Give it a listen and if you don’t like it, may we part ways as internet friends. Forever. If you love him, there’s an unofficial page that’s dedicated to tracking all his podcast appearances and it’s longer than Gunplay’s rifle. So have fun with that, and give him Five Stars on iTunes, like I did.

So podcasts are a thing now. Everybody and their goat has one, and there’s even podcasts talking about podcasts, so it’s pretty safe to say that the whole thing has “peaked”, for lack of a better word. Although it’s been getting a lot of attention in the last 3-4 years, the word has been thrown around for the better part of 10 years, and actually has its roots in the early days of internet radio, i.e. the early days of the internet itself. Obviously there were technical obstacles back in the day, which most people today can barely even comprehend: try streaming anything on that 28.8k modem I grew up with. But the technology evolved, and yet people were still slow on the uptake.

There were two very important developments that encouraged the recent rise of podcasting: number one is the democratization of peer-to-peer traffic. On the one hand, it precipitated the deployment of home high-speed internet, which is one thing, but once the pioneering Napsters and Audiogalaxies were shuttered, people both on the developer side and on the customer side needed to find an alternative to get their music, and it was, obviously, streaming it. Simple as that: you can’t NOT listen to music. But who has the time to sit down in front of their computer and do nothing else? Conveniently, portable MP3 players had become pretty widespread in the interval, so making content downloadable was a no-brainer if you wanted people to hear your nonsense.

A couple of people understood this early: Audible.com who sponsor a lot of podcasts today, were an early pay-per-listen podcasts, including Ricky Gervais’ Show, a former radio show carried onto the internets between 2005 and 2007. Now they carry audio books, which is pretty much the same. But different. Because you kind of have to pay for copyrighted material. But what we’re talking about here is the development of podcasting not as an alternative to listening to the radio, but as an alternative to listening to music. To watching TV. To doing anything else that doesn’t just require a background noise, but actual content. Original material.

And that is most likely what makes the podcast world so daunting: there are a million sources, and a million people doing it, and it is difficult to keep up with who’s doing what, what’s happening where, and why. Luckily, there are some aggregators out there that make the task slightly easier: there is the cumbersome supermarket of iTunes where one can feel free to browse through all the entries (with some help from half-disembodied ratings) and give these pieces a chance. There are also businesses dedicated to the podcasting entreprise, especially for the world of comedy: there’s of course the powerhouses of Earwolf, Maximum Fun and Nerdist, plus Slate in addition to the smaller markets of Feral Audio, Amateur Scientist, SMod or the Carolla Podcasts.

Which brings me to the second thing that propelled podcasting to the forth: people finally understood how wonderful content syndication is. It’s still slow. Really slow. Too slow, considering: syndication weeds out everything that’s not for you (which is an ever-growing proportion) and lets you access the data you actually want to read directly. But I knew things were changing two years ago when my co-workers asked me how to add an RSS feed to Outlook: when middle-aged women are starting to adopt, you know you’ve reached critical mass. And of course! Syndication is wonderful! Modern social media are #BASED on the same principle. And it is absolutely crucial for podcasts that publish new episodes at least half regularly, which you can download without even looking at your internet device. Set it and forget it as it were. And still, some people insist on visiting websites daily, clicking a bunch of links and engaging into all sorts of headaches.

Anyway my point is: what makes podcasts so great (at this point in time anyway) is the complete creative freedom of their authors: you can curse, you can be not funny, you can invite your mom: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you have one or one million listeners to start with, as long as they’re dedicated to your cause and they’re willing to support you, and whatever you do. It can only grow from there. So you know there’s something out there for you. I cannot emphasize how comforting that must be for a podcaster, because then you KNOW there’s somebody out there for you. Even if you actually don’t know it yet. It’s all over again! Sure, a bunch of them will die out pretty fast, within a foreseeable future. That’s why we need to pay attention now.

SO! Podcast Magic is where I help you out a bit in choosing what podcasts to listen to. The way I did it: there’s some guy I like, and I look him up. He’s on a podcast! So I listen to that one, get acquainted with the host, the mood etc. If it fits me, I listen to others, if not I just move on to the next one. But I’ll save you some of that footwork, because I love you like that, Bloglin. I’ll talk about a host, sometimes a network, sometimes an episode. It doesn’t matter. Podcasting is late-blooming internet 2.0 that you simply cannot live without if you are at all interested in anything. Let’s do this.