This Better Be Funny Podcast

Guest comedian on this week’s episode, Faith Choyce, claims that she doesn’t have that big of a vocabulary and is subsequently tested by Jake and Jeremy. It should be noted that Jake introduced the podcast by describing this moment as “…has not a big vocabulary,” which should indicate how valid Jake’s knowledge is when it comes to diction. Also, we try to figure out if Jeremy is truly the only black fan of Bjork. 

FYI, the guys are still giving love to Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce even though they are not officially sponsored by Sweet Baby Ray’s or Food 4 Less.

Making their way back to Sabor y Cultura, the site of the first episode of This Better Be Funny, Jake and Jeremy enjoy all the hijinks and riffs with the awesome James Austin Johnson, a very funny comedian that has thankfully relocated from Nashville, TN to LA. They go through what Johnson describes as “wes-ing”, the latest (maybe) Wes Anderson meme, getting into an in-depth argument about The Pink Panther, cartoon vs. Peter Sellers, harmonizing with Trapped in the Closet, and a whole bunch more tangential fun.

Also, though not officially sponsored by Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce, enjoy Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce. Bet my ribs on it.

After a break over Memorial Day Weekend, This Better Be Funny with Jake Kroeger and Jeremy Paul is back and just a riff-y and funny all the way down a comedic rabbit hole as ever. This week, the wonderful Matt Knudsen (Conan) joins in at local LA favorite Scoops Ice Cream to talk one of the better million dollar ideas they’ve had, filing taxes as a web cam person, newspaper names, and more. You’ll have to listen to the episode for the million dollar idea, which, FYI, is, for all intensive purposes, is protected (i.e. don’t even try taking it).

The hilarious Candice Thompson joins Jake and Jeremy again despite having her car not starting the last time because they played her car radio while the car was off. Without having to worry about calling AAA, they get to riffing on clap talking, white guilt jumping the shark, spotting “chiggers”(?), and more. Also, FYI, Urban Dictionary wasn’t that helpful when they were doing real life “research”.

While enjoying a lovely afternoon in a North Hollywood public park, Jake and Jeremy riff down a road with this week’s guest Rosie Tran that travels through “the trade-up game”, how to get men to fall in love with you, one night stand 101, and what it means to be a legitimate foodie. Basically, the type of conversation you’d expect comedians to have even if there were plenty of children with their parents around staring daggers at them the whole time. 

Danny Solomon (writer for JASH) is this week’s guest joining Jake and Jeremy in a riff session that covers Mos Def’s new name, who owns “cancer”, poor Jehovah’s Witness canvasing strategy, and the Kinsey scale. Oh yeah, there’s also an amazing story of the dumbest bet with the grossest (and also dumb) stakes by Jeremy that you’ll probably hear/have heard in awhile. Jake and Danny certainly couldn’t stop talking about how Jeremy lost a bet of who could get to a 100 farts first.

This week, Jake and Jeremy invade a booth at Astro Diner in Silverlake with guest Shawn Pearlman. The gang and their guest didn’t get kicked out, but they got as close as they’ve ever gotten by being sat at the back of the restaurant, which they probably deserved for talking loudly about Paul Anka, legendary (locally) open mic comedian Boon Shaka Laka, and how “too soon” a joke could be if we comedians were clairvoyant. You’d think a 24 hour diner in LA would be used to this type of ruckus by this point, right? Oh well…

Jake and Jeremy go the locally famous, at least amongst comedians that live in the Los Feliz neighborhood of LA, Rustic Inn where plenty of comedians day drink/get inspired. Joining them this week is recently transplant and very funny comedian James Fritz that tells the story behind his American Bible Challenge t-shirt he wore during the taping of this very episode. Well worth a listen as well as the story of Jeremy speaking Arabic to scare off cholos.

One of the LA comedy scene’s funniest, Jesse Case, riffs with Jake and  Jeremy going through basically getting a pink slip from the tribe if you’re not Native American enough, the vast population of homeless people in Vancouver possibly due to the lack of prophylactics during the last Olympics, and a story where Jake saves a girl from being raped. Don’t mind the music playing in the background at Best Fish Taco in Ensenada where they recorded, just listen to how they’ll dig the funny out of all of that. Oh yeah, just for your reference, the pop star that has staffed glitter wrangler mentioned at the beginning of this episode is Ke$ha. 

Leave it comedians to turn a nice stroll along the scenic parts of the LA River (think that one scene from Drive where they’re by a river) to imagining what would be the start of an episode of Law and Order. The very funny Ro Delle Grazie joins Jake and Jeremy this week in figuring what worst case scenarios and possible alibis for crime in and around or inspired by a small stream floating through a bunch of concrete. Oddly enough, as much riffing as they did about possibly finding one, they didn’t stumble past a dead body. Maybe “the secret” doesn’t work?

Jake and Jeremy go back to their old hijinks of seeing what various dining establishments around LA don’t care if you record an impromptu podcast and straight riffing for an hour with a great guest comedian (last week, they just went to AdultCon sans guest). This week hilarious comedian Lauri Roggenkamp (Just For Laughs Montreal) joins in and it turns out that people getting fast food didn’t care that they recorded a podcast or yell an accusatory “You sick fuck!” loudly and repeatedly. It must be a common thing while getting cheap dinner to go in LA? 

As the episode title suggests, Jake and Jeremy make their way past a man screaming fire and brimstone in front of the Los Angeles Convention Center to Adultcon, mostly to see if Jake will freak the fuck out as he has claimed that sex terrifies him. Surprisingly, there’s a good amount of porn and non-porn booths, a thing that Jake is quick to notice and, no surprise here, they run into a comedian at a porn convention, Alex Loulis. Whether you’ll find out if Jake causes a scene or has a panic attack as boobs and penises are on screens everywhere, you’ll just have to listen to the whole episode.

Also, apologies for all the bad hip hop playing in the background.

Finally, after a two-week-completely-unplanned hiatus, Jake and Jeremy are back to business as usual with This Better Be Funny with this week’s hysterical guest Cornell Reid (The Comedy Garage). Of course, by “business as usual”, what’s meant is suggesting South Central LA isn’t that dangerous to walk around, saying things that, heard out of context, would be bizarre at best to real strangers walking by as an example, and discussing the finer points of “pathetic loser” etiquette of placing dollars on the stage at a strip club. It’s good to be back, no matter how many unsuspecting pedestrians they seemingly creeped out, which is kind of hard to do in a hip place like Echo Park.

As stated above, there were technical difficulties preventing uploading this week’s episode of This Better Be Funny with the very funny Ro Delle Grazie. It would be so convenient to simply blame that dumb fangled thing called technology on this mishap, but, like a lot of things that go wrong on this podcast, it’s probably something Jake did.

Trust that what was recorded was an hour and 10 minutes of beautiful conversation, jokes, riffing, explaining what a podcast is and how to listen to one to a wonderfully random person who was just sitting at the park, and comedy, which concluded with this dare of trying to get Jeremy to do an upside down iron into a backflip after failing like an old man to do it the first time.

There’s only one way to see if Jeremy ended up “Jackie Chan-ing” it or not, by watching it right here. 

Following that, you can listen to the 60+ episodes of riffing goodness in the This Better Be Funny archives.

Oh, you still want a reason for there being no episode this week? 

Well, I don’t know, blame the earthquake that you may or may not have felt today. That’s as good a reason as audio not processing, right?

Guest incredibly funny Tony Sam (HAHAJK.com, Persona!) joins Jake and Jeremy at Zankou Chicken for this episode of riffing/hating on wool ties (Jake is wearing one in this episode), discovering that Jeremy is indeed one of those people who had no idea what shawarma was until he saw The Avengers (making Zankou Chicken an ideal location for this ep.), and Tony’s awful time at a strip club.

Unsurprisingly, that story delights Jake and disappoints Jeremy terribly for a really fun episode.  

Opposite of the no guest Valentine’s Day episode, Jake and Jeremy have on The Martin Dupass, real life husband and wife comedy duo Jeremy Martin and Lauren Thomas-Martin while just hanging out in the parking lot for the Hollywood Improv. As you’d expect riffing with a married couple would go, there’s jokes about home appliances, awkward presents, and attempting to do musical parodies. Also, local LA comedian Jason Van Glass shows up unannounced and interrupts (I promise this wasn’t planned), if you’re into that thing.

Jake and Jeremy, in honor(?) of Valentine’s Day which is the day this recording took place, opted to go sans guest and walk as two straight guys around a pretty empty high end mall where they couldn’t afford anything. To both your and my surprise, they did not kill themselves or each other. Per usual, Jeremy noticed pretty women walking around and Jake was glad he didn’t have to go to a strip club, which was the original plan for this Valentine’s ep., and they both fought over that in pretty great and hysterical fashion. 

British comedian Matt Kirshen (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Last Comic Standing) joins Jake and Jeremy to riff from tea all the way to a student loan officer hunting down money by looking at what comedy gigs are on a calendar of ours. Also, someone, in the middle of the podcast, hands us Malibu Life magazine because three comedians sitting around in the afternoon on the weekdays just screams “balling out of control”.

Jake and Jeremy descend far to the depths of nostalgia where they’re not sure which 90’s black character actor played which role in which movie with guest and very funny comedian Grant Lyon who willfully goes along until someone admits to not seeing a movie. That’s when shit got real* (*what’s real is largely subjective and up to the interpretation of both artist and listener) Basically, they all find that because of people getting nostalgic, everything will be liked ironically at some point. All in all, another really fun episode with some universal truths and Jeremy admiring the human form.

**no one was hurt in the recording of this podcast.

Jake and Jeremy are finally back after Jeremy having a week spell of sounding like Wolfman Jack if he lost his voice. This time around, they have guest Chris Fairbanks (Comedy Central, Fuel TV) explore his limited time spent in Christian youth musicals as well as how many Adam Sandler references he can drop in one conversation. A well rounded episode, I’d say, so long as you consider well rounded to also include riffing on Morgan Freeman impressions for several minutes.