Bunny Ultramod, Hollywood Art Critic

I’ve been listening to a lot of the podcast called Jordan, Jesse Go! lately, and I’m a bit uncertain as to why. Certainly the show has its enjoyable qualities, which would encourage an occasional — or even weekly — listen. It consists of about an hour of gabbing between two friends. The first is Jesse Thorn, who also hosts The Sound of Young America, a very good interview show that, from the sound of things, may soon be changing its name. The second is Jordan Morris, a comic performer and occasional television show personality. The two have spent years making each other laugh, starting with a radio show at their college radio at UC-Santa Cruz, and so the show is regularly funny. They have frequent guests, often drawn from LA’s standup comedy community, a community that Jordan and Jesse could fairly be described as being boosters of. The results tend to be an atypically entertaining conversation between friends, at least in part because both Jordan and Jesse have great curiosity about the world, and like to discuss whatever is puzzling them the most at the moment.

But I have gone beyond being a weekly listener. I went back and downloaded all 198 episodes, representing about four years of podcasting and 12 days of continuous listening. I’ve worked my way through about the first year, and that’s quite a commitment to a single podcast, especially one that is, for the most part, just schmoozing. And I am not sure I will listen to all of it, but, for the moment, there’s something about it I find encouraging.

It only took a few episodes for the podcast to lock into shape. It went untitled for a few episodes, and then the pair settled on Jordan, Jesse, Go!, and it was off to the races, including a distinctive, children’s record style theme song by the Free Design called “Love You.” The edit they use for the podcast highlights the song’s middle section, which is a list of juvenalia: “Bicycles, tricycles, candy sticks.” etc.

The song is especially apt. I don’t imagine there was any great deliberation about this, and there is no way the pair could have plotted out the course of four years’ worth of podcasting. But what interests me about “Jordan, Jesse, Go!” is that, perhaps inadvertently, the pair have created a show that is primarily about growing up.

Both were somewhat young when the podcast began — early 20s. Both were starting their respective careers, and were new to Los Angeles. And so the show has charted the experiences of seeing a new city with a transplant’s eyes. It has documented Jordan’s odd career in the trenches of cable television, and Jesse’s growing audience as a podcaster and public radio interviewer. As the show progressed, the two became more entrenched in the local comedy scene, and guests transformed from first-timers into repeat visitors, and, in a few cases, were added to Thorn’s developing mini-empire of podcasts.

This is the sort of thing we might see on any podcast or radio show that spans a half-decade. But there is more to it. Jordan Morris, in particular, has used the show to crowdsource his transition into adulthood — he has a very keen sense that the sort of things that worked when he was a college student are going to increasingly seem inappropriate as he gets older, and has repeatedly reached out to his audience for suggestion on how to dress like an adult, how to do the sorts of things adults do, and how to behave like an adult. This is done genially and unhurriedly — one doesn’t get the sense that Morris feels like some developmentally stunted manchild. But one does get the sense that Morris understand that the world of adults is not like the world of children, and that we can offer each other advice and suggestions on this shared experience.

The same is true of Thorn, although perhaps not as plainly. Jesse Thorn doesn’t regularly make his experience of growing up into group projects on the program. He does, however, spend time discussing the experience, and he’s had quite a few over the life of the show, including getting married and having a child. In the first year of broadcast, he recounted an especially painful story of getting a dog and then, just as his affection for the little fellow had deepened into the sort of passionate love affair we humans sometimes have with our pets, having to put the animal down due to illness. He spent 18 minutes discussing this in deliberate, intimate, unsparing terms, and later seemed a little apologetic about the fact.

He needn’t have been. Nowadays it seems like every single comedian has started their own podcast, and they tend to be pretty glib and pretty shallow. There’s a place for that, of course. But we also need podcasts from people like Jordan Morris and Jesse Thorn.

Or, at least, I do. I feel like I have spent the past six years in the company of people who not only refuse to grow up, but have taken the exact personality traits that mark them as immature and claimed them as sources of pride. And I am in my 40s now, and have seen how this sort of thing can calcify during somebody’s 30s, so that mild neuroses and vaguely immature behavior gradually turns into somebody’s defining characteristics. The people who possess this sort of behavior often see themselves as quirky, or uncompromising, or whatever other attractive euphemism they seize on to describe their refusal to grow up. But to those of us who are their friends or coworkers, it is frankly exhausting.

So I suppose this is why I have been listening to the podcast so often. Because, for an hour or so, now and then, it is nice to spend time in the company of people who aren’t afraid to grow up, and approach it as an adventure, or as an experience worth having and talking about.