By For a long time, COMEDY BANG! BANG! occupied a weird space in my life. Or maybe comedy itself did. It felt essential, but I couldn’t always explain why.
I discovered that feeling when I was closing in on 30 and entering the corporate world, leaving my record store job behind forever. There’s a particular type of office-worker loneliness that settles in after you’ve stared at a screen for six hours and still have three more to go. Comedy podcasts became what made those days feel less mechanical. I would slide on headphones, and suddenly the workday had structure: a new episode to start the week, plenty of hours digging through the heavy backlog of a well-established show, or following a particularly hilarious guest onto their own podcasts.
Eventually, it helped me discover the other comedy weirdos around me—friends who quietly recognized my references in Skype messages and somehow all seemed to be obsessed with MR. SHOW in high school despite having graduated years apart. We’d listen together, typing back our favorite new quotes as they happened, trying to hold in gut-busting laughter so our co-workers wouldn’t think we were total weirdos.
Maybe it’s me, but for me, COMEDY BANG! BANG! became a huge part of my daily rhythm.
That’s (in part) why it felt surreal to be talking to host Scott Aukerman ahead of the show’s Ground Beefing Tour 2026. For years, I thought of comedy as an escape, and COMEDY BANG! BANG! was the getaway car I used to hightail it out of life. During our conversation, Aukerman suggested comedy podcasts might actually be something closer to infrastructure.
After 17 years, COMEDY BANG! BANG! has finally become old enough to see an R-rated movie on its own—though it’s still too young to rent a car. The premise of the show sounds ridiculous when broken down: comedians improvising bizarre characters as they have a conversation with Aukerman, which regularly veers off the rails of reality into the absurd. The show is built on improv, with Aukerman given only his guest’s name and general occupation. It’s utter chaos disguised as a talk show. But for a lot of people, myself included, the show and its improvised characters became something much bigger than that.
When I asked Aukerman when he realized COMEDY BANG! BANG! had real staying power, he admitted that he never entirely saw it coming. There wasn’t a single moment; rather, it was a buildup of smaller milestones that kept accumulating. The first anniversary. Then the second. Then the television adaptation started coming together, and the show began getting wider recognition, including weekly coverage from The AV Club.
“This actually is a real thing,” Aukerman recalled thinking, “and not just a side project I’m doing while I’m waiting for movie studios to tell me they’re not going to make my movies.”
Podcasting was never the medium Aukerman expected would define his comedy career. In his mid-20s, he joined the writers’ room for the HBO Comedy series MR. SHOW WITH BOB AND DAVID. He was proud of his work on MR. SHOW and imagined the series becoming one of those comedy institutions that lived forever in the same way the comedy shows he grew up watching, like MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS, SCTV, or even SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. Instead, the medium that would shape his legacy barely existed when he started.
“I thought I would coast on my affiliation with MR. SHOW forever,” he told me. “But because we were never able to translate MR. SHOW into much more than four seasons and a failed movie, I think people have just kind of forgotten about it. I had always hoped that I would be part of something important in the field of comedy. I just never could have figured out the way it would come true.”
COMEDY BANG! BANG! didn’t just survive; it became a show that people grew up on. That’s strange to think about, because comedy can so often feel disposable, especially online. A joke happens, people laugh, and then it disappears. The internet may have fractured much of our media ecosystem into an infinite number of overwhelming choices, but Aukerman sees comedy as one of the few things that genuinely benefited from this shift. Podcasting fundamentally changed how comedy reaches people for the better. “The delivery system has been such a boon to comedians, and probably the most beneficial thing to be invented since talkies, or maybe vinyl records,” he joked.
Aukerman told me live shows come with a different kind of pressure than recording in the studio. Beyond simply putting on a good performance, he thinks about the people who spent money on tickets, arranged babysitters, took time off work, and made a night out of coming to see COMEDY BANG! BANG! live. “There’s so much that goes into a night spent at the theater that I feel that pressure of trying to make it as good a show as it can be,” he said.
Live podcast performances also add a balancing act that studio episodes don’t. Aukerman said he’s constantly thinking about pacing: making sure a show doesn’t peak too early, run too long, or end without landing on a big laugh.
But that challenge is also what makes the live version exciting. While some listeners assume much of the show is planned in advance, Aukerman said the appeal is watching performers create in real time. “We’re enjoying each other, making each other laugh, trying to top each other,” he said. “That’s what’s so fun about seeing a live podcast.”
CBB live tours are anchored by Aukerman and longtime collaborator Paul F. Tompkins, along with a rotating lineup of “COMEDY BANG! BANG! All-Stars.” Aukerman joked that being labeled a “COMEDY BANG! BANG! All-Star” is “like calling someone a porn star—once you do it, you are it.” But behind the joke, he said building tour lineups has become a balancing act between bringing back longtime fan favorites and introducing newer performers.
Chicago’s long improv history also gives Aukerman a different feeling from many other tour stops. While he said cities can sometimes blur together on the road, Chicago consistently stands out for one major reason: audience enthusiasm.
“Chicago is the city where we sell the most tickets,” Aukerman said, noting that while cities like New York, Boston, and Los Angeles are close behind, Chicago regularly tops the list.
Beyond numbers, he said the city simply feels like a comedy town. “The audiences are amazing,” he said. “People are hyped to see the show … super excited, super into it, paying attention to what’s going on. It’s really a treat to play Chicago.”
Chicago also carries some memorable moments in COMEDY BANG! BANG! history. Besides the Chicagoland area being the hometown of “CBB All-Stars” Lauren Lapkis and Tim Baltz, Aukerman laughed, recalling it’s also the birthplace of “The Dink Dink Man.”
In 2021, Aukerman and producer Brett Morris launched COMEDY BANG! BANG! WORLD, a website and streaming service that houses ad-free versions of the podcast, along with character-hosted spin-offs, other CBB-adjacent podcasts, such as Tompkins’ THE NEIGHBORHOOD LISTEN, and a few shows, like SCOTT HASN’T SEEN and CBB FM, where Aukerman doesn’t play a caricature of himself.
“Every show has its own version of me, where I’m filling in whatever needs to happen in the dynamic of the show,” Aukerman told me. “For COMEDY BANG! BANG!, I’m in character while I’m doing it. There’s an artifice that I need to keep up that is fun to drop for my other shows.”
I love SCOTT HASN’T SEEN, Aukerman’s movie podcast with improviser Shawn Diston. The premise is simple: guests choose a movie from a list of films Scott has never seen, and they discuss it. They may choose a classic like COOL HAND LUKE, some nostalgic bullshit they loved when they were a kid (I’m looking at you, Jack Quaid), or one they may also have a blind spot for. One of the reasons I love the show has very little to do with hearing people dunk on bad movies. Plenty of podcasts can do that, and do that well. What keeps me coming back every week is hearing Aukerman talk thoughtfully about even the biggest pieces of shit.
Beyond the fun dynamic between Aukerman and Diston (with a fake British accent as CBB character Sprague the Whisperer), there’s something else happening underneath all the goofs. As someone who turned their focus onto writing mostly personal essays, I’m always thinking about story structure: why something works, why it doesn’t, and why some stories keep you locked in while others leave you scrolling your phone. Listening to Aukerman break movies apart, whether objectively good or bad, scratches that same part of my brain. While you get some critique and plenty of laughs, there’s a lot of thoughtfulness for the art of filmmaking as well.
“I tend to approach it from a craftsman’s point of view,” he told me. “I do enjoy really examining a movie in much the same way that I do when I get a script.”
Aukerman confessed he’s fascinated by the moments where audiences instinctively know something isn’t working but can’t always explain why. “People go, ‘This was boring.’ Well, why is it boring?” he said. “What were the choices that were made? I find all that stuff fascinating.”
That’s the part I love. Even when discussing a movie that ultimately “sucks shit,” Aukerman’s not just making fun of THE LITTLE VAMPIRE or SWING KIDS. He’s examining them—asking what failed, what almost worked, and how things could have been better. Underneath all the jokes and bits, you’re hearing someone talk about storytelling with genuine curiosity, as well as over 30 years of industry experience. And maybe that’s why it feels different from just another movie podcast. You’re hearing someone talk about the thing they know how to do best.
So often, I find myself wanting to skirt around the complexities of the world when writing about comedy. Not because I think those things are unimportant, or because I want to pretend the news cycle isn’t a constant conveyor belt of dread, outrage, and things falling apart. But because sometimes people need a goddamn motherfucking break.
Aukerman and I talked about how comedy podcasts can become a kind of lifeline—not just during the monotony of office work, but during genuinely difficult periods in life, too. There’s comfort in hearing funny people having fun together. There’s relief in listening to people spend an hour making each other laugh while your own life feels heavy. Comedy builds communities in strange ways: through live shows, message boards, Discord servers, or simply realizing a coworker across the office has also spent years listening to the same dumb voices and inside jokes you have.
Comedy podcasts can keep you afloat when you’re drowning in Excel sheets just as much as they can when you’re dealing with divorce, grief, loneliness, or whatever fresh horror appears in the headlines that week.
Aukerman said the idea of “comic relief” doesn’t only apply to movies—it applies to life itself. In difficult times, comedians can feel pressure to use their platforms to say something larger or more important. But over the years, he’s come around to the idea that silly comedy is important on its own. “It’s not a waste of time to have those things in your life,” he told me.
Laughter is the best medicine is one of those phrases that feels almost embarrassing to write because it has been repeated so many times. But clichés usually become clichés because there’s some truth sitting underneath them. Laughter doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t pay rent, stop terrible things from happening, or suddenly make the world make sense. But it lightens the weight on your shoulders for a while. It interrupts the anxiety spiral your brain might be stuck in. It gives you something to hold onto for a moment. It gives you relief.
After years of downplaying what he does, Aukerman told me that seeing the impact comedy has had on people changed how he thinks about it. “Just seeing how comedy affects people’s lives and makes a difference, I now feel like it is important,” he said, before quickly undercutting himself: “But that sounds very pretentious, so it’s somewhat important.”
Maybe that’s the right way to put it. Maybe funny voices on a podcast aren’t saving the world. But sometimes they help people get through another day in it.
The first leg of the COMEDY BANG! BANG! Ground Beefing Tour 2026 continues this Thursday, May 28th, at The Chicago Theater. You can find the rest of the tour dates and more at https://comedybangbangworld.com/tour.
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