Matt Belknap
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Matt Belknap, I run a comedy website called aspecialthing.com and a record label called aspecialthing records; I run a weekly live comedy show at the UCB Theatre in Los Angeles called See You Next Tuesday; I’m a story analyst for a movie production company; I’m a screenwriter; and I produce and appear on the podcast Never Not Funny with Jimmy Pardo.
How did you get involved with Jimmy Pardo?
We met in the L.A. comedy scene. I got to know him by watching him perform at Comedy Death Ray, a popular weekly show that started at the M Bar and is now at the UCB. I think he got to know me by reading my recaps of said show on my website. At some point I did a print interview with him for the site, then I had him as a guest on my first podcast, AST Radio. Somewhere in there, we became friends.
How did Never Not Funny start?
Jimmy hosts a live monthly talk show called “Running Your Trap,” and after I started the aforementioned AST Radio and had Jimmy as a guest, I approached him about doing a podcast version of the talk show. We discussed it at length, but eventually decided that recording the live show at the theater wasn’t going to sound so great, so we settled on a different format: a weekly half-hour where we’d sit around his dining room table and shoot the breeze with a guest. (The half-hour became an hour, then an hour-plus, and the dining room was abandoned for a studio by the end of season one.)
Why did you decide to go with a subscription model for the show? and why did you chose subscription over options like advertising and sponsorships?
Originally, the purpose of the show was to promote Jimmy and his various endeavors and maybe get in on the ground floor of a new medium, but after two years we felt like we’d done as much as we could on the promotion front, and while the show grew into its own unique entity, podcasting as an entertainment delivery format hasn’t really taken off the way we all hoped it would — the public at large remains oblivious (or worse, averse) to it. We tried advertising and sponsorships, but our audience isn’t big enough to make that work (you need at least 100,000 subscribers to get serious interest from agencies, I’d say) and it takes a lot of effort just soliciting for it, setting it up, maintaining it — you have to be a salesman, and that didn’t interest either Jimmy or myself. We just wanted to do our show.
So, before any bitterness could set in, we decided to see if we could get something out of this thing that we’ve put so much into. We’re both busy guys, Jimmy has a baby now, so continuing to do this show for free indefinitely was untenable. And I feel strongly that as a professional entertainer, Jimmy should be paid for his work regardless of where he’s doing it — in a comedy club, on a TV set or in a podcast studio. Thankfully, many of our listeners agree: the feedback has been overwhelmingly great and the subscription sign-up rate has been beyond what we could’ve hoped. The general sentiment seems to be that we’re delivering unique, high quality entertainment, and for our audience, I guess that’s worth 77ยข a week.
What other podcasts do you like?
I don’t get to listen to as many as I’d like to just because my schedule doesn’t allow it, but I like Jesse Thorn’s shows (The Sound of Young America and Jordan, Jesse, Go!), Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show on WFMU and the always compelling This American Life. (I know those last two are radio shows, but they’re available as podcasts too!)
maximumfun.org
friendsoftom.com
thislife.org
Is Pat Francis really that annoying in person?
This interview is over!
(Pat’s a super-nice guy and a hilarious individual — he’s one of my favorite NNF guests.)
