When Irony Comes Full Circle — Hollywood Handbook Ascends to Comedy Heaven
Irony is a tool that has become stock in trade in modern comedy. As culture splinters into increasingly smaller niches, tiny subcultures grow tinier by couching themselves in thicker webs of irony, devouring things as quickly as they can be created. Memes become dank, which then become deep fried, which then presumably reach some darker level that we mortals are blissfully unaware of. Usually irony makes things increasingly insular; when you’re parodying a parody of a parody, you have to understand — usually on a deep level — all those levels that came before. Add too many layers, and the whole thing threatens to cave in on itself. But what if, sometimes, irony isn’t an onion? What if it’s a wheel? And what if the logical extreme of irony isn’t absurdity, but earnestness?
Hollywood Handbook is one of the most niche podcasts imaginable, quite a feat considering the hyper-specific nature of many podcasts. It is a notoriously difficult podcast to get into, both because of a premise that’s difficult to pin down and a humour that is abrasive at best. It has becoming a running joke among both listeners and hosts — Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements, aka Hayes and Sean, aka The Boys — that “it takes at about 15 episodes before you really get it”. It’s a sentiment that’s usually expressed with equal parts sadness and pride, like talking about how few listeners your favourite indie band has; it would be cool if more people listened, but if more people listened it wouldn’t be as cool.
The best way I can describe Hollywood Handbook when pitching it to people — because I’m the type of person who recommends podcasts that require pitches — is that it’s an alt-comedy podcast about alt-comedy. Layers upon layers already. Ostensibly, the show is a satire of the entertainment industry, and the often bizarre personalities that populate it. At its outset, Hayes and Sean portrayed the kind of people they have no doubt spent plenty of time interacting with during their careers as comedians and TV writers: the kind of people that refer to art as ‘content’ while drinking kale smoothies. They dialled the inanity and stupidity to 11, speaking in broken English while remaining totally confident in their own self-importance. At times, it’s hard to tell to what degree the guests are in on the joke. A famous episode with Pauly Shore (yes, really) feels like looking into a dark mirror. Shore inhabits the thin-skinned, out of touch celeb with an overinflated ego in a way that feels deeply uncomfortable rubbing up against two people doing their best to parody him.
But as the show continued, gaining a relatively small but dedicated fanbase — one which prompted Comedy Bang! Bang! host Scott Aukerman to declare them “the most annoying fanbase in podcasts” — the targets of Hayes and Sean’s humour progressed as well, becoming increasingly narrow. Rarely showing anything but palpable contempt for their fans (though always to hilarious effect), Handbook began to train their sights on the Internet culture that perpetuated their existence. They talked about things that were “literally giving me life right now”, and put listeners on blast for questioning whether certain guests — mostly women — were “in on the joke”. This naturally progressed into satirizing podcasting itself, both specific shows and as a concept. The Boys began a continued faux-feud with Scott Aukerman, creating “Parking Lot Scott”, contrasting his (mostly) friendly on-air persona with the jerk they alleged him to be. They mined hours of comedy out of stealing and parodying the premises of other podcasts, from Paul F. Tompkins’ Spontaneanation to Matt Gourley’s I Was There Too (retitled the ‘I Was There Me Too Show’).
Meanwhile, the advertisements for the show became increasingly intricate, to the point that subscribers who were paying to have ads removed from their shows had to petition to have them re-inserted for Hollywood Handbook. Ads can sometimes make up as much as 20 minutes of the show’s hour-long runtime, with characters like Santaman, a bizarro Batman-esque Santa who does battle with Moriarty, and Verbatim Vic, who appears when fed-up advertisers insist that their ad copy is read as it appears on the page. And from early on in the show, the employees of the Earwolf network, which hosts Hollywood Handbook as well as many other alternative comedy podcasts, including those mentioned above, were a rich vein as well. The show’s long-time engineer Cody was cast early on as an utter mess who Hayes and Sean could provide much-needed advice to. Kevin Bartelt, whose initial role was taking photos during recording, became a peeping Tom, to the point that his Google autocomplete once read “Kevin Bartelt creep”; The Boys quickly rectified this by urging their fans to search “Kevin Bartelt MMA” instead. Over time, Kevin gradually morphed into “Chef Kevin”, a moniker drawn from his participation in ads for Blue Apron meal prep kits. Now, he’s a producer on the show, featured so heavily he’s practically a third host, and a frequent foil in one way or another.
As the show became increasingly specific and insular, Hayes and Sean turned their gaze to seemingly the only target they had left — themselves. In their own professional and personal foibles, the two found some of their most potent humour: from writing gigs that were canceled after a single season, to Sean’s lamentations about being perceived as cold and sarcastic, to their own show’s lack of effort. While they were presented in comedic ways, what made it all the more darkly funny was that these problems were, by and large, true. And the more honest the show became, and the more nebulous their ideas, the funnier it got. In 2018 Hollywood Handbook hosted a live episode from a Conan O’Brien-fronted San Diego Comic-Con showcase. The conceit of the episode was the two creating a new superhero movie, using lesser-known heroes pulled from a trading card pack. It was a spectacular flop. The solution? Instead of releasing the episode as-is, or trashing it entirely, the two recorded a commentary track of their own podcast, celebrating their ‘triumph at Comic-Con’. The glee Hayes and Sean take from eviscerating their own failure quickly becomes infectious, salvaging a classic episode from disaster.
In recent weeks, this gradual process has steadily crystallized into an outright revelation. In January, Hollywood Handbook released ‘The Masked Engineer’. Ostensibly a parody of The Masked Singer — a show which had already been the subject of much derision across the Internet — sarcasm turned into joy as the hilarity of hearing someone sing karaoke through a voice changer quickly became apparent. It’s truly one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard, yet I can’t even conceive of what it would sound like to someone going in without context as to what the show is. At the same time, the Hollywood Handbook Pro Version, a weekly ‘premium’ edition of the podcast which often features The Boys counting down the requisite 30 minute runtime, took on a wonderful earnestness to it as well. On one episode the two bring on an Earwolf lawyer to (only partially tongue-in-cheek) discuss the terms of their new contract. On another they begin giving ‘relationship advice’, only for the conversation to turn to Hayes and Sean litigating their own friendship insecurities, from not being invited to game nights to being snubbed for a breakfast meetup. There is absolutely nothing funny about it, at least overtly, and yet hearing it unfold was somehow electric.
This is next-level irony, and brings us back to my wheel theory. A hallmark of irony in comedy is detachment, an attribute that Hollywood Handbook embraced in its early days; detachment was ideal when playing characters who thought they were above everyone else. But as the show became deeper, more specific, more granular, it didn’t become more detached — quite the opposite. Hayes and Sean became more open and honest, at first in a way that caricatured themselves, boasting about failed pilots and petty grievances. There’s still a more than healthy dose of the sarcastic bite that keeps The Boys on the bleeding edge of irony. But more and more there’s an honesty and genuineness that peeks through, and it’s often delightful. It seems, when everything is irony, nothing is more ironic than being true.
On Tuesday, Hollywood Handbook released ‘The Masked Guest’. It’s the culmination of Try Month, a much-hyped event with the basic premise of ‘The Boys actually try to do a good job’. They’ve snagged big name guests like Thomas Middleditch, Weird Al Yankovic, and Kaitlin Olson. But there’s no more fitting climax than a sequel to The Masked Engineer, this time featuring previous guests from the show’s nearly 300 episodes, and co-hosted with famous podcast nice guy Demi Adejuyigbe. The excitement and joy over the delightful format and Hayes and Sean reuniting with good friends makes it feel like a fitting celebration of everything they’ve accomplished in the past weeks, months, and years. That it comes days after the birth of Sean’s first child is the best kind of wholesome kismet (it’s also used as a punchline, of course). The episode ends with the entire group singing Semisonic’s Closing Time, with Demi directing each guest to take a line, Sean and Hayes closing it out. With the circle seemingly complete, it’s not easy to predict what new direction the show might take — but it’s fascinating to be along for the ride. Bye.
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