Pod-Canon #8 Hollywood Handbook's "Triumph at Comic Con"

Welcome, friends, to the first new entry in Pod-Canon in quite a while. With this entry on the “Triumph at Comic Con” saga, Pod-Canon returns heroically to its original purpose, which was to give me a regular, high-profile, modestly compensated place to gush effusively about the overlapping comedic genius of Tom Scharpling, The Best Show, Sean Clements, Hayes Davenport and Hollywood Handbook. 

I pitched Pod-Canon to Splitsider as a weekly celebration of the greatest episodes in podcasting history. The problem was, and remains, that I am only one person, and consequently can only listen to a limited number of podcasts. Of the limited number of podcasts that I listen to, I tended to write about Hollywood Handbook and The Best Show over and over and over again, to the point where I kept expecting my editor to complain about me writing about the same damn podcasts repeatedly in a column ostensibly devoted to covering the entirety of podcasting as a medium, not just two particular shows I’m particularly obsessed with. 

Then again, Splitsider did cancel my column in favor of one written by many different people, so that could very well have been their indirect way of communicating that the column was not as far-ranging or eclectic as it should have been. What can I say? I am a man of obsessions, and consequently an inveterate FOT and Hollywood Handbook super-fan. 

The  “Triumph at Comic Con” saga is pretty much the reason Pod-Canon was created in the first place. It’s also the reason I fell in love with podcasts as a medium and Davenport and Hayes as podcasters. Davenport and Clements transformed an ostensible failure performing before an audience that seemed to have no idea who they were or what they were about into three episodes of meta comic gold, a deep dive into a bottomless pool of sarcasm and excruciating awkwardness and sarcasm about excruciating awkwardness. 

“Triumph at Comic Con” takes the form of a bitterly, hilarious sarcastic “director’s commentary”  that finds Hayes and Sean ostensibly basking in the incredible success of a live show at Comic Con that started off awkward and more than a little tense and then flies off the rails spectacularly in a manner at once hilarious and a little painful. 

Things go awry from the very beginning, with an audibly anxious Sean bailing on the opening bit that opens every episode, an absurdist improvised anecdote integrating a random assortment of famous people, when it plays to eerie silence instead of the raucous laughter of an appreciative and familiar crowd. 

The boys seem to have taken the temperature of the room and found it to be downright frosty. The crowd for “Triumph at Comic Con” was not a Hollywood Handbook crowd attuned to Clements and Davenport’s distinctive rhythms and personas. Instead they were a Comic Con crowd that did not respond to Hollywood Handbook with anger or hostility so much as confusion. They just plain did not get Hollywood Handbook. The cult podcast’s multiple layers of irony and sarcasm had them flummoxed. 

Clements introduces himself as a figure perhaps best known for his portrayal of Tex Plose, a renegade cowboy investigator whose head explodes whenever he gets a particularly juicy scoop while Davenport lists his most relevant credit as “Mrs. Batman.” These are spectacularly, defiantly silly jokes that kill on the regular podcast but die a slow, painful, agonizing public death when performed before an audience dressed up like Aquaman or Wonder Woman. 

You can actually hear the audience lose interest when the hosts tell a wall of unsmiling faces that they’re writing a new Avengers movie in which all of the characters work at Central Perk, the coffee shop at the centers of the Friends universe. To determine the cast of this Avengers sequel Hayes and Sean choose cards randomly from a pack of X-Men cards from the mid 1990s.

The idea of casting only X-Men characters in an Avengers movie only serves to further confuse the audience. The crowd’s arctic response to Hollywood Handbook is attributable partially to a lack of familiarity with the podcast and its hosts. But it’s also possible that the crowd discerned that these smart-ass television writers and podcasters were making fun of them and the ridiculous things they find important because they were. That’s who they are as podcasters but fanboys are not exactly known for their thick skin and ability to laugh at themselves.

The unopened pack of 1994 Fleer Ultra Premier Edition X-Men cards that occupies a place of central importance in the episode yields such wonderfully obscure comic book figures as Stryfe and Revanche. They’re characters so rightfully unknown that even an audience as geeky and knowledgeable as the Comic Con crowd seems stumped. 

Sean and Hayes are joined by guest Moshe Kasher, who both leans into the weirdly captivating tension for deeply uncomfortable belly laughs and helps steer the podcast in a direction that enables it to win over a bewildered audience by the very end. 

Kasher returned later for a follow-up episode devoted to a second extensive look back at the Triumph at Comic Con episode and Comic Con performance. Like Sean and Hayes, Kasher operates on multiple levels of irony and sarcasm at all times but he’s winningly sincere and honest when he tells Sean and Hayes that they should be proud of the Comic Con performance, that what might sound like a disaster in the moment or on a purely audio medium like podcasting was actually something trickier and more complicated, as three very funny men, with a little help from Chef Kevin, overcame the crowd’s unfamiliarity with their show and their world and a number of conceptual bits that died quick, painful deaths to create a unique, weirdly wonderful experience for everyone in the audience and everyone at home. 

By the time Tom Scharpling popped up once again on Hollywood Handbook alongside the delightfully droll Martha Kelly for a third episode devoted to “Triumph at Comic Con” to pitch the skeptical hosts on signing off on a touring edition of the podcast, where the roles of Hayes, Sean and Moshe Kasher would be played by different people, the notorious live performance had undergone a remarkable transformation from a visceral embarrassment to the basis for some of the best, and most beloved Hollywood Handbook episodes of all time. 

The title “Triumph at Comic Con” is, of course, supposed to be bitterly sarcastic, as the experience must have felt like a complete shit show at the time, certainly, but also when looking back at it the next day in a podcast studio. 

Yet Hollywood Handbook nevertheless felt an irresistible compulsion to return to it over and over again, to really luxuriate in its failure. The hosts couldn’t help but pour salt into their open wounds because they understood that sometimes bombing is preferable to killing. 

There’s nothing ironic about the title of “Triumph at Comic Con” at this point. These three episodes and the live performance that inspired them are nothing short of podcasting triumphs that gleaned lasting hilarity out of one very tough show in front of a less than ideal audience. 

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