by Eddie Brawley

Created on: December 31, 2008

Comedy, of course, is a broad term. Making a list of the best comedy podcasts is kind of like making a list of the best music podcasts: are you interested in middle-aged intellectuals having a sober discussion about their favorite classical composers or do you want to hear an MTV VJ tell you how awesome the new Fall Out Boy is? For different people the answer is invariably different. That being said, there are some podcasts about comedy that stand out above the rest. Here are my top five, in no particular order:

Never Not Funny. This podcast is hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Jimmy Pardo and features a new guest comedian each week. Pardo will be the first one to tell you that his strength is not writing out jokes and delivering them word for word, but ad-libbing and quickly reacting to the nuances of the current situation. There is no topical structure to this podcast - Pardo lets the conversation go where it may, from 80s hair metal to a guy he ran into at 7-11. A consistently high level of humor is sustained by Pardo's off-the-cuff quips. When this podcast is smart, it's very smart; when the humor becomes cheap or easy, Pardo calls it out and practically apologizes to his audience. He has an opinion on every nuance of the conversation and will not for a moment let a guest forget that he is the captian of the Never Not Funny ship. After listening to several episodes of this weekly show, you will grow attached to Pardo, his co-host Matt Belknap (founder of aspecialthing.com), and the rotating list of a dozen or so guest comedians.

The Bugle: Daily Show correspondent John Oliver co-hosts this weekly podcast with stand-up comedian and fellow Brit Andy Zaltzman. They talk mostly about international politics and current events with an absurdist, random kind of humor that at times evokes Monty Python. The podcast is recorded with Oliver in New York City and Zaltzman in London, but they're both completely on the same page comedically, so you'd never know. Theirs is a single comedy mind honed over years of writing and performing together as a duo in England. The podcast itself is tightly structured, moving from topic to topic in chunks of a few minutes. Each segment is packed full of written jokes, interspersed with periods of spontaneous conversation, then before it gets old there's a music break and they jump right into the next topic. This podcast is a lean 30 minutes, edited down from probably much more material.

I Love Movies: This podcast is hosted by stand-up

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