Humor and the Abject Podcast

Joshua Citarella has a phenomenal new book out, "UNTITLED (Post-Left Politigram)," that you can read an excerpt from via his website linked below. It’s a collection of his research, writing, and artwork over several years related to accelerated political identities in adolescent online culture. He joins from his efficiency living unit in New York City this week to talk about his involvement with h...

Fresh off her solo exhibition, “Utopia Without You” at Williamson | Knight in Portland, OR, artist Tabitha Nikolai linked up with me to talk Nightcore, earnest rites of suburban occult, post-cataclysmic world-building, junk food asteroids, crust punk elves in the Pacific Northwest, a general malaise with liberalism and prescriptive visibility, isolation and the gamer's den, her fictitious corporat...

New York comedian and artist Alex Schmidt has a solo exhibition, “Group Fail Pony Play,” on view through October 28th at Leslie-Lohman Museum. We connected this week to talk about her Midwest roots, loving queer culture enough to satirize it, why they don’t make movies about Chicago anymore, what constitutes an actual family reunion, how breaking a horse is a metaphor for dom/sub relationships, cr...

Philly comic Kyle Harris visited Austin recently for a gig at Altercation Comedy Fest. He kindly made time to join me in the kitchen for an historic meeting of the minds that examines his dislike of not only his chosen art form, but also the city that he calls home. We chatted about sleep paralysis, Good Good Comedy (the only good thing in Philly, according to him), mayonnaise versus Miracle Whip,...

The DSA Podcast is back and bicoastal! If you count the Gulf of Mexico as one of the two coasts, that is. Your trusted hosts—Darcie, Sean, and Azikiwe—are back after a brief hiatus to bring you all the hottest takes on things that have almost no impact on your everyday life. And it’s the introduction of a brand new game never before played on the pod. The outro music is “Jumpers” by Sleater-Kinney...

Austin writer and director Yen Tan released a powerful film this year, “1985.” It tells the story of Adrian, a young man living through the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York who returns home for the holidays to his conservative Texas family. Yen dropped by the kitchen to talk about the development and production of the film, telling every day stories poetically, being an independent filmmaker in Austi...

It’s time for some sound art. Don’t read below unless you’ve actually listened to this entire thing. LOL. 02:00 - AFI - Miss Murder 05:15 - Gorilaz - Feel Good Inc 08:55 - Oasis - Wonderwall 13:00 - Misfits - Hybrid Moments 14:34 - At the Drive-In - One Armed Scissor 18:17 - The Beatles - While My Guitar Gently Weeps 23:03 - HIM - Right Here in My Arms 26:49 - 311 - Beautiful Disaster 30:45 - Nirv...

Los Angeles comedian and non-fine-dining guru Danny Palumbo, a Prodigal Son of Austin, returned to town this weekend for a couple of headlining dates at the Velveeta Room. He dropped by Humor and the Abject to talk about his new food podcast Meatball Party, living in Los Angeles, cooking across a spectrum of kitchens, high concept online food pranks, that time he appeared on America’s Got Talent,...

Photographer Oliver Leach, notorious as BAKOON on Twitter, joins Humor and the Abject over Skype this week all the way from San Francisco. We talked about his love of horror, rent-controlled apartments, his weird photographic processes, teratoma twins, Texas beef, circumventing the gallery system and selling directly to his audience on Twitter, prank phone calls, a bunch of comic books and movies...

Happy Art and Labor Day! On this week’s episode, I connected with artists and art workers OK Fox and Lucia Love, hosts of the excellent podcast Art and Labor out of New York. We talked about shitty jobs in the art world, what led them to launch the podcast, the value of art in revolutionary thinking, not being an authority but still participating, why Kandinsky might be kind of neat, the paradoxes...

Seven is God’s number, and the seventh episode of the DSA Podcasts is positively divine. This time around, Darcie, Sean, and Azikiwe have another pointless conversation, this time regarding Hawaii’s Big Island, bogs, the Hamptons, wedding DJs, people who get fired from their jobs because of social media, Bernard Sanders, The Wing, regional museums, container vendor Storables, the Vietnam War, how...

Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly is gearing up to celebrate the band’s 20th (!!!) anniversary. He joined me in the kitchen this week to talk about Thursday’s origin story, some of his fondest memories from their two-decade career, the anonymous supergroup United Nations, a year of drama involving Lostprophets and Martin Shkreli, approaching age 40, and a whole lot more. The outro music is “No Sympat...

Mothmen! Yetis! Chupacabras! Oh My! Artist Laura Bernstein drops by this week to talk about alternative genetics, cryptids, imagined future beings, circus aesthetics, the paradox of zoos, growing up in the Bronx, materiality and texture, funky wool, recent exhibitions at the Anytime Dept. in Cincinnati and NURTUREart in Brooklyn, and what’s gonna happen when the plumbing infrastructure eventually...

Recorded inside of one of Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses at Dia:Beacon, comedian Ana Fabrega is back in her second appearance on Humor and the Abject. Earlier on the day this was recorded, Ana was a visiting artist for the teens I teach at the museum, performing a live comedy set for them and then helping them workshop one-act plays they’ve been writing. Ana and I talked about the big news that...

Journalist Adrian Chen has covered the darkest corners of internet culture for years. He’s been a staff writer at the New Yorker and Gawker, and has bylines in practically every publication and on every platform you’ve ever heard of. On this week’s episode, he stops by to discuss his early writing on the Silk Road and the dark web, his sociological research into trolling and its complicated relati...

I think that Christin Bailey is the funniest person on all of Twitter. She joined me over Skype this week from sunny San Diego to talk about her recent visit to Europe, her outrageous astrology column, the Animaniacs, why The Departed is the most complicated piece of cinema in the 21st century, her family bonds, and more. The outro music is “Bells of Dublin/Christmas Eve” by the Chieftains.

Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House drops by this week to talk about his humble Midwest origin story, what gets him riled up most, the unending quest to post, whether political satire is dead, the millennial move towards socialist politics, why sophistication is stupid, and his morbid predictions about the supposedly imminent Blue Wave. The outro music is “I Love My Shirt” by Donovan. Buy The Chapo...

You’re probably already following Jenson Leonard on Instagram. He’s Cory in the Abyss, the hilarious and pointed poet, digital artist, and meme producer. Jenson dropped by the kitchen this week to talk about antiblackness in meme culture, the ways in which vernacular is appropriated for material capital, building layers and layers of comedy into his work, the tragedy of the comments section, study...

Artist Lex Brown makes videos, drawings, sculptures, and performances that mix science fiction with a healthy dose of dark humor. Recently, she and Aaron Fowler collaborated on a performance work called “C.E.” that debuted at the New Museum. After getting the chance to see it, I just had to invite her over for a conversation! Lex dropped by to talk about her writing process, her fascination with c...

Exactly what it says in the title. Nice.

Ross Simonini’s debut novel, “The Book of Formation,” is a fascinating exploration of the cult of personality in an age where mass media has replaced traditional spirituality. But Ross isn’t just a writer, he’s also an accomplished visual artist, a musician, and a gifted interviewer. And his novel, appropriately, is told almost entirely through the format of interview transcripts. Splitting his ti...

Happy Knife Month, screedlers! On this episode of the DSA Podcast, Darcie, Sean, and Azikiwe got together to talk about their shared love of knives, and further covered topics as diverse as parental sex, what’s in the fucking news, why Thomas J Gamble is a style icon, Mystic River, the greatest breakups of 2013, astrological signs, True Detective, Eminem’s sobriety, Darcie’s recent hangout with th...

Providence-based artist and activist Sheida Soleimani was recently in town for her solo exhibition “Medium of Exchange” at the CUE Foundation. She stopped by the kitchen to talk about how this recent body of work uses comedy and queer identities to critique the relationship between oil production in the east and military industrialism in the west. We also gabbed about multiple other things like te...

Hollywood Handbook’s best co-host, Hayes Davenport, happened to be in New York recently on a trip back from Italy and stopped by the kitchen. First of all, I’m SORRY about the scrappy audio quality. I explain what happened in the intro. ANYWAYS, this was a really fun and informative episode. Hayes and I talked about the origins of Hollywood Handbook and why certain guests have trouble on it, his n...

Writer Erin Schwartz drops by the kitchen this week to talk about her new gig as assistant editor at VICE imprint Garage. We also talked about why the Jersey Shore reboot is a Greek tragedy, the nonfiction publication she co-produces called Natasha, writing about culture using a lateral but rigorous approach, class appropriation in high fashion, the nuanced layers in the lyrical playground that is...