Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Comedy Podcast

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? On today's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily delves into Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman . This pop culture phenomenon was controversial prior to its release, as comic book purists objected to the casting of Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman. They assu...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. The truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that music mattered. But does it bollocks. Not compared to how people matter. Tracie goes back in time to her semester in London in 1997 by revisiting the British film Brassed Off. This “emphatically empathetic” piece of 1990s pop culture crystallized the importance of collective barg...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Yes, I did go to my high school reunion. It was just as if everyone had swelled. On this week's episode, Emily revisits the ultimate high school reunion film, Grosse Pointe Blank . Rewatching John Cusack's charming and hilarious performance of professional killer Martin Blank made it clear to her that this is one of the...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. ...And that's how I found out there was no Santa Claus. Today, Tracie returns to another one of the movies that traumatized her and Emily in early childhood: the 1984 film Gremlins . Written by Chris Columbus and directed by Joe Dante, the film was advertised as a fun family fantasy, with the adorable mogwai Gizmo (described...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around. This week, Emily brings her deep thoughts about the first of two Christmas movies the Guy Girls will be covering for the 2025 holiday season: Richard Curtis's 2003 romcom Love, Actually . While both sisters thoroughly enjoyed...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Let your heart guide you. It whispers, so listen closely. This week, Tracie brings her deep thoughts about the 1988 Don Bluth animated film The Land Before Time . Although both Guy girls were a little too old to appreciate this staple of Millennial nostalgia when it originally came out, Tracie loved the hand-drawn animation, the w...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. A life lived in fear is a life half lived. On this week's Deep Thoughts, Emily brings her analysis, nostalgia--and quite a bit of drool--to the 1992 Baz Luhrmann comedy Strictly Ballroom. Though this indie film, which was Luhrmann's directorial debut, may have gotten lost among the 80s and 90s movies that were bigger blo...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Well, that was absurd, let's eat dead bird! Just in time for Thanksgiving, Tracie brings her deep thoughts about the 1995 "romantic" comedy Home for the Holidays . Although the dysfunctional dynamics of the Larson family makes for realistic and funny storytelling, the romance between Holly Hunter's Claudia and...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. On today's episode, the Guy sisters welcome Emily's friend and co-author Joe Saul-Sehy , co-host of the wildly popular Stacking Benjamins podcast, to talk about the 1987 Oliver Stone film Wall Street . Even though it has had an enormous i...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. You mean I'm gonna STAY this color? On this week's episode, Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the 1979 Steve Martin film The Jerk, a comedy that never failed to delight the Guy sisters' father, no matter how many times he watched it. And for good reason. Martin's broad physical comedy and cultural commentar...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. We're releasing this episode (109) four days early in honor of Halloween! There are certain RULES that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. In December 1996, teenaged Emily learned to love horror movies when she saw Wes Craven's Scream in the theater. Twice. Unlike most pop culture specifica...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. What kind of a host invites you to his house for the weekend and dies on you? Despite its status as a benchmark of late 80s pop culture, the film Weekend at Bernie's sounds like it should never have been greenlit. Two lowly young insurance employees find their boss dead of an apparent overdose at his beach house--and pretend...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. You're the vulgarian, you fuck! Tracie expected to enjoy revisiting the classic comedy A Fish Called Wanda , but she forgot just how much of this film's humor was derived from cringe comedy (John Cleese speaking Russian in his underwear when a large family stumbles upon him) and punching down (the dubious "comedy&qu...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Pop quiz, hotshot! As Emily tells Tracie this week, the 1994 film Speed is, in a word, BONKERS. This pop culture icon of the early 1990s not only gave us the impossible bus jump that we've always wanted from the movies and catapulted Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves to mega-stardom, but it also offered a pretty darn good roman...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. I'm not sure that it's business of yours, but I do like to waltz with a log driver. Tracie and Emily welcome six-time Webby Award winner Aaron Reynolds (of Effin Birds fame) to the podcast this week to share his deep thoughts about the animated short The Log Driver's Waltz. Created by the Canadian National Film Boar...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Okay, Joan Wilder, write us out of this one. On this week's episode, Tracie revisits the 1984 film Romancing the Stone . Both Guy girls loved this film in their childhood, enjoying both the romance and comedy of seeing Kathleen Turner's Joan Wilder go from hapless writer to confident and capable badass. Baby Emily, as a...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. And if I don't see you: Good afternoon, good evening, and good night! Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show , based on a screenplay by Andrew Niccol and starring Jim Carrey, was praised for its pop culture prescience because it came out just before the explosion of reality television. But as Emily argues on this episode...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. When I was a little kid and I got scared, the Rain Man would come and sing to me. Join us this week as Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the 1988 film Rain Man , for which Dustin Hoffman won the Oscar for his nuanced portrayal of autistic savant Raymond Babbitt. This comedy/drama, written by Barry Morrow and directed by Barry...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. "It's like we say in St. Olaf—Christmas without fruitcake is like St. Sigmund's Day without the headless boy." On this week's episode, Tracie and Emily prove that you can go home again to beloved pop culture from the 1980s, as long as you're talking about The Golden Girls . The episodic adventures of...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. You cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it. Ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love... The (relatively) recent news that Stephen Colbert's show was cancelled put Emily in mind of the fate of Stephen Fry's character Gordon Dietrich in the 2005 film V for Vendetta , which is why she decided to...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Hockety pockety wockety wack! Odds and ends and bric-a-brac! In revisiting this classic Disney animation from 1963, Tracie found that the charm she remembered from her childhood wasn't nearly as charming this time around. While the comedy of Merlin, Archimedes the Owl, and Arthur (known as the Wart) was still humorous, the fi...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. "To die would be a grand adventure!" Emily is delighted to welcome her dear childhood friend--and lifelong Peter Pan enthusiast--Jenn Book Haselswerdt to the podcast this week to discuss Steven Spielberg's 1991 film Hook. Although this fantasy film suffers from a lack of editing as well as some lazy 90s pop culture...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Though it's now consistently named #1 on IMDB's top 250 list of classic movies, Frank Darabont's 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption started out as a commercial flop with no pop culture cache. It's understandable why Shawshank struggled to find its audience: there's no romance or women, the storytelling is...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. I have my eyes... I have my cunning... and I have my strength. This obscure sword-and-sorcery fantasy film from the early 1980s was a staple of the Guy sisters' formative pop culture years because it was on regular rotation on HBO (which people jokingly claimed stood for "Hey! Beastmaster 's on!"). This week, T...

Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Draw me like one of your French girls... This week, Emily finally introduces Tracie to the pop culture juggernaut Titanic , which the elder Guy sister somehow completely missed. Even in 1997, Emily appreciated how the spectacle, costumes, special effects, and even the storytelling serve writer and director James Cameron's pur...