Featured Podcast: Harmontown
Harmontown is a confessional, improvised and surreal live comedy hour that became a podcast weeks after Dan Harmon, Community show-runner, was fired. Last week saw its 50th episode.
It’s three minutes in and Dan Harmon is still rapping about fucking the crowd’s collective mothers. A couple of weeks ago he talked about the time he put a sharpie pen in his anus while masturbating. Later, he’ll lead an in depth discussion regarding how racial differences are emphasised by the two-party political system. This is Harmontown.
THE MAN
The mayor of Harmontown is Dan Harmon, creator of the cult hit sitcom Community. Harmontown began podcasting in July 2012, just weeks after Harmon was fired as Community’s showrunner. The first scene opens on a man whose life is falling apart around him as he tries to fill an hour of unscripted comedy, all in front of a live audience.
The show has the loose ethos of creating a charter for a future moon colony called ‘Harmontown’. This forms the basis of the improvisational conversations between Harmon and comptroller/co-host Jeff Davis (Whose Line Is It Anyway?). The format is employed to create stimulus for the real crux of the show: the extended self-reflexive monologues of Dan Harmon.
Dan Harmon revels in his flaws. A professed epiphany junkie, he obsesses over the narrative structure of his own life. He will drift from extended periods exploring his psyche to exploring the world at large, in an attempt to dissect and label what makes him human. He’s eccentric in his obsessions, immature in his sensibilities, and honest to the last. A typical story will begin with a discussion on snack-making, sidestep through what it means to be comfortable in a relationship, and end with Harmon shitting his pants in front of his girlfriend.
THE SHOW
Even in the free-form world of podcasting, Harmontown is something of an enigma. The show doesn’t have the regular segments and structure you expect from a mainstream podcast. Instead, every episode begins as a new thought-experiment made by creative people for creative people. It often relates to its audience through the shared struggle of creating art, dealing with self-consciousness, and following your dreams – even when it’s not a good idea.
Harmon and Davis actively avoid planning any portion of the podcast and often defy the assumed rules of performance, inviting audience members up to control significant portions of the show, with mixed results.
Inevitably, this means some portions lag – or are often downright frustrating – but the pay-off is the sitcom-esque unlikely family the show has built out of its weekly audience. Week after week, fans return to the live recordings, and slowly instill themselves as fixtures of the show. Passive audience members become recurring characters and grow, as Harmontown grows, until Harmon becomes the head of an ensemble cast.
Perhaps the greatest example of this is the dungeon master Spencer. On a whim, Harmon suggests in an early episode that he’d like to play Dungeons And Dragons, and goes out in search of a dungeon master. By chance, Spencer was in the crowd for the first time that night and walks onto stage. A fan of Harmon’s, they had never met; Spencer had heard earlier episodes, and wanted to get involved. And get involved he did.
From such humble beginnings a hero’s journey begins. As Harmon sets off across country, Spencer goes from introverted dungeon master to beloved cast member. He’s revealed as a comedic talent in his own right and a better rapper than Harmon, who passes the torch to him as the break-out star of the show.
The comedic moments are the tomato sauce of Harmontown. The meat and veg of the show are to be found deep inside Harmon’s self-investigative monologues: his fear of losing control of the show, the joys and conflicts he plays out on-stage with his girlfriend Erin, and his revelatory cringe-worthy stories of mid-20s sexual experimentation.
Perhaps the truly exceptional element in the show is transparency. Harmontown is entirely free of affectation. At its best and worst the show is raw. Harmon refuses to follow any stream of thought that seems easy or dumb. That isn’t to say it’s always intellectual or mature; a great portion of the show revolves around dicks, butts and sundry. But it also tackles much bigger issues – particularly with Harmon’s self-confessed obsession with race.
THE EPISODES: WHERE TO START?
Episode 1: Achieve Weightlessness
There’s no better place to begin than the beginning. Although episodes are stand alone, you really need to be there from the start so you can feel Harmontown grow from a concept to a colony.
High caliber guests appear throughout the series, like Greg Proops (Whose Line Is It Anyway) as a sassy unicorn in Episode 11, and Marc Maron talking about meeting Mel Brooks in Episode 43. For those willing to jump right in, Episode 23 is another highlight, catching Harmon right before the show embarks on a nation-wide tour (which lasts until Episode 42), featuring special guests Eric Idle (Monty Python), Patton Oswalt (Comedians of Comedy) and Ryan Stiles (Whose Line Is It Anyway?).
Episode 24-42: Harmoncountry
The national tour itself is a mixed bag. Some episodes are truly wonderful (Episode 29: Brooklyn NY), whereas others are hard slogs – like Episode 26: Atlanta, which gets completely derailed by a man who adamantly believes there’s no racism in Atlanta. Then there’s the complex Episode 33: Pittsburgh, which features an extended, uncensored fight between Harmon and Erin McGathy after an earlier joke strikes a nerve. The episode is incredibly tense but brutally engaging: by this point in the tour you’re so invested in the characters that you just want everyone to be okay.
Episode 50: Joe Jackson – Steppin’ Out
The show felt a little lost since its returned from tour, perhaps because they found themselves on safe and comfortable ground again – unnatural for Harmontown. But in last week’s 50th episode, the gang try to kill a Dungeons & Dragons dragon solely by attacking its genitals, and we get a guest appearance from Portlandia’s Kumail Nanjiani, who discusses his three marriages to the same woman. A return to form, and hopefully a sign that Harmontown is finding its feet on home soil again.
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James Colley is a writer/comedian from Western Sydney. He blogs at fineanimalgorilla.com and tweets at @JamColley.