I Finally Saw a Zoom Show and it Was Great!
About a year ago or so I figured that I would take the plunge and watch a pandemic episode of Conan for the first time. Conan has always been comfort food for me, soothing and familiar, so I thought that maybe watching the lanky funnyman would make me forget the inexorable horror of everyday life in Donald Trump’s America during an unprecedented crisis.
I made it about twenty minutes or so until I shut it off. Instead of making me forget about COVID 19, watching one of my all-time favorite performers do a show without an audience or an in-studio guest, or a studio, or anything really beyond jokes and access to Zoom served as a painful reminder that everything was different in a terrifying and uncertain way.
Like everyone else, Conan was making the best of some very bad circumstances. He was doing the best that he could to make comedy and entertainment happen under very trying, very difficult circumstances but watching him in this context just made me sad that the world had changed so dramatically and so quickly and might never return to the way that it was.
That was my attitude towards a lot of pandemic entertainment. It just fucking depressed me in a way pre-pandemic entertainment did not.
All pandemic long I haveI day-dreamed about that halcyon moment when I would be able to see Phish or Insane Clown Posse or “Weird Al” Yankovic live alongside my fellow obsessives but watching performers on livestream on my laptop seemed like a hopelessly inadequate substitution.
I felt the same way about podcast live-streams. I go out of my way to support the podcasts that I love any way that I can, whether that means buying merchandise or contributing to Patreon accounts and pledge drives or going to see my favorite podcasters do live shows when they’re in my town.
But for the same reason I never signed on for any music or comedy live-streams, I similarly contemplated buying tickets for podcast live streams without ever actually taking the plunge.
That changed when I discovered that “Weird Al” Yankovic would be the guest for a live podcast taping of Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast and that one or more of the many, many books that I have written about the preeminent pop parodists would be mentioned.
THIS, friends, is how you get me to pry open the old wallet and spend twenty dollars on a show that I can only experience through my computer while it’s happening: you feature someone I’m in the process of writing a third and fourth book about and play to my author’s ego.
So I bought a ticket and logged onto a Zoom meeting where Gottfried and his impressively knowledgable co-host Frank Santopadre were interviewing Al.
The audience was muted, thankfully, but I could see myself and the other digital audience members as well, which made it feel like I was experiencing a real show with other human beings even if it was all happening on my computer via Zoom.
Throughout the pandemic I have miss the intimacy and urgency of live performance but there’s an intimacy to live-streams like the one I was watching as well enhanced by the fact that I was watching the Gottfried, Santopadre and Yankovic broadcasting live from what I imagine is their home or office or home studio.
Santopadre and Gottfried have a wonderful dynamic. Gottfried is famously unfiltered, a rampaging, raunchy id seemingly unconcerned with preparation and research or self-censorship. Santopadre, on the other hand, is gentlemanly and avuncular, someone who does his research and is always prepared.
In his introduction to Al Gottfried mistakenly and hilariously referred to Al’s most recent top 40 hit as the Robin Thicke parody “War Crimes.”
Al can be very dark but I can’t quite see him doing a fun parody about that particular subject matter. The show itself was a goddamn delight. Al was funny and engaging and charming as always and it felt great to be experiencing a live show again, even if it was under less than ideal circumstances.
There was also a guest chat function that allowed me to kibitz with my fellow audience members in a way added a welcome element of interactivity to the evening.
It wasn’t the same as seeing a live show of course but that’s okay. I was deeply entertained for a solid hour and a half and at the end definitely felt that I had gotten my money’s worth, that I had seen something real and not just a shoddy simulacrum.
Will I live-stream other shows? Probably! It took me a very long time to get onboard this particular train but I would definitely be up for more, even if the seeming end of this awful pandemic and its restrictions means that I’ll be able to see shows the old-fashioned way as well.
Watching Al open for the Monkees back in 1987 ensured that my first-ever concert was a roaring success. A mere 34 years later he helped make my first-ever Zoom a triumph as well, albeit under slightly different, less ideal circumstances.
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