How Comedy Bang! Bang! became the ‘SNL’ of podcasts for funny performers who act on their feet

The vibe is part family reunion, part business meeting as “Comedy Bang! Bang!” host Scott Aukerman sits down at the big, graffitied table in the converted garage at his Hollywood home. He’s wearing a black suit; to his left, comedian Paul F. Tompkins is, as always, smartly dressed. From behind his lavish beard, Jason Mantzoukas asks Tompkins — matter-of-factly — which character he’ll be playing. (Aukerman had just, a few minutes earlier, FaceTimed with his toddler daughter and very sweetly had her say hi to “Uncle Jason.”)

Then the microphones turn on, and so do the performers. Aukerman, now with a much brasher energy, starts needling Mantzoukas, who bandies jokes back across the net. Soon Tompkins enters this free-for-all theater of the mind as a Truman Capote-coded socialite named “Hoover Personae” — who at one point observes that the masked vigilante “The Shadow” “was a butterface.”

It’s the jumbo, four-hour holiday episode of “Comedy Bang! Bang!” and before long this room is filled with 12 people all doing character voices, singing filthy lyrics to Christmas carols and cracking each other up. The final guest to arrive is an automated restaurant service played by Gil Ozeri, whose janky iPad recordings of an AI version of Aukerman’s voice make Mantzoukas laugh so hard he has to stand up and hold his head.

Twelve grown adults, sitting around a table on a Saturday afternoon being silly and ad-libbing as their own cartoonish inventions. This is their job — and this is the broad appeal of “Comedy Bang! Bang!”

“There’s nothing quite like it,” says Lisa Gilroy, one of the newer standouts on the show. “I think it is kind of every improviser’s dream to play with people that are just perfectly, as equally mentally ill as you are.”

Scott Aukerman could be called the Lorne Michaels of character improv.

(Liezl Estipona)

The podcast, which turned 15 this year, recently returned from a tour that took Aukerman and a rotation of guests around the country and to the U.K., averaging an audience of 1,000 people per night. On Friday, the tour will culminate in a giant, all-star home show at the United Theater on Broadway.

“I get kind of concerned, like, is this podcast’s audience just aging along with me?” says Aukerman, 54. “And it was great to be on tour, because there are so many young people. There were a certain amount of parents who brought their kids with them who are also fans — like, generational fans — and just a lot of 20-year-olds.”

Still, Aukerman admits he was feeling nostalgic this year, so he brought back Bob Ducca — a dysfunctionally paternal character that Seth Morris has been playing on the show since 2010 — and Nick Wiger singing his hysterically obscene parody of “Monster Mash,” a longstanding Halloween tradition.

The show that began life as “Comedy Death-Ray Radio” on Indie 103.1 in May 2009 is old enough now to have a tonnage of legacy and a tome’s worth of character lore; an actual book, “Comedy Bang! Bang! The Podcast: The Book,” came out last year and is a New York Times best seller. But Aukerman has always been proactive about booking up-and-coming improvisers — which constantly refreshes the podcast with new voices and different comedy styles, and equally draws in new listeners.

In that way, Aukerman could fairly be called the Lorne Michaels of character improv. “CBB” is, in many ways, the “Saturday Night Live” for funny actors who act on their feet: it’s a uniquely lengthy showcase for developing a persona, or a bit, and a spectacular sandbox to play in with other improvisers. It also often features celebrity guests — from Zach Galifianakis to Allison Williams to Jon Hamm — and reaches somewhere around 200,000 listeners.

“My agents would always go, ‘Why are you doing this?’” says Hamm, who has made more than 10 appearances on the show since 2009. “But the podcast model is so smart, because the cost of entry is so low. The real coin of the realm is creativity, and if you can do something that people find interesting... if you build it, they will come. That’s what Scott’s done for 15 years; he’s built this world ... the ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’ Universe.”

Aukerman, who is far more chill and subdued than the heightened and slightly belligerent “Scott Aukerman” who hosts the podcast, has weathered massive changes in the entertainment ecosystem: when he started “CBB” no one even knew what podcasts were, or else they didn’t consider the form legit; then the viral likes of “Serial” captured all of the attention; now, seemingly everyone has a podcast and the biggest shows are celebrities interviewing other celebrities.

Through it all he has continued to steer insane, non sequitur panels with such oddballs as the mystical “Time Keeper” (actually just a guy in Florida who works at a watch repair shop), Ho Ho the lewd Christmas elf, Randy Snutz — a slack-jawed Midwesterner who refills the ice in restaurant urinals — and the dozens of spot-on impressions (Werner Herzog, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber) or chaotic creations by Tompkins, the show’s MVP.

Aukerman has felt some pressure to add cameras for a video version, like so many podcasts do now, and “I just really resist it,” he says. Part of the show’s magic is that performers can literally be anybody or anything and the listener completes the illusion with their mind’s eye.

His energy as ringmaster has flagged at times — the pandemic was a doozy — but “I honestly don’t see any reason to stop at this point,” Aukerman says. “It’s still fun.”

This despite the fact that he’s a new-ish father and co-hosts several other podcasts, including “Threedom” and “Scott Hasn’t Seen.” He also sits astride “Comedy Bang! Bang! World,” the company which houses multiple spinoff shows and employs many of his favorite performers.

He’s still hoping for the chance to create a TV series or direct a film again; Aukerman co-wrote and directed “Between Two Ferns: The Movie” for Netflix in 2019 (based on the popular web series he created with Galifianakis), and he currently has a first-look deal with Sony.

A live performance of Comedy Bang Bang

(Kenzie Trezise)

But for now, podcasting is his main squeeze.

At one time, that might have felt like a letdown, or possibly even an embarrassment. But podcasts are hotter than they’ve ever been, and where else could someone with Aukerman’s underrated talents as a straight man host — highly skilled at greasing lengthy conversations or comically derailing them, juggling multiple extreme personalities, taking care of guest stars who might be confused or possibly terrified — apply them more perfectly?

And where else could its huge stable of improvisers play so freely, and in front of such an enormous crowd?

The podcast “opens up your audience to thousands of people,” says Lauren Lapkus, a fan favorite who first appeared on the podcast in 2012, “who don’t normally get to see improv shows or who just want more of it. That really allowed me to create things on my own without waiting to be cast, or without waiting for someone to say yes to me. I got to just improvise at length, with my humor, doing what I want to do.”

Like other “CBB” alumni, Lapkus has gotten voice acting work as a direct result from her appearances on the show. Many other alums have populated writing rooms and casts of TV shows and films; Ego Nwodim — who plays unhinged nuts like “Entrée PeeE Neur” on “CBB” — is a current member of the cast of “SNL.”

If anything, many of Aukerman’s comedy carnies — including Nick Kroll (creator of “Big Mouth”) and Tim Baltz (“The Righteous Gemstones”) — become too big, or at least too busy, to stay a regular.

But everyone loves coming back, because it’s the ultimate playtime for all of these grown-up kids. It’s the feeling of drowning, Gilroy explains, “and you look over and Scott either pokes a hole in some reality that you’ve just established, or asks you a question that you don’t know the answer to, and you feel the sweat rising — and oh, it’s hell and heaven all at once.”

And for its legion of listeners, the podcast is a chance to pull a chair up to the same table and hang out with some of the funniest people they know — or at least feel like they know.