Extruding America
To fully appreciate this quirky show you have to be familiar with the perception of small-town life in America, or failing that, listen to This American Life. Extruding America is released weekly and shows run for about 10 minutes. It is basically a comedy program; however lumping it into this category does not come close to fully describing this clever little show that operates on a variety of levels.
When you break the show down it is a fairly simple concept. Two improvisation actors (in real life) act the parts of Gerard Armbruster and Stetson Tudd. Gerard plays the role of Ira Glass interviewing Stetson Tudd, a good old boy from the semi-rural American town of Battersea, near Seattle. Stet is the author of a book called ‘The Willow Switch’ where he advocates everyone find their own form of punishment in their own lives.
Each week Gerard tries to focus on one theme of small-town American life. He will try to mould his show around this theme while Stet takes the show down other paths. On a recent episode Gerard tried to focus on the theme of ‘Isolation’ while Stet continually talked about the Chinese dish Ma Po Dofu (full list of ingredients available on the website) that he found useful for fighting against his Winter suicidal tendencies.
Some of the funniest parts of the show that made me cackle out loud like a witch were when Stet described some of the cast of characters in Battersea. Stet goes into great detail about his friends at the local tavern including Turk and Goon. At other times Stet is quite candid about the poor state of the town of Battersea. He says that the biggest sign of progress in the town in recent months was a Gay Pride Parade that involved 40 people.
Overall this is a very quirky and satirical show that is well worth a listen. I’m not sure how much of the show is scripted but judging by the hosts backgrounds it would be safe to assume that at least some it is improvised. Do yourself a favour and download episode one of this show; if you have an ounce of funny in you I’m pretty sure it won’t be your last.
Website: http://www.extrudingamerica.com/
RSS Feed: http://www.extrudingamerica.com/rss
Posted: January 20th, 2007 under Comedy, Audio Blog, Storytelling, Top Rated 8+.
Comments: 20170
reading this review would know him from his comedy work and shows such as Funny Money and Movies at Our House. To see a better biography of Jimmy’s work take a look at this
seven hundred years in the future and focuses on a futuristic American Football league. Traditionally Scott’s novels could be described as science-fiction on a lethal dose of crystal-meth. Scott has been compared to Michael Crichton with an extra serving of gore. This is an accurate comparison, to a limited extent, except that Scott’s novels use science fiction and fantasy as wallpaper to the main events, whereas Crichton may sometimes put more importance on the science-fiction than the characters. While science-fiction and fantasy are important in The Rookie, these background settings are never put above the excellent character development of the novel.
up. Mark and Lizzie, while being very comfortable and relaxed, are content to let the spoken word section of the show drift along without much direction. There does not seem to be enough prepared topics to last the 40-50 minutes of air time and Mark’s pleas for people to call in live seemed to go largely unheeded (there were one or two live calls in the shows I listened to).