Mr. Podcast Dude: Julie Klausner, The New Yorker, Gary Shandling on WTF

Posted by Jason Diamond

On “How was Your Week,” Julie Klausner somehow takes her opening conversation from the connection between comedians and magicians to how she will never take an epsom salt bath to relax, because it always reminds her of Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas without even blinking — or whatever you do on the air that is the equivalent of blinking.

This episode is special because it lets you know that if you’re ever faced with the question of what you should buy Ms. Klausner for her birthday, she liked massages, but just not shitty ones.  She also talks to the always entertaining Paul Scheer, who just got an Adult Swim show.  The obvious literary highlight is when Paul gives a pretty good synopsis of Catcher in the Rye without ever having read it.  No matter how wrong his assumptions were, he at least used the term “jazz cigarette.”

She also talks to Sally Kellerman, who played Hotlips in Robert Altman’s MASH, as well as a starring role in Back to School.  I call the latter her iconic role.  I know the typical train of thought is “yeah, M.A.S.H. is one of the great movies of the 1970s,” but you know what?  It didn’t have Rodeny Dangerfield in it.

  • At the New Yorker’s fiction podcast, Allegra Goodman tackles John Updike’s “A & P,” which was first published in 1961.  I never knew it was Updike’s most anthologized piece.  Did you?