The Dead Authors Podcast

~ the obituary ~

The conceit was that H. G. Wells had built a time machine and was using it to fetch dead writers for a chat. Paul F. Tompkins played Wells in a suit and a mustache while another comedian played the retrieved author. The interview was improvised in front of an audience at the UCB Theatre in Los Angeles. The first one went out on 20 September 2011. Ben Zelevansky wrote the material that had to be written and Eban Schletter did the theme.

It existed to raise money. Every show benefited 826LA, the writing and tutoring nonprofit, and the cover art on the feed reads "The Time Travel Mart presents", which is the name of the storefront 826LA runs as its front door. A charity night with a literary premise usually runs twice and stops. This one ran monthly for four years.

The guest list grew into something absurd. Matt Gourley came back seven times and Andy Daly five. Nick Kroll and Kristen Schaal turned up. One installment inverted the whole thing and sat Tompkins in the guest chair as Mark Twain while Gourley hosted as Carl Sagan, which is the kind of joke that only works after a few dozen episodes of establishing the rules.

~ the bit ~

Improvised American comedy built on the literary canon is hard to arrive at late. Half the pleasure is hearing a performer bluff a biography he has half read, and the other half is knowing enough about the writer to hear exactly where the bluffing starts. I came to this one in 2026, working through a list of podcasts that had stopped, and the jokes hold up better across the gap than I expected. What does not travel is the audience getting a Dickens reference before the sentence is finished.

~ the case file ~

~ stopping at a number ~

In 2014 Tompkins announced that the show would end at Chapter 50. His reason was workload. He had been running several projects at once and wanted to concentrate on the work that paid him and leave room to appear in other people's shows. He said it eleven chapters out and then kept to it.

The feed shows the shape of the ending clearly. Chapter 49, Albert Camus with Steve Agee, went out on 18 August 2015. Then four months of nothing. Then a Preface episode on 28 December with Eddie Pepitone and Jen Kirkman, and three days after that, on 31 December 2015 at eight in the morning UTC, Chapter 50: L. Frank Baum, featuring Chris Tallman.

There are 66 items in the feed and only 50 chapters, because the numbering only ever counted the main installments and the Prefaces and Addenda sat outside it. The libsyn feed is still live in October 2026 and its channel-level date reads May 2026, which is the hosting platform regenerating a header rather than anything coming back. Read down to the items and the newest one is from 2015.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »