Do you ever want to break into someone’s head and see what they really think about? Do you ever sit on the bus and wonder where everyone’s going and why? Do you ever call a wrong number by accident and feel an urge to continue talking to the stranger on the other line? Everyone’s head is a fishtank and it takes a lot to break them open and let the feelings flow out. Sure, close friends reveal things to close friends but it’s pretty damn impossible to befriend absolutely everybody in the world. And who doesn’t get bored of their friends complaining about the same thing over and over and over again? Don’t you want to know what others complain about?
Comedian Chris Gethard has started a new podcast on the Earwolf network called Beautiful/Anonymous (Full name: Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People) that taps into our need to know the dark secrets of other people. Gethard sits in a studio and takes a phone call from an anonymous stranger. They have a full hour to talk about whatever they want to talk about and Gethard is not allowed to hang up. Since it is completely anonymous, callers have the ability to spill everything without the fear of judgment. Adding to that is that Gethard is a very open, affable person who reveals as much about himself as the callers do. You get the sense that he is a very comfortable person to talk to. You may even have an urge to call him up yourself on one of your occasional dark nights of the soul.
The callers range from an eccentric musician who claims to have written more songs than anyone on the planet to a man struggling in a marriage without physical intimacy to a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. In perhaps the most harrowing episode to date, a woman calls in to tell the story of how she found out that her (now ex-)husband is an admitted child molester who sexually abused his own daughter. If you went out to dinner with someone and they told you that, you would want to know more but you would realize that it would be pretty uncool to pry into her life. Here, the woman gets to talk at length about that experience from getting the bombshell dropped on her to the eventual divorce to the terrifying moment of revealing this information to her next partner. You probably never think about how the families of an abuser can support themselves in a situation like this and this woman talks about the difficulties of finding people in the same situation. Because this is a real person speaking freely, the story isn’t a sensationalized, pulpy Lifetime movie. She tells the story with honesty, strength, grace, and even humor. It does not end the way you think a story like this would end and you realize that despite this horrible, traumatic event, her life is not filled with tragedy.
Part of the thrill with documentaries is experiencing another person’s actual life. But that’s often a pretty rare experience because people have a proclivity towards natural performance, even if they don’t mean to, in front of a camera. Plus documentaries still have to have some sort of compelling story that often necessitates high drama, just due to the expensive nature of distributing films that must appeal to wide audiences. Even one of my favorite films of all time, the documentary Crumb, has some thrills and spills in it. You need that stuff. There’s too much money on the line.
With a podcast, you just need a microphone and sometimes not even that. You can just whip out your phone and start recording a show right now, production values be damned. You can just talk to somebody for an hour just as you would in a coffee shop and preserve the conversation for everyone to hear. Though many of the big podcasts have sponsors, money is not necessary and very little is at stake. What results is a sense of comfort that allows people to completely be themselves and breathe their stories into your ears. There is a reason why fans of podcasts feel so intimately connected to their hosts that they feel like old friends. Podcasting may be the most significant art form to emerge in the digital age.
Beautiful/Anonymous continues the trajectory of voyeuristic podcasts that was trailblazed by Marc Maron with his revealing and raw interviews with celebrities. What makes this show unique is not only the fact that these are regular people speaking anonymously, but because Gethard himself seems to have an innate ability to get anybody relaxed enough to spill everything. That cannot be easy. His method is to place the conversation entirely within the caller’s hands. The caller has free reign to take things wherever they want and Gethard has no say. If Gethard catches himself talking too much, he will shut up immediately whether the caller noticed it or not. He isn’t perfect, though. In one episode, a caller begins a conversation about improv only for Gethard to take it to such revealing and dark depths that the caller freaks out and feigns a reason to hang up. What can I say? Sometimes you just have to talk about improv.
It will be very exciting to see how this show develops over the years but I cannot help but worry about certain aspects of this podcast because I tend to castastrophize things. What happens if somebody calls in threatening to hurt themselves or others right now? What if someone confesses to a particularly heinous crime and implicates the host somehow (Is that even a thing? Legal people, let me know!)? What if….What if…Oh, I probably shouldn’t go on or I’ll be here all day. Okay, I need you to leave me alone right now. I have a phone call to make….
