From left: Morey Hill, Ben Oddo and Davis Hunt
Which of these things is more remarkable: the fact that someone launched a throwback, no-frills, live comedy and talk show that’s not broadcast in an age when people live-stream everything, or that it’s lasted two years and built a cult following? Either way, The Ben and Morey Show has become an entertainment gem, a place where people can catch a smart show for cheap ($10!) at 8 p.m. on a Thursday night.
The Scene talked to Ben Oddo, Morey Hill and producer Davis Hunt about shocking their moms, good guests and why — while you can find them on Facebook and Instagram — you can’t check them out via a podcast or live stream (and why that’s not a bad thing).
Tell me something funny.
Morey: We had our moms on the show last night for Mother’s Day. It went pretty well.
Ben: Morey said a forbidden word.
Morey: I said a really bad word.
Ben: Morey said the c-word.
Was it always your dream to say the C-word in front of your mom?
Morey: It was a story about how I had said it before in front of her, and I told it onstage, which involved me saying the word again. But I think it went over well.
Ben: The reason it was funny was just prior to that, she was talking about how she was retiring after like 22 years and her co-workers were there and they were all clapping for her.
Morey: After I said it, one guy went, “Morey!”
Ben: I think that was probably the first boo we’ve ever gotten too.
Did she laugh?
Morey: The story was about how I had told it once before, as a joke, and she got horrified, and I said it again and she got horrified, so it matched up. I can kind of tell the story very quickly. My whole family was sitting around the table, this was a few years ago. My dad was being goofy, and he said, “All right, let’s all go around the table and say a bad word.” And, you know, somebody said “shit” and somebody said “ass,” and one of my sisters was being goofy — she said, like, “Impossible is a bad word because everything is possible.” And it got to me, and I knew immediately when my dad got to me what I was going to say, and without changing expressions I just said the word. And my mom just goes “Morey, no!” As though she had lost her firstborn son — it was a horror scream. I think the question was, we were asking our moms, like, was there ever a time you just wanted to kill us, or when we just made you super upset, ’cause they’re both lovely women. So, to answer your question, that is what was funny.
So, Ben, was your mom horrified?
Ben: No, she wasn’t horrified. Because, as we said, we never dropped C-bombs at dinner, but that was like a Tuesday for us. Our dinners were explosive. I can’t even think about a time we all had dinner together and we just sat down for the entirety of it. It always ended with someone swearing or saying something obscene, and then my mom gets upset.
You’re coming up on 50 shows. Did you think you were going to get to 50? Did you think you were gonna get to 10?
Ben: This is what happened. We all agreed on what the first show was gonna look like, and we got the guests we wanted to get — we got Charles Robert Bone and Santa’s Pub owner Elmer Irwin — and we got our friends to come out, but it could have died after two or three episodes. If the format didn’t work or the guests didn’t keep agreeing to come on — if it just wasn’t funny — it could have been a month long.
Davis: Yeah, there was a lot of grind. I remember telling people when we started that it could last for two weeks or two years. And we’re coming up on two years, which means the end is near.
Morey: Two years in what, July?
Davis: Yeah, July. That’s insane.
Ben: July 30.
You see this with almost anything creative anyone wants to do: You pour your heart and soul into launching it, you know what the beginning of it is, and then you have to do the third show, the fourth show, whatever else. What’s the difference between Show 1 and now?
Davis: They’re definitely more confident now. I mean if you look at the clips of the first show, you can tell it’s just our first time doing the show. And now it’s like, I don’t know, y’all own the stage more I guess. That’s the main difference, from my perspective at least.
Ben: I don’t want to say it’s muscle memory, but it’s a very hectic — you know, I think when [Davis] came on, guests [started coming out] at 7:30, and we get there an hour-and-a-half earlier at 6, and it’s a very hectic two hours getting ready for the show. And so I wanna say between setting up, and we’re in the back writing, and Davis is wrangling the band, and the band is late or doing stuff, and, “Where’s the guest?” and “Can we bring in the beer yet?” “No, we can’t bring in the beer yet.” All these little details that were like micro forms of stress I think we’ve learned to manage better. Except, I think, we were talking the other day, and you were alluding to how it doesn’t go away — the stress before the show.
Good stress or bad stress?
Morey: I mean, it’s good stress, but I feel like every show — we’ve had 48 of them now — has had a catastrophe prior to the show. A few weeks ago our guest called and said, “I can’t make it. There’s a standstill on 440 and I’m not gonna be there.” And it ended up working out, he showed up late but was still on time for his interview. There’s always something like that that’s like, “Oh my gosh, the show’s canceled.”
Would you televise it if you could?
Ben: Depends on what you mean by televise, like livestream?
Davis: If someone asked us to do it on TV I think we’d be very interested.
Ben: The cool part about not filming, though, is that you do get intimate moments, where people are like, “No one is gonna see this, right?” And then they’ll say something on the level.
Davis: When we started the show, there was a little bit of intentionally going against the digital age. I’d tell people about it, my friends, and they were all like, “Well, shouldn’t you do a podcast, or what is it gonna be, like a YouTube channel or something?” And we were like, “No.” I mean, I wanted something to go do on a Thursday night for people.
What is a good guest for you?
Morey: I think there’s a lot of answers for that. All of our guests have been great guests, seriously. When I’m looking for a good guest, part of me wants to get somebody who is a person of note around town, [so that] people say, “Oh wow, they’re gonna be on the show? I’m gonna come, I want to hear what they have to say.”
So the draw.
Davis: We need a draw, and that’s who I would go after. Somebody who you actually want to talk to, and it’s an interesting interview talking about what they’ve accomplished. And then the other kind is just somebody nobody’s heard of that’s amazing.
Morey: Like Tye Dye Mary.
Davis: Tye Dye Mary is a great example. An old hippie lady who’s been tie-dying shirts for 40 years. And she was hilarious.
Ben: But the thing that’s tough about that, when you talk about that, is how many big-name draws are there are in Nashville. A dozen, two dozen? Our thing is to establish, like, “Look, you’re gonna have a good time no matter who the guest is.”
Morey: We’ve had Karl Dean and Bill Purcell and Eddie George and Ann Patchett and the Goldberg brothers. People like that, those are all draws.
Ben: And for me, the ideal guest — and you don’t know this until it’s over — is someone who is kinda natural up there, and it’s not question-answer, question-answer. It’s question, and “let me turn this into a conversation or a story.” I mean, I love that, when a guest is just a natural up there. Last night, Johnathan Kayne was like that. A surprising one was Carl Meier from Black Abbey Brewery.
Morey: The story he told about Martin Luther was awesome.
So who’s your favorite guest so far?
Morey: That’s hard. I mean, Ann Patchett was a fun one, and that was satisfying because she showed up and didn’t know anything about it and I almost felt like she didn’t want to be there, like, “How’d I get mixed up in this?” And she just had an awesome time, and she was very hilarious in the interview. I would say either her or [Prince’s Hot Chicken owner] André Prince was a great one.
Is there anything digitally for people to see?
Davis: We have a camera crew that comes with cameras and films every week, so this season, the production quality of the videos is probably higher than previous seasons. But it’s just a matter of manpower and distributing those, because I mean, editing that all together and looping in the sound and stuff is just a lot of work.
Morey: There might be a digital future for the show. We’ve toyed around with live streaming — we’re so focused on every Thursday packing the house and making it a good show, you know, it’s hard sometimes.
Davis: It’s weird, because I feel like that would be a problem for most people, like we have to be digital.
Ben: But no, we would be dumb-dumbs at some point to not want to expand our audience, and we think that while it is a local show, it’s applicable to people anywhere and it can be interesting to people outside of Tennessee. So yeah, at some point we need to face the music on that.
