"What is it about conference calls?" Jonathan Larroquette asks rhetorically, laughing. "They still feel like a feat every time they happen. Technology's moved on, I guess, but there's still something about just getting two people talking on the phone at the same time."
Larroquette and his comedy-podcasting partner, Seth Romatelli, are speaking to the Scene via phone from Los Angeles, but not without a bit of difficulty and delay in getting all of us on the same line at the same time. You could say that's one of the many themes of the duo's podcast, Uhh Yeah Dude: the weird, sometimes hobbled and often problematic march of technology.
Chances are, you're in one of three camps: You've never heard of Uhh Yeah Dude, you've heard of it in passing, or it means everything to you. At (as of press time) 453 episodes — laid end to end, that's roughly 20 days' worth of uninterrupted audio — UYD has been at it since February 2006, amassing a steadily growing cult of likeminded listeners who follow along as the pair, broadcasting from Romatelli's living room, riff on the news of the day and life in Hollywood. Sober vegan Romatelli mourns and/or celebrates his beloved Dallas Cowboys and curses the buffoons who blow it on painful-to-watch game shows Hollywood Game Night and Celebrity Name Game. Larroquette recounts his weird experiences as a touring musician and former lot kid (yes, his dad is that John Larroquette, he of Night Court and Richie Rich fame). Sometimes Romatelli will present Larroquette with questions taken from Amy Dickinson's syndicated advice column "Ask Amy" — Larroquette's responses to the prompts are almost always diametrically opposed to those of Dickinson, and frequently more F-bomb-laden. Sometimes the pair will simply crack one another up over nothing in particular, and they end each episode with their signature sign-off: "seatbelts," a staple of UYD vernacular that seems to translate roughly to "Be safe out there."
And interviewing the two of them? Well, it's a bit like having your very own personalized Uhh Yeah Dude episode. Episode 454, if you will.
"There's just a shorthand," says Romatelli when asked about the sort of approachable tone the show seems to strike with fans. "I think people have an idea of who we are and what our jam is, and if they're down with that, probably because they have similar sensibilities — I would imagine most people who listen to this show do — yeah, there's a definite, 'Oh, we're homies here,' sort of by proxy."
Cult show that it may be, the podcast — the tagline of which is "America through the eyes of two American-Americans" — isn't some deep-underground obscurity. In its near-decade of existence, UYD has bounced around amid iTunes' most popular comedy podcasts, landed on must-listen lists by publications like Rolling Stone and Paste and caught the attention of celeb fans like Ricky Gervais.
But the podcasting landscape has changed significantly since 2006. According to marketing research site Edison Research, as of fall 2014, Americans listen to more than 21 million hours of podcast audio every day, from comedian Marc Maron's WTF (the UYD boys were guests on a 2013 episode, as it happens) to the breakout true-crime podcast Serial and even a show wherein two dudes watch and review Adam Sandler's Grown Ups 2 every single week. That one, appropriately enough, is titled Worst Idea of All Time.
"There's just been a turn in the last couple of years and I think, certainly in this past year, with the success of Serial of course and stuff like that," says Larroquette. "It's reached this critical point where it's like everybody has a fuckin' podcast. ... Which is great, but of course that also with it brings just hordes of people doing it. But whatever, I don't think it really changes our thing; our shit has never changed, and that's just because of who we are and what we, I think, decided to do when we started with this thing."
The only thing that has changed, really, is how often the duo has taken to the road to record the show in a live setting and meet fans — maybe, they seemingly half-joke, they'll even one day work their way past the first- and second-tier markets and into, as Romatelli calls them, "the outskirts ... the fuckin' real nitty-gritty." As for Nashville, the pair hasn't spent any real time in Music City, although Romatelli points out that, if memory serves, he and a friend stopped at a Nashville-area Hooters when he was making the drive from his native Massachusetts out to the West Coast roughly two decades ago. But when they roll through Nashville this week to record their third episode in a four-show stretch, they'll probably skip Hooters.
Anyway, the cult of UYD grows stronger and stronger each week, even if that weird, hobbled, problematic march of technology keeps people streaming the podcast rather than just downloading it.
"Still nobody knows how to download one," says Larroquette.
"No, technically no," Romatelli responds. "But they at least know what it is, or the word. They know the word. It's like gluten: They don't know what it means, but they know the word."
Seatbelts.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
