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Hello From The Magic Tavern: Interview With Arnie Niekamp
October 11, 2016
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Arnie Niekamp is the creator and host of the podcast Hello From The Magic Tavern. He's also a video game director at Jackbox Games, having worked on games like Drawful, Trivia Murder Party, Quiplash, Fibbage and You Don't Know Jack. I asked him a few questions...
1) Explain the concept of Hello From The Magic Tavern for people who have never heard it. How did you come up with the concept?
It's an improvised fantasy comedy chat show. I play a fictionalized version of myself, Arnie Niekamp, who fell through a dimensional portal behind a Burger King into a fantastical world, and decides to record a podcast every week with a wizard and a talking badger, a podcast he uploads every week back to Earth. It's 90% improvised and every strange new thing that gets introduced is canon, from that moment forward true about the world.
I always loved podcasts, even had a few small ones, but more and more I wanted to do something weirder and more ambitious and serialized. But I also felt strongly that there was something very comforting and even addictive about the laid back chat show podcast format, so I wanted to use that structure to tell the story. And from there the early structural foundation grew out of trying to solve each problem with something in-story. "How do I explain that the podcast exists at all?" The wifi from the Burger King slightly leaks through the dimensional portal, so it's uploaded through that. "How do we do audio credits on a show that pretends to be real?" A mysterious narrator can end each show pushing the credits, who played what, as a way of trying to cover up the fact that the show is real.
2) The format of your podcast is very different from most. How do you prepare for each episode?
Each episode revolves around the guest. And we believe that improvising the episodes gives the show the energy we want. So, the real work is in picking guests. We're lucky to know a lot of talented people in the Chicago improv community. We tend to pick guests based on what energy or type of performance they'll bring, as a way to vary the tone from week to week and keep it from getting too same-y. ("We've had a lot of wacky characters, let's bring on someone more cerebral" for instance.) Once we have a guest scheduled, I have them pitch three simple character ideas to me, just a short sentence for each. I can choose one that isn't a repeat of something we've already done, but also something that I feel will bring something interesting and new to the show. Some characters prepare a lot for their characters, some none at all, but once the show starts it really can go in any direction and the preparation mostly serves as a safety net instead of a script.
Beyond that, sometimes we choose guests to fill a role that will help push some larger idea in the overall story, or move us towards a general direction we want to go in, but this is much, much more rare.
3) How did you get your start in podcasting?
I design and direct and write for video games by day, for a company called Jackbox Games. Fun, weird party games, like Drawful, which I directed. But the podcast mostly comes out of the fact that Matt (Usidore) and Adal (Chunt) and I have performed improv together in Chicago for over a decade. When I had the initial idea, they were the first two people I approached to help me build the world of the show collaboratively.
I've always just loved podcasts, going back to ripping old episodes of This American Life from their website onto CDs to listen to on long drives, before podcasts were really a thing. And listening to WTF back when he was stealing studio time at Air America, and listening to Comedy Bang Bang back when it was Comedy Death Ray Radio and on the actual radio. I bought a minidisc recorder with one crappy mic to try to record my first of many podcast attempts. And over the years I bought more equipment and tried different formats, until I wisely eventually said, "You know what, someone else should really do all this technical stuff, because it's insanely time consuming and I'm still not particularly good at it." Hello From The Magic Tavern, and it's success, finally came after I had more or less given up on doing my own podcast, but this one last idea just kept tugging at the back of my brain until I shared it with friends who encouraged me to actually do it.
4) Tell us about the background of the different hosts. How did you all come together?
We all met through the Chicago improv comedy scene, mostly at the iO theater. Matt Young and I were on our first improv "team" together, lived together for a few years, and have just gravitated towards being in each other's projects over the years. We were both founding members of the current events based improv show Whirled News Tonight, and did that show for over a decade. Adal Rifai joined that group along the way. So, most of the comfort we have performing together on the podcast is an extension of us having done thousands of shows together on stage over the years. We know how to relax and get to the place to have fun together in the moment.
5) Tell us what happens at your live shows. How do you produce those?
The live shows are structured just the same as the in-studio episodes, only with light interaction with the audience... in a way that hopefully still at least leaves a tentative suspension of disbelief that it's all real. Production-wise, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with a live show, and many of them did with our first live show. So we quickly moved towards only doing live shows where the venue or festival provides guarantees that they can record the show for us, with our own production team helping out.
6) Which advertisers are a good match for your audience? Why? How did you find the right advertisers?
The medium-long answer is that we started out as part of the Chicago Podcast Co-op, which is the brainchild of Max Temkin, one of the creators of the game Cards Against Humanity. It gets local companies to throw advertising money into a "bucket" and that money is split up amongst the small local podcasts that make up the Co-op. Sponsors don't pick which podcast they get each week, but one of the podcasts will do a very short, more or less tweet-length ad read, and get a small amount of sponsorship money. It's cheap for the sponsors and although it's not a lot of money for the podcasts, it's a start, and it gives the shows a feeling of professionalism. Because of that our weird little show was able to have sponsors at the top of each episode from the very beginning, before anyone had any idea if it would be anything.
After making the move to Earwolf, Midroll handles getting sponsors for us. We tend to get the kind of sponsors that sponsor other comedy podcasts, often things that skew younger, maybe less serious-minded than the products you might hear on a news podcast. But also, honestly, our audience is pretty diverse, and would probably be valuable to a wider range of sponsors. The types of sponsors who come directly knocking on our door are usually technology-based in some way, such as game companies. But also bars. We do tend to get bars reaching out.
7) Unlike many podcasts where you can start with the latest episode, you recommend that people start listening with episode one. What challenges come with this?
Part of the joy of making the show for us is the serialized, accumulative nature of the show. Jokes and stories become deeper and funnier over time. We've been pretty lucky that our show seems pretty "binge-able." People have looked at our numbers and remarked how unusually high our ongoing numbers are for every part of our back catalog. A lot of that, I think, is because we made a point of keeping the episodes short. The first episode is around 17 minutes long. And although it creeps up from there, we usually clock in around 30 minutes. That makes catching up feel less daunting, and adds to the "oh, I could easily listen to just one more" effect.
That said, as our episode count grows and we get closer to number 100, there's no question that starting at the beginning must feel increasingly daunting to newcomers. And we think about that all the time. We try to make each episode as inviting to new listeners as possible, especially since even the binge-listeners will mostly likely start with a recent episode before deciding to jump back to the beginning. Centering each episode around a guest really helps make each episode feel more stand-alone. You're learning about this new character, and all the running jokes and backstory and character arcs for the host can fill in around that. Also, it may be a small thing, but we quickly explain the premise of the show at the top of each episode. We introduce the co-hosts and try to make a point of always making it very clear that they're a pompous wizard and a talking badger. As redundant as that could feel, it helps orient listeners to understanding what they're listening to at the top of each episode.
8) Your podcast is part of the Earwolf network. What are the benefits of being part of a podcast network? What is expected of show producers who are in a network?
Part of the benefit is just being part of a network that we love and have all been big fans of. We talked to a number of networks and kept coming back to Earwolf as our choice. They help bring in sponsors and are a great resource for any technical problems or questions. They also help to reach out to bigger guests for our show... which is still a challenge since Chicago is a bit off the regular path, but they also got us involved with the Now Hear This Festival. But in practical terms, the biggest benefit we've noticed is the cross-promotion. Nothing brings in more new listeners than having an ad for your show play at the end of a much bigger comedy podcast, or having your latest episode sit on a website, sandwiched between two bigger shows.
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