Ace in the (Memory) Hole

I guess we really do change over the course of our lives. I recently had one example of my changing tastes/moods/whatever confront me in an unexpected way: I no longer listen to the Adam Carolla show.

This came as something of a surprise to me. I have been listening to Carolla regularly ever since the "Loveline" days back in the late '90s. I was on board from the start when the Aceman moved to morning radio back in the middle of the last decade, and I joined him on his post-firing journey into the new medium of podcasting--of which he has now become one of the leading impresarios, if not an actual new media mogul. I even read his first book. That's a long history as a relatively devoted follower.

True, I never bothered much with his television ventures like The Man Show or Crank Yankers (the former just never interested me, the latter--puppets acting out crank phone calls--should have passed without comment just for stupidity alone). And it is also true that I never kept pace with Carolla's output; once he moved his gig into downloadable territory, I invariably fell further and further behind the recent stuff, until my most recently listened to episodes were dated nearly a year behind the newest postings.

I guess that should have been a clue. Obviously, if I couldn't be bothered to listen frequently enough to keep current, the value must not have been all that great in my eyes (or, if you will, ears). Yet, I had been behind before, and made catch up efforts in the past. So why did I feel the need to abandon Carolla now?

My gut tells me to point the finger at the changes I've heard in Carolla's show in recent times. (I can't say how recent, because, remember, I was listening to year old shows by the time I pulled the plug.) For one thing, the promos just got overbearing; each episode of the podcast suffered from heavy intrusions of commercials for products that I would never bother buying. For the most part, I'm OK with someone making a buck for his efforts, particularly when he is supplying a product that has no price. But sometimes it seemed that the frequent commercials were damaging to the flow of the show, enough so to sap away the entertainment value. Let's face it: patience is a limited resource--test mine, or anyone else's, at our peril.

More troubling, perhaps, has been Carolla's ever-greater tilt towards right wing politics. One guest I recently heard on the show was some guy--I don't remember his name, and feel unmotivated to look it up, for obvious reasons--who wrote a book trashing the Occupy movement--a favorite target for Ace's ire. Carolla has long had a fairly conservative bent on many political issues (to be fair, he's relatively liberal on other, especially social, issues). I've heard him make comments with which I disagreed before--but, having done my own homework on Occupy and other issues, and knowing the fallacies embedded in Carolla's view of these issues, I found listening to his erroneous diatribes ever more tedious. Also, I started to suspect that some of his guests were not being booked "organically," but were coming at the direction of outside forces. (Carolla's affiliation with radio host Dennis Praeger may represent the nexus through which the "right wing echo machine" has recruited another outlet.) I can be forgiving when the intellectually lazy Adam Carolla forms a judgment that lacks a certain amount of depth; but I'll be damned if I'm going to be played for a sucker and drawn into listening to Fox News farm team players on the sly.

(An aside: Carolla's intelligence is a frequent butt of his jokes, but the man isn't dumb. He is, however, an untrained intelligence. Adam's strength lies in what he can diagnose through direct observation; anything that requires examination beyond surface details often leads him astray. That is the weakness that makes some of his rants tedious to listen to and undermines the show's quality.)

Perhaps worst of all, as the guest roster grew to include more junior league Hannity wannabes, fewer and fewer guests came on who really had something meaningful to offer. Comedians, once a staple of the show, largely faded from the guest roster. By the time I dropped my subscription to Carolla's show, it had been months since I had heard Dana Gould or Greg Fitzsimmons or any other comics on the show. While I get that it may not be possible to bring in one time staples like Joel McHale--he's grown too big for the show, of course--it would have helped immensely if Carolla's staff had made the effort to connect with the next round of up and coming entertainers, instead of bringing in people who just had a book to sell, or a political axe to grind (or most likely, both at the same time).

That lack of entertaining guests, I think, points to the tragic truth of why I had to dump Carolla's show: it had just gotten so boring. Each episode played out with such a sameness to it; the same rants, the same characterizations of the same people, a sameness to the tone of Alison Rosen's news...hell, even Bryan Bishop's drops--long an entertaining staple of the show--had grown repetitive and stale. The Adam Carolla Show has become, to use the hosts own oft-applied expression, fucked out.

Is there a larger implication in this act of mine? Probably not. I doubt that others are feeling the same way about the show as I do. The show still rides high on the iTunes charts, and once they're hooked, people will keep listening to/watching the same damn show for years regardless of quality. (For example, just look at all the ridiculously long-running series on TV these days.)

And now that I think about it, I'm not even sure my abandoning the ACS reflects any real change in myself beyond, perhaps, a sense that I no longer have time to waste on anything not really interesting to me. I don't seem to have missed the show since I formally stopped listening and deleted all the downloaded shows. (I have also deleted his website from my "Sausage Factory" at right; I can't in good conscience provide a link to a product I won't listen to myself.)

I guess all I'm really saying is, things change. A lesson none of us may have needed, but one that should not go unheeded. So it goes.