More than 10,000 people have downloaded Jeffrey Carter and CSULB alumnus Matt Gourley’s hit comedy podcast, “Superego.”
Although the cast members took a half-year hiatus from recording “Superego,” they returned in October 2008 for more laughs in their second season, and thousands of people are now listening to the podcast from as far away as South Africa.
The podcast is a project that 30-something-year-olds Gourley, Jeffrey Carter, Jeff Crocker and Mark McConville have been uploading on gosuperego.com since 2006. Their psychological case-study characters are well known for the witty narcissism that someone might hear in a Jim Carrey stand-up routine. And “Superego” is free for everyone to listen.
“I think we’re pretty comfortable in our lives, and so this is something we do for free, for fun, [to] give it away,” Gourley said. “We have no overhead [payments]. We are lucky enough to own everything [we need for the podcast].”
Each comedy episode includes all sorts of bizarre case studies. As an example, two of the characters, Bruce “The Throat” Hume and Ed “The Inflection” Olivas, are played by Gourley and Carter. They are classified as having a “dependent personality disorder.” Giving the voice-over for a movie trailer, they announce one member of the cast of the film as “some guy who claims to be the world’s fattest Pollock. No shit! He took a submarine ride, screen doors and everything.”
The film also features Barry Gibb’s beard, the Nazi-like workmanship of Reese Witherspoon, ninja jedi, lullabies by the “B.T.K. Killers” and “Father … an unborn child.”
The idea for the podcast came in a conversation between Gourley and Carter at the O’Malley’s Bar in Seal Beach. Gourley came up with the idea of an Internet sketch comedy broadcast involving psychological case studies because comedians can do whatever improvisation they want.
“What we do is we just come up with a character and then we give it a psychological term afterwards, saying, ‘Oh, this can be this,'” Gourley said.
The Superego broadcasters have invited guest performers from other shows for their own sketch performances. These guests include Steve Agee from “The Sarah Silverman Program,” Chris Tallman from the Comedy Central show “Crossballs” and Jeff Davis from “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
The show has literally taken a life on its own and serves as free publicity for Gourley and his friends, who give comedy performances. In fact, they’ve even given improv sketches as characters from their show in live performances.
When asked about the future of the Superego podcast, Gourley said that as long as it stays fun, they will keep on doing it.
“We’d also like to continue having more notable guests appear,” Gourley stated. “We’ve gone from asking people to come on to people asking us to come on. That’s very satisfying.”
Listen to the Superego podcast at gosuperego.com.
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