Guests dish the comedy

Some of my favourite podcasts involve a simple interview with the best guests. The latest celebrity guest offering to hit the pod world is Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend and the Saturday Night Live host’s preview guest list hits hard: there’s Wanda Sykes, Kristen Bell, Dax Shepherd, and Marc Maron.

The premise of the podcast is O’Brien’s quest to expand his friendship circle away from fake talk show conversations and coworkers. The first episode launched this week with guest Will Ferrell and, in true comedy style, there’s lots of awkward moments around friendship, but it’s also pretty intimate and hilarious.

Joe Rogan’s podcast The Joe Rogan Experience is consistently in iTunes’ weekly top 10. The format is simple: Rogan – a comedian and martial arts fanatic – interviews someone ‘‘of the moment’’ each episode. It’s long-form, a bit macho and pretty free range in terms of conversation topics, but he gets some great guests. There are more than 1200 episodes so it can be a bit overwhelming to start with, but there’s a huge guest list for you to search through.

Last up is WTF with Marc Maron, the master of the intimate interview. There’s something about the audio space Maron uses (the American stand-up comedian hosts his interviews in his garage) that elicits honest, personal conversation. His biggest mainstream interviewee was Barack Obama while he was in office in in 2015, but Maron is so skilled in the art of conversation that even someone you’ve never heard of will deliver something special. The back catalogue includes Robin Williams, Keith Richards, and more recently Joan Jett and Michael Douglas.