Podcasts Playing Murder For Laughs
When Oxygen, the American television network for women, rebranded itself as a true crime channel last year, it leaned into TV’s time- tested approach: a focus on gruesome and mysterious killings, disproportionately involving white female victims and sensationalized by self-serious narrators.
But Oxygen also began experimenting with a new way to cover those crimes. It started a comedy podcast, “Martinis & Murder,” in which the two hosts get tipsy on homicide- themed cocktails, audibly squirm over the gory details, make catty judgments about the suspects’ life choices and use particulars of the crimes as setups for sarcastic jokes.
Here’s a sampling of dialogue from a recent episode, in which the hosts Daryn Carp and John Thrasher discuss the Zodiac killer, a serial killer in Northern California in the late 1960s:
All right, well, let’s get to the third murder — oh my God, there are so many murders to get to here. Fortunately.
Sadly, yeah. This approach to covering murder can seem a little tactless. But, especially for women, humor is one way of coping with relentlessly being told by pop culture that they’re probably going to be raped and murdered by a stranger.
“Martinis & Murder” is just one of a new crop of comedy podcasts, largely by and for women, that bite back at the gendered nature of the true crime genre even as they indulge and obsess. The breakout hit is “My Favorite Murder,” in which Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark take listeners on romps through crime stories with digressions about everything from their Uber drivers to the dated fashions on display in old cases. The pair have built a passionate international community of fans who brand themselves “Murderinos.”
There’s also “All Killa No Filla,” featuring a pair of British comedians who joke that they discuss serial killers in their podcast “so we don’t write to them in prison”; “True Crime Obsessed,” which serves as a comedic recap of true crime documentaries; and “Moms and Murder,” which favors softer, gentler laughs. A lot of these podcasts are alcohol themed: Joining “Martinis & Murder” at the bar are “Wine & Crime,” “And That’s WhyWe Drink” and “White Wine True Crime!”
These comedy podcasts help listeners process the true- crime genre itself. As much as the truecrime stories appeal to women, they also seem designed to keep them in a state of anxiety, to exaggerate the dangers they face, and even to call into question their freedom to move about the world.
The Onion’s first podcast, the sa- tirical true crime series, “A Very Fatal Murder,” also plays with that media bias: The podcast’s f ictional public- radio host describes the central murder victim as “a really hot white girl” with “big dreams and very clear skin.”
Seen through that lens, it makes sense that the hosts of these shows operate at a remove, filtering serious crimes through a veil of irony. True crime operates on a plane of feminine stereotype more than it does reality. These podcasts cut through that kind of craven calculation and inject levity instead. The tagline of “My Favorite Murder,” for example, is “Stay sexy and don’t get murdered.”
Many podcasters have discovered that drinking enhances the experience. In each episode, the “Martinis & Murder” hosts consume a custom cocktail prepared by their producer and mixologist, Matt the Bartender, to fit each particular crime: a hibiscus- infused vodka drink nods to the Arizona setting of one murder; a drink called Satan’s Whiskers is chosen for an occult-related crime.
But for the wider murder comedy podcasting community, the typical beverage of choice is wine, which is fitting: Alongside true crime obsession, wine consumption is a longstanding pop- culture- approved form of feminine indulgence, most recently reinforced on shows like “Friday Night Lights” and “Scandal.”
In any case, the alcohol helps loosen the hosts’ inhibitions, and it gives them some cover for speaking out of turn, too. The injection of alcohol transports the podcast to a kind of alternate- reality space where the rules of feminine propriety are suspended — and where murder is something to laugh off, not seriously fear.