E1 Blog: How the Sausage is Made

Even though the archived eps are all up now, we enjoyed making the weekly posts and retrospectives on stuff. I (Branson) thought I would run you guys through how the average episode of e1 is made. This is the process.

The theme or type of the episode is figured out ahead of time by the time we sit down. Most of the time we all have some sort of loose idea about who we are and what our joke is at this point. My usual decision-making process at this point is:

1. What do I find funny about the subject?

2. How do you make that a guy?

3. How do you make that guy funny for the people you are recording with?

When you sit down with everyone, you really don’t want a well-developed character. We take an hour before recording (sometimes more, but usually not) to discuss the characters, framework of the episode, pre-written bits, and the end. Everyone kind of does it a little different. Charles usually comes up with his character 30 seconds before we start recording. Andrew comes up with the name first. I’m probably the most difficult and particular.

Once we are all settled into our discord call, we start a google doc together. The google doc is the framework for each episode, and contains our names (so we don’t forget), the order of events in the episode, personal details about the characters, a list of funny things that should happen, and usually a reference list, either of names or teams. Here is the bulk of the doc from the first Jedis episode.

For the E2s, they will usually be really short or twice as long, depending on the ep. For example, the Jedis E2 doc is 4 pages long and is mostly stuff like this. At this point, it is because we very clearly know what the joke is by now, and we don’t need as much structure or framework, just lists of stuff.

This is from the game devs episode a million years ago. Joking about drinking water used to be huge and it is clear from all the typos that I used to drink a LOT more before episodes. The thing that is different about these ones is that we used to very much structure every episode around the written parts. We used to think of the written parts as a sort of bail out we could resort to if the improv wasn’t that good.

This is from the barstool sports guyQ episode. This is an older one, but I wanted to put this one here just so I could talk about intros. Intros, especially on the insane episodes, almost always have to be written out and make good sense because I want to start out every recording session by feeling like I know what I’m doing. This is a good intro because it puts everybody on the same page about what is happening in this episode.

This is all broad strokes – none of us have ever taken an improv class or anything like that (I was in high school theatre for 2 years). By now, we’ve just done so many episodes that we have started to make rules about how we do things. Rotating chair eps, walkalong eps, the Biden/RFK/Jack Nicholson eps, that we kind of have our own little system with our own little rules. (For example, anytime we do a traveling episode we know we need to plan for around 8 destinations. If we’re doing a rotating chair, we know to make 4 characters. I know that if I’m playing a slow payoff character, I tease something weird at ten minutes and then start getting wild at 40 minutes in. These aren't RULES, we don't really do rules, but these end up feeling like the best versions.

In terms of ending an episode, I don’t really think there is a great way to end a podcast, but there’s about a trillion bad ways. We always make sure we have a way out written down with no doubts. About 20% of the time, we improvise a new ending, but most of the time we just go with the regular, dignified exit. Most of the time we just sort of say something as a placeholder, a bye, a see you next time, sort of like this sentence right here.