Colin Marshall

Vital stats:
Format: conversations (and occasional songs) between Andy Dick and his friends and colleagues
Episode duration: 1h-1h30m
Frequency: erratic

I know who Andy Dick is, and yet I don’t know who Andy Dick is. He entered my awareness as a guest on Loveline, the nightly radio program that occupied one of the larger, more edifying chunks of my time between the ages of thirteen and twenty. He had a specific reason for being famous back then, which I believe had something to do with a role on the ABC sitcom NewsRadio. I remain more or less ignorant of that show, despite its retroactive receipt of a great deal of comedy-nerd credibility, at least by the standard of ABC sitcoms. I know just as much about Less Than Perfect, the other sitcom, this time about an office, which carried his mainstream recognition into the 2000s. My curiosity has long had a place for his band, the Bitches of the Century, but mostly because of its name. I can’t get enough of that name.

Somehow, this thin experience has provided reason enough for me to download Dick’s every guest appearance on today’s interview-ish comedy podcasts and comedy-ish interview podcasts: Marc Maron’s, say, or Adam Carolla’s. As far back as I can remember, and in whichever sonic medium I can remember, a conversation with Andy Dick has always meant a conversation about drugs and alcohol, either the benefits thereof, the indignities thereof, or the vagaries of quitting them. Given his once apparently constant struggles with substance abuse and tendency toward bizarre public behavior, Dick became something of a dead man walking in the eyes of the media. Yet, like a high-personality Zelig wandering through a very specific and strikingly grim circle of show business, he displayed a hardy survival instinct while his significantly less doomed-seeming associates — actors Phil Hartman and David Strickland come to mind — met their ends.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.