Meet Tom Scharpling, Best in Shows

Some days I reckon Tom Scharpling is one of the funniest people alive. Certainly, Tom Scharpling is one of the great underground wizards of radio, and podcasting. I don’t know how I first heard about him – or when I first started tuning in properly, but he has backstory and projects for days.

And as I was getting my head around all of his great radio satire – his towering The Best Show with Tom Scharpling has been going for 20 years and about a thousand episodes – I found out he was a TV writer (Monk), occasional actor, big time voice actor (Stephen Universe, Adventure Time), music video director (Aimee Mann, The New Pornographers) and general funny-man, comedian, writer. With a stack of other great podcasts.

One of the things that got me through last year’s big burst of lockdown worry was discovering that Scharpling had started a podcast with his friend and fellow riot, Julie Klausner. Their Double Threat show – basically the two of them down a phone/Skype line improvising like mad and cracking each other and the audience up, sometimes with a special guest or two, is utterly sublime. And absolutely recommended listening. One of those podcasts where you walk down the street and realise you’re laughing out loud, and it looks like you’re cracking up at everyone you see – such is the power and unpredictability of where Klausner and Scharpling can find and place a laugh.

Tom Scharpling is also a semi-regular on Marc Maron’s podcast – which might be where I first heard him, but I’d certainly heard about him a long time before that.

And it’s worth mentioning that Scharpling’s other great comedy buddy, his long-time foil, is Jon Wurster. Who is better known, at least in some circles, as a drummer – current member of The Mountain Goats, also a long-serving drummer for Superchunk – in their golden period and more recent ‘comeback’ – and he’s been behind the kit for the last half-dozen Bob Mould solo albums. (All of them brilliant). He’s toured and recorded with many other musical legends. But Wurster and Scharpling met in the mid-90s and formed this amazing comedy duo for radio. They’re like a next-generation Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. They’re like Nichols and May. They’re like, well, actually they’re like “Weird Al” Yankovic and Howard Stern, minus Howard’s early anger. Their enduring partnership just happened alongside of and then deep within their respective solo careers and catalogues.

My other favourite podcast moment from Scharpling – and there are many to choose from – is his hilarious satire of recap shows, Meet My Friends The Friends. Yep, he goes through every single episode of the TV show, Friends, satirising both the show and more specifically the nerd-culture that created the recap show.

In some ways Scharpling is the nerd-culture that created the recap show. He’s part of it anyway. And it’s so deep in him. He was a tape-trader, a record store geek, he played in bands. He wrote about basketball. Started a music fanzine, wrote record reviews, was a champion of so many indie bands. And he hates Billy Joel! (Me too!)

I knew a lot of this already, but I was Today Years Old when I found out that “Tom Scharpling” is in fact a creation. He was born Thomas Giuliano II – and he didn’t like that name. There was other baggage to try to escape too. He had several goes at inventing a new moniker, eventually going back to Tom and then forcing together the word ‘Scharpling’ from Al Sharpton and Garry Shandling.

As Tom Scharpling, he escaped into a world of wanting to be funny for a living. And then set about becoming one of the most prolific radio voices and producers, piecing together that living from being funny on the fringes – having an impact with some TV writing on the side. His gig at Monk was for all eight seasons. And was both creatively fulfilling and financially rewarding. Though never on the level people outside the industry assume. It kept the wolves from the door though. And it gave a leg up.

That’s what Scharpling has been hoping for across the last 30 years. Keeping a startling mind that obsesses, that is fascinating by cramming and retaining knowledge, fed and nurtured. And with outlets.

It’s more than that though.

There was deep trauma in Scharpling’s early life. A chronically ill mother, a miserable childhood, his own mental illness. When he had his own real-life Cuckoo’s Nest situation in his late teens, desperate calls to come collect him from the hospital because he wasn’t as bad as the others in there, and that’s where he left Thomas Giuliano II behind forever. Tom Scharpling was born.

Tom Scharpling would go on to fail at many things – but make a career out of admitting to these failures, to exploring them, and to being fearless as both a satirist and critic. Somewhere, so deep within all of this, he is somewhat both satirising and deeply critical of his own life. His jokes, prank calls, radio wind-ups and comedy writing, all derive from the deep well of pain. But there is very little in the way of ‘punching down’. For Scharpling it’s more about the absurdity of life, the wonders of pop-culture as the temporary distraction from it all, and the profoundly absurd as deep reflection moment in the human condition.

I learned so much more about Scharpling – one of my favourites across the last half decade or so – from reading his brand new memoir.

It Never Ends: A Memoir with Nice Memories! is heart-breaking and beautiful. It’s funny and wise and sad and full of whimsy and advice. It cuts deep. And if you’re bumbling around as a freelance writer wondering why you bother or just interested in comedy and pop-culture then it’s a must-read.

It’s also available as an audiobook – read by Scharpling. So I’m started in on that now for an immediate repeat-visit.