Amy Poehler knows her audience. Shortly after taking the stage Tuesday for a live recording of her podcast, Good Hang, she posed a simple question: “How psyched are you that this show is at six o’clock?” The crowd responded with a thundering roar of approval, a wave of elder-millennial enthusiasm that might have been loud enough to prick the ears of a Times Square Elmo harassing tourists several blocks away.
The folks assembled that night—a murder of morning people—had come to New York’s Town Hall theater to see Poehler show off her superpower: corralling other famous people for interviews that are relentlessly positive yet somehow also not boring. Gene Siskel liked to judge movies using a surprisingly difficult-to-pass test: “Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch together?” Good Hang dispenses with the film and goes straight to the lunch.
Amy Poehler, Abbi Jacobson, and William Jackson Harper
Spotify
In the 18 months since its debut, Good Hang has earned critical acclaim, a devoted audience—it’s a frequent presence on Spotify’s top podcasts chart, where it currently outranks celebrity-fronted programs including Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert and SmartLess, a show cohosted by Poehler’s ex-husband Will Arnett—and the inaugural Golden Globe for best podcast. Poehler accepted that award this winter with a speech that neatly summarized Good Hang’s ethos: “This is an attempt to try to make a very rough and unkind world filled with a little bit more love and laughter—and laughing with people, not at them.”
The live show’s audience, filled with women in floral maxidresses and bearded men who probably host their own podcasts, was more than ready for love and laughter. (Minus, perhaps, the woman sitting directly in front of me, who spent the moments before the show googling the name “Amy Poehler.”)
They reacted warmly when Poehler revealed her surprise guest: D’Arcy Carden, an alum of The Good Place (created, like the Poehler vehicle Parks and Recreation, by nice-guy showrunner Michael Schur) and Broad City (executive produced by Poehler). They might have been even more excited to learn who Poehler had invited for the show’s first segment, in which she and an also famous friend of her main interviewee “speak well” behind that person’s back, explaining why they are so great: The Good Place’s William Jackson Harper and Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson.
