Very often, the hard part about interviewing comedians is getting them to stop being comedians: to stop doing material, in other words, and to carry on an actual conversation like normal civilians.

There are times, however, when — being as lazy as any other reporter — I am tempted just to turn on the tape recorder, let it and the interviewee run for 20 minutes or so, and just rework the best zingers into readable paragraphs. Such is the luxury and deceit of working in print. Or, in this case, electrons.

But the poor sods who work in broadcast don't have it quite so easy, as the trio behind Corktown Radio have spent the last year or so learning. Paul Irving, Dave Martin and Derek Thompson are all comics themselves, and in that time have podcasted 24 episodes of their show from the backroom at the Dominion pub on Queen East. The experience has taught them that interviewing their colleagues live-to-MP3 can be tricky.

"I realize now the art of the interview" says Martin. "You can't just sit down with your friends and start talking." Some comics keep slipping into shtick while others — no names, naturally — don't have anything interesting to say outside of their own acts.

"Everyone thinks they're so naturally funny," he adds, over beers in the backroom of the pub. "But if someone can be funny onstage and off, that, to me, is a statement about how funny they really are."

Other times, the guests are regular folk, such as when the lead cruelty investigator from the Humane Society stopped by for chat, or the young woman who talked up what it's like to be polyamorous.

The goal of the show, says Martin, has been to capture the "grab you by the balls" spontaneity of an open-mic room, or of comics when they are chatting among themselves, whether on a road trip or in the green room of some club.

"Sometimes really great shows will have just 14 people in the audience," he says, adding, with a self-conscious wince at how corny it sounds, that he wants to "create something that shares that experience with the world."

With the world and without interference from the CRTC, thank god. The Corktown boys and their guests seem to alternate between insightful discourse and weapons-grade bullshit, but rarely say anything that would pass on actual public airwaves. (Check out episode 16 and Jon Dore's ruminations on censorship, for an example.) Corktown Radio will tape its 25th episode, marking its one-year anniversary, on Feb. 27, in step with the East End Comedy Revue.

Martin, not surprisingly, is a fan of the Howard Stern brand of talk radio, even if Irving — the contrarian and self-described anarchist of the group — has a dimmer view of the King of All Media.

"I think Howard Stern's show has become a morning zoo," says Irving. In other words, scripted and corny.

"But he's got four hours to fill," every day of the week, Martin counters. Soon enough the two of them are caught up in an argument about the suckiness (or not) of the Stern show. They're not doing material, as such, but we've definitely gone off on a tangent.

"Yeah, but we can be interesting for four hours at a time," says Irving. "Or I can, at least."

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And now, a high-brow follow up to last week's story about the Hee Haw Hour and my half-formed thought that the hicks of the Deep South have apparently been the butt of jokes among Americans since time immemorial.

I checked in with a chum of mine, Rob MacDougall — who teaches American history at the University of Western Ontario and knows a good joke when he hears it — about when, exactly, mocking the South became a tradition in the North. I figured it must have had something to do with the Civil War and how jokes, like history, are written by the winners. Turns out I was wrong.

"One could well ask, 'When did the northeast not look down on the South?'" says MacDougall, noting that the Puritans of New England "had little but contempt for the get-rich-quick tobacco settlements of Virginia" way back in the 1600s.

But the current clichés about the South as a comical backwater date to at least the 1830s and ’40s, he says, when minstrel shows from New York City became a national craze.

The "grinning, yee-haw, malapropism-spouting country negro is a staple of the blackface minstrel show," which often contained white hillbilly characters, too, says MacDougall.

"A lot of early country music is just blackface minstrel music with the burnt cork washed off," he adds. "And stuff like Hee Haw [the TV show] and the comedy bits of the Grand Ole Opry are pretty much identical to the comedy bits of old blackface minstrel shows."

Now we know.

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