This is a headgum podcast. Hello and welcome to Good One a podcast about jokes. I'm your host

Bolter Senior Editor Jesse David Fox. I'm sometimes a part of conversations about what comedy does.

Like beyond making people laugh and the catharsis that goes along with it, which arguably is enough,

what value does comedy have as a sort of social, political tool?

And a lot can be debated, but what I come back to most often,

as stand up especially as a form of immense putting things into words to maximize audience laughter laughter is comedy can shine a light.

Comedy can give people the vocabulary to see and talk about things, which frankly

to one of the absolute great jokes through the last decade, James Adomian's bit about gay villains.

James Adomian, a stand-up comedian and master impressionist who can currently be heard

on his impersonation center podcast, The Under Culture, notice a small trend in cartoons in popular culture that so many villains

we are shown growing up are coded as gay and blew it up to the 1000th degree, to the point

that anyone who heard the joke were never watched most cartoons from the childhood the same way again.

James worked on the joke for a while, so the joke had many incarnations, with impressions of different gay villains being swapped in and out. but we will play the version from his 2015 album

low-hanging fruit.

So here is James Adomian and the many voices that live inside him.

All right, you know what?

I've talked about my life and good guys and bad guys, but one thing I am obsessed with

is the archetype of the gay villain.

It is my favorite thing in the world. That's why I wear my thin. of the

work type of the gay villain is my favorite thing in the world.

That's why I wear my thin mustache and pointy beard,

almost to consciously court the look of a gay villain

...