‘The Dragon Friends’, A Podcast About D&D And Cum Jokes, Kept Me Sane This Week
Listening to a bunch of comedians trying to play Dungeons and Dragons in front of an audience is exactly what we need right now.
Yesterday, I was sitting in my room, on my own (as is now tradition in this age of pandemic) and I was laughing like a drain, just uncontrollably guffawing, having a huge belly chuckle.
It’s a goddamn nice thing to do, now more than ever.
I was laughing because I’d just listened to an entire theatre of people basically have a collective breakdown and start talking, in unison, in the voice of the Droopy Dog from Hanna-Barbera.
Just imagine that, hundreds of people doing that one voice?
The podcast is called The Dragon Friends, and its sometimes hazy premise is that a bunch of Aussie comedians who had never played Dungeons and Dragons before, are led through the game by an experienced and long-suffering Dungeon Master, all in front of a live audience.
The effect is vaguely akin to an exasperated dad trying to herd four red-cordial crazed toddlers out of a house — and it’s very funny. All the players and the special guests are seasoned performers and comedians, so the jokes, call-backs, and hi-jinks all come fast and freely, and would be enough to make the podcast extremely enjoyable on its own.
However, as I’ve been re-listening to the podcast over the past three weeks, I’ve realised that Dragon Friends is absolutely the best comedic D&D podcast — in a bizarrely crowded market — to listen to at present, entirely because of the Droopy Dog factor. The live audience at Dragon Friends shows lends the podcast a surplus of energy, and mania, and chaos.
As someone who would see live shows (or more often than not, perform in them too, I’m awful) multiple times a week, it’s precisely this live theatre energy that I’m missing the most in isolation (and my mum too, I guess).
And it’s good to feel that chaos again.
“Aren’t All Bags, Bags Of Holding?”
The Dragon Friends have a pretty simple formula — the DM, “Dungeon” Dave Harmon tries to lead the characters in the podcast through a well-researched and beautifully creative game of D&D, that traverses spooky Dracula dungeons to futuristic Shadow Runner worlds.
The characters, a motley assortment of standard fantasy archetypes, played by Alex Lee (The Feed), Michael Hing (The Feed), Simon Greiner, and Edan Lacey — all do their very best to utterly fuck everything up.
As Harmon himself says, the cast are all very good friends of his “who all who have contempt for me in a uniquely different way.”
They are joined with an extremely aesthetic live music accompaniment in Tom Cardy, and Ben Jenkins (The Checkout, Tonightly) plays all the NPC voices and other miscellaneous figures. Every episode has a special guest, from improvisors and actors like Bridie Connell, to even musicians like Montaigne (who just ups the class of every episode she’s in immensely, probably due to all the actual talent she has).
Everyone seems to have their go at being the naughty boy of the podcast — Ben, whose one job is supposedly doing voices, seems to only know how to imitate cartoons or Italian caricatures.
Michael Hing’s Freezo is either on a psychopathic murderous rampage or obsessed with the minutiae of the stock market. Alex Lee’s Philge will often put whatever the main McGuffin of the plot directly in her mouth. Simon Greiner’s Bobby Pancakes has a bizarre obsession with tying people’s shoelaces together, and also moonlights as a Jazz Werewolf. Edan Lacey’s Baston, who is legally distinct from any Beauty and the Beast characters, spends most of the time trying to kick things.
They all seem to find cum jokes exceptionally funny.
As much as Dave protests against this kind of shenanigans, its the melding of the two worlds: D&D and fart humour, that leads to some of the best moments, such as when the players aggressively canonised a situation that forced a vampire lord to magically shit himself for an entire episode.
There’s a reason the podcast thrums with live theatre energy — it wasn’t even really meant to be a podcast originally.
Talking to Junkee, Dave Harmon tells me that it was meant to be a one off improv show, which they recorded originally so that “in case it happens again” he would be able to remember what happened.
“There was a point where the podcast became bigger than the live show, and that was intensely funny to us.”
“I’ve Never Seen A Gooch That Couldn’t Be Improved”
Part of the commitment to chaos that keeps this podcast both so exhilarating and close to disaster, is the addition of new guests to the show.
While the main cast have gotten slowly (moderately) more familiar with the concept of D&D, bringing new people in every few episodes helps shake away any feelings of stability or normality, and brings it back to a feeling that can only be described as wrangling idiots to play make believes.
The episodes are recorded at the Giant Dwarf Theatre in Sydney, and are usually split into two halves, and released weekly throughout the season. This also leads to the chaos — over a fortnight, you usually get one episode where everyone is buzzy and excited to be there and relatively composed, followed by an absolutely cursed episode in which the cast are drunk and tired, and the audience absolutely rioting as a response.
The show always engages with the audience in an interesting way: many of the crowd could probably be described as painfully supercilious nerds, who find a lot of humour in amateurs entering their domain. It’s ALWAYS funny hearing them become aghast as the cast blatantly disregard the sacred rules of Dungeons and Dragons, usually in the pursuit of a one-off and mostly juvenile gag.
Fucking with their own live audience might seem like a bad idea for a podcast, but it always seems to work.
Probably the best and most screamingly funny cameo is comedian Tom Walker’s character Johnny Playstation, who much to the dismay of the cast and delight of the show, would continually break into insanely catchy and deranged pop-songs on stage, complete with smoke machines and dance moves.
It even manifests in the plot — maybe the funniest twist, which I will endeavour not to spoil — is in the futuristic season 3 season, where Michael Hing has an existential crisis about the nature of fantasy versus reality when he realises that he could come into contact in the game as Freezo… with himself in the future.
The show then endeavours to make this happen, leading to the utterly cursed and deranged moment where Michael Hing playing an elf warlock is roleplaying with comedian Sam Campbell, who is roleplaying as Michael Hing in the future.
Does it make much sense? No, it really doesn’t, but much like the entire show, you’re swept along on a wave of nonsense and hilarity, and it’s absolutely magic.
Dave reckons that a lot of the anarchy and the humour comes from the fact that every member of the cast are old friends from university, who love to just get the chance to hang out and fuck around with each other.
“The joy of it for us is that we didn’t anticipate that we could see each other every week as adults. Everyone’s improvisors, so everyone has the utmost confidence in each other to deal with any punches we throw at each other, we egg each other on to see who can destabilise the other the most. We try to startle and surprise each other — which is so fun to do with your best friends.”
The Dragon Friends is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, etc.
Patrick Lenton is the Editor of Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.