Feb 05 2012
∞
“ In one of the strangest (and maybe laziest) bookings in the history of broadcasting, Paul F. Tompkins portrayed all three of Doug Benson’s guests on the January 27th installment of Doug Loves Movies. Contestant # 1 of the Leonard Maltin game was “Paul F. Tompkins”, an erudite comedian. Contestant # 2 was composer “Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber,” an Englishman who takes offense if you merely refer to him as “Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.” Contestant # 3 was “Garry Marshall,” the famous producer and director who most recently directed that damn New Year’s Eve movie. Tompkins has been portraying Webber (as the most pompous person imaginable) and Marshall (as a crotchety man who is almost proud of the fact that he is out of touch) for awhile now on Comedy Bang Bang and The Pod F. Tompkast, but never live simultaneously, never for an entire hour, and most definitely not while trying to answer movie trivia questions. Because nobody had attempted something like this before, the podcast featured an element of suspense of whether Tompkins would be able to juggle portraying two alter egos and himself or screw up and shatter the illusion. Benson never let on to the listening audience that it was just one former Best Week Ever host that was participating, and seemed to take pleasure in that fact, along with witnessing the usually competitive Tompkins not automatically throwing the game for himself to win. By the time an understandably hoarse Tompkins plugged his upcoming gigs during the final moments of the show, he had pulled off one of the greatest podcast performances of all-time, which sounds grandiose and something Tompkins’s Lloyd Webber character would say about any of his musicals, but is true all the same.
