True crime shows are nothing new, Dateline has been on since the early 90s and 20/20 since the late 70s. But, true crime comedy as a genre has been stirring up a lot of discourse. How can stories about horrific murders and serial rapists be… funny? Or relaxing? Or enjoyable at all? I fall asleep to a true crime and paranormal podcast nearly every night, and I often find it almost impossible to explain how I could find that comforting.
Listening to any genre of podcasts with more than one host often simulates being around other people for me. It allows me to be in a conversation without having to put the energy into participating in it. Hoorah technology! But why true crime comedy? Why something so dark and, at times, really violating for the victims of these crimes?
A big part is the illusion of control. A lot of Millennials and Gen Z kids have been raised with an ever present fear of violent crime that really didn’t exist in our parents or grandparents generations. Our parents were always nervous about us being kidnapped, we had those fuckass stranger danger presententions (que John Mulaney’s JJ Bittenbinder bit) and morning newscasts with horrific crime reports. And then social media came along and made it omnipresent. If it’s not someone retweeting a news article, it’s a notes app screenshot on Instagram or Snapchat detailing the newest sex trafficking scheme and warning women to look under their cars before approaching so no one will slash their achilles and kidnap them. Or a TikTok demonstrating how to effectively check your hotel room or AirBnB for cameras in the bathroom and bedrooms. We want to be able to control crime; we want the ability to prevent it happening to us.
Hearing about the same serial killers and their motives and methods makes us feel like we can spot that behavior in other people and avoid it. We know that Ted Bundy lured women into his VW Bug by pretending to be injured and in need of help, or pretending to be a photographer interested in them as a model. So now we know not to follow random men to other places, especially without telling anyone. Being able to laugh at these criminals takes it a step further. Calling Ted Bundy a stupid, ugly little bitch takes makes him less scary. It takes some of the power away from him, turns him into the pathetic, desperate freak he was rather than the handsome boogeyman that media coverage made him into.
Traditional media like movies and TV doesn’t really do that kind of work. Adaptations and docu-series like Dahmer, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and Netflix’s Conversations with a Killer series all emphasize how well killers like Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were at going under the radar and how nobody expected Jeffery Dahmer or Ted Kaczinsky to do the shit they did. They all lean into the unpredictable boogeyman quality of the story.
True crime comedy podcasts seem to act as a response to the fear those kinds of media have developed, as they go violently in the other direction. The hosts of these podcasts usually focus pretty heavily on what is predictable and consist in killer’s behaviors and what social systems in place allow these things to go under the radar. My Favorite Murder uses “Fuck Politness” as a tagline for the show, as a lot of survivors have reported interacting with someone who later hurt them despite having a bad gut feeling because they didn’t want to be rude. My personal favorite, And That’s Why We Drink, frequently mentions Gavin Debecker’s The Gift of Fear, a book exploring the value of instinct and a gut feeling and how people often downplay those feelings. The hosts are also quick to point out concerning behavior that no one seemed to pick up on and where authorities often fuck up a case.
We’ve been raised looking for killers in our closets, under our cars and behind our hotel room mirror, thinking that we have to always be on the lookout for a predator of some sort or another. Movies and TV have reinforced that notion, making it abundantly clear that horrible things can happen at any second, to any person, in any place. True crime comedy podcasts dismantle some of that anxiety and lets the listener feel more in control of their surroundings and their life, which is inarguably valuable, even if it’s just an illusion.
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