Mister Ron’s Basement

For those uninitiated, what is the typical episode of Mr. Ron’s Basement all about?

Since March of 2005, every Episode of Mister Ron’s Basement has featured a story from the Public Domain (that is, without copyright protection), usually of a humorous nature, and mainly by American authors.

While it is possible that some stories published after 1923 are in the Public Domain, the rules regarding those are complex, and involve searching for copyright registration renewal information. So basically, everything I read in the Basement is really old. That doesn’t mean they’re too old to enjoy, but it takes a good deal of research to dig these up in the first place.

Over the years of doing this program, I have discovered that we have a rich heritage of humor that is uniquely American, and has evolved over the last two centuries to forms of entertainment that we are all familiar with. American humor is exported around the planet in movies, television programs, comics, audio, and literature. For most of the last century, Films and Video Entertainment have always been among the biggest contributors to our gross national product.

In researching the Podcast, I have dug deeper and deeper into what made our ancestors laugh, and the primary purpose of Mister Ron’s Basement is to bring to light humorists who were once household names in the U.S., and are almost totally forgotten today. I get the stories from various sources that were unavailable not that many years ago. I search through 150 year old scanned newspaper and magazine archives. I find references to funny books in ads in the back of other books. Ebay helps a lot. I have standing searches for particular authors and magazines, and I love using Alibris and Abebooks to compare prices on old reading matter. It’s usually cheaper to buy a great hundred year old book than a new one.

Listeners to the podcast can download the latest episode every day, and get a fun story to listen to on their daily commute, or in the gym, or wherever they may find it convenient. Episodes range in length from as short as two minutes, or as long as an hour and a half. Generally, they fall between ten and twenty minutes.

Each new episode begins with a teaser, then it is bookended by a short sample of an old song, taken from 78 rpm records or wax cylinders. Through our convoluted copyright laws, there are some experts who consider all recorded music performances, as well as the underlying compositions, from the 1890s on to be under active copyright (this is debatable). I strongly believe that my musical sample clips are “Fair Use,” for an assortment of reasons. The titles and lyrics of the tunes usually make a parodic point about something in the story, and no song is played long enough for a listener to feel they have enough of it so as not to buy the music if they want it (and assuming it is available in any form).

I almost never repeat the same tune, in what is close to 1600 episodes now.

After the musical introduction, I explain something about the upcoming story, and perhaps give background information on the author.

Then I read the story, without musical accompaniment or sound effects. My style of reading is not what one hears in most audio books. No matter how funny a tale may be, it can get boring when read slowly. So I read fast — I perform different characters with different voices, and hopefully, this keeps the listener entertained throughout. Most listeners these days have no patience to hear a droning, monotonous voice. Occasionally, the stories do come off sounding a bit like borsht belt rat-a-tat monologues, and I know that isn’t to some people’s taste.

Sometimes I do emphasize the wrong words or muff a line and don’t catch it — hey, I’m doing this thing every day! But generally, these stories are supposed to make people laugh — any academic benefit from the historical nature of them is something I leave to academic types. Someone reading a “Mr. Bowser” story in a newspaper in back in 1886 didn’t think about historical significance — they just wanted something funny.

Naturally, with so many episodes available, and the fact that everything is from so long ago, it isn’t necessary to get the latest one. The Catalog and indexes are a good way to discover the older episodes. In fact, I am proud to say that Episode #7 (a Stephen Leacock story), recorded almost five years ago, is still our most downloaded one. Every October, scads of people download the one hour reading of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” (Episode #174) also recorded in 2005. There are other recordings of this available on the internet, but all of them are much longer to listen to, and mine is just as complete

Some people download the entire collection by going to iTunes, subscribing, and clicking on the “Get All” button, then I assume they listen to them randomly. It’s a bit hit or miss, but could work.

My podcasting week is organized in this manner:

On Saturdays, I feature what I call the “Saturday Night Special” — usually a single stand-alone story that I pick because I really like it. This is often where some of the funniest episodes can be found. Before that, I reserved Saturdays for tales of “Mr. Bowser” by M. Quad for about two years. He was a popular character featured every week in American newspapers for almost forty years. Before Mr. Bowser came to the Basement, I read “Modern Fables” by George Ade every weekend — Jean Shepard used to read those same stories on his radio show back in the 60s and 70s.

Sundays are reserved for stories by Stanley Huntley, one of the forgotten geniuses of American comedy, who had an extremely short career. His tales of Mr. and Mrs. Spoopendyke, presented in the early 1880s, were the predecessor to so many “battling couples” that became a mainstay of American television, radio, and comic strips. While I believe I have presented every Spoopendyke story ever written (about a hundred), there is a rich treasure trove of Huntley’s other humor that we present every week in our “Sunday Salad” episodes.

On Mondays, I read serialized book novelizations. I have presented lots of different novels, and these can be accessed through the Basement index. Currently I am reading Stephen Leacock’s “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town,” which every Canadian High Schooler has read since it was published in 1912. I have been wanting to do this book since I started. It has rich characters, and even today, is excruciatingly funny.

Tuesdays through Fridays feature either stories from a single author, or are devoted to a single subject — say, humorous ghost stories around Halloween, or Christmas tales in December. Some authors are featured a lot more than others. This could be for a number of reasons. An author who died over a century ago is not going to give us any new stories. Some have few stories available. Others have produced what seems to be a never-ending supply. See the indexes to discover them.

And yes, there are some loser stories in there. Sometimes a story seems funny to me at first, but once recorded, it just doesn’t work. But that’s a matter of taste, and some people love some of the stories I can’t stand. So go figure.

What first motivated you to begin the show back in 2005?

At the time, a friend and I were going to start yet another Commercial Web Site for Macintosh Users. To publicize it we considered using the new medium of Podcasting. Knowing nothing about Podcasting, I decided to explore it by creating one just for fun. Looking for material to present, I figured that Public Domain stories were readily available and would cost me nothing for the rights. I picked a Stephen Leacock story for the first one, because I had been a Leacock fan ever since I read an interview with Groucho Marx, where he said that Leacock was a huge influence both him and Jack Benny.

After that, I just kept doing them, because I was having fun. Some of the earliest episodes are okay, but in experimenting with different recording techniques and formats, some of those first episodes are almost unlistenable.

Over the years, I have hoped to “monetize” the show, but so far, this hasn’t happened. If I didn’t love what I was doing, I would have given up years ago. Ideally, I would love a Public Broadcasting type of underwriter, but Public Broadcasters are having a tough time attracting those themselves these days. Still, I am ready and willing to appear on any talk show, from “Oprah” on down to present some of these stories.

You’ve released fifteen hundred episodes since then. How has the show evolved over the years?

Well, I am making new discoveries all the time. It is always a thrill to discover somebody I have never heard of who makes me laugh. One fairly recent example is American author W. L. Alden, who wrote for the New York Times for years, then moved to London to become an American Ambassador to Spain (yes, it is confusing), and kept publishing what seems to be hundreds of stories in British and American magazines and newspapers. The stories are so funny, I often have trouble recording them because I break out laughing. There’s an index of Alden stories and all of them are funny. I recommend Episode #927, “A Matrimonial Romance,” as a starter.

My recording techniques have improved — I am almost getting the hang of it now. For a long time I thought Rice Krispies would make an excellent sponsor because of all the snap, crackle, and popping in my recordings. But that doesn’t happen as often, unless I get carried away and lean in too close to the microphones.

The biggest format change came with Episode #1000 (“The Stanley Huntley Story” – a three hour long, three part episode), where I began inserting “teasers” from the story at the start of the show.

I also used to run into major technical problems with my previous hosting service, which would go down sometimes for months at a time. I felt at least partially responsible for it because I was getting ten to twenty thousand downloads a day, mostly from China, where a hundred and fifty million people are learning to speak English. The terabytes of bandwidth may have been too much for them. When they went out of business last summer, I switched my hosting to libsyn.com, who does an excellent job, and has very few technical problems.

It took me two months to transfer all my episodes over to libsyn, putting in the descriptions and back dating them. Unfortunately, my numbers are nowhere what they used to be, and I don’t think the folks in China are getting it any more. My old server redirects visitors to the new one, but from what I understand, the authorities over there do not take kindly to redirects, trying to block anti-censorship services such as the ones provided by Peacefire.

I also think my delivery has improved a lot. I am especially proud of the way I have been reading “Sunshine Sketches.”

The next step in the evolution of the Basement is a “guidebook” I am putting together. It really is difficult for listeners to find their way around the enormous library of stories, especially if they’ve never heard of most of these authors. So the guide will have capsule descriptions of each author, and suggested Episode downloads to get things going.

Additionally, I will be putting every single author on the Catalog page into a sort of “grand index.” All too many of the authors have just a few stories and it is really impossible to give them all individual indexes as I do with the more well-represented humorists.

These things will be unleashed to the public on March 29th, the Fifth Anniversary Episode of the show.

The nice folks at libsyn are offering to help me put together an iPhone/iPod Touch app for the Basement, but even they admit that 1500+ episodes would overload an app, so I have to work out a way to spotlight authors and subjects on a regular basis, and be able to get enough app buyers to make it worth my while to maintain it.

Very few daily podcasts have lasted this many years. What inspires you to keep it going?

I have fallen in love with Classic American Humor! I also am fascinated by the stories of the authors as well. There is nothing like the thrill of discovering funny stuff that I didn’t know existed. I hope my listeners get that thrill as well.

The stories you pull from are often a hundred years old or more, but many of them seem surprisingly applicable to the present. In general terms, what are the lessons to be learned from these stories?

I think John Kelly put it best in his piece on the Basement that he did for The Washington Post: “Human folly doesn’t change much from decade to decade.”

Learn more at misterron.libsyn.com

About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is the Publisher of iProng Magazine. His editorial contributions primarily consist of interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.