The Sports Card Investigator

When local comedy became a risk to public health instead of just a risk to public annoyance, it mostly shut down. I missed performing immediately but it took months to realize the sudden loss of the community was weighing on me as well. I was surprised. I’d thought of the scene as a nuisance that had to be endured, an always exploding mixture of small-timeness, self-aggrandizement, inane bickering, and the frauds, don’t get me started on the frauds. Yet somehow, insidiously, seeing the same people do the same jokes at the same places over and over had become integral to my mental health. I thought of a line from Seinfeld, “All these years I’m living in a community. I had no idea.”

In this episode I talk with Max Fortune (Back Of The Room podcast, @MaxTFortune) and Sam Whiteley (@SMcstank), two comics that stumbled into new communities during the pandemic. Max joined the freewheeling and tumultuous world of basketball card trading. He walks me through this complex community and introduces me to its unforgettable vocabulary of “raw,” “flippers,” “rippers,” “junk wax,” “Gem Mint 10,” “fire sales,” and the unforgivable sin of the “PWE.” Then there’s the Sports Card Investigator.

Sam landed in the world of basketball influencers, a destination the algorithm steered us both towards when competitive basketball went on hiatus. Like basketball cards it’s products are for children, unlike basketball cards the community seems to actually include children-children rather than children in their thirties and forties. We discuss what acceptable adult participation in a child’s world looks like, and why it’s good for our mental health. Maybe.

Talking with Max and Sam reminds me how much I enjoy discovering communities I never knew existed. People are always creating little escapes and social lives for each other everywhere. There’s more of them than one person could ever know, and as a bonus most of these little worlds happen to be funny.

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