New podcast 'Sounds Funny Radio' showcases Detroit's brand of gritty improv comedy

Picture a pilot announcing before takeoff: “Just so you know, this is my first flight so really strap in there, OK?” Picture a worried man asking: “You’re saying that to the passengers as we go back to our seats? ... Sorry, is that new Delta protocol?”

Then picture the pilot admitting she actually doesn’t know because “I don’t like to read manuals.”

Picturing the scene as it unfolds is part of the process with “Sounds Funny Radio,” a new podcast with deep Detroit ties that turns improvisational comedy into an audio experience. Using ideas contributed via voicemail by listeners, the show’s cast plays a variety of games that range from creating sitcom catchphrases on the spot to weaving unexpected sound effects into scenes set in arbitrary locations like submarines and college lecture halls.

The content is completely unrehearsed, just like live improv theater, and the combination of suggestions from the listeners and creative choices from the performers can be totally unpredictable.

Like, who knew a health-care worker would call in to suggest a comic riff on a postpartum mother’s first bathroom visit after her delivery, which, according to the caller's message, is one of those “very real events that can be very funny but also very scary and empowering in the lives of women”?  Or who would guess that the call would inspire a scene where the aforementioned new mom tells her husband to stop recording her, saying, “We already have the birthing video and you used a lot of zoom!”

“Sounds Funny Radio” is the brainchild of James Quesada, a veteran and former manager of Go Comedy! Improv Theater in Ferndale, and Raul Maghiar, who has a background in mechanical engineering but switched gears to improv comedy — and whose first class in the art of improv was taught by Quesada.

”I made it my mission to kind of bother him after shows at the bar,” says Maghiar. “I would stealthily go up and strike up conversations about theory and improv. I couldn’t have bothered him too much because we ended up becoming friends after that.”

Quesada, who grew up in the Wixom and Walled Lake region, moved to New York City in 2017 to pursue comedy there. Maghiar, who emigrated to the United States from Romania when he was 11 and grew up in Rochester, relocated to the same city about a year later. They were collaborating on various comedy projects when Quesada, who manages a recording studio in Manhattan, started doing drop-in workshops with his friends and colleagues from the People’s Improv Theater located nearby. That led to the podcast, which Quesada hosts and directs. Maghiar is a cast member.

And they’re not the only Detroiters involved. Julia Schroeder, who moved to New York with Quesada and hails from Livonia, is one of the “Sounds Funny Radio” cast members. The Go Comedy! alum performs regularly at the Detroit Improv Festival. Last year, she brought her two-woman play, “The Parent Trap: Lord of the Twins Trilogy” (which Quesada directed) to the Detroit Women of Comedy Festival.

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Two more New Yorkers who consider metro Detroit home are key members of the control room. Collin Dwarzski, who’s from Wyandotte, is the podcast’s associate producer and audio engineer and has been friends with Quesada since their days at Eastern Michigan University. Chris Agar, also an audio engineer, grew up in Oxford, but wound up meeting Dwarzski in New York City when they started a band called DD White that Fox 2 Detroit says “has been described as No Doubt meets Talking Heads with Detroit grit.”

Detroit’s gritty, inventive comedy style is one reason why the podcast’s executive producers, Marc Evan Jackson and Nate DuFort, came on board the project.

Jackson, a former member of the Second City Detroit troupe that ran from the mid-1990s to the end of the 2000s, has had recurring roles sitcoms like “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “The Good Place” and appeared in films like “Kong: Skull Island.” DuFort, a producer, director, voice actor and Detroit improv comedy veteran, divides his time between Detroit and Chicago and is known for podcasts like “My Neighbors Are Dead,” named one of the 10 best comedy podcasts of 2021 by Vulture.

Both Jackson and DuFort liked the idea of experimenting with sound and improvisation, which they say fits into the scrappy Detroit spirit of improv comedy.

”To this day, when people find out that Keegan-Michael Key and Sam Richardson and Tim Robinson and Maribeth Monroe and Larry Joe Campbell and I came out of the same few years in Detroit in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, people ask, ‘What was in the drinking water in Detroit and where did this level of grit and scrap come from?,’” says Jackson, a western New York native who, with wife Beth Hagenlocker, launched the Detroit Creativity Project in 2011 to empower and inspire the city's young people through the arts and provide improv instruction for Detroit middle and high school students.

"I love that (Quesada and Maghiar) and even more Detroiters now living in New York came across a toy in the form of a recording studio … and were like: How do we break this? How do we expand this toy for our friends and for the art form and use it for good?’”

DuFort praises Detroit comedy for finding ways to experiment with comedy. “Some of that is stubbornness and defiance of being in what industry cities would call a flyover state,” he says. Jackson says DuFort can vouch for the fact that, back in the old days of Second City Detroit, "we would find a closet and be, like, 'We could put five people in here.' … We were looking for opportunities everywhere to do shows. This is just a continuation of that same scrappy Detroit spirit.”

With three episodes released since its April 29 debut, “Sounds Funny Radio” is available on Apple Podcasts and essentially everywhere podcasts can be found. Those wanting to contribute suggestions for the comedy can go to SoundsFunny.pizza — yes, "pizza" because, as a jingle for the show explains, “We couldn’t afford dotcom” — and click on the “leave a voice message” button or call the phone number (with a 313 area code) that’s provided.

You also can watch clips of the sessions being recorded (along with full episodes) on YouTube and follow the show on social media at @soundsfunnyradio. There’s also potential for a touring version. Says Jackson of the initial discussions on the project: “One of the second things we talked about was 'Won’t this show be fun to tour live, just like a "Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me" or any number of any other NPR-type podcasts?'"

Whatever the format, rest assured that the podcast plans to keep things strictly spontaneous. “Nobody’s going to tip anybody off about what’s coming,” says Jackson. “Watching people have to deal with the unknown is the magic and the tightrope of improvisation."

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: 'Sounds Funny Radio' podcast showcases gritty Detroit improv comedy