Podcast about the highs and lows of female childhood and adolescence.
May 10, 2013 7:36 AM   Subscribe

The JV Club is a podcast [iTunes, SoundCloud] hosted by comedian, actor and SF Sketchfest founder Janet Varney. The podcast takes the form of a longform interview with an actor, comedian, writer, or someone else that Varney wishes to interview. The conversation usually focuses on the childhood and teenage years of the interviewee, who is always female, and the interviews frequently get very raw and emotional. The first guest was Christina Hendricks, and some of my favorite episodes were the interviews with Kerri Kenney Silver, Maria Bamford, Tig Notaro (who came on again), Stephanie Escajeda, Morgan Walsh, Erica Rhodes, Lynn Chen, and Susan Orlean.
posted by Kattullus (9 comments total) 44 users marked this as a favorite
 
It really is a great show. I actually wrote an email to Janet a couple of days ago to thank her for it. As a guy who only had a brother and male cousins, I think it was really easy to grow up without ANY understanding of what it means to be a girl, coupled with a culturally-reinforced background assumption that girlhood, and especially adolescent femininity, is mostly burden without benefit. This show has been an amazing and affecting education for me.
posted by saladin at 7:59 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


Seeing this post made me do a double-take because the existence of a program like The JV Club is something for which I have been wishing for the entirety of my adult life. I am nearly hysterical about it, and may also be suffering from the vapors.

To me, adolescent girlhood was this inscrutably magical and absolutely incomparable strange monster made of summer lightning storms and poison and trembling hope-fear twinned with the last moments in which I could safely and easily feel anything like what I imagined was freedom. So I could pretty much listen to people talk about how they experienced that time in their lives FOREVER.

Very happy that I can listen to these on SoundCloud, too. I'm halfway through the Kerry Kenney-Silver episode and it's just brilliant. Thank you!
posted by divined by radio at 8:20 AM on May 10, 2013 [7 favorites]


Looking forward to spending time with this this weekend
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 8:57 AM on May 10, 2013


This is fantastic! I've been looking for something like this also.
posted by custardfairy at 9:00 AM on May 10, 2013


This is great! I can't wait to hear Kerri Kenney Silver; I'm in awe of her fearlessness.
posted by Room 641-A at 10:44 AM on May 10, 2013


I started listening to this because it's a part of the Nerdist (Janet Varney dated Nerdist overlord Chris Hardwick for a long time) Network of podcasts (of which I like 80%) so it caught my eye. I really like it more than I should. If anybody thinks this is about issues that girls deal with growing up well, maybe it is, but I relate to almost everything Janet and her guests have to say and I am a male midwestern WASP. To me the show deals much more with growing up than it does with growing up as a girl. It would probably relate to anybody who ever felt like any kind of "other" when they were young or now. That's probably 98% of us. It's really a great show and well done.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 11:37 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


I haven't had a chance to take in Varney's podcast yet (between the other Nerdist podcasts and the handful of Earwolf/MaximumFun podcasts that I listen to, I'm a bit oversubscribed right now) but I thought it spoke well of both her and Chris Hardwick that they remained on such apparent good terms post-breakup. I'll have to check it out when I get time! Thanks!
posted by Strange Interlude at 12:56 PM on May 10, 2013


Metafilter: this inscrutably magical and absolutely incomparable strange monster made of summer lightning storms and poison and trembling hope-fear twinned with the last moments in which I could safely and easily feel anything like what I imagined was freedom.


that is a fantastic sentence
posted by forgetful snow at 2:23 PM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]


I've listened to a number of JV Club podcasts. I think Varney is a good host and obviously I wouldn't have downloaded more than one episode if I didn't like the show to some degree. I also realize that I'm probably not the target audience for a show like this and that there are any number of podcasts that are of the more traditional "Let's talk in detail about every show you've been on/movie you've appeared in"-variety. So this might be something of an unfair criticism, knocking the show for not being something it doesn't aim for in the first place. But a typical reaction from me to this show is exemplified by the Christina Hendricks episode, where Varney spends most of her time asking questions of the (paraphrasing) "So, you hung out with the drama geeks in high school, but were also in the punk clique a little bit?"- variety, while I'm walking my dogs fuming "WILL YOU ASK A QUESTION ABOUT MAD MEN ALREADY?!"
posted by The Gooch at 5:41 PM on May 11, 2013


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