Podcasts Play Murder for Laughs

When Oxygen, the television network for women, rebranded itself as a true crime channel last year, it leaned into TV’s time-tested approach: a focus on gruesome and mysterious killings, disproportionately involving white female victims and sensationalized by self-serious narrators. But Oxygen also began experimenting with a new way to cover those crimes. It started a comedy podcast, “Martinis & Murder,” whose hosts get tipsy on homicide-themed cocktails, audibly squirm over the gory details, make catty judgments about the suspects’ life choices and use particulars of the crimes as setups for sarcastic jokes.

Here’s a sampling of dialogue from a recent episode, in which the hosts Daryn Carp (the assistant to Bravo’s Andy Cohen) and John Thrasher (a producer at Oxygen) discuss the Zodiac killer:

At first blush, this approach to covering murder can seem a little tactless. I mean: People died! But especially for women, humor has emerged as an easy coping mechanism for relentlessly being told by pop culture that they’re probably going to be raped and murdered by a stranger, as ludicrous as that is.

Most of the time, Carp and Thrasher are discussing the same crimes that are featured on Oxygen specials; they often quote directly from episodes of shows like “Snapped” (about women who kill) and “Killer Couples” (self-explanatory). But instead of talking like grim-faced, gravel-voiced hosts, they inhabit the voice of a particular kind of viewer at home, one who alternates between being seized by the sensational story and ridiculing it.

“Martinis & Murder” is just one of a new crop of comedy podcasts, largely by and for women, that bite back at the gendered nature of the true crime genre even as they indulge and obsess.

The breakout hit is “My Favorite Murder,” in which the hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark take listeners on absurdist romps through crime stories that digress into riffs about everything from their Uber drivers to the dated fashions on display in old cases. The pair have built a passionate international community of fans who brand themselves “Murderinos.” In recordings of live shows, the roaring female crowd sounds as if it’s greeting the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan.”

There’s also “All Killa No Filla,” featuring a pair of British comedians who joke that they discuss serial killers in their podcast “so we don’t write to them in prison”; “True Crime Obsessed,” which serves as a kind of comedic recap of true crime documentaries; and “Moms and Murder,” which favors softer, gentler laughs. A lot of these podcasts are alcohol themed: Joining “Martinis & Murder” at the bar are “Wine & Crime,” “And That’s Why We Drink” and “White Wine True Crime!”

A 2010 study suggests that women in particular are drawn to true crime because it provides an outlet for managing anxieties about becoming victims, and to glean survival skills on how to escape or outsmart predators. But true crime also helps create and perpetuate those fears. U.S. men are much more likely to be murder victims than are women, and yet women are much more likely to see themselves reflected in the media as victims of violent crimes. (Well, white women are.)

Though murder-themed, these podcasts feature lengthy digressions into personal anecdotes and strange and insignificant details of the crimes. (What’s a jitney? What was your high school superlative? Remember pagers?) “My Favorite Murder” episodes have been getting longer over the series’ run; they now regularly stretch to 2 1/2 hours. That itself functions as a kind of sly commentary — that these sensationalized crimes aren’t actually as important as the relatively mundane everyday concerns of the women on the shows.

Along the way, these podcasts have hit upon a smart business model: Instead of putting great resources into reporting out an under-covered case, à la “Serial,” they churn through the seemingly endless stream of true crime tales, rehashing old cases with the help of Wikipedia pages, Netflix documentaries, local papers, other podcasts and of course, Oxygen specials. Accuracy is not exactly these podcasts’ strong suit, but mistakes and inconsistencies are just more material for jokes. On a recent “My Favorite Murder,” Kilgariff ridiculed Hardstark for using the term “upper legs” when describing a body part stuffed into a suitcase:

They delight in pretending that they’re a little bit bad, too. The running joke of the Zodiac episode of “Martinis & Murder” involves the hosts’ accusing each other of responsibility for the never-solved crimes. The women of “My Favorite Murder” draw out the word “murderrrrrrr” into an almost seductive drawl. As a host of “Wine & Crime” put it on a recent episode devoted to female perpetrators, “There are some truly monstrous women out there, too, y’all, and you’re listening to three of them.”

Many podcasters have discovered that drinking enhances the experience. In each episode, the “Martinis & Murder” hosts consume a custom cocktail prepared by their producer and mixologist, Matt the Bartender, to fit each particular crime: a hibiscus-infused vodka drink nods to the Arizona setting of the Jodi Arias murder; a drink called Satan’s Whiskers is chosen for an occult-related crime. But for the wider murder comedy podcasting community, the typical beverage of choice is wine, which is fitting: Alongside true crime obsession, wine consumption is a long-standing pop-culture-approved form of feminine indulgence, most recently reinforced on shows like “Friday Night Lights” and “Scandal.”

In any case, the alcohol helps loosen the hosts’ inhibitions, and it gives them some cover for speaking out of turn, too. The injection of alcohol transports the podcast to a kind of alternate-reality space where the rules of feminine propriety are suspended — and where murder is something to laugh off, not seriously fear.