‘Heavyweight’
Starring Jonathan Goldstein
(Pushkin Industries)
Available on all podcast and streaming audio platforms. 

Out of the first 60 or so episodes of “Heavyweight,” my favorite moment may come in the one titled “Etta.” The show’s most curmudgeonly semi-regular, Gregor Ehrlich, spontaneously launches into what amounts to a savage spoof of the entire concept of the series and the narrative style of the host, star, and creator, Jonathan Goldstein.

“Oh, I don’t matter. I’m just the fly on the wall, watching the human condition as people live and die and suffer and babies are born and old people lowered into the ground. And when the dirt hits the coffin … that reminds me of my sponsor.”

I don’t know which is more remarkable; the accuracy of Mr. Ehrlich’s parody or the willingness of Mr. Goldstein to be ridiculed in such a fashion. Like Mr. Goldstein himself, Mr. Ehrlich has an admirable gift for seeing the comedy even in the most tragic situations, as well as the profound in the ridiculous, and mixing them up in such a way that what’s funny seems even more so.

“Heavyweight,” which has thus far reached nine seasons and 65 episodes, recently relocated to Malcolm Gladwell’s “audio production company,” Pushkin Industries. It’s a perfect fit, in that “Heavyweight” is a program about coming to grips with the past, which, in that sense, provides a highly personal analogy to Tim Hartford’s “Cautionary Tales” and Mr. Gladwell’s own “Revisionist History.”

Every episode of “Heavyweight” is about a specific person and a specific incident: something that happened that changed the course of their lives, or, at the very least, that they have been puzzling over for decades.

For instance, #64 “Kevin” concerns a pair of brothers who were raised by a single father who, though not abusive in the usual way, was nonetheless, to put it delicately, batpoop crazy. Their only respite from their dad’s relentless nuttiness was in the company of another pair of brothers who lived next door. But at a certain point the two kids next door essentially disappeared, and Kevin has spent roughly 30 years wondering what happened to them.

Then there’s been a subseries about the aforementioned Gregor Ehrlich, Mr. Goldstein’s lifelong friend, who first appeared in the second episode. Here, he tries to get back a set of CDs that he had loaned decades before to a young musician friend who became the pop legend Moby. And yes, he’s also seeking acknowledgement of his own contributions to Moby’s subsequent success.

A more recent episode (#59 “Etta”) deals with Mr. Ehrich’s mother, who is not your conventional hoarder but has nonetheless filled an entire house with her own offbeat works of art. Among these unique knick-knacks are a series of bottles inscribed with aphorisms such as “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” The problem is what to do with all those rooms and rooms of tchtotchkes now that his parents are 90 and not going to be around much longer.

The situations themselves, and their resolutions, are only part of the enjoyment; much of the reason we listen to “Heavyweight” is for Jonathan Goldstein himself. A recent show, for instance, titled “Live From New York,” has Mr. Goldstein delivering a wry extended take on the story of Cain and Abel in the tradition of such great Jewish monologists as Myron Cohen.

Yet, for all of his profundity, Mr. Goldstein is heir to the great legacy of self-deprecating Jewish radio comedians like Jack Benny and George Burns, who knew that the way to get both the big laughs and the audience sympathy was to regularly throw themselves under the bus. 

Every episode begins with Mr. Goldstein calling a certain Dr. Jackie Cohen, another old friend who never runs out of original ways to belittle and deflate him, with his own abject cooperation.

And even as Mr. Ehrlich pokes fun at Mr. Goldstein for doing so, every episode ends with a highly philosophical summing up of the events therein. This isn’t necessarily to make sense of what happened or offer moral clarity, but rather to give us a useful way to think about it.

The episode on Gregor and Etta ends with, “You can try to move your aging parents out of their house. You can treat death like a to-do list with items to check off, but ultimately you can’t control how people live or die. … Cue the outro music. Cue the dime store insight. Whether it’s to a museum or to a landfill, none of us knows where we’re flowing. In the face of that, we need to learn how to let go. …

“My feeling is that bodies are vessels, just like colorful bottles are vessels, just like podcasts and houses packed with stuff and all of art is. It’s all just stuff and stuff can be beautiful, but it’s there to help us get closer to the non-stuff. Because like the words Etta inscribed on one of her final bottles, all important matters are invisible.”