Wisecrack starts with a standup set like none you’ve ever heard before.
Edd Hedges, an up-and-coming comedian, recounts his childhood in the tiny English village of Stansted Mountfitchet. He tells funny, relatable jokes about being a chubby, weird kid who was no good at sports — or anything, really. He comments about his relationship with a father who would injure him so badly that he’d sometimes have to miss school. And he talks about the night his childhood bully and neighbour killed his own mother and her friend, and then came knocking on Hedges’ door.
Hedges dives between divergent tones with an impossibly deft touch, telling horrifying stories and making you belly laugh moments later, without ever feeling like he’s being insensitive or crass. It’s masterful, captivating stuff, and it’s easy to see why Wisecrack’s producer-host, Jodi Tovay, would have been so enthralled when she first heard the set on a vacation to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
A two-decade veteran of the true crime industry, Tovay was fascinated by the story Hedges was telling, as much as the fleet-footed way he was telling it. When he was done, she rushed backstage to ask questions about a potential collaboration. He was already gone. The next night, she got there in time, but he wasn’t interested. She continued to pursue him. Years later, he relented, and the result is this odd duck of a six-episode podcast series.
Once we have finished listening to his set midway through episode two, Wisecrack delves straight into very familiar true crime territory. Tovay insists on knowing why Hedges’ neighbor Brett did what he did, and if he was intending to kill Hedges that night. Once the comedian has finally agreed to help her, she flies from Atlanta to Stansted Mountfitchet, interviewing his and Brett’s families, and “feel[ing] a lingering chill in the air” walking past the crime scene. For such an unusual story, it all becomes very rote.
The thing is, there aren’t any concrete answers here. The big reveals are all to do with mental illness and systemic failures — there’s no “aha!” moment or surprise villain. The only people involved who could provide concrete answers as to Brett’s motivations are dead, so there’s only Tovay’s intuition, and that intuiting can lead to some queasy places.
In one of the show’s more bad taste moments, episode five opens with Tovay talking to her friend – a “20-year veteran of social work in Georgia” – before she goes to interview Brett’s dad. Her friend dramatically warns her off (“I personally wouldn’t go there”), implying that because his son is a murderer, he must be a dangerous person. He’s not, of course. The father is a gracious man, contending with an awful thing; he deserved a lot more than to be dangled like human bait in Tovay’s quest to find dramatic beats for her true crime podcast. Though Tovay does express some remorse for prejudging him in that way, it’s notable how her treatment of him differs from her treatment of Edd’s father, who, during the worst of his abuse, literally broke his son’s hand. That’s all waved off in a sentence or two.
Throughout Wisecrack, Tovay is constantly ruminating as to whether Hedges was telling the truth in his stand-up set when he said that Brett knocked on his door after committing the murders, or whether he was using a horrible tragedy to further his own comedic career.
The issue of how truthful comics are and/or should be in their sets is an interesting, complex question worthy of exploration — think of the Hasan Minhaj controversy from a couple of years ago. But the issue is lost, as Tovay doesn’t seem to realize that she is also inserting herself into a story that definitely has nothing to do with her.
When Tovay says later on, “I felt like Edd owed me the full truth,” it’s hard not to think, “Why?” The blatant hypocrisy of her approach can get quite galling.
Wisecrack is constantly fighting between Hedges’ storytelling skill and this horrible thing that happened right next door to him, and Tovay’s determination to both insert herself into the story and the story into conventional true crime boxes. Neither comes out conclusively on top, which results in a podcast that’s as fascinating as it is frustrating.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.