This week’s pick is Wisecrack, the true crime comedy that recently won Podcast of the Year at the 2026 Ambie Awards. But before I get to why it hit (and yeah, it gives me that feel when you listen to a first episode of a show and you just lock in), a confession. I had wanted to be a standup comic for most of my life.

I discovered the power of comedy young, mostly because I had to. I was an asthmatic kid who was not good at sportsball. I spent my entire elementary school baseball career standing in right field, praying that no one would hit me with the ball. Somewhere around twelve, I worked out that a punch lands with slightly less force if the bully throwing it is also laughing. So I memorized standup routines and ran them on the playground, a tiny opening act performing for my own safety. Eventually the punches stopped, but I kept doing the jokes anyway. I was convinced I would grow up to be a comic.

So when I landed at Comedy Central, I finally tried it for real. Six months of open mics at two in the morning, in the back rooms of weird BBQ restaurants (stand-up venues can be…a thing), with more comics in the room than actual audience members. That is where I learned the most clarifying lesson of my creative life. I am not funny on a stage. And not in a self-effacing way. I think I am funny (or funny enough) in life. On stage... not so much. They refer to it as bombing, and I did it nightly for half a year before I accepted that, as much as I love the medium, and I still do, performing it was never going to be for me.

Which is exactly why Wisecrack really sang to me. It is a comedian doing the thing I never could, with stakes I cannot fathom. And how it got made is its own story.

Edd Hedges is an English comedian who went home for a charity gig and turned the most frightening night of his life into a stand-up set. In the audience was Jodi Tovay, a crime television producer who, by her own account, was taking a break from making crime TV. His set got to her. She left her vacation early and started digging. What she found became a nine-year investigation and, eventually, this show.

Tovay hosts and narrates the investigation, with Hedges' stand-up set about that night woven through it. This is not a stranger's tragedy told from a safe distance. It is his town, his memory, his fear, and the jokes are how he reaches the parts straight reporting cannot. It shows the power of comedy to not just make people laugh, but to make them understand and contextualize the difficult things that can be hard to say aloud. Tovay is right beside him on the verification, the timeline, and the legwork, so the comedy never floats free of the facts. You can hear the trust between them, and that is what lets the comedy get this close to the story without tipping over.

The way they did it is what is so exciting and fresh. We have had funny true crime before, two hosts riffing over a case, the gallows humor of the retelling. That is comedy about true crime. This is comedy from inside the story, performed by the person the story happened to, and it could feel sensationalistic. Yet it never does, because Hedges is laughing at his own fear and his own hometown, never at the loss. As Tenderfoot's Donald Albright described it, the stand-up serves as a device, and every punchline hides something darker. The laugh lowers your guard, and the show walks you somewhere serious in what begins in a very unserious way.

In the first episode, Hedges talks about being a heavy kid and getting bullied for it, and about learning that a joke could take some of the sting out of a punch. That is the thing this show understands all the way down. For some of us, comedy was the first tool we ever found for getting through the hard stuff.

The tonal control is the other thing, and I had not heard it done this well. Most true crime asks you to sit in the dark and stay there. This one lets light into the room without ever making the death small. It treats humor as a way through grief, which is the hardest version of the trick to land. That is why Apple named it a best of the year, why it left the Ambies with Podcast of the Year and three more in one night, and why Universal is already adapting it for television with one of the minds behind Severance (I am in).

The craft is just as deliberate. From the first bit of tape inside the comedy club, it puts you in the room and grounds you. The detail does the work: the mildew-and-bleach smell some clubs have, the tight space, the laughter that tightens into quiet as the darker parts surface. It builds a world that feels lived-in and real, and it folds the standup into the story rather than hanging it at the front as a throwaway frame. Late one night, listening alone, the end of episode one put the hair up on the back of my neck. Those are the podcast moments that you live for.

A quick, honest heads up. There is a real murder at the center, and the show does not flinch from how brutal it was, or from the mental health and justice failures around it. It handles all of it with care, and there is no gore for shock, but it is heavier underneath than the comedy framing lets on. Go in knowing that.

It is also, plainly, a great binge. Six tight episodes, the kind you finish in a couple of sittings and then need to talk about with someone. If you keep circling true crime but bouncing off the grimmer end of it, this is your way in.

Where to start: episode one, no skipping. It is built to be heard in order.

One last thing, out in the open. I know people in the world that made this show. That is not why it is here. It is here because it is the most original thing I have heard all year, and I would be telling you about it either way.

Steve Raizes has spent 15 years in audio, working on shows like 48 Hours, The Daily Show, and RuPaul's Drag Race. He covers podcasts for Pix Media, where he writes Worth the Listen. When he's not listening to podcasts, he's raising a 6-year-old and a ragdoll cat (possibly not in that order).

Currently listening to: The Idiot (Serial Productions)