In the first episode of βUnbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,β four women held in a bunker for 15 years against their will appear on a segment of the βToday Showβ with Matt Lauer.
Asked about her abductor, a woman named Cyndee explains, βOne night he invited me out to his car to see some baby rabbits, and I didnβt want to be rude, so, here we are!β Lauer responds, βIβm always amazed at what women will do because theyβre afraid of being rude.β
The hosts of βMy Favorite Murder,β Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff, wouldβve had no such problem. Together, the Los Angeles βbased pair runs a true-crime podcast about murder cases β solved and unsolved, new and old β in which they grant listeners such pearls of wisdom as βgo be rudeβ and βfuck politenessβ to avoid extended interactions with potential murderers.
Both hosts have supported these ideas for a long time, Hardstark told The Huffington Post over email. βNow we just find ourselves in the awesome position of sharing that message with a large audience of women who havenβt been told that they donβt have to be polite at the detriment of their safety,β she wrote, βand that being rude to protect yourself doesnβt make you a bitch.β
βMy Favorite Murderβ has been around for less than a year, but itβs already hit the No. 1 spot on iTunesβ list of top comedy podcasts. Its Facebook group β the closed one, where members discuss pop cultureβs obsession with true-crime, real-life acts of violence, and the showβs many inside jokes β numbers at over 55,000. Last month the hosts participated at the Los Angeles Podcast Festival, recording their first-ever live episode in front of a studio audience raring to laugh at ... death?
Thereβs no denying βcomedy podcastβ and βmurderβ is an odd coupling, but their popularity suggests the show taps into a niche: people who want to indulge in the gruesome realities of the world. People who are mostly women.
βWe can only speculate, but it seems that women can empathize with victims and their families in a way that makes the crimes feel personal,β Hardstark said.
Crimes like that of John List, the man who killed his wife, mother and three children in the familyβs New Jersey mansion before disappearing for 18 years, or Richard Speck, who raped and killed eight student nurses in Chicago.
In each hour-long episode, Hardstark and Kilgariff choose one murder case apiece to research and share with the other. Mini half-hour episodes pull from an increasingly large pool of βhometown murders,β stories solicited from their growing fanbase about the darkest moments in their townsβ histories. While βMy Favorite Murderβ might not have the journalistic integrity of, say, βSerialβ β the hosts introduced a segment called βCorrection Cornerβ after a few episodes to address mistakes β the podcast offers speed, allowing listeners to binge on a vast quantity of horrible stories.
But how do you laugh at a woman like Jennifer Morey, who survived an attack from a would-be killer in Texas thanks to her own quick thinking? In short: you donβt.
βWhen we joke and laugh, itβs aimed at the heaviness of the subject and just how fucked up it all is,β the host said. Instead of poking fun at victims, the hosts rail against the world around them: maximum sentencing laws, statutes of limitations, the backlog of rape kits waiting to be tested, and the idea that media and law enforcement fail to sympathize with sex workersβ deaths.
Of course, the podcast is for listeners of any and every gender. Many of the self-described βmurderinosβ who connect with Kilgariff, Hardstark and one another on the podcastβs social media pages start by expressing their surprise at finding so many others interested in pitch-black true-crime. But maybe it provides a greater release for women brought into the world knowing it might sometimes be a little less safe for them. No one loves murder, exactly. (I know from telling others about this article that saying βIβm writing about a murder podcastβ is a quick way to raise a lot of eyebrows.) Rather, we like the way these stories make us feel β whether thatβs being a smidge more grateful for ho-hum mundanity, satisfied that we are correct in our worldview (yes, it is scary out there) or in awe of the fact that something unexpected may be always right around the corner.
And thatβs exactly why itβs okay to be βrudeβ sometimes.
As the women of βMy Favorite Murderβ would say ...
βMy Favorite Murderβ is available on iTunes. Follow the podcast on Facebook and Twitter.
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