Cashing In with T.J. Miller is a podcast by comedians Cash Levy and T.J. Miller started in 2012. The premise is that it’s Cash Levy’s talk show, but he can’t find any guests to come on except for T.J. Miller. Each episode is structured in segments, starting with the Triple Banger Lightning Round (a series of three questions) and ending with Maskers (“ask the masters,” in which they answer listener-submitted questions). In between, and sometimes varying in order, are What Hurts?, Where Were You, Essential Questions of Human Nature, Practical Living in the Modern Age, Tiny Opinions, and Tweetalyze, as well as the (extremely occasional) Tickling the Oracle. Common topics include travel, relationships, parenting, language, comedy as a profession, sports, movies, and absurdist philosophy.

A typical episode involves some kind of sketch explaining why T.J. Miller is the guest yet again. These often include celebrity guests that have canceled for one reason or another (including one being hit by a car and one eating too much naan). Other examples include when Cash went into the Alaskan wilderness to interview Sasquatch, only to find it was T.J. Miller in a costume.

Riffing

Cash Levy and T.J. Miller are both improvisational comedians. In the context of a comedy performance, improv has to be “tight.” It has to make a certain amount of sense and it matters whether a joke lands. On the podcast, the pair’s improv is “loose.” They tend to throw out whatever they think of, creating more freeform comedy. In a multi-person improv scene, such as in Middleditch and Schwartz, there is an effort to maintain continuity and to establish a storyline. With Cashing In, the improv has a more dreamlike quality in which the facts of a situation can fluidly change (often as a joke is developed).

Cash: It’s fun working with a celebrity. You get a lot of nice comments, people come up and say things like, “You’ll get there.”

T.J.: Did somebody really say that to you this time?

Cash: Yeah.

T.J.: Somebody said that this week?

Cash: Yeah. “You’ll get there.”

T.J.: What is that about? Also because Cash has been killing so hard that it’s difficult for me to follow him, because he’s a headliner in his own right, so that’s an even weirder thing where they really enjoyed your show but at the end of it they’re like, “You’ll get there.” Get where? What do you mean? We’re all right here.

Cash: Well, I was walking to a Conoco station.

T.J.: Oh, and he was like, “You’ll get…”

Cash: And they yelled it out the window, but I blamed it on you.

T.J.: Well I was the one that encouraged those developers to put the Conoco station so far away from the [comedy club]. And that effectively was the longest I’ve ever reached to try and justify something that we’ve said, to no avail. I mean it was…

Cash: Well that’s, y’know, that’s the key to improv, you’re supposed to take any suggestion and you really took that all the way.

T.J.: Yeah. And I think, you know, we’re… we’re about… it’s less about “yes and,” you know, affirming something and adding information, for us than it is for sort of, “yes, and here’s how you mispronounced that last sentence of words.”

“Salty Butter Face- Live from Omaha!”

Many jokes on the podcast originate from Cash Levy stumbling over a word and the pair creating new meaning from it, or retroactively contriving a reason why it makes sense.

Cash: Last time we left after the podcast, we had a little donnybrook with the parking lot attendant.

T.J.: Oh I’ll talk about this.

Cash: For the first time I got to see T.J. Miller in a very combative situation and I didn’t know what to picture. And you went na- you went crazy on that guy.

T.J.: I went naked on that guy.

Cash: Yeah. You went really naked.

T.J.: When you go super crazy on somebody, I call that going naked on them. ‘Cause you gotta be real crazy to strip your clothes off in a donnybrook situation and say, “come at me.”

“Kool-Aid Boogaloo”

These invented words and phrases like “going naked,” referred to as cash phrases, are documented on the fanmade site cashphrases.org. The concept of cash phrases originated with two sayings Cash once tried to popularize: “custom fit” and “taste it.” These were soon followed by da shi-shi, Cash’s favorite nonsensical catchphrase, and eventually other invented words and phrases became cash phrases too.

An absurdist perspective

Much of the comedy in Cashing In comes from looking at something ordinary from an unusual perspective. This is illustrated in what could be called one of the show’s axioms: that everything can be a ladle if you attach a handle to it. Some things, like cups and bowls, make excellent ladles; most things, like guitar strings, sand castles, and pillowcases, make extremely poor ladles. The idea is that what makes a ladle a ladle is the long handle, and that definition has absurd consequences. Instead of treating those absurdities as a reductio and discarding the definition, Cash and T.J. acknowledge and embrace the absurdity.

This is the comedy inherent in saying something ridiculous while taking it seriously. Ideas are never discarded as “just a joke.” Instead, any given idea thrown out there while riffing is investigated in philosophical detail.

Comedy through repetition

Callbacks to previous episodes and past jokes are a major part of what makes Cashing In what it is. Jokes are even repeated far past the point of being funny, then coming full circle to become funny again. This is illustrated in T.J.’s Maskers rant. The segment’s name is short for “ask the masters,” and T.J. strongly insists that the segment has nothing to do with masks. Listeners regularly ask questions about masks, prompting T.J. on nearly every episode to rage about Maskers.

Another example of repetition is Cash and T.J. on one episode spending several minutes making “I don’t trust a lawyer who…” jokes. It has been established in the podcast that one should not trust a lawyer with ten lava lamps, as this surpasses the lava lamp legal limit.

Not just comedy

Cashing In contains a fair amount of actual advice, in the form of the Practical Living in the Modern Age segment, as well as serious discussions about relationships, family, work, and health. The first and most notable Practical Living is “pre-tipping,” the practice of tipping a server at a restaurant during your first interaction with them. This only works if you’re a good tipper. By tipping the server right away, you build good will and receive the benefits from tipping well. An important aspect of pre-tipping is also post-tipping (and letting the server know you are also going to tip them at the end of the meal). From anecdotal evidence, servers appreciate pre-tipping and it leads to better interactions.

T.J.: The only drawback to pre-tipping is it somehow sounds sexual I’ve found.

“Chocolate Seals- Live from Edmonton”