The Buddy System
A humble podcast with Chicago comedians Chris Higgins and Matty Ryan.
We finally land the #1 best guest, getting arrested in high school, Matty got to pretend he was a Higgins on a father/son trip to Oregon, Elliot’s childhood cannon, rail torpedoes, normal boyhood stuff like exploding train tracks, Chris’s arch nemesis: the seagull, playing tug of war with and eel and then also an octopus, cryptid of the week: the PNW Apecat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Frog tongue cheeseburger, reading fantasy books vs. animal tracking, rat pocket tailor, Luke and Matty roast Chris’s outfit for six hours, doing a S&P 500 in your pants for hotel dominance, Luke’s extremely dope wolf shirt/the wolves inside us all, Nimrods, posses, hell yeah city New Episodes every Tuesday! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bastille day, march on Versailles, eagle or vulture, profesh executioners, coy wolves, British swan laws, where the christ are all the baby Garys Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matty's a bit of a doctor himself, George Washington coulda been a nobody, 4th of July fireworks and fungi, World Cup fans, professional perverts, open wounds in flood water, Frozen is a phenomenal film. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matty has spider bones, a man called Grover, Colorado suckholes, White Sox mascot, beautiful brave sons, hogs both small and mangled, Proboscis monkey, Chris doesn’t trust his own ass Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
90s Jock Jams, the World Cup song situation (why Jelly Roll?), the show Alone, a Naked and Afraid snakebite story Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
No guest this week, just Chris and Matty hanging out for a summer episode of the Buddy System Podcast. The boys try to figure out if they could draw the United States from memory, get deep into sauna and steam room culture, talk through whether Matty wants kids and how protective he already is of his nieces and nephews, break down why soccer beats lacrosse on pure accessibility, and close out with another Cryptid of the Week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scoochie Boochie (https://www.instagram.com/scoochie_boochie) is back on the Buddy System Podcast, and Chris and Matty barely make it through hello before the three of them are swapping tour bus stories, including the act that got left sleeping under a bridge in Milwaukee. From there it is a full hour of comedy podcast tangents: why nerds keep pairing Magic the Gathering with cocaine, a Christian unicycle family dribbling basketballs for Christ, the fact that every crow sounds like Ron White, whether you could train a dog for the biathlon, and the universal truth that your male cat has nipples. Scoochie shouts out his friend Alex Wannell as Treasure of the Week for talking him through a brown recluse bite, the guys invent a pistol with a single tooth, and somewhere in there katana otters, a fridge full of kimchi, and a plan to dodge the draft all come up before the whole thing lands on the green team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chris and Matty finally do the alien episode, which according to Chris is the moment they officially became a real comedy podcast. They dig into the Age of Disclosure documentary, UAP whistleblowers, the little guys at Area 51, and the global race to reverse-engineer alien tech, before getting sidetracked onto flying cars we never got, AI quietly making everyone dumber, and a dragon cover-up theory that may get them detained. Then Chicago comedian and environmentalist Lucia Whalen (@luciawhalen) joins for her third visit to tell the full story of the car that was definitely stolen until it wasn't, and to bum everyone out (lovingly) about Roundup, Monsanto, and the Supreme Court before talking everyone back off the ledge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Our buddy Sam Biru (@morkatabiru) finally pulls up to the Buddy System for the first time, and he earned it: Chicago comic by way of Philadelphia, 2025 JFL New Faces, and one of the best of the new class. Chris and Matty get into the laughing tap to JFL pipeline, the time two grown men with their luggage finished a kids' bingo card at the Milwaukee Bobblehead Museum, and why it is basically impossible to doomscroll the news and then go do standup. From there it is whitewashed history class and the ongoing case that Paul Revere is not real, the Penn State professor who taught nothing, and Sam's acting past, including a play where his only job was to die of a seizure and the time he got booted a week before opening night for bringing beer and hash to rehearsal. Sam runs a live voiceover bit as a 75 year old conspiracy theorist school bus driver, the guys pitch a songless Lord of the Rings, and it all ends with a full Chet Hanks appreciation hour. Comedy, Chicago stand up, and a whole lot of tangents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Our buddy Adam Gilbert (@adamgilbert__) is back in Chicago for a sold-out weekend and we got him in the studio. We arm him with a hatchet because and he tells the story of the night someone stole his suitcase out of his car outside the Hideout while he was on Molly, how Old Navy in Indianapolis got him through the rest of the road run, and the absolute farce that is trying to file a police report at the Logan Square station. Chris and Adam reconnect on meeting at Cream City Comedy Fest in 2016, comedy festivals as summer camp, and the brutal Tuesday-night logic of clubs putting headliners on slow nights. We do Cryptid of the Month with Mothman, the New Jersey Devil, and Adam's complete confusion about who Cthulhu is, which becomes a Katulu's-cock-behind-a-Patreon-paywall bit and the birth of NSFC (Not Safe For Cowards). Plus: hungover British accents in the Amtrak quiet car, Adam's first full year headlining and the tickets-tickets-tickets grind, his animal-penis Wikipedia spiral leading into a fully sober lecture about what tentacle porn is, bad Better Help teletherapists, and Adam going on record that Chicago tavern-style pizza beats New York pizza. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Our buddy Luke Null (SNL, "Pretty Songs Dirty Words" ft. Wayne Brady) is back at the studio and he and Chris have a new segment to debut: Will Matty Read It, where they pitch Matty a book and find out whether he'll actually read the thing. Luke goes first with Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold, a Kill Bill revenge novel set in the First Law universe with a numbers-obsessed sociopath named Friendly. Chris counters with Stephen King's Gerald's Game, the one about the woman handcuffed to the bed in a Maine cabin with a dead husband on the floor and a very tall man watching her from the corner, who the boys spend the rest of the episode calling Carl. Along the way they get into George R.R. Martin letting fan fiction of his own books trickle out, why The Dark Tower movie is the worst book adaptation ever made, the genius of The Stand's Boulder-versus-Vegas premise, and Matty workshopping his own forest fantasy novel on the spot with strict rules against robot shit and animal husbandry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's a spring double-holiday episode and Israel and Rob made sure Chris and Matty actually learned what the Battle of Puebla was about before they ran their mouths. From there: Mattie's iPhone alarm has ruined Bob Marley for him, he found a pile of dead flickers in Michigan and called the DNR, ramps are out, Chris recaps the Dallas / Tulsa / Portland / Eugene tour run, Texas writes everyone's textbooks, Homo sapiens vs Neanderthals (we won because we threw stuff), three new Favorite Animals including a monkey that looks like it got napalmed, Maeve buying a Costco pear tree that needs a buddy to fruit, an amphibious bike with big old titties (patent pending), and Oregon rocks for Treasure of the Week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Comedian Sam Rocha (@samhandleyrocha) joins us and the conversation goes everywhere. Sam moved from Santa Barbara to Chicago to study comedy at Columbia, AOC followed her after her political campaign manager sketch, and her commitment to Mariah Carey is unmatched on this earth. We get into the airline that genuinely forgot to book a pilot, the time Matty got chewed out by a pilot for trying to smoke a cigarette on the runway as a teenager, Chris's new Cat Bird ring, Matty's potentially 10,000-year-old arrowhead, picking your daemon if you lived in The Golden Compass, a 103-acre wallaby island for sale in Scotland that's allegedly full of homophobic wallabies, Things We Wrote Down™, the delivery robot surveillance soft launch theory, and the time Sam tried to convince ChatGPT that Mariah Carey was a hero of 9/11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chris and Matty celebrate the most sacred of stoner holidays with an hour of weed stories, childhood chaos, and brand new cryptid content. From Chris kayaking to school in Boulder to Matty dodging undercover cops on the South Side of Chicago, the guys trade their wildly different paths to becoming functioning adult stoners. Plus, the debut of Cryptid of the Month featuring the Not Deer and Champy, a detour into Nepal's time zone situation, and the discovery that dwarf metal is a real genre of music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Our good pal Loosh comes by the studio to bum us tf out. She's got facts, she's got figures, and she wants to know if she should've brought her hat. Lucia Whalen is the first two time guest of the Buddy System and will be back a plenty with her new segment, "Lucia Bums Us Out" Check it out! Its very fun and also informative! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chris and Matty are back with an episode that covers Mormon missionaries, battle horse PTSD, fake IDs, the world's dirtiest man, and the Swiss military strategy of just slapping people. Chris tells a story about herding cattle in Montana and riding horses in the wild, Matty nearly dies horseback riding in Nicaragua, and both guys agree that bike cops are the least threatening form of law enforcement. They get into WWII history, defend Portland and Fargo, pitch a friendship kidnapping service called Napper, and Chris recounts taking acid at LCD Soundsystem and briefly wanting to run for president. Matty spots a barred owl at Montrose and goes deep on killer whale ecotypes. Plus: the man who didn't shower for 65 years and why that ruins everything we know about medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chris opened a tin of sardines at the studio and Matty is not having it. That somehow leads to the accidental invention of bread, T-Mobile charging ten dollars to talk to a human, Batman being a billionaire cop, their Batman villain names, and asking the warehouse ghosts to please keep things platonic. Two new segments debut this week — Things I Wrote Down and Treasure of the Week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The self-proclaimed best rapper in the United States and the guy born from a volcano -- Scoochie Boochie joins Chris and Matty at Iconoclast Studios for a conversation that covers improv burnout, comedy rap as an actual genre, pandemic hair disasters, and the hard truth about the improv industry (there isn't one). Plus a brand new segment drops: Notes from Our Phone, where everyone reads their most unhinged half-baked comedy premises. Things get educational — did you know toilet paper wasn't invented until 1857? Or that Romans shared a communal butt rag on a stick? Neither did we, and we're worse for knowing it now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's Matty's birthday, it's St. Patrick's Day, and someone gifted him a whale penis sculpture. Chris and Matty get into the origin story of Chicago dyeing the river green, hotel horror stories, the NA beer and mocktail price scam, body proportion facts discovered in the shower, a love letter to San Francisco, and a top five sandwiches ranking that gets heated. Plus: a tanuki follow-up, playground violence nostalgia, and why modern conspiracy theorists might actually be the optimists now. New episodes every Tuesday. Leave a review and join the Patreon at patreon.com/buddysystempod for bonus episodes, early access, and cooking segments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices