Photo Credit: Mindy Tucker
Kevin Allison’s Risk podcast has been around for nearly 10 years. Over that time, it has published nearly 1,300 stories from both nationally-known comedians and everyday people. The show is similar to shows such as The Moth or This American Life, but prides itself on being completely uncensored. “Nothing is too intimate or emotional or sexual or violent or controversial,” Allison says. “We allow people to tell about the most intense or meaningful or revelatory moments in their lives. Some of the stories are hilarious, some of the stories are scary and some are really beautiful and tear-jerking.”
As the show has continued over the years, Allison is continually surprised by the diversity and quality of stories that come in. “We’ve had stories on the show about someone attempting murder or someone being kidnapped and held hostage,” he says. “Then we also have stories about really intimate things like being there when a parent dies, or really funny comedy of errors stories about losing your virginity.”
One of Risk’s most popular stories is “Jeremy” by Kyle Gest. In this gripping, and at times terrifying story, Gest recounts the experience of becoming off and on friends with someone who would go on to commit horrible crimes. “What I love about that story is that Kyle is really able to take us into all of his thoughts and feelings of bonding with his friend and feeling really encouraged when his friend is nice to him and being fascinated by his friend’s strangeness,” Allison says. “But then over the course of a couple of years he was becoming more and more aware that his friend was downright dangerous.”
The story is one occasion where the show gives a personal perspective to something that had made the national news. “What you often don’t get in national news stories are the intricate mixed feelings and little nuances of the ways that people were confused or seduced,” Allison says. “That story is a very striking story because I love the way that it goes beyond the headlines and into the intimacy of being friends with someone who it turns out did some extremely monstrous stuff.”
While there is a breadth of stories that appear on the Risk podcast, there is one common factor among them. “The most important thing is that the person can express to us that this incident that they lived through meant a lot to them,” Allison says. “That they were very emotionally wound up in what was happening. Because it really doesn’t matter if it was something small or something huge. If you can show us that you really cared, and you were very upset or emotionally invested in what was going on, then we’ll start to care too.”
Allison gives the example of someone who tells a story about a fear of flying. “Most of us will listen to that and say, ‘Well I don’t have any fear of flying in an airplane. That to me doesn’t seem all that risky,’” he says. “But that person can take us in to the actual experience that they had flying in an airplane with all of the thoughts and feelings that went through their body and their mind and all of that sensory detail. Then it can really come alive for us, the listeners, in a very resonant way.”
Each Risk show has a theme, though Allison says that they are very loose with them. “When we do themes it’s actually a little bit more like: Here are some words, and see if they trigger any memories for you,” he says. The theme of Milwaukee’s show is “intense, buzzing or lost.”
Allison’s experience with his storytellers can verge on therapy. “Most of the time the process is a real chance to be able to bond in a very intense short amount of time with lots of people,” he says. “That is one of the surreal things about my life. I do get to know some incredibly personal things about people in a very short amount of time and help them tell that.”
Risk! Live will be at The Back Room @ Colectivo on Friday, March 15. You can purchase tickets here.
