Hello From the Magic Tavern

In 2015, Jackbox writer Arnie Niekamp teamed up with his improviser friends, Matt Young and Adal Rifai, to start a podcast with a unique approach. No, it wasn’t about true crime, current events, or rewatching a classic tv series. 

Instead, Hello from the Magic Tavern casts Arnie Niekamp as himself, a Chicago comedian and podcaster who stumbles through a dimensional magical portal (behind a Burger King drive-thru) and finds himself in a magical, fantasy world called “Foon.” 

There, he records a podcast with his two co-hosts, Usidor the Blue, a wizard with an extremely long name (Young), and a talking shapeshifting badger named Chunt (Rafai). 

Each episode is completely improvised, with the hosts and guests continuously trying to make each other break into laughter with crude references, bad puns, and outlandish storylines. 

The show has been a wild success. Their Patreon has thousands of subscribers, they regularly feature staples of the comedy community (like Felicia Day, Andy Daly, Jason Mantzoukas and Thomas Middleditch), and they’ve hosted numerous live shows to sold-out crowds. 

While the show is carefree and, well, silly, its performers have managed to build an incredibly immersive and expansive fantasy world with a simple concept in improvisational comedy: “Yes, and.”

“Yes, and” is pretty straightforward, but powerful. Whenever a partner in a scene makes a suggestion you should “yes and” (accept the change, and build upon it). So in the case of Hello from the Magic Tavern, whenever one of the hosts or guests says something about the land of Foon, it instantly becomes canon. 

Offhand suggestions have created a trial by fire legal system (it’s a trial, but a fire’s in the room), blood drives for vampires (to drink), and the fact that, randomly, January 3rd exists on both Foonish and Earth calendars. 

In an interview with the A.V. Club from 2017, Rafai talks about how the ideal guest is one who is not afraid to “break our world.” He goes on to say, “The beauty of our show is that you can’t break the world. Even if we say, ‘the sky is yellow,’ and you come on and say, ‘the sky is orange’ we’ll be like, ‘…yeah, it changes.’” 

And of course, whenever they have a hard time explaining how one of these “yes and” moments is possible, they always can fall back on chalking it up to “magic.” 

Over time, the show has expanded well beyond its titular Magic Tavern, and Arnie, Usidor and Chunt have traveled across all of Foon. “Yes and” has allowed the universe to grow and, more importantly, to constantly remain fresh.

By embracing new suggestions and building upon them, any idea can expand as much as Niekamp, Young and Rafai have expanded the world of Foon. You don’t have to change the color of the sky, but by embracing “yes, and” you might just open yourself to brand new, and unexpected, worlds.