"Coming to you from Los Angeles, California: the show where people turn for intelligent conversations on all the topics you care about!"
Point vs. Point is a weekly American comedy podcast hosted by comedians Evan Mann and Gareth Reynolds. Ostensibly a debate-based news show in which the hosts are meant to offer contrasting points of view on issues of the day, each episode always devolves into a never-ending series of petty squabbles between the two.
Evan and Gareth play a fictional Odd Couple version of themselves; Evan is a knowledgable, oversensitive and dull liberal, while Gareth is a narcissistic, hot-headed, ignorant right-winger and pathological liar. Each episode features Evan reading real news stories from the week the show is released, but the discussion is always derailed by Gareth's stupidity and incompetence.
The show started as a series of video segments on Evan and Gareth's YouTube channel
in 2012 before launching as a weekly audio podcast in 2014.
Most episodes of the show feature the following recurring segments:
- The Big Story: A series of news headlines from the previous week.
- Gareth's Turn: Gareth is given free rein to talk about whatever he wants, but he rarely has anything prepared and usually just rambles off the top of his head.
- Newsy Nuggets of Nuts: Evan reads strange or humorous news stories.
New episodes are released weekly (except when Gareth is on tour with his other podcast The Dollop) through the All Things Comedy Network.
Tropes appearing in Point vs. Point include:
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer: In the late summer of 2017, Evan and Gareth start living in one under the streets of Los Angeles.
- Affably Evil:
- Dr. Anthony Shmarza is one of the most outwardly friendly and agreeable characters on the show, who also performs ridiculously evil medical experiments on people.
- Evan's personal assistant "Alfonso" (real name Jack) turns out to be this.
- Bad Liar: Evan can always tell when Gareth is lying, mostly because his dishonesty is so ridiculous and impulsive.
- Black Comedy Rape: Evan's whirlwind relationship with Charlize Theron is eventually revealed to be this; a con artist named Jack was continuously drugging him into a hallucinatory stupor with spiked orange juice and sexually abusing him while pretending to be the supposed couple's personal assistant "Alfonso".
- Blatant Lies: Around 80-90% of everything that comes out of Gareth's mouth. Evan sees right through 100% of them. Notable ones include:
- He constantly announces that he will sell various products and inventions (such as a sheet with a hole in it that people can have sex through, or a "snake-proof" suit that allows people to survive being swallowed by snakes) on "realwebsite.cum".
- He regularly brings his friend Ronald in as a guest on the show to try and trick Evan into thinking he's various other people, most often his "Swindian" (Swiss-Indian) friend Dan Govandi or his Oklahoman attorney Chaz Beaumonty. Evan always catches on right away, but Gareth and Ronald insist on maintaining the lie at all costs.
- They don't even try and hide the fact that "Dan" is the lead singer of a band called Ronald & The Raccoons, known for the songs "My Real Name Is Ronald" and "Dan Isn't Me, It's Just For That Podcast".
- Jealous that Evan is supposedly dating Charlize Theron, Gareth hires a delusional drug addict who dresses up as Wonder Woman for tourist photos on Hollywood Boulevard to pretend to be his girlfriend Winona Ryder.
- Country Matters: Gareth has been known to call Malia Obama (Barack Obama's daughter) a "cunt" on numerous occasions.
- Everyone Has Standards: Gareth is sexist, racist, classist, anti-Semitic and borderline homophobic; however, he chastises Dan Govandi in one episode for making fun of transgender people and provides a fairly accurate and sympathetic description of gender dysphoria.
- Exact Words: While giving Evan and Gareth a tour of the sewer city they now all live in, Dr. Anthony Shmarza assures Evan that the water trickling from a certain spring is entirely drinkable... meaning one is physically able to drink it, not that it's at all safe. Evan of course gets horrifically sick.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Despite the fact that they don't seem to like each other at all, Evan and Gareth are forced to be together for the sake of the show.
- Line-of-Sight Name: In episode 8, to try and avoid Evan catching him in another obvious lie, Gareth says he's late for a dinner with his friend "Dan Govandi" (a mispronunciation of Govinda, an Indian actor they had just been talking about), and proceeds to bring his friend Ronald into the studio to pretend to be Dan Govandi for years afterward.
- Mondegreen Gag: Gareth constantly confuses words—even basic ones—with other ones:
- After hearing that a woman got drunk by drinking vanilla extract, he mishears it as "vanilla Ex-Lax" note and announces he will use it to get drunk at a concert.
- After hearing that new racially diverse Emojis have been introduced, he launches into an impassioned rant about how being "emojinal" shouldn't depend on one's race.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: When Ronald pretends to be Gareth's attorney Chaz Beaumonty, he simply wears a cheap fake moustache.
- Playing with Syringes: Dr. Anthony Shmarza supposedly impregnates Evan with his own sperm and later gives him a hormonal injection that induces menopause without telling him first.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Gareth is boisterous, selfish, reactionary and aggressive; Evan is sensitive, introverted and plays by the rules.
- The Reveal: In late June 2017, it's revealed that Evan's romantic relationship with actress Charlize Theron was actually a giant hallucination caused by a con artist named Jack (who himself was pretending to be his and Charlize's personal assistant Alfonso) drugging him over the course of three months.
- Too Dumb to Live: The extent to which Gareth understands basic facts and concepts fluctuates a bit due to Rule of Funny, but he's had some low moments:
- He insists from the very first episode that the solution to droughts and rising ocean levels is for humanity to start drinking seawater en masse.
- He is apparently unaware that there are countries called Israel and Iran and thinks that Evan is saying the words "is real" and "I ran".
- His parents told him that Santa Claus stops delivering presents after kids turn eighteen, and he still believes it well into his thirties.
- He is unable to grasp the idea that there is both a Navy ship and a person named John McCain, and concludes that US Senator John McCain is a man that can transform into a ship.
- Underground City: The sewers of Los Angeles that Evan and Gareth are eventually forced to live in counts as this.
- Who's on First?: A news story about tensions between Iran and Israel confuses Gareth because he thinks Evan is saying "is real" and "I ran". Evan even name drops "Who's on First?" but Gareth doesn't understand the reference.
