Tear Jerker / The Last Podcast on the Left

While The Last Podcast on the Left is technically a comedy podcast, they will often discuss serious topics.

• In Episode 26, Marcus tells the story of how he had to help a deaf man break up with his girlfriend over the phone. Marcus had to act as the man's voice while simultaneously typing down what the woman said.
  Marcus: That's what I typed! "Crying... Crying... Still Crying."
• In Episode 161, Henry admits that his continued research may have contributed to his girlfriend to leaving him.^note Though as the first entry over in Heartwarming moments shows, he bounced back.
• At the end of Episode 182, Marcus acknowledges the death of one of the podcast's biggest fans. During his message, Marcus begins to choke-up at several points and warns the listeners against suicide.
• In Episode 189, Marcus plays a sound clip from 2001 of NYU students reacting to news footage of the Twin Towers burning after the first plane had hit. The students slowly realize that the objects falling from the Twin Towers are not paper, but they are in fact people falling. Many of the students scream as they see the second plane hit the Towers.
• The death of Caylee Anthony, only two and a half years of age. The trio agree that, regardless of wherever you believe Casey deliberately murdered her or not, it's still a horrible idea to find the remains of a little girl in some woods somewhere.
  • And then there's the trial and how much of a circus it was. The prosecution got cocky and made critical mistakes with what little evidence they had, then got blindsided by the wild accusations of a defence that didn't have their own evidence and got free rein to confuse the jury. And this isn't getting into how a vital clue was missed due to miscommunication and the finger-pointing that followed. It’s hard to believe justice was truly done when you take all of this into account.
  • If you choose to believe Marcus' theory, then the why behind the murder makes it even worse. Casey was not a criminal mastermind or a serial killer, she just didn't want to be a single mom anymore, and through her sociopathy and narcissism decided that killing her own child was the way to get her freedom back. Getting rid of Caylee was just a means to an incredibly selfish end.
  • Much sympathy is shown towards poor George Anthony by the hosts. Things were already bad with a narcissistic habitual liar of a daughter and an equally narcissistic wife who was always on her side. But then their granddaughter is found dead, and George suspected that his daughter was responsible for it, leading to him being Driven to Suicide, which failed. Then he had to go into court and not react to Jose Baez accusing him of molesting his own daughter. Poor man had it rough.
    • Henry admits that, watching the trial footage, he started getting angry at everybody else in the Anthony household at points. In his estimation, nobody cared enough about Caylee to break the unspoken silence in that household, since Casey would explode every time she was confronted on her lies. Essentially, they let Caylee’s death happen because nobody was brave enough to speak up, which might have prevented the whole tragedy.
• The hosts have a moment of pity for James Thurman Jones, the father of infamous cult leader Jim Jones, after finding out that he died a penniless, depressed alcoholic openly despised by his wife and son whose tombstone read "Everyone in the world is my friend." In general, the elder Jones seemed to lead a rather messed-up life, something that's touched on by Marcus, Ben, and Henry multiple times.
  • Marcus opines one of the real tragedies of Peoples Temple - at the start, they were doing actual good, helping to solve real problems and push for racial integration in the states they were in. Had Jones not gone off the rails the way he did, it's likely they could have continued being a positive force and an example of a socialist community that worked.
  • The true irony of the Jonestown massacre was that it was intended as an act of "revolutionary suicide", with Jim believing that he would go down in history as a great man protesting against the establishment. Instead, he is now remembered as a lunatic who lead nine hundred and eighteen people, himself included, to their deaths - all of which was boiled down to a tasteless joke by pundits and politicians. Denied the legacy he truly wanted, all he has now are the "Kool-Aid Man" pins that Henry has.
    Henry: What a waste.
    Marcus: What a gigantic waste.
• In Episode 347, the hosts explain how killer Mark Twitchell used internet catfishing to lure in a victim. The victim, a man, wanted so badly for his date to work out that he overlooked glaringly suspicious details. At one point, the man actually decided to abandon the date, but he was ultimately lured back in. One source claims the man's last pain-free words before being murdered by Twitchell were, "I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment."
• "Side Stories: KB" is dedicated to memories of the guys' good friend Kevin Barnett after his sudden death from pancreatitis in January 2019.
  • In "Side Stories: Human Dolls", Ben admits that he passed a man on the street who resembled Kevin and wished he could hug the man.
    • On the February 26th 2019 episode of Last Stream, Ben admits that in a drunken stupor, he did attempt to text Kevin again only to find that his phone number was disconnected which caused him to break down. Henry does seem a bit saddened by this, but the tone shifts back into more heartwarming comedy in which Ben says they can keep his number connected when he dies, even crowdfund for the payment of his phone bills.
• In Episode 349, the horrors of Josef Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz are so brutal that the hosts break up the more upsetting facts with fun trivia about Home Improvement. It doesn't really help.
  • As discussed by the boys, Mengele's experiments on twins were All for Nothing. The whole point was to understand the phenomena of identical twins, with the eventual goal of unlocking hereditary genetics, thus accelerating the development of the Nazi's Master Race. But rather than just studying identical twins, Mengele took fraternal twins as well, which polluted his data to the point of utter uselessness. And that isn't even getting into the fact that the Nazi's only used their rudimentary understanding of hereditary genetics to validate their beliefs, which were a hodgepodge of occult nonsense cherry-picked from Madame Blavatsky's works. Operating on this level of pseudo-science bordering on mysticism, it's likely that Mengele never would have got what he wanted anyway, no matter how good or bad his science was. This makes the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, at his hands in Auschwitz-Birkenau pointless on top of cruel and stupid.
• Episode III of Aum Shinrikyo gives us the tale of a woman who managed to escape the cult on multiple occasions... only to keep coming back. She simply could not rid herself of the idea that Shoko Asahara would send her to hell for her disobedience, even when she knew that everything the cult did was bad. She ended up going through the extremely traumatic "bardo" ceremony three times as a result.
• Captain Charles B. McVay III's controversial court-martialling following the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. It resulted in the destruction of the man's career and a constant stream of hate mail blaming him for the deaths of sons and fathers, which eventually lead to his suicide. And all because, it seemed, the US Navy couldn't accept that the loss of the Indy was down to freak chance and needed somebody to blame for what happened. As Marcus bitterly puts it:
  "When America's hurt, somebody's gonna get it."
• The life of Anneliese Michel (the inspiration for The Exorcism of Emily Rose) is very much a tragic story from beginning to end. Her deeply religious family didn't understand (or rather, didn't want to accept) her epilepsy and seizures, instead believing that she was possessed by demons. Anneliese was subsequently subjected to 67 exorcisms, many of which Anneliese herself asked for. These traumatizing procedures lead to Anneliese eventually starving herself to death, and she was so weak by the time she died, she could barely manage to whimper out her last words: "Mama, come here. I'm afraid."
  • And then there's the fact that the entire thing was encouraged and taken advantage of by a cabal of priests who wanted to use the entire thing to publicise their opposition to the Vatican-2 reforms. The idea that anyone could exploit a person's medical condition to push their own religious agenda is heart-rending. The one merciful comfort is that these priests didn't get what they wanted - the public was outraged by the exorcisms and they were put on trial for negligent manslaughter.

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