Two years after its launch, Pen Pals with Daniel & Rory is going strong as one of the funniest, most sincere podcasts there is.

Co-hosts Daniel Van Kirk and Rory Scovel turned the tired 'mailbag' show paradigm into more than 100 episodes of a podcast that never ceases to sound as inspired as it was on its first episode.

Each week, the two stand-ups read and react to letters, postcards, emails and direct messages from listeners posing hypothetical questions, asking for unprofessional advice or just sharing stories.

The pair have covered topics as divergent as the toxicity of family ties and the validity of vanilla ice cream. They've explored music, cults, social media, religion and mysteries of the universe — like Rory's haunted giraffe statuette or the fact that they each have aunts named Connie who made them Alf costumes for Halloween.

Pen Pals casts a wide net.

"Whatever people write us, that dictates everything," Rory tells Q104.3 New York's QN'A." The tone of an episode is not our choice. It’s all in the letters."

Through the podcast, Daniel and Rory have served as junior grand marshals in a Mardi Gras parade in Galveston, Texas, talked about suicide with guest Conan O'Brien, and they would have crashed a wedding this spring (with the bride and groom's blessing) were it not for this meddling pandemic.

The show is fortified with inside jokes and references dating back to its earliest episodes. To help get new listeners up to speed, fans created a guide to some of the highlights of the first two years of the show, dubbed 'Emily's Pen Pals Path to Pitching Pen Pals'.

But what might seem like shapeshifting on the part of the co-hosts is actually the opposite. Daniel and Rory aren't so much versatile on Pen Pals as they are utterly genuine and deeply funny.

Each letter, no matter how trivial or taboo, is handled with care, humor and open minds. Nothing is off-limits and you never know where Daniel and Rory are going to go, but the laughs are always nearby.

"I think that we can talk about anything dark, anything light," Daniel says. "Because of who Rory and I are, inherently, we are probably a minute to a minute-and-a-half away from some sort of joke anyway. You can't take the comedy out of it."

In separate conversations with QN'A, Rory and Daniel discussed the genesis of Pen Pals, why it works so well, where it has taken them and where it could go.

Read more below!

Check out Pen Pals with Daniel & Rory here on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow the show via Instagram and Facebook.

See Daniel Van Kirk live Thursday, July 16, at 9 PM Easter/6 PM Pacific at the Nowhere Comedy Club! Check out his Good Night Show podcast and Dumb People Town with Randy and Jason Sklar!

Watch Rory Scovel in his Comedy Central series Robbie here!

Photo: Mindy Tucker

Full Schedule

Latest Stories