When Mike Reiss takes a vacation, he often skips over the tried and true and heads for global hotspots like Iraq, Libya and North Korea. And cold-spots, too, like the Antarctica, Lizzie Borden’s home in Fall River and a mini-sub cruise a couple of miles beneath the North Atlantic to see the sunken Titanic.

With his wife Denise, the intrepid explorer of the two, they also hit the more-traveled destinations as well. Through it all, they joke about awful hotels, hideous tour guides and less-than-wondrous dining experiences in their popular “What Am I Doing Here?” podcast. If the humor and surreal sensibility of the podcasts remind you of a wildly popular TV series, it’s no wonder.

Mike Reiss at various times has been a writer, producer and showrunner of the Emmy Award- and Peabody Award-winning animated series “The Simpsons” from the day it began nearly 30 years ago to the present.

But that’s just one of many roles for Mike Reiss, who was born and raised in Bristol, Conn. He is also an author, screenwriter and playwright. He has now parlayed the couple’s unusual global jaunts over the decades into one of the most wickedly funny podcasts around.

So far, they’ve created more than 40 15-minute-or-so podcasts packed with tell-it-like-it-is travel info from “hotspots and hell holes” with gags galore mixed in—certainly more than Radio Lab. And the laughs can even come from unexpected places.

“The hardest part of this recent trip was getting out of Canada,” said Mike Reiss, who had just returned from his latest trip to visit the submerged Titanic. “The airport was like the fall of Saigon and that’s when you discover that Canadians aren’t nice all the time.”

Mike Reiss, 62, is a bit of an animated character himself with a wide-eyed face that teeters from LOL to WTF. Denise adds her own wry commentary to her husband’s global kvetch-a-thon.

The podcasts started when a friend, knowing of the Reiss’ years of unusual travel itineraries and subsequent wild anecdotes, urged Mike Reiss to try his hand at the downloadable entertainment format. He invested in tech equipment, hired a producer and recorded a handful of test shows.

“It was a nice pandemic project since we weren’t traveling,” he said.

Bleav, the company that has several hundred podcasts in its roster, liked what the couple had done and suddenly “What Am I Doing Here?” was available to a wide audience of “Simpsons” fans and those armchair tourists who wanted something more unchartered—and with a touch of Homer and Marge.

Mike Reiss pointed out that his podcasts are substantial. “It’s not like others. I found that about 95 percent of other podcasts are people interviewing a friend—and because I’m a great go-to guest, that friend is often me. But this one is fully produced, like a radio show.”

The podcasts…|CONTINUED|