Wacky delight of Richard’s Famous Food Podcast

Richard’s Famous Food Podcast is easily the most difficult to describe show I have reviewed to date.

Richard's Famous Food Podcast is wildly entertaining in the way of a Monty Python sketch show, free-associating from one absurd scene to the next.

Richard’s Famous Food Podcast is easily the most difficult to describe show I have reviewed to date. The best I can come up with is: a series of short audio features about food trends, hosted by a pickle, with regular musical interludes and fourth-wall-warping sketches.

It’s wildly disorienting and wildly entertaining in the way of a Monty Python sketch show, free-associating from one absurd scene to the next.

Along the way you’ll certainly learn something about food, but the real point here seems to be an expression of a specific surreal sense of humour that best can be described as “very online”.

Something this densely constructed and bizarre feels as if it could have been born only on the internet, where independent creators working in highly experimental forms have found substantial audiences.

The host and creator of Richard’s Famous Food Podcast is Richard Parks III, a writer and producer who also made (among other things) Wayne Coyne’s Human Head-Shaped Tumor, a 2012 musical radio play billed as being “in the style of Mercury Theatre’s War of the Worlds” and starring the Flaming Lips’ lead singer, Coyne.

RFFP is just a kaleidoscope of creativity. Parks combines clever writing (featuring lines such as “bone broth is stock’s millennial niece”) with editing that feels like it wrings every drop of juice from the material, and outrageously detailed sound design.

The abundance of sloppy, crunchy, slurping Foley effects is a nightmare for those who can’t handle a noisy chewer at the dinner table. In Parks’s hands, these sounds take on an almost musical tone, mixed in alongside a recurring orgasmic yell from an old Orson Welles television spot.

One recent episode, a crossover with the brilliant and similarly mind-bending podcast Everything is Alive, really pushes things into even stranger territory as a guest host steps in to interview the podcast — not the host, the podcast itself. This eventually leads to a trip to the podcast graveyard, where jettisoned audio goes to die.

Listen to Richard’s Famous Food Podcast on your favourite podcast app.

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