My Dad Wrote a Porno: Do Not Listen While Operating Heavy Machinery

Need to improve your Monday morning commute? Listen to a podcast called My Dad Wrote a Porno. You can guess that this is a NSFW (though I think I've recommended it to everyone I work with regardless), very adult podcast that you don't want your kids listening to. But if you're acquainted with the birds and the bees, grab your headphones (and your cervix) and get ready.

The show is hosted by three Brits: Jamie Morton, Alice Levine, and James Cooper. Jamie is the unfortunate soul whose father has written a pornographic e-book entitled, Belinda Blinked. His father writes under the choice pseudonym of Rocky Flintstone and this whole endeavor began as a retirement lark after he tired of writing tamer fare, like travel guides, with his wife. He gave the finished manuscript to his son, and the horror-struck Jamie decided there was only way to get through this piece of erotic fiction - reading it chapter-by-chapter on a podcast with his friends, Alice and James.

I first heard about this podcast on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour (the source of all of my favorite recommendations) and I was hooked after the first five minutes. And the people I have recommended it to have been similarly ensnared. I devoured the first season over a weekend, and thankfully, because Rocky Flintstone did not just stop with one book, the gang are now in the midst of reading Belinda Blinked 2, releasing a new chapter every Monday morning to start my week off right. I have frightened my fellow commuters by cackling on the shuttle or giggling on the street. But who cares, because this podcast is so brilliant. In addition, there are little "Footnotes" released on Thursdays that feature Q&As, deep-dives into themes that arose from a particular chapter, like a very informative Dutch lesson that gives you everything you need to know before a trip to Amsterdammmm, and interviews with celebrities who love the podcast (my favorite so far is the one with QI Elf Dan Schreiber from No Such Thing as the News - talk about everything I love mashed up into a glorious half hour).

I realize none of the above adequately explains what is so wonderful about MDWAP. It's an odd combination of bewildering plot (or lack thereof), un-sexy sex scenes (my fellow female listeners will back me up when I say there is nothing more cringe-inducing than the anatomically impossible references to cervixes sprinkled throughout the first book), stilted dialogue, and oddball characters ranging from our heroine, the bizarre Belinda Blumenthal who seems to think nothing of taking her kit off in every conceivable situation, to the Youngish Man, whose name we got as a complete afterthought once he was done shagging Belinda. And of course, this is all delivered in Jamie's fantastically soothing voice. He tries to be as professional as possible but simply can't hold it together when a particularly egregious event unfolds (i.e. every five to ten seconds) and requires as much moral support as Alice and James can muster. Even more hilariously, the trio will occasionally try to highlight moments when Rocky has genuinely written something well or displayed some kind of literary brilliance, only to quickly cast their praise aside as they get to the next horrifying sentence.

My Dad Wrote a Porno is the most gleeful, inane experience you can hope to introduce into your life. It is so funny, so unrelentingly preposterous, and such a product of the modern age where we can take the literary foibles of a retired Irishman and turn him into a worldwide sensation with a global audience of three million people. We can complain all we like about how fractured and chaotic the world is. But as it turns out, all we need to unite the masses is to listen to a hapless man narrate his father's erotic fiction.