Shownotes Transcript
Hi, welcome to Sound School from PRX and Transom. I'm Rob with the backstory to great audio storytelling. A couple weeks ago, I wrote to Ira Glass asking a favor. Hey Rob, it's Ira. I wanted to know if he could answer a couple of questions. Questions about chicken bombs. I'm talking to you from the back of an Uber in Budapest. I don't know if we're in Buda or we in Buda or Pest.
Buddha. I meant Buddhist side. And to answer your question about chicken bombs, I don't remember when I first heard the term, but it came up in a story meeting. This year, 2025, is the 20th anniversary of Chicken Bomb entering the lexicon of audio production. ♪
Now, you say you've not heard the phrase before. Okay. Or maybe you've heard it and you've even used it yourself and you wondered, Chicken Bomb, where'd that even come from? Well, I have all the answers. I was there for the first Chicken Bomb.
Back in 2005, I was teaching radio at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies up in Portland, Maine. I assigned a Vox Pop to the students. I always assign Vox Pops to new producers. It might be cheap journalism, but it's an excellent teaching tool. Anyway, Elizabeth Chur was part of the spring 2005 semester at Salt, and at my urging, Elizabeth recently dug up her old Vox Pop. She blew the dust off of it and sent it to me. It's the second audio piece she ever made.
What's your idea of the perfect dinner? Probably the ingredients would include good food, pleasant ambiance, and great conversation. On a recent Sunday afternoon, we asked people in downtown Portland to name their ideal dinner date. If you could have dinner with any person in the world, living or dead, who would it be and why? I would have dinner with Condoleezza Rice, because I think she's fascinating and very private. Yngwie Malmsteen. He's one of my favorite guitar players, so...
Sit down, have some red wine, talk guitar licks or something. Julia Child, a pioneer amongst women. The question she asked for the Vox Pop was, you know, it was a light one to be sure. One that elicited light responses. Brad Pitt. Just because he's cute. The Buddha. Ulysses S. Grant. Frank Zappa. Daniel Burnham. Marilyn Monroe. Elizabeth told me in a voice note that she remembers having 30 answers to pick from for the final Vox Pop.
And once she'd made her selects, she had a hard time figuring out the proper order, especially where to insert her favorite piece of tape. I couldn't put it at the beginning. That would be a really heavy note to start off with. And I didn't really feel like I could put it in the middle because it feels like anything that happened after that would just seem kind of trite by comparison.
And so I decided to put it at the end. I guess I think of it kind of like a fireworks display or a big symphony. You want to go out with a bang. My dad, he died a couple of years ago and I'd love to be able to go back. It was very, very sudden. I'd love to be able to go back and have dinner with him. We listened to Elizabeth's Fox Pop in class and then talked about what worked and what didn't.
Usually those discussions center around the quality of the recordings and the responses and the pacing, the mix, etc., etc. In this case, though, there was a big discussion about the tone of that last quote. I was kind of surprised during class that it got such a reaction. Elizabeth says even 20 years later, she likes how that quote juxtaposes emotions in the Vox.
pop, a mixing of light and dark. And she says it's a memorable piece of tape, more so than any of the other quotes. To me, it made a lot of sense to both place it where I did and to include that in the piece, because I feel like as a whole, the piece, that was the emotional heart of it. Richie Duchamp was in the class with Elizabeth. He heard the quote differently. Richie thought it stood out too much. It was an emotional outlier, which made it a distraction. Too distracting. Kind of like a chicken bomb, he said.
And of course, everyone in the class was like, what the hell is a chicken bomb? And Richie said, you've never heard of a chicken bomb? No, Richie, we haven't. What is it? So Richie told us it's a prank, a really smelly prank. In a recent message to me, he told me it's like the nuclear option in a prank war that nobody ever decides to use.
This is what I remember him telling the class. Put some raw chicken into a glass jar, then pour in some milk. Screw the cap on the jar, not too tightly, but enough so that it's sealed, and then put the jar in the room where you want to prank people.
In a few days, the chicken and milk will become so rotten, it blows the lid off the jar. An awful smell will fill the room. And no matter what you were doing at the time it went off, you'll have to stop and deal with the chicken bomb. It's the only thing you'll focus on. So as we were... I still laugh about this 20 years later. As we were talking about Elizabeth's vox pop in class, Richie said that quote from the woman who wanted to have dinner with her dad was so emotionally out of place...
He said, "I forgot about everything that came before it and after. It was a chicken bomb." Well, of course we all howled with laughter. A chicken bomb. That had to be like one of the funniest and strangest things that anyone has ever said in one of my classes.
Now, listening to it again 20 years later, I'm not sure the quote warrants being labeled a chicken bomb. But in that moment, the idea stuck with me. That something in a story that feels wildly out of place might be an idea or a feeling or a plot point that prompts a listener to say, wait, what the hell was that? And they stop listening to figure it out. That should be called a chicken bomb.
From then on, in class after class, workshop after workshop, for years and years, even when I'm working as a story editor, invariably, at some point, something appears in a script and I say, oh, I think that's a chicken bob. And invariably, I tell the story of Elizabeth, Richie, and the crying woman. But I always figured people would think it was just, you know, a funny story, a little anecdote to make a point. I had no idea the phrase would stick.
Fast forward to 2020. I was interviewing Sully Chum for Sound School. Sully lives in Kenya and is the host and executive producer of the Afro Queer podcast. And we were talking about reporting on LGBTQ issues on the continent and how some of the stories they produce are heavy, really heavy. I mean, we've gone and reported stories where we came back. And I think the first season we did drink a lot afterwards.
We would finish, and as a team, we'd go and be like, man. When it came time to write one of these stories, Sully said they'd often have to make a lot of difficult choices about what to include and what not to include. Like how much detail does a listener really need, especially if that detail is incredibly hard to listen to? As an example, she told me about reporting a story called Minneapolis to Mogadishu,
In short, it's the story of Kay, a young queer woman and her conservative Somali family who did not accept her sexuality. In 2018, Kay's dad was deported out of the U.S. and back to Somalia. While he was there, he invited Kay to come visit, come see him and her grandmother. Kay thought it was a great idea. She loved her dad. She loved her grandmother. So Kay flew to Mogadishu.
And the visit goes really well for a few weeks. Suddenly, you know, they tell her, oh, we're going to go into this shop and, you know, get you medication. And they walk in and then she's grabbed and put into chains. And that's the last time she was free for the next, you know, three months of her life. Sully says Kay's family forced her into what she called an Islamic Rehabilitation Center, an organization that relies on religious education to coalesce.
quote-unquote, fix people, to steer them away from behavior that's culturally unacceptable. Kay told Sully how difficult it was to realize that the people she loved the most just did this to her. Kay also described the violence she experienced, sometimes extreme violence.
So Sully told me she was faced with a question. Do listeners need every detail about the violence? What are the choices that we have to make, too, to make sure that, you know, they call it like chicken bombs. If we put this in that story, everyone is only going to focus on this moment of extreme violence. I couldn't believe it. Sully said chicken bomb. I didn't know Sully. She'd never been in one of my classes. And there she was in Kenya using chicken bomb in the exact right way.
And so since Chicken Bomb has traveled as far as Kenya, maybe I shouldn't have been surprised when just a month or so ago, I was texting with Sean Cole, who worked at This American Life. And in one of his texts, he wrote, Chicken Bomb. What? Where'd you hear that? He said, This American Life. The staff uses it all the time.
And to answer your question about chicken bombs. Which brings us back to Ira Glass and the backseat of an Uber in Hungary. I don't remember when I first heard the term, but it came up at a story meeting. And I think it was Lily Sullivan, one of the producers on This American Life, who brought it up, but it might have been somebody else. Ah, there it is. There's the connection. Lily was one of my students at the Transom Story Workshop here in Cape Cod. And my understanding was that a chicken bomb is when there's a plot point in some story...
that's so much more interesting than the story that you're actually there to tell. And the way it was explained to me was that it's as if you have a story and somebody's talking about something and then in the middle of them talking, kind of off on the side, or perhaps as a subplot in their story, a chicken explodes, spontaneously combusts. And so then the main plot of the story, whatever it might be, you just really get so distracted by the exploding chicken that you lose focus.
and you don't follow the story. It's a detail that's a vivid detail that one might think, that will make my story richer and more complicated, but in fact, ruins your story because you reveal that something much more interesting than the plot of your story is happening off to the side. ♪
That is a slightly different take on a chicken bomb. You know, the way Richie and Sully used it, a chicken bomb in a story is not necessarily interesting. It's disruptive. It's startling. It causes confusion and overtakes the story. Whereas in Ira's version, yeah, it's disruptive, but in more of a, oh, hey, tell me more about that sort of way rather than, OMG, what the hell was that?
Both versions work for me, though. In fact, I love that the meaning has shifted slightly over the years. And there's now a continuum of chicken bombs from distraction to disruption. By the way, when I was recently in touch with Richie, the guy who coined the phrase, he told me chicken bombs, the ones with raw chicken and milk in a jar, are mythical.
What? All this time, I thought it was a real thing. I wrote back to him and I said, I had no idea chicken bombs were made up. And he said, oh, it's not that a chicken bomb is not real. It's more like a cryptid. I had to look up cryptid. Quote, a creature whose reported existence is unproven, such as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. He
Yeah, well, I've read some real chicken bombs and scripts in my day, and so I can attest to their existence, at least in stories. Do you have a chicken bomb story? Surely you must. I'd love to hear about it. You can find Sound School on Blue Sky, or you can email your story to rob at transom.org. In fact, if you want to send a voice memo, that would be even better. I might use it in a future episode of Sound School. ♪
Many thanks to Elizabeth Chur, who extracted her Vox Pop off a CD for me. Last year, Elizabeth published a book called The Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers, How to Save Democracy One Conversation at a Time.
And my thanks to Richie Duchamp for coining Chicken Bomb in the first place and chatting about it 20 years later. Richie is the Los Angeles bureau manager of NBC.com. And lastly, my thanks to Ira Glass for responding to what must have seemed like a ridiculous request.
This is Sound School from PRX and Transom. Music in this episode comes from my friends at Stellwagen Symphonette. I have Jay Allison, Genevieve Sponsler, Jennifer Jarrett, and Sophie Crane helping me out. I'm Rob Rosenthal, recording at WCAI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the radio center of the universe. It just occurred to me that maybe the fact that I'm recording this voice memo from the back of a taxi in Buda
is the chicken bomb in this actual voice memo that is just a distracting fact that's so distracting. Why am I in Budapest? That it actually steps on the meaning of everything else I'm saying. I can only hope.