In many families, razzing one another is a form of bonding. What ties the family together is memory, and if that memory paints one small cousin as a total doofus, well, that's the price that must be paid for love! The next memory will pick on someone else. It's the circle of life, baby.
My favorite kind of family lore is one that remains a mystery. Maybe someone stole a piece of pie that was supposed to be kept for someone else, but the culprit has never revealed themselves. Maybe someone got a scratch on the new car and never fessed up. Every family has secrets they keep mainly because they are funny. It is objectively funnier to maintain the mystery of who keeps leaving receipts on the kitchen counter than it is to ever know for sure.
That's the beauty of today's story: it is a family mystery that spans decades, infiltrates new generations, and outlives a key character!
In this week's episode Youngmi Mayer joins me to determine who in this family is creating chaos. Youngmi is a comedian and host of the Feeling Asian and Hairy Butthole podcasts.
Youngmi and I discussed her recent trip to Korea where a woman tried to steal her purse (!!), and what the limits of juicing up a story are. The key, we seemed to land on, is just to live for the plot so you never have to juice anything afterward.
Then we began our decades-long story about a family with an unsolved mystery. You see, once upon a time, decades ago, someone (we don't know who) tried to flush a hot dog down the toilet. There are Law & Order sounds and finger-pointing, and eventually ... a confession.
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(The transcript for this week’s episode can be found here.)
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