This is legitimately the funniest thing that has ever happened on MBMBAM
[Transcript:
Brothers: Brooks. Brooks: So, uh, my question is: my boyfriend keeps on going into the pantry and grabbing handfuls of fettuccine– [audience laughs] uncooked– Griffin: I would hope he’s not grabbing handfuls of cooked fettuccine, Brooks. Travis: In your pantry! Brooks: –and eating them raw. And he keeps calling them chips? Justin: Okay. [audience laughs] Brooks: How do I make him stop? Travis: Is your boyfriend here? Brooks: Yeah. Travis: You’re a monster. [audience laughs] Words mean things! Griffin: Does anybody remember– [clears throat] I haven’t been to Olive Garden in many moons, but they do have, like, a little, like, fettuccine bottle that you can just grab them out and chew– hold on, was this a prank you guys pulled on me when we went to Olive Garden as kids!? [audience laughs, Justin quietly snickers] No, stop! Everybody shut up! Do they give you fettu– raw fettuccine to chew on in the lobby of the Olive Garden? [Audience, shouting: No!] Griffin: You [stutters] fuckin’ bastards! Travis, shouting: YEAHHHHHHHH! [audience cheering] Justin: The prestige! [Travis laughs] Travis: Now you have IBS! We got him! Griffin: [crosstalk] I didn– What I need you– Brooks, we’ll get back to you– what I need you two to understand is that was not the only time I went to Olive Garden. There were– [breaks in embarrassment] Travis: Were there never employees around!? Like– [Justin laughs loudly] Griffin: I– I, wanting to seem like an authentic metropolitan diner, would always grab the fettuccine and walk over to my friends, like, “mm, yeah, I’m a little– little peckish.” [Justin and Travis laugh] Justin: Griffin, as a– Griffin: I fucking can’t believe– I can’t believe you did that and I can’t believe literally I’m finding out in the worst imaginable venue. Justin: Speaking as a former Olive Garden employee, there is– if I saw a little kid eating fettu– raw fettuccine? The odds of me stopping them are negative 1000 percent. Griffin: Okay, Brooks. Justin: Brooks! Griffin: Yeah, so I’m gonna sit this one out, Brooks. Travis: Wait– Justin: Brooks, is it possible that your boyfriend has been laboring under the same delusion as my brother for all these years? [crosstalk, unintelligible] Oh, they sell this for you to take home? Okay, well, fancy for myself then. Travis: Brooks, is it possible your boyfriend does not believe these are chips, but instead likes to annoyyou by calling them chips, a thing I– not exactly that, but similar– do to my wife all the time. [audience laughs] Griffin: Is it possible, boyfriend, loves chips. And you never have chips, and this is his way of passive aggressively [audience laughs] sort of guilting you into go– “MM, these are tasty chips!” And as a raw fettuccine eater myself, I can tell you it’s not a– it’s not a good chew. You do it– you put it in your mouth, and your six-year-old brain thinks “it’ll turn to fettuccine in the heat of your mouth.” It doesn’t work like that! It doesn’t work like that! Just doesn’t work like that. Justin, softly: Brooks?]
I wonder how it feels to know your silly podcast, videos about character creation engines and Dungeons and Dragons game literally changed how people use the English language on an international level
you know, the mcelroys make a lot of jokes about code phrases and waking sleeper cells whenever they have to say something weird or confusing for a jumbotron, but i don’t think even they could’ve predicted how true that could become for a million dormant fans being resurrected from a few seconds of audio
With MBMBaM…the conversation we had internally was like, we feel like we’re making this really dumb thing while really important stuff is happening, and we kinda felt bad about that. And then after we put that episode out, we got this flood of like, “thank you for being a distraction.” And we’re like, oh yeah, distraction’s important. We don’t have to deal with stuff to be helpful, sometimes you can just distract. And so that’s kind of always been our MO in general, just as people. If something’s going wrong and people are getting stressed out, we make jokes and we break tension…
We’ve never discussed this, but I think Justin and Griffin would agree, that you can set an example without explicitly saying, “this is a thing I’m combating” or “this is a stance I’m taking.” But rather, like, I’m going to choose to embrace this thing and talk about this thing and face this battle in a certain way, that I would hope you would understand what my position on things is. And so we talk a lot when we’re doing Amnesty especially, because it’s in our present world, in West Virginia…so for example, my character is a bisexual Puerto Rican woman. And it’s like, are we gonna make her…deal with shit? [laughs] And it’s like, noo. No, we’re not. Like, that’s not the world we wanna create and that’s not as interesting.
And when we were doing TAZ Dust…we ended up having—me and Justin and Griffin and Dad—a two-hour long conversation about, I’m gonna set up the Old West…but Dad wants to play a woman and I don’t want people to be, you know, misogynist to her, even though in the time period, they would have been. Dad wants to play an Asian woman and I’m not gonna have people use racial slurs, even though that’s what they would have done at the time. And we really went back and forth, like, are we being disingenuous by not acknowledging that this is the kind of circumstances that people would have had to deal with? But by doing that, would we be reminding people of these bad things that still happen in the world?
And so yeah, we put a lot of thought to it and we try to find a balance between not trying to pretend like there aren’t issues and not trying to pretend like everything’s okay. But also knowing that people know that there are issues and so we don’t need to constantly remind people that there are issues. It’s a tough balance to find, but we try really hard.
– Travis McElroy at DragonCon
thought I’d transcribe the bit where he confirms Aubrey as Puerto Rican. this was a response to a question about the brothers’ decision to keep current events and politics mostly out of their podcasts.
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