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Hi Welcome to Sound School from PRX and Transom. I’m Rob with the backstory to great audio storytelling. 

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote to Ira Glass asking a favor.

Ira – Hi Rob. It’s Ira. Um… 

Could he answer a couple of questions. Questions about “chicken bombs.” 

Ira – I’m talking to you from the back of an Uber in Budapest. I don’t know if we’re in Buda. 

(To the taxi driver) – Are we in Buda or Pest? 

Taxi driver – We’re in Buda. 

Ira – Buda. I’m in Budaside. And to answer your question about chicken bombs. (starts to fade out) I don’t remember when I first heard the term but…. 

This year, 2025, is the twentieth anniversary of “chicken bomb” entering the lexicon of audio production. 

You say you’ve not heard the phrase before? Or, maybe you’ve heard it -- or even used it yourself -- and wondered “Chicken bomb? Where’d that even come from?” 

Well, I can explain. 

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 may be cheap journalism but it’s an excellent teaching tool. 

Anyway, Elizabeth Chur was part of the spring 2005 semester at Salt. At my urging, Elizabeth recently dug up her old vox pop, blew the dust off of it, and sent it to me – the second audio piece she ever made. 

Clip – Start of vox pop. She’s asking people who they’d most like to have a dinner date with. (Fades then under)

The question she asked was a light one to be sure. One that elicited light responses. 

Clip – (fades up) A series of light responses. (fades down)

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 the proper order. Especially where to insert her favorite piece of tape. 

Elizabeth – I couldn’t put it at the beginning. That would be a heavy note to start off with. 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 think of it kind of like a fireworks display. Or a big symphony. You want to go out with a bang. 

Clip –This is the quote she’s referring to. A woman tearfully saying she’d like to have dinner with her dad who recently passed away. 

We listened to Elizabeth’s vox pop in class then talked about what worked and what didn’t. Usually those discussions center around the quality of recordings and responses, the pacing, the mix, etc. In this case, though, there was a big discussion about the tone of that last quote. 

Elizabeth – I was kind of surprised during class that it got such a reaction. 

Elizabeth says – even 20 years later -- she likes the juxtaposition of emotions in the vox pop, a mixing of light and dark. And, she feels it’s a memorable piece of tape. More so than any of the other quotes. 

Elizabeth – To me it made a lot of sense to both place it where I did and include that in the piece because I feel like as a whole, the piece, that was the emotional heart of it. 

Richie Duchon 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. “Kinda like a chicken bomb,” he said. 

Of course, everyone in the class asked “A chicken bomb? What is a Chicken bomb?”  

Richie said “You’ve never heard of a chicken bomb??!” 

No. Richie. Nope. We haven’t. 

So, Richie said “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.”  

He said to 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. 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. 

And so as we were talking about Elizabeth’s vox pop, Richie said the quote from the woman who wanted to have dinner with her dad was so emotionally out of place I sorta forgot about everything that came before it – and after.” 

Of course, we all howled with laughter. A chicken bomb. That had to be one of the funniest and strangest things any one has ever said in one of my classes. 

Now, 20 years later, I’m not sure the quote warrants being labeled a chicken bomb. But in the 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.   

And it was. 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 bomb.” And, invariably, I tell the story of Elizabeth, Richie, and the crying woman. 

But I figured people would think was just a funny story. A little anecdote to make a point. I had no idea the phrase would stick. 

Well, fast forward to 2020. I was interviewing Selly Thiam (Chum) for Sound School. Selly lives in Kenya and is the host and executive producer of the Afroqueer 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. 

Selly - We've gone and reported stories where we came back, and I think the first season we did drink a lot after we would finish. And as a team, we'd go and be like, man. (laughs)

When it came time to write one of these stories, Selly 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 it’s 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. 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. 

Selly - 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... That's the last time she was free for the next three months of her life. 

Selly says Kay’s family forced her into an Islamic Rehabilitation Center. An organization that relies on religious education to quote unquote “fix people”, to steer them away from behavior that is culturally unacceptable.  

Kay told Selly 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. 

Selly told me she was faced with the question: Do listeners need every detail about the violence? 
Selly - 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 gonna focus on this moment of extreme violence.

I couldn’t believe it. Selly said “chicken bomb.” I didn’t know Selly. She’d never been in one of my classes. And there she was IN KENYA!! using “chicken bomb” in the exact right way. I couldn’t believe “chicken bomb” had travelled so far! 

Of course, I asked her where she heard the term. Turns out someone I’ve with taught used it. 

And, so, since “chicken bomb” has travelled 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?? I asked him “Where’d you hear that?” He said, “This American Life. The staff uses it all the time.” 

Ira – (fades in) And to answer your question about chicken bombs. 

Which brings us back to Ira Glass in the back seat of an Uber in Hungary talking about chicken bombs. 

Ira -  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.

Ah. There it is. There’s the connection. Lily was one of my students at the Transom Story Workshop here on Cape Cod. 

Ira - 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, 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's something much more interesting than the plot of your story is happening off to the side. 

That’s a slightly different take on a chicken bomb. The way Richie and Selly used it, a chicken bomb in a story is not necessarily interesting. It’s disruptive. It’s startling. Causes confusion and overtakes the story. 

Whereas, in Ira’s version, it’s disruptive, yes. But, in more of a “Hey, tell me more about that!” sort of way rather than a “OMG. What the hell was that??” 

Both versions work for me. 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. 

Mythical? What? All this time I thought it was a real thing. I wrote back to him saying “I had no idea chicken bombs were made up!” 

And he said “It’s not that a chicken bomb is not real. It’s more like a cryptid.” 

I had to look that up. Cryptid: “A creature whose reported existence is unproven… such as Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster.” 

Yeah, well, I’ve read some real chicken bombs in scripts over the years. 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 Bluesky. Or, you can email your story to rob@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. 

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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 to Richie Duchon for coining “chicken bomb” in the first place and chatting about it 20 years later. Richie is the Los Angeles Bureau Manager of NBC dot com. 

And, lastly, thanks to Ira Glass for responding to what must have seemed like a ridiculous request. 

This is Sound School from PRX and Transom.

Scoring music in this episode from my friends at Stellwagen Symphonette. 

I have Jay Allison, Genevieve Sponsler, Jennifer Jerrett, and Sophie Crane helping me out. 

I’m Rob Rosenthal recording at WCAI in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the radio center of the universe. 

Ira – It just occurred to me that maybe the fact that I’m recording from the back of a taxi in Buda, is the chicken bomb in this actual voice memo. That it’s 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. 

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