Worst Year Ever · Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

Reading Even More Of Ben Shapiro's Terrible Short Stories

December 23, 2021·56 min·5 clips

The hosts of Worst Year Ever read Ben Shapiro's sci-fi short story 'From the Pit' while hiding from family during Christmas.

The cold open starts crooked. Robert twists a holiday tune into a dark bit, and Cody catches blame for not having an emergency tambourine on hand. Christmas quickly turns into logistical pain. The panel pitches the episode as something for mall traffic or for hiding from extended-family pressure. Then the reading gets wonderfully picky. Ben's cigarette passage gives them a target small enough to pick apart and silly enough to keep going. The mites basically take the stand. One host checks whether tobacco attracts insects and finds the funnier possibility: cigarette butts may keep mites away. That is where the room locks in. They do not just call the sentence bad. They treat the wrongness like a tiny specimen under glass. The objection keeps getting narrower. Tobacco pests may be real, but that still does not save a cigarette in a billionaire's house crawling with mites. The joke gets nerdier. Adult flea beetles are named, searched, and tossed out as the wrong creatures for the scene. That is the pace here: fake adventure prose keeps running into biology, search-engine irritation, and the joy of catching one stray detail in the act. The phrase "spit mites" takes over, because of course it does. Once the panel has a dumb name for the imagined creatures, the reading becomes a shared autopsy of the prose. They still keep moving, though. The ending circles back to holiday-family provocation, then drops into the iHeart outro with the same messy momentum.

As heard by us

A profane Christmas-week roast that turns Shapiro's tiny-fiction logic into a running joke about mites, tobacco, and bad detail work.

Worst Year Ever spends its Christmas-week episode reading more of Ben Shapiro's short fiction and treating every shaky detail as an invitation to wander.

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Press play for a Christmas-week Worst Year Ever bit built around Ben Shapiro's short story.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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