Being in the entertainment business, Jamie’s first thought wasn’t to change his name, get extensive plastic surgery, and move to a faraway land where no one could ever connect him with his dad’s alter ego. No, he embraced it by bringing a copy down to the pub to read out loud to be mocked by all of friends.
The books follow the antics of Belinda Blumenthal, who is a sales manager at Steele’s Pots and Pans, an international cookware conglomerate, and they basically read like awkward Dunder Mifflin IRL erotic fic. Recurring themes include:
- Really inappropriate training sessions
- Tits-based promotions
- Made-up idioms (“bosom gal pals”)
- A grossly negligent HR department
- Misunderstandings around the characteristics and general purpose of the vagina
- Whimsical punctuation (I feel your pain; Rocky)
- Absolute ignorance of all things cookware
Out of the potential ashes of his sanity was born the “My Dad Wrote a Porno” podcast, in which he and friends, James Cooper and Alice Levine, read Rocky’s words of wisdom and provide snarky, hilarious commentary.
Jamie and the gang take the show on the road every so often, and are in the midst of a multi-city tour RIGHT NOW. I had the chance to catch one of their first shows in San Francisco last week, and it was amazing! Jamie read a chapter that didn’t make it into the books because it failed to meet even Rocky’s incredibly low literary bar. In it, Belinda brings her sales team to Cardiff for a “team building exercise” run by a sexy “team guru.” And it is so bad. Let’s just say the group is groping and squirting before the first Powerpoint slide even hits the screen.
The sex is classic Belinda—abrupt and awkward. As always, Rocky’s complete lack of understanding of the female anatomy (“she flashed her cervix”), makes me seriously question how Jamie ever got born.
Performance features included:
- Cast getting shitfaced during drinking game structured around Rocky’s most-used tropes (“Belinda blinked”, excessive scenery detail, etc)
- Really, really terrible Welsh accents
- Audience participation – acting out passages featuring particularly byzantine tangles of body parts
- Crucial female anatomy lesson courtesy of Alice
- Audience cosplay of beloved characters
There are only 2 shows left in the US – Chicago and Washington DC. Get tickets here!
Can’t catch the tour? Listen to the podcasts, and catch up on past seasons in book form with the My Dad Wrote a Porno book. It’s everything you never wanted to know about work and sex (but really mostly sex) in an international cookware company!
