Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster · Plosive

Joy Crookes

November 12, 2025·1 hr 18 min·5 clips

Joy Crooks reveals her boyfriend compiled a book of her mangled proverbs, including 'fruits of my labia' and 'the sky is the ocean'.

Ed opens with tour admin. Fresh Hell gets plugged properly: UK dates, a bit of Ireland, and the usual shove toward edgamble.co.uk. Then the welcome goes sideways. A Malteser image somehow turns into bad vibes chocolate and friendship melting where nobody asked for it. James is annoyed already. Ed tests a Flanders voice because a long running podcast apparently needs new running jokes on purpose. It is flimsy, which makes the argument better, especially now YouTube lets listeners see the bit as well as hear it. Joy drops into the middle of that. Food chat quickly becomes a style tribunal: 90s leather, early-2000s cleavage, and why the restaurant needs both. Then ham arrives. Iberico gets treated like treasure, until Joy drags the fantasy back to Richmond sausages and soft white bread. The posh sausage gets rejected. Cumberland takes a hit, oregano starts sounding suspiciously try hard, and Ed ends up defending sausage identity with far too much energy. Richmond becomes the word nobody can leave alone. Once James says he did not expect to hear it that way, the table keeps the phrase alive out of sheer mischief. The sandwich keeps shifting. Joy wants the cafe sausage butty, but the hosts wonder if iberico could be jammed in anyway. Hard bread is the enemy. One aside turns iberico extras into a dental risk, which makes cheap soft bread sound suddenly wise. Then Mighty White happens. Nobody quite knows whether the name is safe to say, and the detour lands in exactly the wrong-right Off Menu place. The ending wanders off lead into a fake guest riff, with walkies, spelled-out names, secret ingredients, and nonsense that only works because everyone commits too hard.

As heard by us

A loud, loose Off Menu episode with cleanly absurd food chat and a longish warm-up.

Joy gets the full Off Menu treatment here: brisk, silly, and very specific about food. The dream-restaurant prompt wanders through 2002, 90s leather, early-2000s cleavage, ham on a berico, and Richmond sausages, with Joy still keeping pace.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For a Joy Crookes Off Menu chat that turns sausages, bread, and running jokes into a proper sprint.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster