Worthless information, expertly overhandled.
Minutia Men is a quick-hit comedy talk show built around Rick and Dave trading odd facts, personal humiliations, and ridiculous side arguments. The fun lives in the overreaction: Lent loopholes, Cubs expenses, medical misery, parody songs, and trivia too specific to ignore.
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Minutia Men is a comedy talk show built from tiny topics, old radio instincts, and two people who can turn almost any aside into a bit. Rick and Dave do not need a grand premise. A forehead bruise, a tan from Arizona, a Lent workaround, or the price of Cubs spring training tickets can carry the room. The show moves quickly. It likes interruption, correction, mock logic, and the kind of comic escalation where a dumb misunderstanding gets treated as a serious cultural question. One Passover story hinges on a fake tradition about sucking a penny. Another opening turns kidney stones into a competitive masculinity argument against gout. That is the basic engine: ordinary life, made weird through confidence. The episodes also carry a strong radio-variety feel, with intros, closing tags, parody songs, jingles, and recurring archive segments. Studio Walls lets the show pull older clips back into the present when an anniversary or headline gives them a reason to exist again. Celebrity interview material appears as texture rather than prestige. A Liberace story, Beatles impersonator clips, and a baseball reflection from a guest all sit beside jokes about shopping, aging, and confession hotlines. The blend is specific, informal, and proudly low-stakes. It is not polished in the corporate sense, and that is part of its charm. The comedy comes from rhythm as much as punchlines: one voice sets the scene, the other pokes a hole in it, and the story swerves. Religion, sports fandom, old music, Chicago-adjacent baseball grief, family dinners, and bodily inconveniences all become fair material. The show is blunt and occasionally rude, but the dominant mode is dry amusement rather than shock. It suits listeners who like their trivia with banter, their nostalgia with jokes, and their nonsense handled with unnecessary seriousness.
Made for: For listeners who like fast banter, old-school radio texture, strange trivia, Cubs-and-Beatles asides, and comedy that treats tiny grievances like breaking news.
What sets it apart: Its edge is the hyper-specific pileup: archive clips, recurring bits, personal stories, and throwaway facts keep folding back into the conversation until minutiae becomes the main event.
By day, Rick Kaempfer and Dave Stern are the publishers of Eckhartz Press and Chicago Author Solutions. By night, they are unappreciated fathers and husbands. And in their spare time they are consumers of worthless information. Each week they share their newest worthless information in the podcast, “Minutia Men”.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Rick and Dave turn ailments, odd facts and cultural memories into escalating banter with an unusually durable appetite for digression.
Rick and Dave treat a broken shoulder, an overengineered Lent exemption and a nighttime collision with a doorframe as invitations to keep adding comic complications.
Rick and Dave can turn fifteen shoulder screws into the setup your afternoon was missing.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Rick and Dave spin a Lent loophole, a bruising baseball memory, and Green Eggs and Ham into a loose comic half-hour.
A Lent vow opens the episode into its real subject: the funny, flexible logic of exceptions. Rick and Dave test whether travel, a wedding, the garage, and a one-drink limit really count, then stretch the bit into rollover-minutes math and Hofbrauhaus beer steins.
Rick and Dave turn Canada, Beatles history, and Lincoln's birthday into a loose, knowingly uneven run of parody songs.
"Honest Abe" is built as a parade of parody songs, with Rick and Dave turning a Canada item, a Beatles anniversary, and Lincoln's birthday into a string of musical side trips.
A bruised late-night stumble opens into Ellison Arngren's odd, telling memories of Liberace.
A forehead bruise gives the episode its first bit of momentum, as Rick and Dave turn a late-night fall and an unconvincing sleep routine into easy comic business.
A missed week becomes a tracker joke before Walter Shapiro's family history bends the episode into stranger territory.
Rick and Dave turn a missed week into a comic investigation, starting with two emails, a car-accident theory about lateness, and a tracker on a mother who is not picking up.
A broken arm, about six older men, and half-remembered TV crushes turn male conversation into the punchline.
Minutia Men turns a simple question about what men talk about into a small table-side field study. It starts with Rick's broken arm, its 15 pins, and a gleefully imagined childbirth scene, then drifts toward about six older men talking nearby.
Chaotic friend-table comedy with hip-hop energy.
Geek talk with group-chat energy.
Sports talk, derailed correctly.
Frank Ziegler's Cape May seagull case, an Oscar Mayer Wienermobile crash on Interstate 294, and a Columbus hamsters-in-pants arrest give Minutia Men its most memorable headlines.
Rick discusses his aversion to using public restrooms, which has become a topic of mockery among friends and listeners.
Rick and Dave open with Rick's X-ray showing 15 screws in his broken arm, joking about airport security.
Rick and Dave vent about the lack of acknowledgement when they let someone merge in traffic, discussing the importance of a simple courtesy wave.
Rick and Dave banter about Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah hangovers, and their podcast's penis jingle.
Rick and Dave discuss their Fourth of July celebrations, including a baseball game and a neighborhood party with fireworks.
Rick and Dave discuss Rick's first experience playing Dungeons & Dragons after his wife won a session with a dungeon master at a silent auction.
Rick and Dave discuss Passover traditions, including a humorous misunderstanding about sucking a penny at the seder.
Rick and Dave banter about Dave's kidney stones being a more manly version of Rick's gout.
Rick and Dave discuss their trip to Arizona for spring training, the high cost of Cubs tickets, and a movie premiere about Dick Allen.
Rick and Dave joke about breaking a Lent promise to give up alcohol and using a fictional automated confession hotline.
Rick and Dave discuss clothes shopping, weight gain, and Dave's new Skechers Slip-Ins shoes.
Rick and Dave open with Lent rules, including Rick’s decision to give up booze with “one a day maximum” exceptions and a story about a Friday beef-sandwich dispensation at a church charity event.
Rick and Dave open with a set of parody-song teases, including a British Invasion style track and an AI-assisted bit, before moving into listener material.
Rick and Dave open with Dave’s account of combining melatonin, one-third of an Ambien, and a sleep gummy before falling into a doorframe around 2 or 3 a.m.