History's worst ideas, told with sharp teeth.
Profiles In Eccentricity is a history-comedy show built around people who made life stranger, meaner, louder, or harder to believe. The panel moves from story to riffing at high speed, covering outlaw corpses, political violence, boxing brutes, occult Nazis, Storyville money, and doomed engineering schemes.
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Profiles In Eccentricity turns history's bad ideas, violent careers, and human curiosities into a fast-moving comedy panel show. It is built for stories that already sound fake before anyone starts joking. A corpse becomes a money-making attraction. A political faction keeps splintering into bloodier internal feuds. A boxer lives as both local legend and walking warning sign. The transatlantic telegraph becomes a contest of ambition, ego, and technical overreach. Storyville shows up as a city economy of desire, liquor, corruption, and rot. The show is not tidy. It opens with banter, veers through personal references, and then locks onto a story with surprising momentum. The panel keeps the facts visible while constantly kicking the legs out from under any grand historical pose. That rhythm matters. Episodes about Carlos the Jackal, Otto Skorzeny, Nazi occult missions, the INLA, and Paul Sykes are heavy with violence and political ugliness, but the delivery stays conversational rather than reverent. The comedy often comes from translation: obscure history gets dragged into plain speech, mocked, corrected, and reframed until the absurdity is impossible to miss. There is a lot of interruption. There is also more structure than the chaos first suggests. The show is at its best when a grisly detail, a bad nickname, or a ridiculous institutional decision opens into a larger picture of how power, ego, money, and stupidity actually move through the world. It suits listeners who like history with dirt under its nails. It is abrasive, informed, and intentionally unpolished. The point is not to celebrate eccentrics. The point is to stare at the strange record, laugh at the worst human packaging, and still come away knowing what happened.
Made for: For listeners who like odd-history stories, criminal biographies, political violence, and historical disasters filtered through aggressive comedy banter. Best for people comfortable with crude humor around grim material.
What sets it apart: The show pairs narration with a loose panel dynamic that keeps interrupting, correcting, and deflating the story in real time. It feels less like a lecture than a messy, funny argument over a very strange file.
A show about weirdos. Hosted by comedians John Fahy, Aaron Pita, and Matt Brousseau, each episode tells a tale about someone who lives afoul of the rules most of us live by.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Detailed historical profiles meet unruly comic commentary, with particular attention to the institutions and opportunists surrounding eccentric figures.
Profiles In Eccentricity turns historical biography into a lively comic roundtable. John Fahey, Aaron Peter, and Matt Brousseau pair researched narration with rapid interruptions, testing each strange decision against modern instincts without sanding down the period detail.
An undertaker charges admission to see a dead outlaw; somehow, you'll want the next detail.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A dead outlaw becomes a paid attraction, and the episode makes the grisly commerce feel stranger than the shooting.
Profiles in Eccentricity finds its sharpest edge in the way a ranch gunfight turns, almost at once, into public spectacle. Sheriff Bob Fenton's account, the rider found with a single gunshot wound to the chest, the about-empty whiskey jug, and Joseph L.
A borderland memory opens into INLA factionalism, brutal punishment, and comedy that keeps stumbling over the history.
Profiles In Eccentricity frames the Northern Irish Troubles through closeness, fear, and factional absurdity. John Fahey remembers life near the border, people around him being involved with IRA stuff, and the shock of recognizing a figure from books when that person walked into…
A rowdy boxer portrait with sharp research and a loose, lively tone.
The episode frames Paul Sykes as a boxer whose life keeps swinging between damage, odd kindness, and hustles. It lingers on the bruising aftermath of Wilson's brutal night, then follows Sykes as he helps him with clothes, a suit, and a way home.
A sharp, irreverent look at war mythology and revisionist history.
Profiles in Eccentricity stays trained on wartime mythmaking and revisionist history, with Operation Valkyrie serving as the hinge for a conversation that leans hard into skepticism.
Storyville's money machine feels funnier, filthier, and more exact than it first sounds.
Storyville comes through as a money-soaked red-light district, with liquor sales, cuts taken off the top, and a 400 percent profit on drinks all feeding a system that sends cash from the street to the top.
A grotesque meat-shower riff carries the panel from doomed drones to Fantastic Four rights and a capers dispute.
Meat Shower turns dropped loads, confused drones, and self-inflicted bodily danger into a grotesque little comic-history spiral. The host and guests keep circling the same blunt image: men treating their own anatomy like weaponry, while the warning to protect the queen gives the…
Franklin's French debut turns diplomacy, vanity, and boils into a civic spectacle.
This stretch keeps Benjamin Franklin's trip to France in view, where diplomacy and spectacle move side by side. Franklin is sent to seek a loan from France, or ideally a loan and troops, and the episode even allows for the absurdity of a 70-year-old crossing the Atlantic with…
Sharp Black pop culture commentary with gossip, jokes, and blunt advice.
Awards season, celebrity memoirs, and new music picked apart with host Louis Fertel and guests.
Comedian Chris Gethard takes one anonymous call a week and can't hang up first.
Isa Calderón and Lucía Lijtmaer riff on feminism and TV history from Spanish stages.
Graham Clark and Dave Shumka turn one small topic into a full episode of tangents.
The hosts introduce an episode about Vlad the Impaler, drawing parallels to current events and the film Nosferatu.
The hosts of Profiles in Eccentricity discuss the bizarre 1876 Kentucky Meat Shower, where chunks of meat fell from the sky.
Comedians John Fahy, Aaron Pita, and Matt Brousseau conclude their three-part series on Benjamin Franklin, covering his final years from 1772 onward.
The hosts of Profiles in Eccentricity introduce a segment about Igor Kenk, a notorious Toronto bicycle thief.
The hosts of Profiles in Eccentricity introduce an episode about Yukio Mishima, a Japanese homosexual author who attempted to overthrow the government and be ripped.
Profiles In Eccentricity opens with the 1814 London Beer Flood, where Sir Henry Mew's Horseshoe Brewery kept an 18,000-imperial-barrel vat at Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street.
John Fahey uses a St.
Profiles in Eccentricity frames Paul Sykes as a Wakefield-born bully, boxer, and prison regular, with John Francis Fahey, Aaron Joseph Peter, and Matt Brousseau on mic.
Comedians banter about Carlos the Jackal and terrorism, with guest Ramsey Badawi, in a humorous podcast introduction.
The hosts of Profiles in Eccentricity introduce themselves and banter about the movie Life before discussing the transatlantic telegraph.
Hosts John Fahey, Aaron Peter, and Matt Broussard interview writer/actor Dalan Musson about his work on Nazi occult-themed projects like Iron Sky.
Profiles In Eccentricity traces Otto Skorzeny from his 1908 birth in Vienna, his fencing scars, and his entry into the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS.
Storyville’s madams turned prostitution into power, with Hattie Hamilton and Katie Townsend buying influence in New Orleans.
The hosts of Profiles in Eccentricity banter and introduce their discussion about Benjamin Franklin's eccentricities.