Softcore History

Softcore History is a comedy-history show built on a simple arrangement between friends. Rob Fox and Dan Regester take turns as host of the week. The one in the chair brings a story he has written up, and the other reacts more or less on the spot. The rotation matters enough that Rob, finding himself leading back to back, has to confess he forgot it was not his turn. What follows is less a lecture than a running negotiation over the facts. Dates get guessed at: in a New Orleans story, a debate over when Lafitte's bar opened and whether it was named for the pirate Jean Lafitte ends with 'could be wrong'. In This Is Sparta!, an argument over how to pronounce Delphi ends with one host promising to keep digging the trench. Then comes a reading of the prophecy that leaves Leonidas accepting his death. The subject range is broad but leans hard toward sex, scandal and soldiers. Titles such as The Horniest Soldiers In American History and How The Navy Got Its... Reputation sit alongside This Is Sparta! and America's Shady History With Saudi Arabia. FDR surfaces in two different excerpts. In one he takes over a Navy-related investigation and opens a secret file called Section A; in the other he meets the King of Saudi Arabia in the 1940s. Dan says that Saudi episode grew out of Adam Curtis's BBC documentary Bitter Lake, a recommendation from former co-host Jake Goldman, who is described on air as having left to farm oysters. Sports creep in as well: an excerpt from The Starting 9 For Hell’s Baseball Team turns to Pete Rose, and the hosts do not rate him highly as a person. Pop culture is a frequent point of comparison. Leonidas is measured against the movie version, Saving Private Ryan gets a mention, and a detour about the White House pool wanders from FDR to the Kennedys to Gerald Ford. Guests widen the circle; Alex Buscemi, welcomed back as 'the Boosh', joins the Navy story and ribs Rob at the close for nearly skipping his plug. The humor is blunt and often crude, with sexual jokes and swearing throughout, and one cold open turns on the idea of cursing less to keep a parent listening. Tangents from the hosts' own lives, such as watching Oppenheimer on mushrooms or writing an earlier Hannibal episode through the night, share space with the history. A Patreon preview mentions bonus episodes and a separate sports tier that includes golf picks. The sign-off is a pun on the name: 'you just got soft serve.' This Is Sparta! is a fair first listen. It has the whole formula in one place: a famous story, a quibble over pronunciation, a movie comparison and a solemn prophecy read aloud between jokes.