The Fifth Hour: Suburban Superhero With Extension Cord

On this April Saturday edition of The Fifth Hour, Ben Maller opens with a confession: he has mostly stopped cursing on the podcast because recording the show after his overnight radio shift makes it too easy to accidentally drop an F-bomb on the air. The episode then unspools into three long, digressive monologues that circle the same quiet theme—the absurd, losing battles of domestic life, told with the self-aware grandiosity of a man who knows he is losing.

The Holidays That Were Made for This Show

Maller notices that April 11 happens to be both National Poutine Day and Barbershop Quartet Day, and he treats the coincidence as a cosmic gift to his show. The barbershop holiday triggers a memory: years ago, a fan from Chicago sent him a barbershop-style song called "The Chubby Cubby," a goofy, innuendo-laced Cubs anthem from the Sammy Sosa era. Maller played it on the air, but the program director at the Chicago affiliate blacklisted it as contraband. The song was resurrected years later when the Cubs finally won the World Series, but by then, Maller says, it had suffered "the cruelest fate: adequacy."