Podcast / Three Bean Salad

Clockwise from top left: Mike, Henry and Ben

Ben (reading an email from listener Ross): Your podcast primarily relies on in-jokes, previously established jingles, and meandering lukewarm banter about an email you received several episodes ago.

Henry: Okay, I think there's a little bit more than that going on.

— The Slippers episode

Three Bean Salad is a British comedy chat podcast that started in 2021. Each week, the three beans tackle a different theme suggested by the listening audience.

The beans are Mike Wozniak (of Taskmaster fame), semi-decent cartoonist Henry Paker, and Benjamin Partridge (host of the Beef and Dairy Network Podcast).

The chat is interspersed with jingles by Ben, which mark recurring segments (like listener emails) or topics (like America and flightless birds).

Each episode ends with a different listener-submitted cover of the theme tune. Sometimes the jingles are replaced by listener covers as well.

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This podcast contains examples of the following tropes:

• Baldness Angst: Played for laughs by Henry, who tries and fails to explain his approach to baldness by comparing his head to a room made of ham.
• Berserk Button: Henry hates people talking boringly about guitars. Mike and Ben love talking boringly about guitars.
• Body Horror: As discussed in horrifying detail in several episodes, being one with the bean machine (see Man in the Machine) is extremely gruesome, painful and debilitating for Ben. It's all Played for Laughs, of course.
• Britain Is Only London: Averted. Henry's supposedly glamorous, exciting London lifestyle is often contrasted with Mike and Ben's borderline Medieval lifestyle in 'the provinces' (Exeter and Cardiff). See Shining City.
• Cats Are Mean: Zigzagged. Henry's cat Bluebell has her own jingle, which describes her as 'soft and gentle and wise and kind,' but also warns she will 'swipe off the faces of our enemies' and 'toy with the corpses of anyone who defies our galactic rule.' The backing vocals ('she's a cat') have also been interpreted by some as 'she's a cunt.'
  • In the extended version, she brings down an evil galactic dictator and gains the ability to speak English. Then she argues with Henry over the food he gives her. Then she tries to find out what love is. It's a long jingle.
  • Bluebell is extremely politically conservative and believes that America Is Still a Colony.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Henry tells long, rambling stories which don't go anywhere, has surprising blind spots (like not being able to remember the difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit), and often has no idea what's going on. He has been accused by the other beans of either not paying attention or simply deleting information as he goes.
  • The Cuckoolander Was Right: When Henry uses the word 'peregrinate' (in the Exercise episode), Ben and Mike laugh, assuming he’s just made it up. To everyone's surprise (including Henry's), they later discover that not only is it a real word, but Henry even used it correctly.
• Damned by Faint Praise: A favourite tactic of Sperbs (see Manipulative Bastard). In his first email he described the show as 'mildly funny.'
• Determinator: Henry 'Die on Any Hill' Paker will not be corrected, even when he's objectively in the wrong. In S4 E1 Dinosaurs, after being informed for the second time that octopuses have beaks:
  Henry: I still don't know that octopuses have beaks, and I will defend my right to not know that.
  Ben: Henry, listen to me.
  Henry: Yeah.
  Ben: Octopuses have beaks.
  Henry: You can say that as much as you like.
• Dissimile: In the Teeth episode, Henry describes his encounter with a sausage as tall as a man (that would come up to somewhere above his pelvis).
• Does Not Like Spam: Contrary to the prevailing national stereotype, Ben has an almost pathological dislike of tea.
• Eagleland: The America jingle is a bombastic avalanche of played-for-laughs American stereotypes. It ends with Ben simply saying the word 'burgers.'
• Feathered Fiend: Mostly rheas and cassowaries, as marked by the Flightless Bird Zone jingle.
  (acoustic guitar and harmonica in the style of early Bob Dylan) No, please, not the face!
• Felony Misdemeanour: While editing the Forests episode, on hearing back the Alan Bennett impression he attempted during the recording, Ben phones the other beans to apologise for its poor quality. While Mike is largely indifferent, Henry refuses to accept the apology, and implies Ben deserves to be hung on a gibbet.
  • Ben hangs up, returns to the edit, and discovers that his own impression is immediately followed by Henry doing an equally bad Alan Bennett impression. He calls Henry again to demand an apology. Henry apologises... before gleefully launching into yet another bad Alan Bennett impression.
• Forced Meme: Attempting to get 'you can't sit on your own arse' to take off as an expression, despite a lack of consensus on what it means.
• Insane Troll Logic: Constantly played for laughs.
  • How to wash 'chicken leather'? Well, when they're alive, chickens take dirt baths. So simply put it in the washing machine with a handful of dirt.
• Helpless with Laughter: Ben attempting to relay the story of the £85 Grinch.
• Mad Lib Thriller Title: Discussed in the Spies episode:
  Mike: There's a special lexicon. If you can shove in a word like 'protocol' somewhere, or 'paradox,' 'ultimatum...'
  Ben: The Attaché Protocols.
  Henry: The Attaché Dossier Protocols. Why is it that a dossier is exciting but a folder isn't? It's basically the same thing, isn't it?
  Mike: I'm not interested in a folder. A file, I'll take, e.g. Ipcress.
  • Short Title: Long, Elaborate Subtitle: After some discussion, the title Henry ultimately pitches is Smolensk Rising: Unearthing the Original, Previously Unseen Nazi Attaché Briefs.
  Ben: That's great.
• Man in the Machine: Ben's body is fully integrated into the bean machine, the device that selects the topics for discussion each episode.
• Manipulative Bastard: Sperbs, an enigmatic listener who only emerges from the shadows to subject the beans to backhanded compliments and mind games.
  Henry (only halfway through Sperbs's first email): I am now a hundred percent dependent on Sperbsy for any sense of self-worth.
• Motor Mouth: According to some listeners' observations, Henry talks more than the other two beans combined.
• Mood Whiplash: The Patreon jingle is eerie, ominous and Stygian ("It's time... to pay the ferryman..."). The first time Ben played it for the other beans (in the Exercise episode), they were audibly taken aback.
  Mike: (long pause) Quite menacing. As a first note.
  Ben: Yeah.
  Mike: It's imbued with more threat than most of your jingles, I would say.
  Ben: Do you think it strikes the right tone?
  Henry: Well, I feel edgy, I feel... do you want people to feel a bit panicky?
  • As Ben noted, the 2021 and 2022 live shows both had very high-energy openings, followed by their normal low-energy content.
  Ben: We've gone from European club to embroidered badges in less than a minute.
• Nightmare Fetishist: In the Submarines episode:
  Henry: Then the water's in your face, you've got giant crabs tearing your eyeballs out, you've got tentacles going into all your orifices, ripping you apart from the inside.
  Ben: This is sounding better and better.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Guaranteed to occur whenever Henry dons an accent for comedy purposes. His attempt at Cockney was described by Ben as a hate crime.
• Running Gag
  • We will all become crabs. Ring the crab bell.
  • Owlfuckerz, Henry's other (much more popular) podcast.
• Secret Identity: Ben's evil persona (or possibly Evil Doppelgänger) is named Bonjamin.
• Secret Word: Listeners have successfully (and unsuccessfully) used the word 'Pompidou' to identify each other in the wild.
  • It's also been used to unlock various real-world discounts, most notably at the Soup Dragon Cafe in Scotland.
• Shining City: Henry's depiction of his hometown, London, as marked by the Glamorous London Life of Henry Paker jingle.
  Mind the gap... between your provincial existence and this metropolitan utopia.
  Henry (singing): It's the magical town where we all dream to live!
  • See also Britain Is Only London and Suburbia.
• Soap Within a Show: After receiving an email from a listener in Diamond Harbour, New Zealand, the beans reminisce about the non-existent long-running soap opera of the same name.
  Diamonds in their eyes
  And diamonds in the sea
  Come with us and meet the families
  Of Diamond Harbour...
• Sound-Effect Bleep: Notably used to bleep out the names of famous people that the beans happen to encounter in questionable circumstances, such as the celebrity that ruined a Paul Simon gig for Ben by talking all the way through it, and a different celebrity that Henry saw pissing in a car park. (A later episode revealed that the latter was in fact Jeremy Irons.)
• Standard '50s Father: Mike plays up to this character. It even has its own jingle, Provincial Dad Chat.
• Suburbia: Contrasted with the Shining City in the Board Games episode.
  Henry: I'm not going to be part of a suburban Trivial Pursuit league. I would rather die and be eaten by rats in the heart of Piccadilly Circus.
• Surreal Humour: Like the Beef and Dairy Network Podcast, but with less structure.
• Toilet Humour: As marked by the Digestive Tract Talk jingle. For example, Henry's story from the 2022 live show about taking a dump in a 'cat lat' on a school trip.
  • Discussed in the Asteroids episode:
  Ben: Do we mention anuses too much? Is it going to stop us becoming the world's number one podcast?
  Mike: I don't think that's what will stop us. But I think, even as an experiment, it might be worth seeing if we can talk about anything else.
• Toxic, Inc.: Though the bean machine's only apparent purpose is to randomly select one of the listener-submitted topics, each use warms the planet by three degrees.
• Vulgar Humour: Occasionally. When they do talk about sex, they play the Lewd Content Warning jingle (which doesn't actually function as a warning, as it's typically played once the lewd content is already well underway).
• Wiki Walk: It's not unusual for an episode to be taken over by lengthy tangents that have nothing to do with the listener-submitted topic.
  • In the Glass episode, Ben reasonably kicks off the topic by noting that Mike is the only bean who doesn't wear glasses. This sets off a chain of events leading to a long and involved discussion of autocratic dictators and their celebrity friends.
• Witty Banter: Consistently served lukewarm, as per the page quote.