THE man from Oddville now has one of the oddest jobs in television – rounding up live critters and locating gross-sounding foods for “Fear Factor.”

He’s Rich Brown, 39, formerly the star of the short-lived but critically acclaimed “Oddville MTV” and now the main producer of Segment 2 on each episode of “Fear Factor,” hosted by Joe Rogan.

Segment 2 is the portion of every episode of the NBC reality series in which contestants are challenged to lie down in a pit full of rats or eat quantities of cow brains or buffalo testicles.

“Rogan likes to call me ‘producer of all things gross and disgusting,’ ” says Brown, whose latest foodstuff find was the pig rectums seen last night.

Contestant Noel won the pig-rectum-eating competition with his unique method of squeezing the organ until it was essentially flattened and easier to consume.

Exotic as it might sound to eat pig rectums, they are consumed in various cultures, particularly Asian. In fact, everything consumed on “Fear Factor” – including sheeps’ eyes, crickets and beetles – are available from legitimate markets or specialty purveyors.

“A lot of my job is research,” says Brown, a native of Seaford, Long Island, who attended NYU and has a masters degree in journalism from Columbia. “It’s finding out what types of unusual foods are eaten around the world and then making sure that we feel it’s safe to eat.”

All the consumables on “Fear Factor” are “sold as [U.S.] government-inspected and -approved food products,” Brown explains, adding that the pig rectums – basically the lower part of the large intestine and about a foot long in a pig – came from a distributor in Texas.

But in Asian cooking, innards such as pig rectums are likely cooked in hot oil with seasoning and other ingredients such as vegetables. On “Fear Factor,” foods are boiled or poached to rid them of any possible germs, but that’s it. “We like to boil or poach the product because it allows it to be as close to its original form as possible while still being safe,” Brown said.

To test how much of any one exotic food a person can be expected to tolerate, Brown calls on sideshow performers with whom he became acquainted as host of “Oddville” and its long-running predecessor on Manhattan cable public-access channels, “Beyond Vaudeville” – “guys who are accustomed to eating live critters [and] have a fairly high tolerance and strong stomachs.”

Brown, who writes a diary of his “Fear Factor” experiences on the show’s Web page on NBC.com, says the live-animal segments are more stressful than the food challenges.

“I always have a certain amount of stress when we do animal stunts because animals are unpredictable,” he says. “Rat bites in particular can be pretty serious. If they get on to your nostril, they could rip off a part of your nose.”