[liquid pours]
[clink]
[siren wailing]
[Intercom] All right you fuckers,
you're forgetting this is the end of the world.
It's time to start acting like it.
It's happening right now.
If you're masturbating,
wrap it up.
Make it a good one.
It's the last masturbation you'll ever have.
[Susie] I actively don't plan anything for after X Day.
Been doing it since 96
and it's like, yeah,
if there's any chance, I'm not going to
screw it up by not buying into this.
- Okay folks, it's almost quarter of seven
in the morning July 5th, 1998.
Friends, it's not about when we get everything we want.
What it's really about, like every other religion,
it's about for the non-believers get what they deserve.
No seriously, now and I do mean seriously,
you're going to get whatever you want.
The important thing is to really know what you want.
If your imagination is so limited that all you can
think of is a better version of your crappy apartment,
that's exactly what you'll get
and it won't seem that different after 7:00 AM.
[Susie] Bob is teaching me things about disappointment
except the disappointment in Bob
is sweeter than the disappointment in life.
- Ten seconds.
[Susie] Life's disappointments are brutal,
Bob's are part of a joke
that once you finally get over the butt hurt,
you start laughing at it.
[crowd] Two, one...
- Fuck them if they can't take a joke!
[cheering]
For 30 years, almost none of us ever broke character.
Fretten, sometimes the character might take over.
Once again, we find ourselves
in that age-old traditional situation,
7:00 AM or something like that.
Something like July 5th, something like 1998,
something like the planet earth,
we don't have any idea where or when we are
and that is the point of the whole thing.
X Day could happen any second.
It may not happen this year.
[cheering]
There have been times when we were so good at
keeping a straight face,
that we could have had another Scientology.
We love fooling people,
but we don't want to fool anybody that way.
[Man] The young people of our generation
have no moral norm for their actions today.
They want somebody to stand up and say,
"What is right and what is wrong?
How far can I go?"
- Nearly moment by moment,
young people are bombarded by distorted visual images
that are saturating their minds
and yes, sabotaging their future.
- In the early 80s we were outliers,
we were outside the norm.
People who'd grown up in the 50s were just trying to
come out of all of the weird stuff
that had been heaped on us.
- Once a person is pervert,
it is practically impossible for that person
to adjust to normal attitude.
[Ivan Stang] The 60s were still echoing,
but it turned into the 80s
and that whole spirit got flipped on its head.
[Man] You are being deceived.
You're being brainwashed every day by the devil.
- Everything's getting too square again.
- The normalcy was oppressive to me.
- I grew up in a cultural vacuum,
a small conservative Illinois town.
- I kind of prided myself on being the outsider
in high school.
You know, the guy that's so weird,
and no one would talk to him.
[Commercial VO] There is a conspiracy of unimaginable
proportions working solely to rob you of your very abnormality
and I'm here to tell you tonight...
[Sternodox] The Conspiracy is them.
They're the ones that want to hold us down.
They're the ones in control.
- People are always telling us how to talk, how to walk.
[Nurse Vicki] It was the war of the weirdos
against the straights.
- To enjoy a feeling of being with the in crowd
is so seductive.
[Commercial VO] Marion was rejected today.
If she felt accepted,
the whole pattern of her life would be different.
- We were grasping for this crazy religion
to help us see the light.
[Reporter] It's the Church of the SubGenius,
their prophet's name is Bob.
- Bob Dobbs came to town to set you free.
- It was just this outpour of expressing ourselves
and how wrong we thought the direction of society was.
I thought it was hilarious.
- We're probably the only cult that admits
that we're ripping them off every day
and teaching them to enjoy it.
[Commercial VO] There must be discipline.
- It's wrong.
It's sin.
- Just say no.
- If Jim Jones could talk 900 people into killing themselves,
we can talk 900 people in the sending us dollar.
[Commercial VO] There's only one guaranteed way
you can have peace.
- The world will end the 1998.
[Commercial VO] God said judgment is going to come.
[Commercial VO] Repent.
Quit your job.
Slack off.
[Susie] The idea of being able to get away
from this shit stew of a world--
it's a dream.
- For those who've abandoned hope,
we'll restore hope and we'll welcome them into a
great national crusade to make America great again.
[echoing VO] Great again, great again, great again.
- I grew up as a little white boy
in America in the 1950s in a middle-class home,
so I have nothing to complain about.
I feel like anybody who grew up in that situation
has it better than most medieval kings
because we had aspirin
and some people had air conditioning.
- I'm one of those guys that was
fortunate to have like an idyllic childhood.
My family was as normal as they could get.
I was forced to go to a fairly fundamental church
for the first 18 years of my life,
so that probably had some effect on why I rebelled
so strongly once I got away from my folks.
- I can't say that I'm rebelling against my
religious upbringing or anything like that
because I didn't really have one.
I was raised basically secular humanist scientist.
This is Fort Worth, Texas.
I was surrounded by Baptists.
I really did feel like a weirdo.
Kids would go,
"Hey, Doug, where's you family go to church?"
I didn't even know the name of a single church.
I'd really be stuck.
I'd say things like, "Oh, the [mumbles]."
[indistinct room chatter]
[Philo] I was very much into comic books
and any kind of alternate publications
and music like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart
and people that were not mainstream.
[Ivan] I did not feel like my classmates.
Despite my very fun childhood,
I had terrible teenage years.
I had to hang around the theater department
in order to meet girls.
That's how I met my first wife, in fact.
[Philo] I was discouraged from participating in art.
Art was not a place where you can make money.
You need to get a real type job.
So I worked for AT&T
and that's kind of like where my
inside to The Conspiracy took place.
- My sister-in-law, she said, "I have these friends
"Philo and Cookie that I met that you should meet them,
they've just moved to Dallas."
I said, "I don't want to meet any friends.
I don't need friends."
Said, "No, you might like this guy.
He collects comic books and he likes Captain Beefheart."
I thought, what?!
Both comic books and Captain Beefheart?!
[Philo] We just became great friends.
He was the liberal.
I was the conservative,
but we were both so disaffected with politics.
We didn't believe any of it was true.
- What we really had in common was collecting,
well, what we might call kook pamphlets
or extremist literature of religious or political cards.
You'd go to a laundromat and there would be
The Watchtower from Jehovah's Witnesses
or a comic book from Chick Publications.
You know, "This Was Your Life".
We loved the range of ridiculous things
that human beings can convince themselves of.
- If I went out and made my daily quota,
the first thing I'd do is go over and wake up Reverend Stang
and say, "Let's get up.
"Let's go do something.
Let's have some fun."
- We were trolls before they had that term.
The internet hadn't been invented, but CB radios had
and Philo, because he had a real job, had a CB radio...
but we didn't use it to help the world.
We used it to puzzle and confuse strangers.
We would get on and say things like,
[alien-like] "Men of earth, men of Earth,
"we are speaking to you from 50 million light years
away in space."
- "Come in pink boy," remember?
- Well there were these two guys that were doing it
back to us.
They were trolling us and they were saying,
"Shut up pink boy, shut up pink boy."
And we interpreted that as,
"Oh, the aliens are finally talking to him.
And that was what they had to say."
The next thing we knew,
pink boys were everybody we didn't like:
bosses, rude waiters, nasty clerks in stores.
We were surrounded by dumb asses.
We knew that we were dumb asses too,
but we felt like it was a matter of degrees.
[Philo] People that we didn't want to have anything
to do with, the pinks and the mediocritines,
the techno glorps.
[Stang] Part of me was in terror of all of that,
but there was also the terrible stress of having to, you know,
make the living and not lose your soul.
At some point, one of us said something like,
"Why aren't we rich yet?
We've got all these skills and things."
And Philo goes, "Well, I guess we're not geniuses.
We're really just sub-geniuses."
And in my head, everything fell together like a puzzle box.
A Rubik's Cube suddenly formed itself.
A weird fringe cult for weirdos,
specifically for weirdos.
That was the Church of the SubGenius.
[Philo] When we did the first pamphlet,
it was really a labor of love.
The pasting up, the cutting.
[Stang] We tied together every fringe belief
you could think of.
It was like getting all your toys, your dinosaur toys,
and your army men toys and your cowboy and Indian toys,
putting them all together on the floor
and having this whole world that was a conglomerate
of all the cool stuff ever.
It was so much fun!
[Philo] We had this sort of an icon we can blame everything on,
the conspiracy of normalcy.
[Stang] There's Bob, The Conspiracy and Slack.
If you're going to have a cult,
you have to have a cult leader.
Well, that's Bob.
- We need to put a face to that entity.
- We can't afford artwork.
No, this clip art, this public domain stuff.
It's old, nobody cares about it.
- As we flip through the catalog,
there was that face.
[Stang] We both instantly knew, that's Bob.
After a couple of months, we had assembled
SubGenius pamphlet number one.
- When the printing bill came in on the first pamphlet,
it was $60.
My wife got very upset with that.
You're going to have to send these to publishers.
We can't afford that kind of thing.
You need to try to turn it into a book or something.
Publishers, wow, okay.
I got Writer's Digest and got the addresses of every publisher
in the United States and mailed the pamphlet to them.
We've got 150 rejection slips back.
The rest of them didn't say anything.
- I was living in San Francisco,
working with my colleague partner,
Gilbert Shelton at Rip Off Press.
I wandered into the publisher's office, and a fellow named Fred,
and he opened some envelope up
and pulled out the initial pamphlet.
He grumbled something about it
and threw it in the trash can next to his desk.
To his complete irritation,
I pulled it out and started laughing at it.
It was the funniest thing I've ever read.
It was good to, like-- how refreshing.
I think my first act was to get an envelope
and put all the cash I had in my wallet
and it wrote a note saying, "Send me more pamphlets."
- The first pamphlet, pamphlet number one,
is a significant document in many ways.
It is the vector by which many people have had their
most significant introduction to the Church of the SubGenius.
- Doug sent a pamphlet to KPFA
and so I saw that and really loved it and for years,
since I was a kid,
I've been putting stuff in the mail to strangers,
so they became new strangers.
They start mailing stuff back.
It was like the internet really,
but instead of a thousand people,
it was 10 or 15 of us.
It was really fun.
- It was such a seminal little pamphlet;
it was almost like a test of your mindset
like were you a SubGenius or not?
If you got it, you were a SubGenius.
[Nurse Kelly] It really spoke to me.
It had this whole thing about how the goal is Slack
and the motto is fuck them if they can't take a joke.
- The central doctrine more than anything else
in the Church of SubGenius of course,
is this Slack thing.
- It's probably one of the hardest things to
describe in the church, you know.
- We don't describe it because by definition
Slack is really different for each person.
[Margaret] Slack is what everybody wants,
it's what we still want.
[Nurse Kelly] This idea of a place where people can live
where they don't feel harried by just the multiple things
that one feels harried by all the time.
- You know when you don't have it.
- That's for sure.
[Paul] It was like finding like-minded people.
If you could truly say any of us had minds to be alike.
Somebody with the same type of cynical perspective,
same reference points.
[Margaret] They were so layered in everything.
It was, it was part pop culture, part science, part religion.
So it appealed to me a great deal
and I did do just as it said,
I sent a dollar with the letter.
- What's that say?
Send a dollar?
Even I've got a dollar.
So I sent off a dollar and I got this little pamphlet
and that was where the crushing loneliness started
to get chipped away.
- I was doing a magazine called Famous Potatoes
using a lot of ads and clip art stuff
and it was a fine artist, Robert Williams who said,
"Hey, you ought to send some stuff off to the
Church of the SubGenius.
They're doing a bunch of clip art stuff like you do."
So I sent stuff off and I think it arrived
just after Stang's birthday or something,
and he just flipped out over the Famous Potatoes
and he sent me all the pack and I didn't have to pay.
- There was a flyer on a phone pole that said,
"Get ready for a pretty tough future,
what scientists are afraid to tell us."
And then there was a picture of Bob.
I showed it to all my pals
and they were like, "yeah, yeah."
So we didn't send them a dollar,
we sent him $100 from Little Rock
and we got the first pamphlet back.
That just Bobbed us all up immediately.
- It was a little bit of a sense that there are
other people interested in these things.
They might be far away
and they might exist from post office box to post office box,
but they are out there.
[Susie] It was intoxicating to think that there was somewhere
where you didn't have to fit in,
where people were crazy in the good way.
So I sent in my 10 bucks and I became a SubGenius.
[Philo] We got the first few orders coming in,
remember we were so excited and then all of a sudden-
- Terrified more like it was like, what?
Somebody actually sent us $10,
now we really have to do that newsletter.
- Now we actually had to start working
and doing stuff.
- Hey Reverend Stang?
[Stang] Huh?
- Another gun.
- We said, you've got a religion,
now you've got to have the tent revivals.
You know, you can't just say you have religion.
You have to have this gathering of the faithful.
- It was a sad day for mankind.
It was a sad day for mankind when man stopped,
started sticking with his head and walking on his feet,
the kind with four-legged backup.
Awww, yeah,
I can feel it emanating.
I can feel its eyes just burning into my eye.
I can feel a man staring at me and screaming at me
and threaten his eyebrows.
I can feel that man saying he wants to testify to Bob.
[Philo] A devival is a SubGenius revival.
It didn't sound good to say revival.
Devival sounds a lot better.
It actually sounds kind of like devil.
[Stang] They were a way for us to act as if we were
rock and roll stars or preachers or something.
- Thank you Bob,
♪ for closing my memory.
[Stang] I was the one who was supposed to get up on stage
and do stuff and I actually had terrible stage fright.
I wasn't interested in that at all.
But a Dallas character who later ended up calling himself
Reverend Buck Nakid,
the SubGenius thing really clicked with him.
- The word crime is serving the conspiracy and the penalty.
And the penalty...
[Stang] He was ready to get up on stage and preach.
- The penalty is worse than having your gonads cut off.
The penalty is worse than having your head cut off.
[Stang] Eventfully, I didn't really like the way
Buck did it.
- And the rest of them are wrong
and you're only one that's right.
That's how you're supposed to feel-
- So I started doing it.
Before we start the services,
we should have a
just a moment of,
a moment of sacred noise.
[screaming]
Thanks to the SubGenius thing, I discovered I wasn't alone.
There were weirdos all over the place.
[Margaret] They were very normal people who just talked
nutty stuff about the Church of the SubGenius,
which made them very easy to relate to
and get along with.
[Byron] I remember seeing all these bands and stuff
and I thought, you know,
These guys are loaded, these guys are drunk.
Then I saw Doctors for Bob perform
and I thought these guys are clinically insane.
- Anti-music is a concept of unfettered expression
musically and sonically to try to create this sound that
trained hands can't do.
You have to go totally on instinct
and that's what we did with Doctors for Bob.
- It was kind of this Looney Tunes fraternity
and you had to kind of enjoy guys to be a part of it.
The way that I viewed the Church and the SubGenius
is that in a way it is the patriarchy strained
through cheese cloth.
- It was a boy's club and I was attracted to it
because I wanted to meet the boys.
- It is divinely taking itself by the hair
and turning itself inside out
and looking at the world with fresh eyes
and that's why it's such a special place
for special people doing special things
having special feelings and we have to put up with.
[cheers and applause]
I think it was this way of saying it's them and not you,
you know.
Don't you worry if the world or The Conspiracy
is getting you down, you come stand by me
cause you're one of ours.
- The Conspiracy's major efforts is to take your
Slack away and to sell you a false version of it,
which they manufacture.
- Well, I'm afraid we all discovered The Conspiracy
probably our first day of school
when the other kids made fun of you
for using the wrong color crayon
or you're not doing it right.
- It was important that we encapsulate
everybody's best enemy into something that could be
easily distilled into one thing.
Something that people could say,
"Yeah, I understand that, we're all victims of that."
- Anything that bothers you is the Conspiracy.
It's a little bit, the thing that assassinates presidents
from both depository libraries.
It's a little bit the suppressed saucer technology
that is owned by the European union,
but it's also just when it's too hot on the bus.
- In 1953, Jehovah I, the alien space god
informed Bob Dobbs that
there was this conspiracy of normal people
robbing the Slack of the SubGeniuses for centuries.
But that on July 5th, 1998 at precisely 7:00 AM,
the men from planet X would come rupture up to these
paying believing SubGeniuses
and give them the power to wreak revenge on all the normals.
Next thing you know, you've got the doctrine
for an entire religion.
Oh yes.
Bob can set free the winos.
He can set free the prisoners.
Do we have any more testimonials from the crowd?
- I found the image of Bob's head in a bed pan
and ever since it's just been Bob all the way.
- Saved by the image of Bob in a bed pan.
Our tendency is to just let everybody throw in,
so we don't really have any rules.
- I was once a degenerate but Bob saved me.
- Amen.
Amen!
We encourage people to form their own schism.
You know, join the church and send us money,
but immediately rebel against it.
- Well, there's always a split in the church
and if there wasn't, we'd create some
because you can't have a church without schisms
and the more schisms in a cult, the better.
- Ladies and gentlemen, I think we need to inject this
campground with some real hate.
[cheers]
I would like to bring to you the great Papa Joe Mama.
[cheers]
[Joe Mama] One of the major magnets of religion
isn't the common love of something,
it's the common hatred of something.
That's what brings everybody together.
So, I just wanted to offer that sort of alter ego,
the sort of anti-Bob, if you will,
and the Church of the SubGenius.
There are two distinct branches in the Church of the SubGenius,
the highbrow, Ivangelical branch,
led by Ivan Stang and his philosophical followers.
[Stang] Some of the SubGeniuses were looking at me
as kind of the do-gooder.
I was a little too easy on the normals.
I didn't really want to destroy the whole world.
I just wanted to loot it, get all the good comic books.
Well, other people really do hate the normals.
- The Ivangelicals and the Holocaustals represent
two sides of the church.
Now the Ivangelicals believed that all the pinks
need to be enslaved and can still serve a purpose
after the final judgment in which earth is liberated
from the chains of pink and conspiracy rule.
Now the Holocaustals, we're kind of a more
traditional fundamentalist if you will.
We believe that you do need to eliminate and exterminate
all the normals.
- Not every one of the Churches of the SubGenius
gets along with one another cause it's the group for people
who can't join groups.
I've often tried to explain to people about
Church of the SubGenius,
these can be very smart, talented people,
but somewhere along line they've got a personality problem
that keeps them from joining in and being
sociable and
popular and
normal.
[radio distortion]
[Woman on tape] I like go to the lake.
I like to roller-skate and go walking around.
Um, I like to do-
- This character named Doug Wellman
using the handle Puzzling Evidence,
he was way ahead of us in collaging found sound.
[indistinct distorted noise]
[Paul] Doug Wellman had been making these audio collage tapes
with sound effects and improvised,
humor as it were.
- It was like a network of people that traded
cassette tapes.
- You'd get the tape and you'd listen to the tape
and you'd immediately start a tape back to the friend
and it was just such a great way to communicate.
[CoSG tape] Wouldn't you like revenge on these mediocritines,
these pink boys,
these normals who have made normality the norm?
- Doug was in Berkeley and I was in San Francisco
and we turned on KPFA and heard ourselves on the radio,
which was a little moment of discontinuity
because how could we be on the radio when we were
here listening to it
and it turned out this fellow had gotten a hold of one of
Doug's tapes and was just filling his show out with them.
We contacted him and invited ourself onto his show
and at some point that became our Slack,
which, you know, was a great name because the show
is actually 90 minutes long.
[CoSG Radio] Welcome to the SubGenius Radio Ministry
Hour of Slack.
- This gave us a body of cassette tapes
that made us sound a little more developed than we really were.
[Paul] Nobody had met each other to that point.
No real events or anything.
It was all just a mail media network.
There were finally enough people who were curious about
each other and becoming actual friends that we wanted to meet,
so we decided we were going to have a convention in Dallas.
- Have you ever wondered about your neighbors?
Maybe wondered about the weird thumps and bumps
or chants emanating from their apartment?
They may be followers of Bob, that's the fastest growing cult
here in the Southwest.
[Stang] Somehow or another, Channel 4 News
got wind of this SubGenius thing.
[Paul] Ivan was really resistant at first.
[Stang] I was married to a schoolteacher.
We didn't want to get my wife in trouble or get Philo fired,
plus Philo's parents didn't know anything about this
whole SubGenius thing.
They were very religious.
- I didn't ever want to do anything that was
going to embarrass them in public.
Even though I had this really strong need to rebel,
I wanted to kind of do it privately.
The church is so omni-pervasive that we couldn't possibly
get into the dogma in any less than three or four hours.
I thought maybe a secret identity is a good thing.
[News Anchor] It's the Church of the SubGenius
and they're holding a revival.
- My name is Sternodox from Little Rock, Arkansas.
This is Puzzling Evidence representative Doug Wellman
from, Oakland, California.
- I'm Paul Mavrides from the LIES foundation
in San Francisco, California.
- Deep in the heart of San Francisco.
[Stang] People came from all over the country.
- I'm from Houston and I came to learn more about Bob.
- Bob is like a super salesman.
- He can sell you anything and I bought it.
- I just kept hearing the word Bob, Bob, Bob.
It would wake me up in the middle of the night.
I'd wake up doing jumping jacks.
I wouldn't know why.
- Devo was in town
and Mark Mothersbaugh came by.
- It was only by chance that I started receiving mail
from the SubGenius Foundation
and I realized who Bob was.
- Two of the guys from Devo are at the convention.
I thought this is really cool.
- Everything was completely like a parallel universe
to what Devo had been doing back in Akron
and now was trying to foist upon the world.
This was big time major, grade A proof positive
that it had been going on somewhere else.
- There's a good Bob and there is a bad Bob.
There's a big tall Bob and there's a little short Bob.
There's a kitchen Bob and a living room Bob...
[crosstalk]
[Reporter] And where is Bob leading them?
- When you first look at it, some people go, "Oh, I get it.
This is a takeoff on weird cults and conspiracies."
Then they look a little bit deeper
and if they're really an attuned sort of person,
then they realize, "Oh, I get it.
This really is a weird cult with cosmic wisdom and dogma
that I've been needing all my life,"
and that's usually when they write their first check.
- Kelly Lane, Channel 4 News, Dallas.
- As the song says, different strokes for different folks.
- Doug's been standing out in the sun too long, I think.
[laughing]
- I lost my ass on that.
It was disastrous for me personally,
it hurt my job
and probably my marriage.
[Philo] He was struggling to make money
and I have to admit for me that was probably the time in my life
when I had the least amount of trouble earning an income.
- I was in the perfect position of being desperate enough
to do low budget promotion for a weird cult.
[Philo] Stark Fist...
7,000 of them.
That's a lot of weird shit.
- It certainly is.
- I kicked in a few bucks now and then,
for the most part he was the guy that was shelling out his money.
- Now you should make a film about slave labor
in the SubGenius church.
- That's what I'm doing.
- Yeah.
- I was kidnapped in my native country of Africa
walking down the street
and these five people came up and told me to
get over here to American and fold these damn envelope.
- It was like a carrot was being dangled in front of me
personally all the time.
This thing could be big.
- We were aware that we were sort of
influencing other of the people.
That was exciting.
You didn't know who, but you could kind of tell other
people were like, "What's that Bob thing you're doing?"
[Linklater] I kind of wish I had found the Church of the
SubGenius when I was a teenager living in East Texas,
a little town where the state prison was
and it was nothing but Baptist churches everywhere,
which my family didn't go to.
So we were sort of the oddballs.
- What do you do to earn a living?
- You mean work?
To hell with the kind of work you have to do to earn a living.
All that does is fill the bellies of the pigs
who exploit us.
- They look at you and say,
"Oh, you're not getting anything done.
"You're a bum.
"You're a slacker.
You're disengaged,"
all the put downs that people throw at people
who seem to be living their own lives,
who kind of following their own passions.
[Interviewer] What is this?
Some kind of a psychic TV type parallel...
- Well, we all know the psychic powers of the televised image,
but we need to capitalize on it
and make it work for us instead of us working for it.
[Linklater] That's a threat.
That's a threat to The Conspiracy.
That's a threat to the mediocrity machine
that is the modern capitalist world.
[Philo] Other creative people started coming into the church.
[Penn Jillette] There was a guy who owned a record store
in Amherst, Massachusetts.
I think he's the one that told me about the SubGenius.
I was told at one point that I was the only person
who had paid his dues to the SubGenius
every single time they asked.
The effect they had on David Byrne,
the effect they had on The Residents,
the effect they had on Paul Reubens.
Even people who didn't know
were building on SubGenius tropes
and sensibilities.
[Philo] It was very flattering.
Some of these people were like our heroes.
So to be recognized by your heroes,
it's a real ego boost.
We actually got big heads and stuff.
[Stang] My sister-in-law, she'd moved to New York
and was in the publishing business.
She went to a picnic with a bunch of other people in the
publishing business and a young man named Tim McGinnis,
who was a brand new editor at McGraw Hill,
found this smudged pamphlet on the floor of her car.
He goes, "Where'd this come from?"
She goes, "Oh it's my crazy brother-in-law.
He and his buddy did this."
He goes, "I want to get in touch with him.
And tell him to get an agent."
Next thing we knew Simon and Schuster, McGraw Hill
and MacMillan were all bidding on the book of the SubGenius,
which caused the asking price to go up to $20,000.
That was enough to pay Paul Mavrides and John Hagan-Brenner
to do professional design on it.
- Doug brought in hand-scrawled manuscripts
and packets of clip art and stuff that he wanted included
so I'd take a chapter and I'd paste it up,
I'd generate some original material.
[Stang] John's style was perfect because it kind of
matched the clip art.
[Philo] When McGraw Hill first released it,
some places we could find it in the religion section,
and I thought that was a huge win.
We got a contract for a book.
We got it in the stores and it's in the religion section
instead of the comedy section.
It's not next to Doonesbury.
It's next to the Bible and stuff.
- People go, "Man, I barely made it through high school,
"but I stumbled upon your book and I realized
I'm not the only one."
[Penn] I got that book.
I read it beginning to end.
I absorbed that book.
I adored that book.
I love that book.
They kept me with, "I get this, I get this, I get this.
"I understand that this is directly from my heart...
"What the fuck are they talking about?
I have no idea what this is."
- This is the word of all mighty Bob...
Is the roadmap.
There is no other book like this book.
No other word like this word.
- It was these older, wiser miscreants
letting us know that indeed, all of these human-made
organizational systems are as flawed as you suspect
because they're made by us.
- This was the age of Jim Jones
and all kinds of other vampires and psychic parasites
out there using religion to establish
control of a segment of a confused and desperate
population, and there's no shortage of people
like that for reasons good and bad
and real and imagined.
- It's fascinating to me to look at religious experience,
to look at cults,
to look at us and them
and all this stuff that I passionately disavowed,
and then saying to me, which is what the SubGenius did,
"No, no, we know you don't believe in any of this stuff.
"We know that us and them is role,
"But we're going to worship Bob Dobbs
"and we're all a congregation and there's the pinks out there
"and there's us in here and we hate them
and we love us and won't that be fun for a little while?"
- Slack is a gift to the God.
The Baptist Church did not save you.
The Catholic Church did not save you.
The Unification Church did not save you.
The Jewish Synagogue did not save you.
The Church of the SubGenius did not save you,
but it was Bob.
Bob who walked on hot pavements-
[Paul] We actually are a religion.
You know, uh...
that seems like a art piece that seems like a religion
that seems like performance art that seems like a joke
that seems like a religion.
- Simply because we're involved in something that is funny,
we don't believe that for that reason we should be taken
any less seriously.
- We started getting invited to things like art museums.
They thought it was performance art.
[Paul] Ivan Stang was approached by a fellow in San Francisco,
wanted to put on a SubGenius party in San Francisco
and Zoe pictured some storefront or a loft or something
with a hundred people and went, "Yeah, we'll do that."
And we came back to the second meeting
and Tom was all excited.
He had gone out and rented a 900 seat theater
for two nights.
- San Francisco tonight is the location of the
first international SubGenius World Survival Crusade.
[Paul] TV stations picked up on the show.
[Beirn] It all began with the book of the SubGenius
and the Church's deity, Bob Dobbs.
- I was preparing tacos one day for my children and...
[Beirn] Now Bob-
- The face appeared and it's Bob.
[Stang] The night of Slack show in San Francisco in 1984
was the first time anybody had put any money
into a SubGenius show
and flew several people from Dallas and other cities
into San Francisco
and there was even a paid stage manager.
There were people building sets just for that show.
About half the people here will have a great time.
The rest of them will probably run for the exits.
[Paul] The one thing none of us were at that point,
and still aren't, are professionals
and I knew that nobody had ever been in front of an audience
as big as the one we were hopefully going to draw.
- I remember Friday night going out around the corner
of the Victoria Theater and the line went out,
up to Mission and around the corner;
I almost threw up because I thought,
"We're not showman, these people are paying $7.50."
- It looked like it was going to be a disaster.
As people were coming in,
we had a galvanized tub of evil-looking Kool-Aid.
- Some people would come over and they would take it eagerly,
the Dixie cups, just like they did in Jonestown
and they would drink it and they would come over and say,
"How long till I get off?"
And they thought it was like, acid Kool-Aid,
it was like, "Oh, about 20 minutes."
- Of course some people were very nervous.
The real question was, is this cyanide or LSD?
We made sure it was non-sweetened
so we wouldn't kill any diabetics.
[organ music]
[tempo picks up]
[cheers and clapping]
[Philo] It was great.
It was really the first event where a lot of people
got together and said, "Hey, we're all SubGeniuses,"
rubbing elbows.
- The Night of Slack ran for two nights
and was surprisingly successful.
[Stang] It was the first show that Bob Dobbs himself
ever showed up at.
We were not expecting that at all.
He walked out on stage,
and then Puzzling Evidence, Doug Wellman,
runs out and shoots him with a hand gun
right in front of everybody.
[indistinct crowd chatter]
- Oh my God, Bob was killed that night.
It was so sad.
[laughing]
- We were coming from the airport
and I got to thinking, if you want to sell a religion,
you have to kill the deity.
That's how you do it.
So I shot Bob thinking the thing would just take off.
[Stang] The audience went berserk.
But the funny thing was the cops didn't care.
Nobody cared afterwards.
People were having drinks.
The band was dancing on the corpse of J.R. Bob Dobbs.
[chaotic music]
- It was this chance to just sing
and dance and be crazy.
It was really, really, really, really fun.
- Science does not remove the terror of the gods.
We can't do much about those evil gods
from the other side of the cosmos.
But enough of this,
you don't want to hear about this.
Who is the right hand man of Bob?
Who sits on the right hand side of Bob?
None other than the Reverend Ivan Stang.
[cheers and applause]
- I'm not here to talk about the Bleeding Head of Arnold Palmer.
- One of the things that we liked to talk about
was how the Church of the SubGenius would allow you
to control your own time.
- Can we have the house lights up a little bit?
- We decided to have our producer
be our plant in the audience.
- There's a main doctrine of the church called time control.
Many people don't want it.
Will you take your watch off?
[audience laughing]
It's a nice watch.
[audience laughing]
[Paul] Then before he presumably could be stopped,
Ivan put the watch down on the concrete block
and not just smashed the watch,
but broke the concrete block into pieces.
- Time control.
It is time control.
You've got to be willing to kill everything
in your previous life.
[Paul] And then what happened was the unexpected.
We were going to move on to the next thing,
but people in the audience suddenly ran up to us
and started taking their watches off
and throwing them on stage.
Some of them were really nice watches,
but the audience demanded that we smashed them all.
[audience cheering]
Doug had to sit up there and smashing one after another.
So there it was.
The audience was ready to take it way beyond
what we were doing.
- Praise Bob!
Praise Bob!
[Wellman] I thought this thing goes farther
than I ever imagined.
- We had run for the exits, but only in order to get
you this report on time tonight.
However, if you're the kind of person who likes to
pull the wool over your own eyes,
church is in session again tomorrow at 8:00 PM.
- That was an amazing evening
and also, I met my first crazy SubGenius.
This was the first person I ran into
who took it all the wrong way.
He came up to me after that second show and he was livid.
"The people in Dallas that did this thing, and Bob,
"when they find out you're just making a Sonny and Cher
"Comedy Show out of it, they're going to kill you.
"This is terrible.
"Look in this book here it says,
"stop what you're doing right now.
"This is serious.
"This is not a fan club.
This is not a joke."
And I said, "Dude, I wrote all that stuff.
"Me and Philo got high one night and we wrote all this crap.
Give me a break."
It really shook me up.
[Philo] It was a little bit scary.
We realized some crazy people are attracted to this.
You know the ones that are like, "Where's Bob?
No, where's the real Bob?"
- I think what starts off like a joke,
a few kind of believers who want their life to have
a little more meaning than it does or they feel it does
and then they get a little too gung-ho.
They want to adhere a little too much.
They start believing a little too much, and then here we go.
[Penn] You are playing with fire
and the idea of taking fire
and doing what the SubGenius did,
which is setting off fireworks.
It's really beautiful.
It's really fun.
And every second of that,
just a little bit of gasoline
and it'll tear your face off.
- There are religions that were
originally intended to be jokes
and then they turned into gangs,
you know, into mafias.
- I'm here to offer you an opportunity to know
the truth so that if you can connect with it,
then you might survive.
- It's a kind of horrifying moment when we realized
that we could probably pick up 300 people randomly
from anywhere who had pledged their lives to us
if we asked them to.
[screaming]
- I suspect that some of the people who call themselves
SubGenius were actually replacing their
childhood religion with this,
and that wasn't my world view,
but when I saw people do that, it was a little scary.
- I guess I was angry at...
everyone.
I'd been treated pretty shitty my entire life by folks.
Their message appealed to me.
[Paul] The traditional exchange is that you
take responsibility for them.
They want you to tell them what to do,
and this was the kind of power we didn't want.
It was the exact opposite of what we're aiming for,
which was to remove people from that kind of a hook.
[Stang] There are people who really want to join this cult
and want it to be everything it says it is,
and then when they find out that it's not anything it says it is,
they get really mad.
- You've heard our phrase "fuck them if they can't take a joke."
This is important to us.
- Just when you think you might get a handle on--
Oh, it's a collaborative network of artists
all over the country.
That's all it is.
Oh no, that's not what it is.
So it's really a secretly sort of a subversive organization.
No, no, it's not really that.
It's just a bunch of drunk guys in Dallas
trying to freak people out.
- You either got the joke or you didn't,
and you got the joke instantly or you didn't.
- Occasionally people will call us out on that whole
"fuck them if they can't take a joke" thing or it's like,
"Well that just excuses everything."
No, it's just funny.
- When was the last time you gave a straight answer?
- Well, these are all...
We don't care whether they get the joke or not.
Half of them can't.
- We're trying to make you laugh
but also maybe shock you a little bit
with our irreverence and you may think it's funny.
We hope you do, but if you don't,
you shouldn't punish us
because we are trying to deliver medicine of a sort
and if you can't take the joke, then please go fuck yourself.
- It began in the heart of the Bible Belt in Dallas, Texas,
but its membership is spreading across the nation.
[News Anchor] Their prophet's name is Bob
and their followers are legion.
[Paul] Everybody in every mass media liked
Church of the SubGenius because it was this crazy thing
that they could just inject into their own stream.
In the absence of the internet,
it was kind of a meme for media.
[Reporter] People, 4,000 of them so far and more every day
have already joined up.
Suddenly the joke has become serious.
- At first it was a joke, but there was something
much deeper and more life affirming than I even realize.
- Y'all are out to put down outrageous cult groups.
What does this mean?
- No, no, this is an outrageous cult group.
[Philo] The church was meant to never be mass marketable.
We never really wanted to have a lot of followers.
- Basically I was a very lonely weirdo
in a small Massachusetts town.
I finally got a boyfriend who was a member of the church
and show me the pamphlets and I said, this is it.
- They imparted into me the values
that have gotten me where I am today.
- We got this attention, a lot of attention
and I started a fear that this thing's going to get too big.
- What the hell do you think you're doing?
Dragging your butt through the day selling body and soul
to a bunch of bland normals?
There is a simple answer, dear friend.
- I feel like I'm part of something, yeah,
I feel like I'm finally being represented by something.
[Speaker] The next president of the United States of Brighton,
Mr. Bob Dobbs.
- You have voted by Time Magazine as the
fraud of the century.
Do you get any flak from the folks from mainstream religion?
- Not nearly enough.
There was a little wave of people going,
"Oh, they're corporate now.
"They're huge. "They're sold out.
They're pink now."
Well, not really.
[Philo] Oh, we got Will at just the right time,
counting checks.
- Huge wad of cash.
[Philo] Here we go again.
[Reporter] Like any other prophet, Bob preaches about
the end of the world.
Only his predictions are just a little different.
- The men from planet X will arrive to rupture
the true believers of geniuses up into the escape vessels
of the sex goddesses.
- Why do you do this?
[Stang] We offer eternal salvation
or triple your money back.
[laughing]
- Triple your money back.
- Is the world going to end?
That's what I'm asking you.
I said do you have a prophecy of doom here for us?
- The world will end for those who deserve it.
- All right, all right.
- Those who- - Wait, wait, wait,
now we're getting somewhere.
All right, so basically here's your deal.
For 30 bucks, you don't die at the end of the world.
[screaming and yelling]
[Stang] It occurred to me, this is the fulcrum event
of human history.
This is when we finally get our history back
in our own hands.
- What an ass.
- It's time to join the SubGenius Revolution.
The countdown has begun.
It's like Christmas.
Santa is coming, Santa is coming real soon
and we've got the short wave you can tune in
and hear Santa delivering his little gifts of
death and destruction.
- At X day, you always see all sorts of different
people and they all had this kind of common sense of humor,
a warped sense of humor, a dark sense of humor
and I find dark sense of humor to be the most fascinating
type of sense of humor because it's taboo.
You could talk about all these taboo subjects
and make jokes about things that polite company
would find extremely distasteful.
- We're going to find out if he's really Jewish.
[laughing]
[Follower] Let's make him Jewish if he's not.
[cheers]
- It was cool as shit.
I was a socially awkward person and suddenly, you know,
after a couple of sermons, I could go to half the towns
on the East Coast and people would open their doors to me,
buy me dinner.
About a week ago, I had a vision of seven o'clock coming,
and Reverend Stang getting up on stage and making some kind of
lame excuse while the saucers didn't come,
then some bent dumb ass out in the audience
just putting a bullet in him.
- We're missing Jesus and Stang.
Perhaps there are some amongst us that are worried
that if nothing shows up in 20 minutes,
they're going to get themselves beat to a bloody pulp.
- There's a white limo pulling up.
[Speaker] It is a white limousine.
[indistinct chatter]
[Follower] Hail the limousine.
[Stang] Of course, there's tremendous feeling
of anticipation.
Twenty years ago I thought 1998 was a million years off.
Geez it's really coming, this is really happening.
This is the original handwritten note in J.R. Bob Dobbs
own hand that says the world ends July 5th, 7am, 1998.
This is the original paper touched by Bob.
- It's been difficult to be patient,
but I knew that if I just persevered,
I'd be able to say goodbye from above,
from the saucers.
[Stang] Thirty seconds.
- Here's this joke that I've been telling myself
and other people for over half my life.
[Followers] Thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten,
nine, eight, seven,
six, five, four,
three, two, one.
Fuck them if they can't take a joke.
[Onan] And then the saucers didn't show up.
- At one time, this, uh, date was comfortably far
in the future, but it has turned out that the
pleasure saucers of the sex goddesses
did not descend on that occasion to lift us
all off into universes of slack.
[Onan] Everybody was looking around.
Looking around at each other.
- He's a charlatan.
He's a fucking charlatan and he's been lying to us
all these years.
There ain't no Bob Dobbs, it's just a fucking dummy.
It's a fucking dummy.
- I just did what Bob told me to do.
- I had a real philosophical problem with the X day thing,
and I still have a hard time remembering the date
because in any religion,
if you have an end of the world date,
I think it should be written in the bylaws that that date
has to happen long after you, the person issuing the date,
is dead.
You don't put it just a few years later.
[Philo] We never really expected the Church to go to 1998.
Back in 1981, we set 98 out there cause it was still
way out there.
[Speaker] We tried to warn you children.
You wouldn't listen.
You can't take all the money,
all the girls,
and all the Slack
and never have to pay it back.
We're going to need a good lubricant, aren't we children?
[screaming and cheering]
[Dr. Legume] I guess to be honest,
I'd have to say that I never really expected
any flying saucers.
To be honest,
a lot of this stuff is really, really stupid,
but I guess a lot of people need something really stupid
in their lives to give it meaning.
- I don't know, it's still a pretty beautiful world
we've got here and Bob is still a very important part of my life
and always will be.
[Philo] There was some sense that, now what?
- The decade has been marked by strong growth,
the lowest unemployment in a generation
and yet remarkably little inflation.
[Reporter] Some think it's a boom without end.
- I was about to give up on the church.
The thing was 10, 15 years old and people were
starting to get tired of it
and things weren't quite as terrifying as they are now.
[Reporter] As freer trade flourished this decade,
the internet evolved into a commercial phenomenon.
- Then the internet came along.
[Onan] People can tune in to it 24 hours a day.
[Stang] Suddenly we could reach those fringe people
that weren't going to run into it in a bookstore.
[Onan] There's the loss of you have to know a guy.
- In the 80s, there was a cost to knowing about them.
Now you can meet people and signal who you are
in quicker and more efficient ways,
perhaps with less depth.
[Philo] The internet did so much to kill
so much old ways of doing things.
I think it makes it a lot harder now to make a big splash.
[Paul] It was a medium.
It flattens everything out like TV used to do,
so that an inconsequential offend is the same
as a horrendous calamity
or a staggering triumph of humanity
and the people exposed to it no longer can distinguish
between factual things and fantasies and trite.
[News Anchor] Good evening everyone.
The reaction of so many people today was, "Oh no, not again."
Another high school, Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado
this time on the edge of Denver, it has been a horror.
[Reporter] Police have identified the gunmen as
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
They apparently belonged to a cliché of outcasts called
the Trench-coat Mafia.
[News Anchor] Do you have an explanation for this stuff?
- A lot of it's the feeling of being an outsider,
feeling disempowered.
[News Anchor] You have middle class kids that are alienated
and angry, and we've always had alienated kids,
but these kids become real powerful because they get
linked together via the internet
and the sad thing is that this may not be the end.
[Ray] Joe's next in Tallahassee.
Hi Joe. - Hey Ray.
This is all part of that Church and the SubGenius thing,
which is a big deal about exterminating the normals
and killing the pinks
and now we see the ultimate tuition of that.
Don't we?
- Father Joe Mama, not one to be accused of extra good taste.
He decided to promote our upcoming Boston show
in a kind of reverse way.
- Another one of my little functions in the
Church of the SubGenius is that of agent provocateur.
The face that makes the outside world think of the
Church of the SubGenius is very dangerous.
[Radio Host] Joe, you obviously know a lot about this cult,
and it sounds horrifying by your description.
[Joe Mama] They're having a devival this weekend in Boston
and the bodies aren't even cold in the graves.
And then the host says, "Well I always heard the
Church of the SubGenius was a joke."
Well see, that's the thing.
They pawn it off as a joke.
So people don't take it seriously.
[Philo] That was over the top.
Sure, you want to find the media event that you can
go get attention from, but that's bad taste.
[Stang] I didn't really appreciate that,
but I'm generally not going to run around censoring people
or telling people what they can or can't say.
- Somebody in Boston City Council did take us seriously
and they managed to get the venue to shut down
and not allow us to do the devival.
- The Cambridge Baptist Church heard about it
and came to our rescue and said,
you can do your devival at our church.
Then they started getting bomb threats.
[Joe Mama] We had basically performed outside the
venue in some park or something like that
and Friday had a chance to basically put me on trial
for this questionable humor and the whole time,
even though Friday and I are good friends
and I wasn't worried about what she would do,
the audience kind of took it a lot more seriously.
The choice is yours, my friends, do you merely want to
enslave the normals or do you want to add the options
to kill them dead on instinct?
- Like this one.
Kill.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
Kill.
[Joe Mama] You were wondering,
did they know that this was a joke?
- There've been many situations where people
got the wrong idea about Church of the SubGenius.
Of course we want them to, so we asked for it,
but it has backfired a few times.
[Dr. Legume] There actually were serious cult deprogrammers
who had added Church of the SubGenius to their watch lists
of cults to watch out for and warn people about.
This Church of the SubGenius hates a lot of things.
They hate the right things.
Sometimes they make fun of the wrong things.
- I dropped character now because there've been
so many crazies.
It's important for me not to leave behind
another Scientology or Mormonism.
- I don't know that they really got the message.
You know that the real message is:
Think for yourself,
be your own leader.
- The idea is not in restraint.
It's in confronting the dark things.
Finding the things that hurt us and tear us apart
and pulling the fangs out of them,
making them into a fucking joke
because that's the whole premise of the Church,
is fuck them if they can't take a joke.
[News Anchor] This just in, you are looking at obviously
a very disturbing live shot there.
The plane has crashed into one of the towers
of the World Trade Center.
- Terrorism against our nation will not stand
and now if you join me in a moment of silence.
- The view from my apartment...
was the World Trade Center.
- Watching all of this, I wasn't sure that I should be doing
a television show because for 20 years we've been in the city
making fun of everything,
making fun of the city to come to this circumstance that is
so desperately sad, I and I don't trust my judgment
in matters like this.
- Like I was thinking the other day that you can figure out
how bad a person you are by how soon after September 11th
you masturbated, like how long you waited.
- I don't like political correctness in any of its forms.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to say it.
Not funny at all.
- I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you,
and the people who knocked these buildings down
will hear all of us soon.
[Nurse Kelly] Time was changing and we could feel it.
- I kind of feared that this may be the end of the
Church and the SubGenius soon just because...
just because we're not going to be able to make fun of
things that hurt people.
[Reporter] President Bush finds himself enjoying huge
public support.
[George W. Bush] Either you're with us,
either you love freedom
or you're with the enemy.
[Stang] It was getting kind of serious and disturbing.
[Radio Host] Yetis and simpletons, we have a lot of
fun here at the Institute,
but unfortunately the fish has hit the fan.
Reverend Mary Magdalen has had her child taken from her
for no greater crime than her membership in the
Church of the SubGenius
and her participation in X day drills.
[Stang] Because of pictures on the internet,
the family court judge in this little town in New York state
took the little boy away from the mom
because she was a SubGenius.
[Radio Host] Why don't you head to your favorite web browser
and type in subgenius.com/maghelp.
- They got the kid back,
not because of sanity on the part of the judges,
it was because the biological father screwed up so very badly,
but for two years, we were in the news.
- I just thought, if I'm associated with something
where they can take away my kids,
I don't want my name anywhere on it and I think that's a
reminder about who we are today,
where you get punished for who you're associated with.
- You must be ready to unleash a shitload of fire and brimstone,
death, bullets, lead, guns, fucking knives...
For a while, I was feeling a bit morally culpable about
telling a group of people who are attracted to an organization
that is targeted towards
awkward and marginalized and sometimes mentally ill people
and standing up in front of them like some big
pumped up superheroes screaming and yelling about
how they should live a life of hate.
[Stang] A lot of the energy that was there was from,
I won't say we were pissed off or mad or angry,
but maybe we were a little bit angry;
angry young man railing against the system
a little bit through humor.
- Because we hate you.
[Stang] But I think that you can't sustain that level
for that long and I think the people get tired
and want something new after a while.
- I took a lot of these zaniness and the absurdity
and that actually was very helpful to have
and to kind of have in your hip pocket as you went through life.
But it got a little too far out for me.
- I had an epiphany.
I realized that The Conspiracy that had stolen my Slack
for 50 years of my life was me.
I had to lay off the hate part of it.
Like anything, Bob is best in reasonable, sensible doses.
You do not want to drink the whole pitcher of Kool-Aid,
you just what to drink a small cup.
I don't really want to destroy you, man,
and you don't even care if the saucers come or not.
[Philo] I took a short break when I was transferred
to California.
I was actually being career advanced in the company
I was working for.
They thought I was doing a great job,
so I just followed it.
I couldn't be as strong in the church as I wanted to be
and having as much fun with it as I did, you know.
[Stang] The world never did know about Church of the SubGenius.
We never were that big.
It is kind of obscure that keeps it special.
If everybody knew about it,
it would be normal.
[Paul] We were just too lazy.
We didn't want to be responsible for our own cult members.
We just wanted to tap them on the forehead and say, wake up.
And of course some people you have to hit with a sledgehammer,
and even then that doesn't do the trick.
Or you can get them to wake for a second or two
and then they doze off again
as soon as they see a cat picture on the internet.
[dramatic music]
- Today's secret ingredient is...
[dramatic music]
[cheers]
- How am I doing?
Am I doing okay?
I'm President.
Hey, I'm President.
Can you believe it?
[Paul] Donald Trump's probably the most SubGenius
world leader there's ever been.
He's completely caught up in his own world.
Does what he wants makes up his own reality.
- I'm not going to give you a question.
- Can you state- - You are fake news.
- Sean Spicer, our Press Secretary gave
alternative facts.
- Facts and lies have no meaning to him.
SubGenius, but not in a good way.
- Trump steaks.
Where are the steaks? Do we have steaks?
We've been friends for a long time.
- We're living in a world that's upside down.
Trump is the perfect example now
of a world turned upside down.
He's the "Joker."
- This is a special year.
Our country is doing great.
[Penn] We've got surreal,
unbelievable,
shocking,
psychedelic
covered with reality right now.
- It's not a good place for any party to end up
with a cult-like situation.
- I mean, Bob Dobbs is not in any way
weirder than Donald Trump.
I mean, Donald Trump wins.
- I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody
and I wouldn't lose any voters.
Okay?
[Audience] USA. USA.
- It's very effective to slice the world up
and to pit everyone against each other.
It's an effective means for power.
- The country of Mexico is killing us.
The crime, and the gangs, and the drugs.
[Group Chant] Build that wall.
Build that wall.
- We're torn as SubGeniuses because of course
a good portion of our viewpoint is that
The Conspiracy is out of control.
In fact, to our horror each passing day,
the world seems more and more SubGenius.
- I've got highly effective all-natural weight loss aids-
[screaming and cheering]
- The great story here is this vast right-wing conspiracy.
[Donald Trump] There are many people that don't agree
with that birth certificate.
- I can't trust Obama.
He's an Arab.
He is not-
- Everybody is in their own private Idaho.
Everybody's in their own bubble
and all they do is go into a feedback loop
where they can get things to reaffirm
what they already think.
- This administration is trying to fool you
into believing that the news the white house doesn't
really like, well, isn't news.
- Three million illegals voted.
- Where are you getting your information?
- The Soviet Union has a worldwide
disinformation network.
[Stang] They go to media sites that incite them,
that make them paranoid and worried
and fretful about the future.
- They can't control the amount of rapes that are going on.
- Just because they're refugees doesn't mean they're
fucking rapists.
- They're racist, sexist, homophobic,
xenophobic.
- I am no racists.
- You're voting for Donald Trump.
[Jerry Casale] None of them are interested in breaking
out of the loop and realizing, "Oh, I've been duped,
I've been programmed."
- Trump Derangement Syndrome,
hatred of Donald Trump so intense that it
impairs people's judgment.
[Jerry Casale] Like if you quit being real humans
and thinking for yourselves, it's over.
[Donald Trump] This is your country.
[Penn] I don't know how you carve out
a place for that kind of playful us and them
in a place where the news
is filling so many of those roles.
That being said,
I also couldn't have thought of the SubGenius in 1978,
so obviously they're better at this than I am.
[Howland] There's always going to be a conspiracy.
It can morph, it can change and it can evolve
and so can the Church of the SubGenius.
- We'll never fix the government like,
we'll never get it to where everyone is happy.
There will always be acrimony
and so we desperately need comedy.
- Well, I think the best thing we can do is
spread our message
and hope that it is useful in the coming crisis,
which is descending on the planet
and the human world that inhabits it.
[Stang] For the last 20 years, the only thing I had to do
to make my half of the mortgage payments
is keep selling SubGenius ministerships.
And it occurred to me, wait a minute,
this isn't a bad gig at all.
Once a month I have to sit here and assemble these things.
Maybe spend half an hour a day taking them to the post office?
That's not bad.
People are still obviously getting a lot out of it.
Just last week, I went to the post office
and there was this envelope there, postage due.
I had to fork out $2 and 45 cents just to find out
what was in this letter and it had no return address on it.
The postal guy said, "Well, I could just throw it away."
And I went, "Man, it's probably a joke, but it better be funny."
I got home and opened it up.
It had $1,000 in $20 bills in there
just out of the blue.
I immediately took half of it to a sick person that I know
who cried with gratitude.
It's like, no, we're not crazy to keep doing this.
It really does come along at the right time for some people.
[cars passing]
- Palmer,
Palmer,
what happened to Philo?
- He's hiding.
- Oh.
You guys look awful,
but a lot better than I expected.
Ay yi yi yi yi.
Praise Bob.
Welcome to Austin.
[Philo] This is sort of like a booze quest.
Uh-oh, another human blockade.
Look, there's something.
There's a mermaid woman.
A mer-woman.
- That's you, once you get your shirt off, honey.
[Philo] Oh, I thought it was for real.
- You first- - This is just a sad-
- I bet you if you take your clothes off,
everybody here will follow you.
[Philo] This is just a sad, sad joke.
- Do it. - No, no.
- If you took your clothes off and I'll bet you anything-
[Philo] I'm not a leader.
I'm just a fast follower.
- If you were to do that.
- I'm the second guy in.
- She'd be next, and then her, and then her...
To me it's always been play.
You go to a SubGenius show,
they're not waving their arms in anger.
They might be pretending to,
but that's the main thing you get,
is laughter.
[Philo] We're still just playing.
- This is Philo and I'm Ivan.
- Tony, this is Reverend Stang.
- Yeah, I'm a reverend.
- We're cult leaders is what we really are.
Our real job is to be cult leaders.
[Stang] There you go, these'll take you like a
week and a half to read.
It's called Church of the SubGenius.
If you're not a genius, you'd probably qualify.
- If you feel different and you feel oppressed by
society's imposition of normalcy on you,
you don't have to be that way.
You could be the person that you want to be.
We know that we think for ourselves,
and that's more important than you thinking like me.
[Stang] Test, test, test.
[Sound Crew] Okay.
- It was the night 62 million assholes
scraped rat feces into their exposed skull cavities
with a rusty butter knife.
Everyone agreed that change was needed to make America
great again, and it didn't much matter that we'd soon be having
our urethras board out with a high speed electric drill,
at least until the Ku Klux Klan settled in and got comfortable
over at the Justice Department.
Every week when the baboons came down from Oatmeal Ridge,
they'd all circle around the plasma TV to watch
Fox and Friends.
Now that the judicial branch was well-stocked with
white nationalists, they didn't have to worry so much about the
colored folk or the multi-dicked Mexican rape demons.
Best of all, there'd still be plenty of sports to watch
and everyone loved all the choices of the
Applebee's salad bar.
The end.
Now it's time for you kids get bed.
Nighty night.
[Radio Crew] Five, four, three, two.
- It's bubbling-
- Bubbling Evidence?
- Yes.
- But I think it's Bubbling Evidence, yeah.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the name of the show is.
- It's Puddling Effluence. - Questionable Judgment.
I think it's Questionable Judgment.
- Questionable Judgment, that's for sure.
That's a description.
That's the abstract of the show.
- Bishop Joey is here with us.
- Yeah, he is.
- Tonight on the show.
- Well Bishop Joey, what is your church's version of Slack?
- Most of us wear clothes.
- We already did that.
Our church did that long ago with the all-inclusive
divine excuse.
That's the first thing we gave them.
You just need an excuse that excuses you for anything
that may have happened or might happen at
any time in the future.
♪ Is it true what they say about Bob? ♪
♪ That when you have Bob life's no prob? ♪
♪ He'll give you Slack
♪ And more sex than you can hack. ♪
♪ Oh, life's a bowl of cherries with Bob Dobbs. ♪
♪ Is it true what they say about Bob? ♪
♪ That when you have Bob life's no prob? ♪
♪ If you want drugs, then he will give you God's. ♪
♪ Oh life's a bowl of cherries with Bob Dobbs. ♪
♪ Is it true what they say about Bob? ♪
♪ That when you have Bob life's no prob? ♪
♪ Send a dollar and a letter
♪ And you'll feel, oh, so much better. ♪
♪ Life's a bowl of cherries with, ♪
♪ And life's a bowl of cherries with, ♪
♪ Oh life's a bowl of cherries with Bob Dobbs. ♪