Slacking Towards Bethlehem: J.R. 'Bob' Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius (2018) - full transcript
[liquid pours]
[clink]
[siren wailing]
[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]
[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]
[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
- 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.
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]
[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. ♪