Quick Hit: Geek Comedy Interview

I'm working on a book, in school, and working, so I'm busy.

Here's an interview from the book I'm working on, a little snippet while I work on some beefier projects. It's with one of the columnists from Cracked, Bobby "Fatboy" Roberts on geek comedy, women, and success.

Q: Cracked.com is a popular site, seen as being reliably hilarious. How would you describe the spirit of Cracked? What sort of reader are you appealing to?

A: This is probably a better question for the editor-in-chief, Jack O'Brien, but if I had to answer, more as a reader than a contributor, I'd say the spirit is educational smartassery. The emphasis is on the comedy, but you don't get to do the jokes if you don't know your shit. And you can't just have a knowledge of the subject you're shining a spotlight on (or skewering) you gotta know how to write succinctly and effectively. A large amount of the most-seen articles on Cracked read like textbook entries, if the guy writing the textbook was raised on a diet of George Carlin and Bill Hicks.


Q: Cracked has gone through many lives – as a MAD Magazine imitator, and later a boys magazine a la Maxim. It finally succeeded as a website. While most print media is struggling in the current economy, do you think other factors contributed to Cracked's success on the Internet?

A: From what I understand, Cracked's success on the internet came from stepping back and looking at what was already working as far as original comedy on the internet goes, and then gathering up as many of those writers and content creators as possible. Again, I'm not so sure about how it happened, I wasn't there at the time, you'd probably wanna talk to the editor on that note.

Q: Much of the content on Cracked has a similar 'feel' in terms of tone and style. Are there guidelines that writers have to follow?

A: There's not really a set of guidelines or bullet-points, so far as I know. But there is an editorial influence that does help to shape the tone of the articles, be it through suggestions or rewrites and line-edits by the editors themselves. Never so much as to erase the individual voice of the author, but just enough so that there exists a cohesive tonal whole that carries over from piece to piece throughout the site.


Q: What sort of guidelines do you follow as a writer? Are there restrictions to your style or content? Are there lines you won't cross regarding offensive content, words, or imagery?

A: Me, personally, I don't restrict myself too much. I'd like to say "I don't give a fuck about offensiveness," but the truth is, if you're writing something and you haven't done the work in the set-up to make a punchline about, say for example, the mentally handicapped, sound *right* then either that joke needs to be rewritten or jettisoned completely and an entirely different angle needs to be taken. It's a kind of a nebulous area, especially since humor is so subjective. There's a line, and it's a thin one, between being edgy and just being a jackass. I guess the first rule on that note is that if you're consciously TRYING to find that line, you're doing it wrong. There's a way to make even the most offensive topic funny, but you gotta set up that punchline pretty carefully.

Q: Cracked covers a lot of 'geek' topics, like video games, Star Wars or kids cartoons. Do you feel like there's a good way to define 'geek' humor?

A: I think the definition of Geek underwent a sort of shifting about a decade back, and has been gradually evolving as it goes. At this point a "Geek" is simply someone who is immersed in pop culture. Maybe in some instances it's more specialized than that, broken down to a more specific subset of pop culture, but really, that's it. Geek has come to mean "Enthusiast" more than anything. Sports Geek, Movie Geek, Knitting Geek, whatever, at it's core its the same sort of community-building/community-based shared interest in an aspect of pop culture at the root of it. And considering how largely pop culture plays a part in most people's daily lives, the stigma of being a "geek," is rapidly waning, save for the fact "geeks" are self-identifying with the word almost as if they're trying to reclaim it from its previously negative connotations, and in the process, prolonging those connotations as the geeks engage in this heirarchal "real geek" structure wherein they use their "geek cred" to beat up on other, lesser nerds online for not being as real.

Jesus Christ that was a long ass sentence. And geeky as fuck, too.

Basically, Geek Humor is humor that has anything to do with pop culture, period. It gets more obviously geek the more specific your pop culture reference gets.

Q: What characteristics would you apply to geek humor? Do you feel that geek humor has any negative slants, such as a strong misogynist streak or a tendency for racism?

A: I'd say the most negative slant Geek Humor has is this sort of forced, feigned sense of superiority. That slight twinge of Comic-Book Guy that a lot of essayists and bloggers and recappers glaze their paragraphs with. Snark is the easy default when it comes to these things, and a lot of authors (myself included, more than a few times) will fall back on the authoritative voice, casting themselves as the armchair know-it-all who has the easy solution at their fingertips if ONLY the world would just listen to them (and give them a couple thousand extra hits so the google ads will funnel a nickel into their paypal accounts)

Sometimes misogyny and racism sorta sneak their way into the subtext, but a lot of that seems to be done accidentally, by people who don't quite realize what it is they're saying. I don't think it's necessarily a racism/sexism thing in a lot of cases, it's just that these people aren't familiar with these other viewpoints because, yunno, they DON'T GO OUTSIDE, period. Seriously though, if you're dealing with geeky writers, writers who obviously have a bit more tunnel-visioned focus on their subjects, it makes sense that things falling outside of that tunnel vision aren't going to be as easy a grasp for that writer, at least until whatever they ARE staring at does an episode or writes an issue that covers that particular social ill.


Q: While women are using the Internet in droves, there aren't many strong female comedy presences on the web. Do you think this will change in the future? What are steps to making this a reality?

A: It'll change in the future, sure, much in the same way there's more female stand-ups than there were in the 80's. Barely, but there is more. However, the troubling part of using that analogy is that there's STILL a perception that women on the club circuit simply just aren't as funny as the guys. People have written veritable tomes on why this could be, citing delivery, inability for large parts of the stand-up audience to relate, so on and so on. I don't have the answer myself. I do know that it seems to be a little easier for that gulf to be bridged online, when the element of sound is removed and all you have left are the words. That equalizes things a little. The only way the numbers will even up is if more women put themselves out there.

Q: Overall, do you feel like geek humor a positive step forward for comedy or a negative step back?

A: I'm not so sure it's a forward/back sort of thing, really. I think it's just a decent component of the whole. I think it helps that people can get the ha-ha's they need to make their day go a bit smoother, and those ha-ha's can be a little better tailored towards their specific geeky focus. On the flip, I think it's healthy for people to step out of that geek comfort zone every now and again and experience other people's geeky interests, too.