The Church of Subgenius: The parody that became a cult
I can’t help but think that the last 15 years or so have proved that parody and satire don’t really work as intended. Sure, we can get a few yuks out of someone or something, but acting like making a pointed joke out of something we all know about is anything other than a passing diversion is desperately naive.
In fact, one could even say that making memes and jokes about someone helps them, even if it’s at their expense. After all, it seems that no matter what people say about someone famous or a powerful institution, the more people know about them, the better. Look at the likes of Drake and Elon Musk. Two men who appeal to their die-hard fanbase of followers and repel literally everyone else. This makes them two of the most clownable people alive, and yet they are also two of the wealthiest and most famous people on the planet.
People figured out that the only power that satire and parody have is that which you give them. If a cutting remark or a funny parody follows you around, and you keep your head down until you go away, then people will also forget about you. If you just front it out, it becomes a way people remember you. Craig David kneecapped his career nearly 30 years ago because Leigh Francis said his name funny. Drake has stadiums full of people calling him a pedophile in front of a TV audience of hundreds of millions, and still has hits with ease because he just didn’t go away.
Because the fact is, the things that people joke about become what people take seriously. Bizarrely enough, there’s a cult that proves this better than any rich person ever could.
But how did a parody of a cult become a real fucking cult?
The Church of the SubGenius was formed as a parody of existing religions and the way they would often be bastardised by Western prosperity culture and pop culture as a whole.
Where your average youth pastor can easily be clowned on for referring to Jesus Christ as the original “woke king”, with The Church of the SubGenius, the absurdity was the point. This is a religion that supposedly came to its (entirely fictional) founder and prophet J R ‘Bob’ Dobbs, while he was watching (or building, depending on the telling) a television set.
Hell, it’s god, Jehovah 1, is canonically one of the Elder Gods from H P Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos. He contacted Dobbs to spread his word and brainwash the world into working for a living. In a fairly interesting case of a supposed religion being built against its God, Dobbs fought against Him, spreading the word of “Slack”. Essentially, telling the world to chill out and take it easy. Despite this clearly being a parody, you can see why people would begin to take it seriously, right?
Every time a new part of the church’s lore dropped, every holiday, every practice, every homily and hymn, people would absolutely take it to heart. Making it the very dogmatic rule that the church was built to parody. When people started vandalising property in the early 1990s in support of the Church of SubGenius, as was the case in Bedford, England, of all places, it was clear that this was beyond a joke. This had become the very thing it was trying to speak out against, something that people blindly followed.
Always be careful with what you joke about; it might just come back to bite you in ways you weren’t expecting.