All Hail Bob Dobbs: The Church of The SubGenius [Something Interesting #29]

This subject is one that I’ve wanted to cover for quite a while, since it reminds me of watching all kinds of late-night weirdness during the late 90s and early 2000s. It also gives off vibes of a kind of 1980s punk lifestyle I would never know or understand. The problem though, as the Oddstrosity video posted below points out, is that the further you look to better understand it, the more bizarre and hard-to-fathom it becomes to grapple with what it actually is. Because I’m probably neither descended from yetis nor can I fully grasp Slack, I’m going to give the barest bones on one of the premier “parody” religions: The Church of the SubGenius.

Here’s basically what you need to know:

It was founded in 1979 by Philo Drummond and Ivan Strang, getting its start through a photocopied pamphlet called Sub Genius Pamphlet #1 (link provided below).
Its prophet is J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, a Dallas-based salesman who saw JHVH-1 through a homemade television in 1957 and transcribed the Pre-Scriptures that would eventually become The Book of the SubGenius.
Humanity is mostly here on Earth due to aliens wanting them to follow through with their bidding (humans are usually called “pinks”, by the way). The only people who are able to counter-act this brainwashing are the descendants of yetis.
The core concept is Slack. Once you have Slack, you’re able to live a carefree life free of the aliens. Ways of getting Slack are usually through sex and avoiding all work.
The apocalypse was supposed to come via those same aliens on 7/5/1998 but that may have been a misreading and it's actually 7/5/8991.
Earth actually may have been destroyed in 1998 but we're all really living on Mars.
There are 5 major tenets for SubGeniuses to follow:

Stop working.
Buy the Church's products.
Go against law and order.
Further the goals of The Church by harnessing the power of fear.
Eliminate anyone who did not descend from the yetis.

There’s a lot of famous weirdos who are associated with The Church.

Aside from those points, I’m pretty vexed about all this but still have to applaud the absolute bonkers willingness to push this as far as possible. I recommend at least checking out the videos and documents posted below to see how far you can go with it. Some of the ideas are pretty rough to handle, even for something that’s supposed to be funny. It’s understood to be a satire of both Christian fundamentalism and New Age woo but it’s more spiky than gentle ribbing.

If you manage to grasp Slack, I applaud you. If not, don’t be afraid to move on and wait for my next Something Interesting post. It’ll be about something more lighthearted like Esperanto or the history of power pop or something like that…