J. R. "Bob" DobbsCritiques

This might be more relevant now than it was before 1998.

Whenever I meet a literary person who hasn't read this bk & isn't even familiar w/ the Church of the SubGenius, I realize that their lives are so incomplete that I turn them sideways to see if they're still there in profile.

To set the record straight (an 8 letter word w/ only 1 syllable): being an ever-so-slightly-infamous person I sometimes run across (I try to run them over but it never works) mentions of me on the web by people who apparently "think they really know me" (reference to Gary Wilson). Such mentions might overcredit me for my involvement w/ this bk; some might speak of my contempt for the Church of the SubGenius. They're both RONG (deliberate misspelling).

One of the biggest regrets in my life is that I didn't get involved in the Church until January of 1981. If I had only been a mnth earlier, I wd've been listed as a member of the "Board of Directors of the SubGenius Foundation appointed in 1980". Instead, I'm just listed as having made "Additional Sacrifices" in 1981. At least I was immediately sainted. It's obvious that the other churches give a bum deal to their saints by waiting to exploit them AFTER they're dead. This regret haunts me to this day. No matter where I move, no matter where I hide, it haints me.

My actual contribution to the bk is small - a foto of me that someone else took of me painting a stencil that someone else made & a foto that I had taken of sd stencil not-very-convincingly seeming to form my own head. Nonetheless, I actually GOT A ROYALTY CHECK FOR $12 from the 1st edition of this. & THAT, my friend (or whatever) is as good a sign as any that the Church of the SubGenius is rooted in integrity.

This bk is SHEER (Sub)GENIUS. Let me repeat that: This bk is (Sub)SHEER GENIUS. To poorly paraphrase an interview that I gave that's in my movie entitled "B.T.O.U.C." that you'll probably never, EVER get a chance to see, "The Church of the SubGenius is out to save yr soul even though it doesn't BELIEVE in souls." & this bk does it so well that you only need to read one word of it (wch there's no need for you to even BELIEVE) in order for you to go straight past hell, purgatory, AND heaven into the far-flung reaches of the imagination.

& the GRAPHICS! I mean, HOLY SHIT!, the editors of this bk gathered together the finest talents that "Bob" cd bribe or rib or offer slack to & put them to work 24/7/20-20/20-odd-sex. This is the FINEST representative of the under-uber that most of you will ever see. & I NO what I'm talking about.

There’s long been a rumour circulating on the Web about this book: that both it, and the SubGenius Foundation which produced it back in the 1980s, were in reality the handiwork of the CIA on behalf of the shadowy “elite” the book itself talks about. I mean, how better to conceal The Truth than by lampooning it?
   The Foundation was a new cult, deliberately incorporating every nutty idea you’ve ever read about or just heard of—from crank diets to UFOs from the Hollow Earth—and its rather ambiguous Messiah was J R “Bob” Dobbs, formerly a salesman. In a nutshell (so to speak) “Bob” informs us that: the Earth and its inhabitants are under the control of an alien entity; that there’s a global Conspiracy among the world’s “elite” to keep this fact from the public; but that, by following “Bob”’s teachings (and, of course, sending him money) we can (and I quote) learn to “pull the wool over our own eyes” at last. The first thirteen chapters are a round-up of “Bob”’s revealed “wisdom”; the remaining ones tell us what to actually do (and where to mail the cheques) now we’re enlightened.
   This was all good clean fun too back then, getting a rise out of the Scientologists and Moonies—a great idea. The downside is that, inevitably, the actual text of this book becomes every bit as boring after a while as the relentless outpourings of the cults and religions it’s satirising. On the other hand though, it’s lifted by the hundreds of clip-art illustrations, done like the small-ads in magazines and some of which are hilarious. What’s most striking of all perhaps, reading it in the twenty-first century, is how prescient it now looks—you find exactly these sort of “global conspiracy” ravings all over the Web.
   And the true message of SubGenius? It was (and still is) telling us humans, “Will you please, PLEASE, just stop taking yourselves so damn seriously.”

A lump of crap.
Not funny at all.½

The Book of the SubGenius
By J.R. "Bob" Dobbs
Fireside Books/Simon and Schuster (1987)
Review by Karl Wolff

"I dunno what the hell's in there, but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is." A memorable line from John Carpenter's science fiction masterpiece The Thing (from 1982). A novice reader might feel the same way opening to a random page of The Book of the SubGenius (the first edition from 1983). Including the infamous "bible" of this parody religion is a foregone conclusion for an essay series called "American Odd." The book is very odd and very American in equal measure.

Growing up in the Eighties, I consumed my share of Saturday morning cartoons, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and other more obscure animated franchises. Anyone else remember Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors? Besides these cartoons, I discovered Mad Magazine with occasional detours to Cracked and Eerie. I learned about the mechanics of satire and parody at a very early age. Mad softened the ground for more explorations into oddball and underground American culture. Before I entered college in 1997, if I desired to know about strange things I really had to dig. The Internet was a shadow of its former self in the 1990s. It took forever to load images and Napster's availability meant waiting and waiting.

So I headed back to the printed word. Mad led to 'zines. I discovered RE/Search, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Discordianism, George Carlin, and Bill Hicks. I remember seeing Bill Hicks on Ha!, the first incarnation of Comedy Central. Back then the channel had to fill time, so it dumped tons of stand-up comic footage on air and broadcast things like Higgins Boys and Gruber and Short Attention Span Theater (one of Jon Stewart's earliest TV gigs). Among my many searches for the strange and unusual, I came across The Book of the SubGenius. It is only recently that I've read it from cover to cover.

The Book is a collection of pieces done for the SubGenius 'zine, The Stark Fist of Removal. The Church originated in the minds of three men - Ivan Stang, Philo Drummond, and Dr. X - and putting out their first pamphlet in Dallas, Texas in 1979. Living in Texas in the Eighties must not have been easy, especially for those of weird tendencies. In addition, Dallas was where JFK was assassinated and operated as a vortex for conspiracy theorists. "Bob" Dobbs assures the reader its appearance in Dallas is merely a coincidence.

Church doctrine and history is a bombastic admixture of surrealism, absurdism, DIY 'zine style, apocalypse, conspiracy theory, and generic men's fashion. J.R. "Bob" Dobbs is the central figure, a satirical subversion of Fifties Establishment salesmanship and Sixties yahoo New Agey idealism. Like Mad Magazine, the Church of the SubGenius pokes fun at both The Silent Majority and hippies. But buried beneath the crazy conspiracy theories, crackpot origin myths, and medicine show hucksterism are nuggets of wisdom. Being a SubGenius isn't about intelligence or race or wealth, it is about attitude. Mainly it is about Slack. Defining Slack is about as easy as defining Zen.

Hilobrow's Joshua Glenn eloquenty described the SubGenius attitude by saying, "To their immediate juniors, the Boomers' serial absorption in, for example, the anti-war movement, drug experimentation, the women's movement, the anti-nukes movement, environmentalism, and various self-actualization fads was a turn-off. In reaction to the Boomers' example, OGXers* have attempted -- with greater and lesser degrees of success -- to render themselves un-suggestible. At worst, this means that OGXers are a cynical bunch; at best, however, it means they're serious (not earnest) and ironic, though in a philosophical way. Their immunity to suggestibility, acquired at an early age, came in handy during the Reagan era, when many of their elders and juniors allowed themselves to be persuaded by the dogma/myth that propositions considered extreme just a few years earlier -- lowering taxes on the rich, shrinking the domestic safety net, prying the poor off welfare rolls -- were actually good common sense." While Glenn's essay was about comix artist Daniel Clowes, the same holds true for the Church of the SubGenius. Reading The Book of the SubGenius is an exercise of un-suggestibility. To paraphrase The Book, "If you think The Church of the SubGenius is a parody religion, then you don't get the joke."

Unlike regular religious dogma, the Church of the SubGenius openly encourages schisms. They have no rules except one: don't discriminate based on gender, orientation, social standing, and so forth. The Church of the SubGenius is to organized religion what Dadaism is to art. The authorship of The Book of the SubGenius reads like an art-punk Who's Who. Besides Stang, Drummond, and Dr. X, there is Bob Black, Mark Mothersbaugh, and Robert Williams, among dozens more.

"Bob" isn't your regular garden variety messiah either. With his ever-present pipe, he intercedes on behalf of humanity. He worked as a two-bit men's fashion model and was an extra in B-grade sci-fi movies. He works on behalf of JHVH-1, god of wrath and/or space alien.** In the book, he warns of X-Day when the Xists will arrive to enslave humanity. The Xists are aliens from the Planet X. Besides Jehovah-1, there are elder gods, space aliens, conspiracy theory (mainly aimed at the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve), and positive affirmations. With "Bob," one has to be brave enough to pull the wool over one's own eyes. The Book packages these kooky theories and crazy rants in pages crowded with collage. It is somehow both ridiculous and sublime. It's also a small miracle Simon and Schuster published this.

While X-Day (July 5th, 1998) is in the distant past, The Book of the SubGenius remains a literary oddity. A weird charisma radiates from the writing and art work. Who knows, you may already be a SubGenius?

*OGXers, meaning The Original Gen-Xers. A term based on Glenn's idiosyncratic system of generational periodicity.

**The Church of the SubGenius endorses "cinematic cheesiness." While hipsters (or the caricature thereof) view pop culture through nine layers of irony, the SubGenius consumes B-grade sci fi movies with an unironic joy.

http://www.cclapcenter.com/2015/10/american_odd_the_book_of_the_s.html

obviously of historical interest only, but glad my local library has kept 2(!) copies of this around, as it's a good way of showing folks who don't remember a time before the WWW how we used to have to find our cranks and weirdos. it's also good proof that some stuff didn't get invented by those crazy kids on Tumblr.

I don't want to write a review of this book. But I'm compelled to give it 5 stars! Praise Bob! Did I say that?

Have you accepted Bob as your personal savior? You will after reading this book...

Combined with Principia Discordia, covers two of my favorite pseudo-religions.

If you've ever wondered who the smiling guy with the pipe is, grab a copy of this book and get to know J.R. "Bob" Dobbs. ("You'll pay to hear things you already know" being one of their slogans.) The official book of my favorite fake religion. Got this in high school, and was alarmed to stumble across it again when collecting ISBNs to post to LibraryThing.

Damaged from 2/24/15 water leak at INACS.