NEW SG Interview: Dave Anthony — The United States of Absurdity0

by Nicole Powers

For the past three years, writer, standup comic, and former SuicideGirls’ political correspondent Dave Anthony (aka SG member FearTheReaper of Asshole Fuckface Roundup fame) has been educating his friend and fellow comic Gareth Reynolds — and an increasingly large audience — on some amazing historical characters and events your teacher somehow omitted to tell you about in class. Turns out there’s a lot of epically awesome history that didn’t make the official curriculum.

Dave and Gareth’s podcast, The Dollop, was first launched in April, 2014. The premise is simple: Each episode, Dave, a strange history junkie, regales Gareth with a spectacularly stupid yet true story from America’s past, and Gareth reacts with appropriate (and inappropriate!) shock, awe, and witticisms. The Dollop formula was an instant hit, and three years on it’s been perfectly condensed into a book, The United States of Absurdity. Illustrated by James Fosdike, with a forward by Patton Oswalt, the book features 29 stories found down the back of history’s dirty, messy, and rather sticky sofa.

Some of the stuff Dave uncovers is just plain hilarious, while other inglorious passages from our past vividly illustrate how things a lot of the best minds at the time thought were top notch and the bee’s knees, were in fact — with the benefit of hindsight and a little perspective — indisputably batshit crazy. (Performing lobotomies through the eye socket with an ice pick, using electroshock therapy as an anesthetic, and “curing” a president with a fever by relieving him of 7.9 pints of blood, for example.) And there’s the rub. The Dollop isn’t just enlightening in terms of mood and history, it also subtly edifies us on the fact that many of today’s newsworthy episodes, with the benefit of time and distance, will similarly seem obviously and utterly insane — if we survive long enough to see them in the rear view mirror!

SuicideGirls caught up with Dave to find out more about what we’ve been missing in the 8 years since his funny-as-fuck sociopolitical musings graced our site thrice weekly. Read the full interview on SuicideGirls.com/.

The United States of Absurdity will be available where all good books are sold on May 09, 2017. You can find The Dollop on iTunes, Podbean, Podbay, Soundcloud, and Libsyn . If you like what you hear, please support Dave and Gareth’s hilarious history project on Patreon.