"Yeah, my great-great uncle? Dude was 'so' horny. Just, incredibly randy all the time."
"'Randy'?!"
"Randy."
(Beat)
"...you don't know what 'randy' means?"
—Henry and Zip, clearly off to a great start already.
Generation Goblin is a comedy podcast run by two siblings, Henry and Zip - self-described as an experience wherein they 'use snippets of the internet to act as springboards for discussions that don't have any practical value, but are pretty entertaining'. These snippets of the internet can range from Yahoo Answers, Reddit threads, eBay listings, and other news items and articles - really, anything they can dig up and have a good laugh at. Of course, this tends to lead to them going very Off the Rails very quickly.
Episodes are released bi-weekly.
You can listen to the podcast here
, and visit the podcast website here.
This podcast contains these tropes:
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: From the list of '50 Things That Will Not Be In Heaven' - demons, Satan, theological debates -
- Artistic License – Biology: 'Mosquitoes don't piss. They just drink blood and die.'
- Catchphrase: 'It's podcast magic!' — frequently used when Willing Suspension of Disbelief needs to be employed for whatever auditory goof they're playing around with to land home.
- Cold Open: Every episode opens with a teaser clip from some bizarre taken-out-of-context joke from somewhere within the episode.
- Darker and Edgier: In the first episode, while discussing the Dora and the Lost City of Gold trailer, Henry and Zip, apropos of absolutely nothing, start spiraling off on a wild tangent about how the trailer that they saw involved a Found Footage horror film in which Dora brutally and systematically kills off the cast and crew of the entire movie. This goes on for several minutes, with every new detail added throwing the conversation further off the rails.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: A lot of the Dream Interpretation segment invokes this, with the siblings frequently claiming that dreams submitted on Yahoo Answers are prophetic or symbolic in some way.
-
Epileptic Trees: A theory that they develop in episode three explains why the stars in Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night" don't look all that much like actual stars. It was ghosts. He was painting the ghosts. - Insufferable Genius: Yahoo Answers user 'English Guy', seems to believe that they know a whole lot more about psychic abilities and powers than the original question asker, and has Henry and Zip in hysterics for nearly full five minutes.
- English Guy returns in Episode Six to bestow his immense wisdom about weed-smoking demons. He is just about hailed as a legendary knowledge-bestowing figure.
- Episode Ten: English Guy is BACK.
- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Episode Four was recorded in a pitch-black room in the middle of a hurricane alert. Zip remarks more than once on the incredible aesthetic that this resulted in during recording.
- I Was Just Joking: Episode Five: Zip reads out a series of tweets from writer Ben Mekler "reviewing" the upcoming Joker movie with notable lines such as 'the film is a literal riot. I just flipped a car with two of the guys from Indie Wire', and then promptly goes on to inform everybody that some news outlets took these comments all too seriously.
- Kung-Fu Jesus: In Episode Five, Zip suggests that the best way to 'summon a Jesus' is to invoke his name and ask him to punch you for doing something really mundane, such as opening a soft drink can.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: A lot of the haunted/creepy listings on eBay that Henry digs up tend to fall under this category, because, as is frequently established, a lot of the things that go up for sale in the 'haunted' category there are really, really bizarre.
- Episode Five: the dibbuk box. Oh dear god, the dibbuk box.
- Running Gag: Podcast Magic, of course - and the fact that Henry is fifteen years old and, as such, a literal child.
- Shout-Out: Frequently, to media that Henry and Zip tend to like (or want to rant about, for whatever reason), but most notably to My Brother, My Brother and Me - when they realized that they had inadvertently answered one of the same Yahoo Answers questions that the McElroys had already featured on their show.
- Sibling Team
- The Stinger: Every episode closes with either Henry or Zip announcing cheerfully what they're going to be doing on the next episode, which is invariably completely ridiculous.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Episode Four - Henry reveals to the listener, with great glee, that they've been a furry this entire time.
"Take out your earbuds. That's right. That fursuit has been there for three days."
- Too Dumb to Live: Episode One features the tale of one of Henry's classmates, who allegedly snorted crushed Smarties as if snorting cocaine, and then immediately regretted their life decisions.
