Last week, on a blessedly temperate Wednesday eve, hundreds of variously costumed people thronged outside DAR Constitution Hall, just a short trot from the White House. In Washington, D.C., ostentatious hordes typically mean some new protest is afoot, but this gathering was for a different reason. The crowd — an assortment of makeshift elves, magicians, adventurers, and park rangers along with others, such as myself and my slightly unprepared companion, in casual dress — had come to see three brothers play Dungeons & Dragons with their father.
The first of a two-night stop along the McElroy family’s national Become The Monster Tour, my fellow audience members and I were in attendance for a live-show recording of The Adventure Zone, a wildly, surprisingly popular role-playing comedy podcast hosted by Justin, Travis, and Griffin McElroy, and their father, Clint. For the better part of three hours, we enjoyed the goofy twists and ludicrous turns of a Travis-led game scenario titled “Oh Dang! Bigfoot Stole My Car With My Friend’s Birthday Present Inside,” in which Justin played a surly, witchcraft-curious teenage girl roped into babysitting Griffin’s character, a less-than-true-to-life 11-year-old Griffin McElroy. After the titular Bigfoot car-snatching, the two were eventually driven around by a hip-hop-emcee-styled limousine driver played by Clint. Like their devoted audience, the four were dressed in cosplay for their respective characters, costumes made all the more garish by the fact Travis McElroy had set the game in 1998.
I returned to the DAR Constitution Hall the following night — this time with a different but similarly unprepared companion — for a sold-out live-show recording of the brothers’ first and flagship podcast, My Brother, My Brother and Me. Billed as “an advice show for the modern era,” the once-weekly podcast — known as MBMBaM to fans (often pronounced “mah-bim-bam”) — aired its first episode in April 2010.
The brothers, introduced every episode as “your oldest brother, Justin McElroy”; “your middlest brother, Travis McElroy”; and “your sweet baby brother, Griffin McElroy,” promise to “take your questions and turn them, alchemy-like, into wisdom.” Instead, the queries, whether selected from listener submissions or mined from the feverish id of the internet that is Yahoo! Answers, are little more than an invitation to hop into their comedic sandbox. The result is an unending stream of wit, idiocy, and lighthearted fun that shoves meaning into nonsensical phrases such as “blast my cache” and “beanfreak” and crafts instant, fan-cherished lore around gonzo monstrosities such as “Garfield the Deals Warlock” imagined out of thin air.
The McElroys’ unique mélange of oddball humor, quick family banter, and silly, seductive weirdness has turned what might easily be two niche comedy podcasts into the crown jewels of an ever-expanding new media-entertainment empire. In addition to the sold-out live-show tours, the podcasts consistently rank among the highest downloaded comedy podcasts on iTunes — MBMBaM currently sits in the top 20; TAZ, at 28th — and the combined Twitter following of the brothers and the two shows is well over 1.2 million.
Originally conceived as a one-off episode for MBMBaM, The Adventure Zone has grown into something approaching a cultural phenomenon. Despite the nerds-in-their-basement cache of Dungeons & Dragons, the McElroys emphasize comedy and storytelling over fidelity to rules and mechanics. Paired with familiar yet engaging campaign arcs — an Agatha Christie-inspired train mystery; a Groundhog’s Day-type time loop; a Ben Hur/Fast and Furious crossover “battlewagon” race — TAZ is immediately accessible to anyone interested in good fiction. Their just-concluded 36-episode arc, titled “Amnesty,” featured a monster-of-the-week-style campaign, à la Buffy the Vampire Slayer, set in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest.
Which turns out to be quite a few: Since its debut episode in late 2014, the twice-monthly podcast has been downloaded over 180 million times. Last July, the McElroys partnered with artist Carey Pietsch to create a graphic novel adaptation of their first TAZ campaign arc. Upon its release, The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins topped the New York Times’ trade fiction bestseller list, the first graphic novel ever to do so. This July, their second graphic novel adaptation, The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited!, also hit No. 1 on the list.
In 2017, sweet baby brother Griffin McElroy was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 “media luminary,” and this year Clint McElroy and the brothers began writing their very own Marvel comic series. They filmed a short-but-charming six-episode TV series, set in their hometown of Huntington, West Virginia, for the streaming service Seeso in 2017 (currently available on VRV). Through one of their numerous other podcasts, The McElroy Brothers Will Be In ‘Trolls 2’, they somehow succeeded earlier this year in — pardon the pun — trolling DreamWorks Animation into giving them bit parts in the upcoming film Trolls World Tour. Their work even made it into friend-of-the-show Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton.
Theirs is a family business. In addition to their other projects, the brothers each host a podcast with their respective wives. And, of course, they do make time to play D&D with dear ole dad at least once a month.
That family also extends to their hometown of Huntington. Since 2014, the McElroy family has catalyzed hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations for Huntington and West Virginia-based charities. Each year around Christmas, they host a holiday fundraiser around their annual MBMBaM “Candlenights” live-show performance in Huntington. In 2017, the McElroys organized and published a TAZ fan-artist comic, “The Adventure Zine,” as a charity benefit for the city’s Facing Hunger Food Bank, which raised more than $187,000 in donations.
The trio, raised Southern Baptist in a culturally conservative state, have become more openly political and “woke” of late (indeed, they caution listeners against revisiting MBMBaM’s first 80 or so episodes, produced in the far back early aughts when no one knew better). But even as their views on social and political issues are clear in their work (as is their right), they have largely managed to keep their comedy about comedy, an admirable feat in 2019.
Theirs is a goofy realm with real-world reach, where anyone who wants to joke about ghosts and horses and ghost-horses or adventure into the Magical World of Elevators and fight with a talking sword is welcome — including my two live-show companions, both now fans for life.
J. Grant Addison is deputy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine.
