Happy Humpday BaddaBing BaddaBlog readers! This is Pop Culture Wednesday, the place where we talk about the various nuances and properties in media. Today will focus on a web comic strip that has risen to incredible amounts of both fame and infamy, Cyanide and Happiness.
Cyanide and Happiness was originally a webcomic series that began releasing content daily in January, 2005. The original writers and illustrators consisted of Rob DenBleyker, Kris Wilson, Dave McElfatrick, and Matt Melvin. Matt Melvin would later leave the project. The show quickly gained popularity via social media websites like, MySpace, LiveJournal, Quora, and Facebook. If you are too young to recognize all but one of those sites, you’re lucky, the first three kinda sucked. The strip’s website, Explosm.net, is also heavily trafficked.
The strip became popular enough that they were able to start creating YouTube videos.
The videos are currently being created biweekly on their channel, ExplosmEntertainment. Videos are also uploaded a few days in advance on their Vessel page. The videos have also increased C&H’s popularity enough that in 2009 Explosm was able to successfully crowdfund a book consisting of what the creators deemed to be their best comics. Since then, four other books consisting of collections or entirely new material have been released.
The Cyanide and Happiness Show furthered the project’s success when it was released last year. The show features much of the same humor as every other iteration of the work, but is in a longer 15-20 minute format and has more running gags than the other versions of C&H. Fans are eagerly awaiting the shows next season, dubbed Season TOO (Dumb and Dumber logic, I guess), which will be released sometime in early 2016.
If I had to describe the allure and humor of Cyanide and Happiness, I would call it anti jokes on crack. Every one of the jokes is some combination of dark, disturbed, or some kind of misdirect. I always feel a slight pang of guilt for laughing at a C&H joke, and that’s why it’s so popular and addictive. Not only is it funny, but it also dances playfully on the line between funny, offensive, and inappropriate. This masterfully crafted combination always leaves me wanting for more.
If you would like to experience the awesomeness that is Cyanide and Happiness, here are the links to their various websites.
I hope you enjoyed learning about this online awesomeness. If you did, please like this post and leave a comment down below. You can also subscribe to this blog via email using the upper right tab. Alternatively, you can stay up to date by liking the official BaddaBing BaddaBlog Facebook Page or by following me, @LucasDeRuyter, on Twitter. I hope everyone has a great Wednesday and be sure to come back here on Friday for News for the Mighty, News of the Week.
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