Join editor-in-chief Kyle Mann, creative director Ethan Nicolle, and special guest host Frank Fleming for the fourth ever Babylon Bee podcast. And yes, it's that Frank. Get Frank Fleming's Book, Heckbender (warning, H-E-double hockey sticks is in the actual title). Also, Sidequest is amazing. (5:26) Trump Enters Konami Code, Gains Infinite Terms (10:21) Kool-Aid Man Protests Wall (13:12) Modern-Day Good Samaritan Tweets About Republicans (20:03) Main topic: Behind the Babylon Bee headline submission process (42:49) Hate Mail Bonus Content (Paid Subscribers Only) (48:14) Punching Grammar Nazis (56:45) AOC On The Price Is Right (1:03:02) Q&A Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
In a world of fake news, this is news you can trust.
Owning the lips with facts and logic.
You're listening to the Babylon Bee.
Here are your infallible hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
Yeah, I'm Kyle Mann.
I'm Ethan Nicole.
And this is the Babylon Bee podcast.
And today we have a very special treat for you.
We are joined by the man, the myth, the legend that we have raved about for the past three hours.
Constant raving and gushing.
Frank Fleming.
Frank, how you doing, bud?
Hey, thanks for having me, guys.
I'm big fans.
You're plural big fans?
I'm the big fan.
Oh, man.
This is why they never left me.
I already messed up.
Yeah, this is why they never left me out.
This is why he only writes and he doesn't talk.
Good night, everybody.
But yeah, I love Babylon Bee, though.
I usually read the headlines, but you know.
Especially your own.
You're a jerk.
All right, so today's show, we're going to do some fun stuff.
This is our first time bringing on one of the writers as a co-host.
And so, Frank, we're going to do a lot of Frank stories today.
Yeah, so we're going to read, as usual, we're going to read through stories, and then we've got our topic of the week for which Frank is joining us.
We're going to talk.
This is a very special treat for fans of the Babylon Bee.
We're going to go through some not-so-good Babylon Bee submissions that we receive.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of mystery, a lot of curiosity about what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to coming up with headlines.
And a lot of people, I've seen it now that I've been on this side of things, the tsunami of headline pitches that we get from fans all day long.
It's overwhelming.
It really is.
Yeah.
And so I think a lot of those people wonder what goes on.
Why aren't we posting all those headlines?
And what kind of stuff do we get?
So we're just going to get into that.
Yeah, we're going to talk a lot about submissions and the creative writing process.
So if you're interested in writing, you ever want to send the Babylon Bee submissions or you just like to write creatively on your own for whatever venture, this is something that I think you'll enjoy.
So we're excited for this.
And yeah.
Cool.
So how are you guys doing?
How's your week been, Frank?
It's been, you know, busy as usual and working at coming up ideas.
It always feels like whatever last idea I came, I'm never going to come up with another one.
Yeah, another one.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
You have a book coming out, which I think by the time this airs, it will be out.
So I would like people to know about it because I've read it and it's awesome.
And I also did the cover.
Yeah, yeah.
It's called Hellbender.
It has Satan.
Can you please call it Heckbender for us?
For this show, it's Heckbender.
Okay, and it has Satan in it.
And Christians love Satan, right?
I mean.
Yeah, that is our distinctive.
They love him.
Unconditionally.
It's a science fiction comedy.
It's got a.
It's hard to do.
It's extremely violent.
I will warn parents it's extremely violent.
Yeah, but it's all.
It's not for little kids, yeah.
Yeah.
But it who is Frank Fleming.
You're good at doing extreme violence and not swearing, though.
This is how Frank Fleming loses his gig for writing at the Babylon Bee.
I didn't know all this stuff about Frank.
He writes amazing books.
I want to recommend his book, SideQuest.
It's already on Amazon.
To me, it's like an allegory for a small Bible study group that fights demons in their mind or something.
It's hard for me to explain.
I don't think that's exactly what it is, but it's like this.
It's like the office.
No, not the office.
It's like Office Space, that movie, meets Lord of the Rings.
It's like C.S. Lewis meets G.K. Chesterton, meets John Bunyan, meets the Bible.
Meets Terminator 2.
It's funny.
The Hobbit.
The people are like secular people who read that, they never picked up on the allegory because it doesn't explicit it in.
Yeah, it's never explicit, but I think if you, yeah, it's really impressive and very vast and hilarious.
Anyway, that's enough Frank gushing probably for now.
We'll gush about Frank later.
Yeah, I'm about 13% of the way through SideQuest, to my great shame.
Yeah, you're probably in the part where he's dating the demonic woman.
That's where I am.
And he's really trying to figure out if he should break up with her.
She is working for Satan.
Yeah, it's like, I don't know.
Basically.
Yeah, it reminded me of that sketch.
I forget what group did it where the guys are wondering if they're the bad guys.
And they have the skull cap.
They have a caps with the skull emblem, like a Nazi skull emblem.
And they're like, do you ever think that we're the bad guys?
I don't remember that one.
Yeah.
I'll figure out who did it.
Should we dive into our weekly stories?
We're going to do some couple more classic ones this week because we're actually recording a lot of these episodes not chronologically because we have a lot of vacation stuff happening.
So we're going to do some classics.
Every week, there are stories.
These are some of them.
So there's been a lot of talk about Donald Trump possibly not leaving the White House if he loses the 2020 election.
Like somehow there's some mystical power that he can unlock to stay in the White House forever.
And this is something we've been trying to tackle for a week or two because Bill Maher did something on it, if I remember right.
Bill Maher's constantly.
I watch Bill Maher's show sometimes just to see what people are saying.
And sometimes he has conservatives on too sometimes, but he's constantly saying this.
Everybody, he says it with this trembling lip.
If he doesn't get re-elected, he's going to just stay there and there's nothing we can do about it.
There's this weird.
He's just going to sit there.
Don't the cops just escort him out if he refuses to leave?
Isn't that how it works?
How is he going to do that?
I love this cross his arms and pout.
Yeah, I love this image of the whole administration being leaving.
And he's the only one and he's just sitting there.
He locks the door from the inside.
I don't know if anybody has any key.
Nobody has a key.
He's the only one with a key.
He just chains himself to like a pillar and just like swallows the key.
Yeah, so the headline we did was Red Alert.
Trump just punched the Konami code into his phone to grant himself infinite terms.
For the homeschoolers, Konami code.
Konami is a video game thing.
Konami is not a word you say out loud a lot.
Did I pronounce it right?
I don't know.
Konami.
I've always said Konami, but you said Konami.
Point of order, though.
Shouldn't it just be like 30 extra terms?
Yeah, I think the well, now the Konami code has taken on a life of its own to where it's used in a bunch of different things.
But I think Frank's right.
I think in the original Contra.
It started with Contra, right?
At least that's when I first used it.
Yeah, I think it was...
Actually, it started with Gradius.
It gave you full power-ups.
Actually, Frank's our oldest.
Are we just going to bring Frank on every week to just actually all of our facts?
He just named a game and I don't even know what it is.
Hey, Frank, do you work for Snopes?
Yes, I, you know.
It's a good, you know, it's a good side gig.
It really intertwines with this one.
So this is.
So this was a Gradius first.
I didn't know that.
Garati.
Yeah.
Yeah, Gradius or Gradius.
Yeah, I knew it from Contra too.
My brother and I used to play that, and we'd beat the game thanks to the Konami code.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That became like a like today.
I drove a stick shift for the first time in like years.
I hadn't driven one in forever, and it just came back to me.
And the Konami code's like that, the moment you start to punch it in, it's like your motor functions just remember.
Frank, without.
Was that Without looking, can you tell us the Konami code?
I just realized how confused it's up, up, down, down.
I forget if it's right, left, right, left, or left, right, left, right.
BA, start.
You got it.
You didn't put the start on the one of them.
Yeah, you have to start, right?
I was in a hurry.
I always thought it was up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right.
But then, like, you know, and then you do select start if you want to do two players.
And what does that do if you use it as a stick shift?
Yeah, that's, I was confused.
I, I, it took me a while.
I'm just saying no one uses stick shift, like your motor, like your, uh, what's the word for that?
When you're like motor skills, like you just, your body just remembers what to do.
Yeah.
Kind of like riding a bike.
Muscle memory.
That's it.
Yeah.
Like your muscle memory and your thumb.
It's the same kind of thing.
Like the way that your feet work the clutch.
Anyway, sorry.
So this is one of our Trump pieces, the rare Trump piece that wasn't written by Frank.
And I don't think I got, I don't think I quite nailed Trump's voice as well as Frank can.
But there weren't that many quotes from Trump in the article either.
You know, so I didn't have to do the whole Trump voice.
Great code.
Maybe the best.
Great code.
Maybe the best.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know what else to say on this one because it's so bizarre to me that this is an issue for anybody.
It seems so paranoid, the idea that he's going to lose the election and then just refuse to leave the house.
Well, the funny thing is that the Democrats were saying that about the 2016 election.
Like Trump wouldn't acknowledge the results if he lost.
Oh, yeah.
And then they are the ones who are, you know, Hillary Clinton's the true winner of the election, you know, for the past two or three years.
I wonder if that would have worked.
He could have just like marched in the White House.
Nope, I'm president of Hillary, but he got there first.
Like Kramer from Sein Valley just kind of pops in and just acts like he got the job.
Opens the door and walks in.
Yeah, he probably, maybe he did.
Yeah, maybe that's what happened.
Maybe that's what happened.
You guys there?
We're none the wiser.
I lost you for a second.
Oh, we made really funny jokes while you were gone.
Oh, okay.
Did I get cut out or what?
No.
Yeah, I made a weird hissing noise, kind of.
Anyway.
Oh, okay.
Should we move on to the next story?
Yeah.
All right, let's do it.
All right, we got the next story.
It's a Frank classic The Kool-Aid Man story.
Why don't you take that, Frank?
Yeah, it's anti-wall extremist The Kool-Aid Man leads campaign against Trump.
I love this one because it's just stupid and doesn't really have a political point, which are always my favorite political satire.
Yeah, mine too.
No, it's just so dumb.
I disagree.
I think Frank's favorite satire owns the limbs.
Yeah, it's not real satire if you can't fill your mug with liberal tears.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Yeah, you know, good political humor, I think, kind of hits that sweet spot.
And this is that sweet spot where you get people from the left and the right sharing this because Trump supporters go, yeah, that darn Kool-Aid man, you know, and they think it's funny.
It's like an endearing quality about Trump.
And then the left, you know, also will share this because the wall is such kind of like a big iconic thing for Trump's presidency.
We talked about, I can't remember if it was on the podcast or on a different thing, but about how I think it might have been George Carlin that said that there's like a, you know, you can joke from the right at the left or you can joke from the left at the right, but you can also do like a come in from a third direction that's like a completely different point of view.
And to me, like this is my favorite one where it's like just the dumb guy who sees the dumb joke in the middle of it all and makes it.
Just makes a stupid absurd joke that he has nothing to do with it.
Are you calling Frank the dumb guy?
He's good at playing that dumb guy voice that like makes the dumb joke.
I love it.
That's what I love.
That is my dumb joke.
That's the right word.
Absurd.
Yeah, it is like finding that spot where it's just stupid and you don't have to worry because I feel sometimes I want to make a point and that gets in the way of being funny.
Yeah, just be funny.
That's the best.
And I think you are good at that.
I'm going to affirm you.
Yeah, I'll say the Kool-Aid man is such a good thing to hang satire on.
Like the Kool-Aid man is something we can all remember.
It's such a good pop culture point of reference.
It just smashes through walls and no one asks questions.
Yeah.
Everybody accepts it.
It's a great.
I'm trying to think of exactly how to describe it, but everybody knows what the Kool-Aid man does.
He's got a great catchphrase.
You know, the oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
Busting through walls.
And then when you can find that perfect connection with something like Trump's Wall, I mean, that's just absolutely brilliant.
Was there any blowback on this one?
Was there any blowback?
The Kool-Aid lobby.
I was upset.
Flavor, what's the other one?
Flavorade?
Yeah.
Yeah, they were upset that we used Kool-Aid instead of Tang.
So this is one of the news stories.
This is a new Frank Fleming classic, brand new classic.
It will be, I predict.
Hot off the presses.
Hot off the presses.
Modern-day Good Samaritan sees injured man on side of road, angrily tweets about Republicans.
The text was broken up and it said and girly tweets, it looked like.
I was really confused.
What a nice guy.
The Good Samaritan that sees a needy man on the side of the road and is willing to go through the effort to pull out his phone and say how evil the Republicans are.
He says, well, let's read what he says.
He says, just look at what's happening here because Republicans care about corporations and not the community, he posted, including a picture of the injured man in his tweet.
I like that visual of taking the standing there and taking the picture of the injured man instead of doing something.
Yeah.
My favorite part is he then takes out of his own pocket to donate to Elizabeth Warren.
It's just like, it irritates me.
People think like, oh, I care about people.
I donate to the Democrats or I donate to the political group, but it's like, that's the opposite.
That's just that happens on both sides.
You know, people think I'm doing something because I'm giving money to a politician.
Yeah.
I think, didn't that, who's that goofy, who's the goofiest Democratic candidate?
The guy who wanted to nuke everybody?
Oh, Swalwell.
Yeah.
And I think he said.
He's doing a bit.
He's a comedian.
He's just a comedian doing a bit.
But he did one of his little marketing posts.
So it was like, you know, do you want to spend a dollar on coffee or do you want to spend it to save the nation and give the money to me?
He's like, yeah, buy a bag of chips, I think.
Yeah, that's right.
It was a bag of chips.
Please, everybody, don't donate to politician.
Buy chips.
Like, if you ever have the urge, buy a bunch of bags of chips instead.
It'd be a better world.
It was one of those campaigns that's just asking for it.
Like, because I think it was formed like a question, like, would you rather have a bag of chips or give money to me?
And like, every, you know, and there's like 10,000 replies.
Chips.
Chips are good.
Like, never, marketing people, never, never do your marketing in the form of a question like that.
Yeah.
And I lost my thought.
Frank, you got a thought?
Frank, do you have any thoughts in your head?
I'm all out of thoughts.
I all have thoughts too.
Actually, on your article, you say he reaches into his pocket.
He made a $35 donation to Elizabeth Warren.
He says, if we can get Trump out of office and Warren in, then we can get this man-free healthcare.
And then he said, and get rid of his student debt if he has that.
I saw you did a tweet where you were railing about the student debt thing, which I think is great.
You want to rage about student debt for a minute?
Yeah, yeah, it just enrages you because it's like the whole point is these colleges are getting more expensive, like way past.
It's like way past even healthcare expenses, how much they're going up.
But all the focus is the debt that causes and not like, why are these colleges so expensive?
Like, I'd be all for relieving people's debt if the colleges were forced to pay back all the student debt.
Yeah, like the problem is, is that they just get more and more expensive because nobody really seems to see the bill.
Like, it's just like it's all this federal money and just this.
Yeah, and then like Elizabeth Warren said, they want to remove all the consequences of that.
So, like, oh, don't worry about getting it.
We'll pay it off for you.
And now the colleges will have even less incentives to get cheap.
So that just drives kids.
I got four kids eventually going to go to college.
So, you know, it's like.
I guess you can just go into debt for like $4 million, a million dollars a kid, and then just get forgiven later on.
So, Frank, do you mean to tell me that politicians are ignoring the root cause of a problem?
I don't want to cast aspersions, okay?
But it's possible they're maybe not thinking this through.
Shocking.
There you have it from our correspondent, our Trump correspondent, Frank Fleming.
Oh, yeah, my thought was when we were talking about the chips thing.
You're still thinking about the chips?
Yeah, I'm back on the chips.
No, my thought was that it's just funny to think that whole idea that if you give a dollar to a politician, it's going to do something.
Like, if we all just were buying chips and just kind of just living, like, if everybody just lives life and just does stuff, like politicians just be sitting there doing nothing.
They just be twiddling their thumbs.
Like, they have to create the idea that we need them so bad.
Yeah, they create the need.
That's true.
Oh, yeah.
I got so mad everybody made fun of like Obama being on like golf course all the time.
It's like, no, that's a good time.
That's a good place for him.
If he did nothing but golf, he'd be the best president ever.
That's why I like the message that Jordan Peterson's always saying, just clean your room, clean up your own mess.
If everybody just did that, who was the president that died like a month after taking office?
Was that Harrison?
Yeah, Harrison.
He's my favorite.
Yeah.
Best action of president ever.
It's all downhill since then.
Yeah.
Yeah, the problem there is they replaced him.
Yeah, bummer.
That was where we all, that's where it all went wrong.
It's too bad he didn't have the Konami code.
Yeah.
Would he stay?
If he punched in the Konami code, would he still be in office even though he died?
Does it give you immortality?
Or does it give you like 30 lives?
According to Frank, on Gradius.
According to Frank, it was actually in Gradius.
He only gives you 30 lives.
No, it gives you all the power.
Say, there it is.
Yeah, you get all the guns on Contra, right?
I tried to correct it, and I even got it wrong.
Does Snopes do podcasts?
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, one time they fact-checked.
Yeah, they could clear this up for us.
One time they fact-checked one of our articles and they made a video about it.
Yeah, it was like this slideshow with all the music and stuff.
No, I think it was someone about Christmas.
Is playing Christmas music before Thanksgiving now a federal crime?
And they did like this minute-long video that was like this, you know, music, stock music in the background and the slides with all these pictures.
It was beautiful.
Well, we're going to talk about the AOC Price's Rights story that went crazy on Snopes in the subscriber portion of the show.
So little teaser there.
Talk about some Snopes.
Yeah, get into the Snopes thing on that.
All right, so I think we're going to get into our main topic here.
And now, the Babylon Bee's topic of the week.
So when I took over the Babylon Bee, one of the first things I did was dive into the submissions inbox.
And I was very excited because I had been coming up with satire for a couple of years.
And to be able to have an inbox of submissions, and I have access to it.
Now there's a bunch of ideas that I can draw from.
There's a big well of ideas.
And I was so excited.
These are submissions coming in from fans, yes.
And I go to the email inbox.
So you hadn't checked it in a long time?
I never had access to it.
Because I was just writing.
I was just sending an article.
So now I'm in charge.
And I look at this inbox and it was horrifying.
Now, I will say that the vast majority of submissions are just not quite there.
Fans will send something in, and it's 90% of the way there.
That's kind.
Yeah, okay.
Well, but we'll talk about this in a little bit in the context of writing for comedy, but a lot of them are just not fully formed ideas.
Yeah, they had an idea.
My favorite are the ones that say, like, here's something, here's one.
A lot of people started with, here's a free one.
And then they'll be like, if part of an idea, like Judge Kavanaugh, something or other.
That's pretty funny.
Huh?
You're welcome.
And then, and then that's it.
Were you thinking of doing any Kavanaugh jokes?
That's good.
Yeah.
We should have done that.
We should do a Kavanaugh joke.
When Kavanaugh was big in the news, we should have done a few Kavanaugh articles.
Yeah, you get that up.
Better late than never.
You get that a lot in all realms of creativity, I think, as people who think the seed of an idea is worth something, but it's really not until it's something.
You haven't created anything yet.
Yeah, like it's one thing that people mistake, like, this is sometimes people mistake, like, this is something you should make a joke about for it actually being a joke.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, we get those emails all the time.
You guys should do a joke about worship leaders.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Maybe we'll do that.
So I'm trying not to make this topic mean-spirited because the thing is that I acknowledge that I will write 100 ideas and 95 of them are bad.
I think that's the biggest divide between somebody who writes for a living and someone who doesn't.
And they don't understand.
The more you write, the less precious you are about what you write.
Because we have a secret group where we pitch headlines all day.
And I would be curious to see what the percentage is of headlines get used out of that.
Yeah, well, I mean, we publish about 30 a week, and that thread at the end of the week has about 400 ideas.
And that's not the only source.
That's not the only source.
So it's probably 5% to 10% at most.
Yeah, so I mean, everybody's pitching tons of headlines, and just a few get used.
Unless you're frank, then we use like half of them.
Yes.
Yeah, every single one of my ideas are gold.
I don't know what's wrong with you people.
That's true.
That's true.
But yeah, that's the biggest thing I think that people aren't prepared for.
And then there's, yeah, I mean, there's that.
And then there's just not getting the voice.
Like, just not understanding what we do.
I think that there's people that have a joke in their head and a funny idea and translating that into a simple headline where it punches you in the right spot in the you know the way it's worded, that in itself is a trick.
Yeah no, that's right, and sometimes it's.
Maybe it's a funny idea, or it's a funny joke, or it's a funny even.
It's a really good headline.
Yeah, but it's not right for the Babylon Bee, because you know so you really got to think when you're writing creatively, where am I sending this?
Is this outlet even?
You know, we get people that send us poems and songs.
You know, publish my song, and it's like we don't do songs like what.
Have you read our website ever?
But it it's not that hard, though, especially politics.
I find you just add, you just take, you know, an actual headline and just add what an idiot to the end.
Then you got satire.
Like, Bernie Sanders promises to pay for everybody's college.
What an idiot.
Oh, I got to get writing this.
I'm writing it down right now.
Yeah, Frankie, you should write a book.
I just published it.
It's on the site.
Hey, can you do another one with Ocasio-Cortez for us?
I always thought you just put the word satire in brackets at the end of the headline.
Savage.
Is that a reference to something?
No.
Wow.
Yeah, so, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to read a couple of...
Yeah, we just want to give you some samples of the kind of stuff we get.
I actually have, people love Dave D'Andrea, our voice guy, the voice of the Babylon Bee.
I'm a little mad because he's more popular than we are.
Yeah, people love it.
People just fast forward to the podcast right now.
Just to hear Dave.
Just to hear Dave.
So, Dave, some of these I had Dave do.
So we'll do this one.
We got a very interesting headline about Judge Kavanaugh.
It's very long.
I'll read it.
Okay, you're going to read it first.
I'll read it and then.
Hear the day version?
We'll hear the day version.
Okay.
This was during the Kavanaugh hearings we received this email.
Judge Kavanaugh kicks pregnant woman in her stomach multiple times over a period of weeks.
One day giving it his all, now screaming at her.
He starts crying and is crushing her chest with his weight.
And now back to you.
It seems like he kind of kept thinking it was over and he kept adding things.
You know what?
I don't get that one.
I don't get what he's going for.
Let's do the day version.
The day version.
This just in.
Judge Kavanaugh kicks pregnant woman in her stomach multiple times over a period of weeks.
One day, he gives it his all.
Now screaming at her, he starts crying and is crushing her chest with his weight.
And now the weather.
All right, and there's the day version.
That really brought it to life.
I think it works.
It works when you have it in the newscaster voice.
Okay, here's another one.
Okay, now I can't read this whole one.
Some of these are too obscene.
So this is one of those where someone sent us like a poem and he said this is a satire submission for your site and it goes like this.
George W. Bush Jr. just deserves to be executed.
Molten lava coats crystallized teeth.
Dentists operate with pitchforks.
Their company lowered their salaries.
Acid skin bubbles to the beat of its owner's decrepit heart.
Doctors operate with their talons.
Their company lowered their salaries.
Bankers set fire to themselves in cash vaults.
The CEOs monetized the ashes.
The CEOs lowered their salaries.
That's just part of this line.
It's really obscene after that.
Actually, what I put in here is only something like half of the poem.
Oh, really?
And I...
Oh, wow.
And why didn't you publish this?
That's a good idea.
My favorite is later on.
He says, window washers jumped to their inevitable deaths, running the squeegee along the windows on their way down.
Their company lowered their salaries.
Just like my cartoon mind, that's quite squeegeeing all the way down the sky's colour.
That's the dedication to the work.
That's quite a mental image.
Yeah, then it gets very dark.
Yeah, we can't read the rest of that one.
I kind of wonder.
I do like the last line.
The very last line is the homeless arm themselves with nuclear weapons.
I'm a libertarian.
I'm okay with that.
Yeah, you do have a constitutional right to own a tactical nuke.
There's nothing in the Constitution about it.
Yeah, you know, I wonder if these guys have a piece that they're proud of and then just go around emailing it to every website they can find.
Because I can't imagine that this guy wrote this thinking this would be right for the Babylonians.
Yeah, he just had that in his back pocket.
Yeah, he probably goes around and misses it everywhere.
Yeah, that's possible.
Anybody who does political satire, maybe.
I don't know.
Yeah, and this brings up another topic with these submissions sometimes.
People will email their one idea that they have.
Yeah.
And then they'll keep replying to it.
Yeah, keep checking in.
Hey, did you get that?
Are you going to run this?
And I don't ever reply and say no.
I guess maybe I know.
There's a parable about that with the judge.
You keep petitioning, and eventually.
Oh, that's true.
So I'm the one being unbiblical.
Yeah, I don't know.
You're the judge who fears neither God nor man.
All right, let's do a couple more.
Come on, listen submissions.
I got an inside scoop for you.
I heard about this time traveler.
He invented a time machine and claimed he went back in time and killed baby Hitler.
He said he did it because he was tired of people calling him a Nazi.
I can't follow up on this because he claims I don't understand what the word Nazi means and there's no record of this Hitler guy.
Is that the whole email?
Yeah, that was like the whole submission.
Did you do the headline?
Is that?
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what that is.
See, this is what I was saying with people not understanding what website they're writing for.
They kind of have this idea and then it just kind of naturally flows into the rest of the idea and there's no separation.
People don't get, you know, it's for us, it's headline and then copy and people don't make that distinction.
So, Frank, this helps you write better articles.
Just keep, just write this massive paragraph.
I'm just going to cut and paste a bunch of stuff from here.
Yeah.
It's perfect.
This is good stuff.
Yeah.
I like the squeegee stuff.
I want to do something about people squeegeing.
All right.
I'm going to, okay, resolution for us.
In the next month, let's try to get the word squeegee into a headline.
You think we can do it?
Yeah.
I think there's probably something good with Trump using a squeegee on the White House, Oval Office Windows.
There's something there.
Squeegee is a funny word.
Sometimes you just find that funny word that you want to do.
Some of you have been falling with the squeegee.
It's a very wily coyote.
He holds up the sign.
He holds up the sign, like, please end this cartoon before I land.
All right, one more.
All right.
I like this one.
Should I read this one?
Yeah.
Are these all different headlines, or what is this?
So this is what.
It's about Trump.
Looks like Thanksgiving season.
I don't know.
I think this was multiple emails that the guy kept sending.
Okay.
Trump decides this year to not pardon the turkey, instead to behead it and eat it in the White House.
Cheers.
I am amazingly good at doing this and available.
Oh, man.
I like that.
I'm always going to throw that into your headline.
Yeah.
I like the Defi's expectations.
He doesn't part of the turkey.
That's the basics of humor.
He ate it.
Yeah, that is the basic.
Yeah, you know what's funny?
Like I was saying, there's something there.
It's maybe 90% of the way there, right?
Yeah, there is a seed of an idea.
That's like I said, it's something to make a joke about, but by itself, it's not a joke.
Yeah, it needs something else.
It needs something else for sure.
Fix it, Frank.
Fix it.
The reason I pulled this one wasn't because it was particularly bad, but because of the.
Yeah.
I am good at this.
Yeah, Lily adds cheers, and I'm amazingly good at doing this and available.
I wish I had his confidence.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Add that to every headline.
So keep working at it, bud.
So should I keep reading that?
Yeah, let's do it.
Do a couple more.
President Trump today visited the Constitution in Washington, D.C.
He then ordered security to open the case, then pulled out a Sharpie and crossed out the 14th Amendment.
What is the.
Oh, and away he corrects it.
Oh, he keeps it.
The Bill of Rights, then okay.
I meant the Bill of Rights.
Then the president opened the Constitution and added his signature to our nation's founding document.
It's official now, said President Trump.
Oh, man.
Is that the end of that thought?
I think that's the end of that headline.
This is the final thing.
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
There is something there of him signing the Constitution to make it official.
I forget, does the Constitution even have a signing section?
I don't know.
I don't know anything about the Constitution.
What is the Constitution?
Yeah, what's that again?
I don't know.
It's like six pages and it's pretty dry.
I've never really gotten through it.
Not a real page turner.
No.
Okay, and finally, President Trump issued a new order today to require all women coming into America first take a pregnancy test.
Airlines are running out of pregnancy tests.
What does that mean?
Yeah, it seems to imply something, but I don't know what other than maybe they just weren't prepared.
You know, because I mean, they should have a pretty good idea of how many people go through the airport per day.
You know, about half of them.
Yeah, they have a certain amount of seats.
You know, they should be able to estimate that pretty well, not running out of pregnancy tests.
This is a joke about poor airport management.
Yeah.
I do not get what it's trying to say.
I think it's trying to get it.
It's an immigration joke.
President Trump issued a new order.
It's an immigration joke.
Okay.
It's about anchor babies.
Oh, okay.
Frank didn't get it.
Take my word for it.
I thought it was a good idea.
Because, yeah, make sure they don't bring, don't have, yeah, make sure they don't show up pregnant because you want an anchor baby and then airlines are running out of pregnancy.
See, but that thought at the end, it's like, what?
And is he trying to imply that the airlines are in cahoots with the immigrants or something, and they're trying to let their babies through or something?
No, I think he's saying that there's a lot of pregnant women coming through.
Okay.
Oh, I get it.
But you wouldn't test pregnant women.
You test for all of them.
You test all women, right?
Yeah.
Airlines are running out of pregnancy.
And you wouldn't want to be discriminatory as you test all men, too.
Yeah.
Now I get it, I think.
I just told one of the five conservative go-to jokes.
What was that one?
Women are men, and men can be women.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, the go-to.
That's the go-to.
You did a what?
Sorry.
All right.
Well, that's just a sampling of what we receive in our inbox.
Those are some of the favorites.
I did have Dave read some more.
I might just have him as an Easter egg at the end of the episode.
Yeah, please.
You can hear some of Dave's takes on those.
All right, so let's just talk briefly as we wrap up our main topic here about the creative process and how we'll make it a little broader here, how we come up with ideas.
And that's the one question every single person always asks you, right?
When you go and you're on a pie.
Every creative person gets identified.
How do you come up with ideas?
So, Frank, how do you come up with your ideas?
It's kind of stare at a blank page, just kind of like get real tense and grunt until you get on an idea that comes out.
I thought it was, where do you get your ideas?
That's the question he really asked.
Yeah.
Where do you get your ideas from?
I think my brain.
Yeah, somewhere in your brain.
Seinfeld has a good bit about how he doesn't like typing on the computer because of the flashing cursor.
Oh, yeah, it's very intimidating.
What do you got?
Yeah.
It's blinking like that.
He does this line.
I don't remember exactly what it is, but it's something like this.
So what do you got?
Yeah.
That's perfect.
Yeah, I think, well, I think it'd be interesting to get into if a person that's listening right now really does want to write for the Babylon Bee and we could like, you know, and they wish they could just sit down with the Babylon B writers and just like we could just explain to them the best possible way to do it.
Like what would you tell them?
Well, first of all, I think it's different for each person.
It's true.
Yeah, everybody's gotten in kind of a different way.
And then I think with each person, there's different ways that headlines come to you and ideas come to you.
Because sometimes you're, I've woken up in the middle of the night and this is the idea.
This is it, you know, and written it down.
And the one that we did the other week, Dave Ramsey's new cooking show, where he makes people cook on a budget, you know, Hex Kitchen or something.
Oh, yeah.
I woke up with that on the tip of my tongue, you know, that morning and then wrote it an hour later, you know.
But a lot of times it's just a brute force.
You know, you write 100 ideas, you throw away all of them, and then you write another 100.
It's really simple.
You look what's in the news, you then look at pop culture, see how you can, you know, jam the two things together.
You got a headline.
Yeah.
And then you write, and then you write, what an idiot.
What an idiot.
Well, I would tell writers and anybody trying to come up with ideas that they're trying to sell, like write out your list of headlines and then actually let people read them and watch their face.
Like see if they actually involuntarily laugh.
That's the scariest thing you can do when you're a writer.
It's easier to, for some reason, because you can't see the response, you can email your submissions over to the guys at the Babylon D without ever showing somebody your submissions.
It feels safer, but like be daring and dangerous and go out there and print them out and get some people to look at them and look at the ones people actually laugh at.
That's what stand-up comedians do.
They go and they practice their set knowing that most of the jokes aren't going to be that funny the first time they like tell them.
But they hone in on the ones people react to.
It's the same thing with any kind of comedy and that's why it helps.
We work in an environment where we have other writers that we're working with so we can see the responses, the likes we get from the other guys in the forum or whatever.
Me and Kyle bounce things off each other.
Reaction is huge because you need that confirmation.
So if you're writing in that vacuum, I highly recommend getting out of that little vacuum and getting people to read them.
Look for those reactions.
And that's where you'll find your, that's how you hone.
You can't hone by just writing in the dark constantly.
Yeah, plus, people love it when you just hand them something to read and you just kind of stare at them while they're reading it.
I do that to my wife all the time.
Well, it does work because they aren't expecting to laugh.
And so if something is really funny, they can't hide it.
Yeah, my wife doesn't think I'm funny.
And so I'll, you know, I'll read, hey, what about this idea?
And she's like, huh?
But if she gives me the, oh, that's good.
Yeah.
I'm like, this is absolutely going to be cool.
I'm terrified of my wife showing her jokes.
Yeah.
But she'll laugh.
Yeah, she laughs at them all the time.
The whole reason she married me is because she thinks I'm funny.
I mean, I got nothing else going for me.
Oh, wow.
You must really have nothing else going for me.
Made her laugh on our first day.
Yeah, you know, what's always weird to me is you watch, when they used to do those bad singer episodes of American Idol at the very beginning, and you wonder to yourself, like, did this person have no friends or family?
Yeah, did nobody ever tell them?
And I'm sure some of them are fake, but the ones that are real, it's like, did nobody ever, have you sung before in front of anybody ever in your whole life?
Or maybe you did and the family was like, yeah, you're good.
Yeah, and that's why it's invaluable to find somebody who'll be dead honest with you.
That's what I found with Doug Tenapel.
Like, he would, because I came from a small town, and I was like, you know, one of the best artists in the small town that I was from, which felt really cool and big.
But once you get out of that small town, you're competing with everybody in the world.
With the internet, you're always competing with everybody in the world.
They should make a movie about a small town guy who goes to Hollywood to hit it big.
Yeah.
It's a gold idea right there that's never been done before.
But when Doug started, Doug's a, I was a big fanboy of his.
He created Earthworm Jim, but he was also a Christian.
He was completely honest with me about how bad my art was.
It was the first time I'd ever had somebody tell me how bad my art was.
I'd never had been told my art was bad by anybody.
It was very crushing at first.
But then like the first time he said that my stuff was good, like he actually wrote the forward for my first book that he says like, oh my gosh, you've done it.
You're good now.
And that meant so much more to me than anything else anybody ever said because I knew he completely meant it.
Yeah, I mean the truthful insight, truthful feedback, it's like invaluable.
It never stops hurting though, but you kind of got to get tough skin, get used to it, because you never get better unless you get that feedback.
Yeah, and there's just something amazing about, I think it does help once you, at least for your first time, that you like, somebody who's kind of like a hero of yours, you know, laughs at your joke or something.
Sometimes we get retweets or shares or I know that you're a fan of Mike Nelson Frank, so I got to tell you that he thinks you're hilarious.
And I know that's meant a lot to you.
So yeah, when your heroes find you funny, man, that's amazing.
I'll add that you need to be able to distinguish between the critics that matter and the critics that don't.
Yeah.
Like we're talking about finding people that you trust.
Yeah.
And honestly, if you, you know, if you were to put out your work more widely and a bunch of people, you know, criticize it, but the people that you trust say, no, this is good.
I would give that a lot more weight than the people who are naysaying it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend just posting your headlines.
Like, well, I guess it depends.
Just posting it on Facebook.
Just post it on Facebook.
Just do it.
Until Zuckerberg comes.
Yeah, but no, I find that in the context of the Babylon Bee, when we tweet something and it's like, oh, it doesn't get very much response.
But then someone I really trust or like or admire will share it.
And I'm like, okay, you know, I'm happy with this.
This thing doesn't get very much response.
I always just assume it's a shadow ban.
Yeah, it's conservative bias is what it is.
Yeah, it's censorship.
Censorship.
Yeah, well, also, what gets things shared isn't necessarily what makes people laugh all the time.
Like, you may laugh at a thing but not share it.
There's a weird crossover there because you can also make jokes that aren't actually that funny, but they take on a position that people want to share and they want that to be like a representation of what their opinion is.
So it's a little, in our space, you can't always look at the shares as whether or not things are actually funny.
Yeah, I think Frank's referred to that as clapter.
Oh, yeah, clapped.
Yeah, yeah.
That's where it's not so much you're funny, but you're making fun of somebody that people already hate, which especially, you know, in politics.
So they just kind of give it to you and clap, oh, you made fun of Trump.
He's dumb.
Or you made fun of KZO-Cortez.
And that's kind of like doing humor on politics, where you're doing it for an audience who agrees with you.
To me, it's always like doing humor on easy mode.
Yeah.
Yeah, without the Konami code.
Gradius.
That gives you 30 power-ups, right?
No, no, it's not 30 power-ups.
It's just most of the power-ups you can get in Gradius or Gradius.
I don't know.
I'm going to Google how to pronounce Gradius.
Gradius?
I never heard of that.
And I'm old.
I've heard it.
I might even have it on my arcade machine over there.
I'm not sure.
All right, we're also going to do some hate mail.
Can't forget that.
I really miss Adam Ford.
Yeah.
Now we know that you guys don't even care about the rest.
Yeah, you skip to this part.
Skip right here.
I'm going to stop putting the time stamp in the show notes.
You guys probably can't even find the show notes at this point.
Yeah, you're just here for the hate mail.
So we got this lovely message from a wonderful lady.
And we got this about a year ago.
I'm sure it was right after we did something about President Trump.
So here it is.
Please don't ever send me your paper.
This is the sickest excuse for a news article I have ever seen.
And now we're going to the all cap.
Capswalk on.
My President Trump gets enough garbage without satire.
Have a good day.
Sent from my iPad.
So a few comments on this.
So much to say.
So much.
We get this a lot where, especially from people of the older age persuasion, where they don't know what to call our website.
It's not like I don't like your website or I don't like the articles on your website.
It's always something like, I don't like your newspaper.
Yeah.
Or they'll.
Please don't ever send me your paper.
I'm sure we'll read it at one point.
I think we got hate mail once where someone said, I really don't like your sorry excuse for a cartoon.
A cartoon.
It was about an article.
It's like this card too.
I don't like your cartoon.
I think we've gotten comics.
I don't like your comics.
I don't like your comics.
And we didn't have any.
We have a couple infographics now, but then we didn't have anything like that.
So I like that, not really knowing what to call it.
That's always.
And the idea that we are going to like, oh, okay, cancel sending this woman the paper.
You know what?
We're going to go ahead and do that.
We're going to mail her.
We already have copies of a printed paper.
We are going to be gracious here and agree never to send her our paper.
I do also like when you could tell that she got fired up halfway through.
And then she put her caps lock in an attack position.
Well, she even, we didn't.
The word satire is also fully bolded and underlined.
Yeah, so there's my President Trump gets enough garbage without satire.
Have a good day.
You know, it's just this.
He doesn't need satire.
Satire is the point.
That's awesome.
So at least she recognized it was satire.
You know, a lot of times when we get criticism or hate mail, they'll put satire in quotation marks.
Oh, yeah.
Like the scare quotes.
Your so-called satire with the quote.
And then the other thing I wanted to mention was that whenever we get hate mail from people of the older persuasion, it's always sent from my iPad.
That's kind of the default.
Like, I don't know how to change my signature on my iPad.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, I guess if you're younger, you usually delete that.
Oh, I have Groudius on my NES.
That's what I have it on.
Wow.
You're very retro.
I am.
I want everyone to know.
Let's just listen to Kyle playing Groudius.
Let's do it.
We're going to move on to our subscriber portion of the show now and say goodbye to everybody else.
So I'm Ethan Nicole.
And I'm Kyle Mann.
We got Frank.
You want to say bye?
Yeah, bye.
Buy my book, Hellbender.
Yeah, Hellbender.
And Frank's book.
Navy SideQuest.
Do like a package deal.
And if you want to get the rest of our podcast, go to babylonb.com slash plans, and you can sign up as a subscriber at any level.
And you can get the remaining 4 billion hours of podcasting that we do eventually.
And we're just going to sign off here, and I'm going to let you enjoy Dave D'Andrea reading off some of our favorite bad submission headlines.
Molten lava coats crystallize teeth.
Dentists operate with pitchforks.
Their company lowered their salary.
Acid skin bubbles to the beat of its owner's decrepit heart.
Doctors operate with their talons.
Their company lowered their salaries.
Bankers set fire to themselves in cash vaults.
The CEOs monetized the ashes.
The CEOs lowered their salaries.
Line cooks are cooked on the grill by the managers.
The patrons rate their restaurants five stars on Yelp.
Their company lowered their salaries.
Window washers jump to their inevitable deaths, running the squeegee along the windows on their way down.
Their company lowered their salaries.
Trump decides this year to not pardon the turkey.
Instead, to behead it and eat it in the White House.
Cheers.
I am amazingly good at doing this and available.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.