Teamworking Day: Baby Got Book

Brockway: I have convened the Hot Dog today to talk about a parody song called “Baby Got Book.” Already you understand how this is going to go, and already you are so tired. Some fuckin’ Carl who insists his officemates think he’s hilarious had an idea and correctly assumed he’d never have an idea that good again. So he blew the family vacation fund recording some shit like “Fat Guy,” a Billie Eilish parody his wife’s divorce lawyer would later call “the inciting incident.”

Seanbaby: Oh fuck. Oh no, fuck this.

Brockway: I just made “Fat Guy” up but - oh my god, for the video where she’s sitting on the guy’s back as he does pushups, we could replace her with a fat guy and the pushup dude could really be struggling! Shit, I think I just started divorce proceedings. Okay, we’re not talking about “Fat Guy,” we’re talking about “Baby Got Book,” a parody song by Dan Smith about how he loves big Bibles.

Seanbaby: Here's what I already know: Everyone who produced "Baby Got Book" has been cursed by God. If "Baby Got Book" ever plays in an elevator, that elevator lets you off in Hell. If you hum this song to yourself near an expectant mother, a hooved bat will kick its way out of her womb. Fuck whatever this is.

Brockway: Your instincts are spot on, and theologians will one day refer to this moment as the high water mark of faith – the moment all belief in a decent god began receding from this world. But you’re burning out early. This hate is not a sprint; it’s a marathon.

Brockway: Yes. Fantastic. Dan didn’t understand either the ideas of parody or song at all, and this was released in the 2000s, so it took him 20 years to come up with it. All of his instincts betrayed him here – he felt the need to keep “big” central to the song, but knew he had to exchange butts for bibles, like some kind of reverse Catholic Church outreach program.

Seanbaby: When this person dies from a new disease scientists will call "Screaming Dan Warts," Saint Peter will recite these exact lyrics to him because they will hurt more than the words, "Get your wack ass out of Heaven, you worthless piece of shit."

Brockway: It will look exactly like that scene from Teen Witch, only Dan Smith is Teen Witch and the second he starts rapping he will drop through an open portal straight into hell.

Brockway: Wait, plenty of space in the margins and it has pictures? Is this the turn in the song? Is this the part in "Dog Police" where the bandmates slowly realize they’re talking about fucking actual dogs? Because now it comes across as a story about a guy who needs Large Print Bibles with colorful pictures because he was raised in a dog crate and didn’t learn to read until he was 23, but Kirk Cameron doesn’t think adult illiteracy should keep Tugboat from the throne of Christ.

Jesus, that’s insane. Dan, you can’t throw an implied crate tragedy like that out there and then follow it up with swapping “me so horny” with “me so holy.” I don’t even know how to explain the ways that’s wrong. No, I know exactly how: I’d have to start with how racism changes over time and then read you the Webster’s Dictionary definition of “horny.”

Seanbaby: It's suspicious that Dan has the exact tone and rhythm of someone who just had their dick ripped off. He's still fucking going and this song is a first draft idea in a Say The Dumbest Thing contest. It's what you would sing to make fun of someone in a CHRISTIAN LIVES MATTER shirt. If The Omen had a strip club scene, this would be the soundtrack.

Brockway: No. That’s incorrect. That’s all… technically wrong. See, this is why not anybody can be Weird Al. You can’t just leave a lyric mostly intact because you can’t think of a better one. This way you’re begging the question, why do “even white preachers got to shout?” It’s supposed to be a throwaway line but it changes everything. It implies that, as a matter of course, all black preachers look for Bibles with big asses. But this Bible’s ass is so big it transcends that old racial stereotype. Plus the original was spit by a black man, and the parody is by a Cleveland white. Dan Smith, you got lazy for one line and now you’re accidentally saying “you know how the blacks fuck thicc bibles, right? I’m not normally down with that, but I just saw a Bible so stacked even I, a white person, thought about penetrating it.”

Seanbaby: I knew this guy was going to fuck books in a problematic way the second I saw him rap his way out of that pile of Bibles. Dan represents a serious issue in our education system. Statistically, every African-American is assigned the responsibility of "some white idiot's first black friend" five times. Our nation's black friends are spread too thin for something like Dan. What I mean is, can you imagine performing "Baby Got Book" if there was any chance of a black person in your life seeing it? It's not exactly a hate crime, but it's very disappointing. "Baby Got Book" is like shitting your pants at a holocaust museum, but with less musicality.

Brockway: He’s from Cleveland, I don’t think he’s actually seen a black person in real life yet. He might think they’re fictional, like elves. He might think this is LARPing.

This song is such an insane failure by every metric, It’s almost a shame he only had one of these in his lifetime. Dan Smith could’ve been the untalented Hip Hop Christian Weird Al, a niche everybody can agree to hate in every respect. He could’ve united the world.

Wait, holy shit-

Seanbaby, this is a whole album! SEANBABY THERE’S A HIP HOP CHRISTIAN WEIRD AL.

Seanbaby: How dare you discover this. How fucking dare you. Reseal this tomb and burn the clothes you're wearing. Swear on the blood weeping from our eyes we will each die carrying this secret.

Brockway: I’m so sorry, but scroll down - see we’ve already written thousands of words about it. It’s too late to save us because it’s already happened, is happening, and will happen again. This is our Groundhog Day and the clock resets every time somebody new reads this. We build our own hells.

Anyway D.E.B.’S. Kid is incorrect from the title stage, since you can’t imply ownership within an acronym. Let’s not get bogged down though, since the very first words on this album are a default text-to-speech reader saying “yo player, pass me that mic so I can pwn some newbs.” Right away you know you’re about to get pure attitude from a guy that got beat up a lot as a kid, teenager, and adult. The rest of the song is about a gross Bible Camp called Camp Crusty, a name he stole from an old Simpson’s episode, which is where the insufferably unfunny stole their senses of humor from before Rick and Morty.

Seanbaby: What you have to admit about Dan is he raps about real experiences. These are relatable human truths. Black preachers do make love to zaftig bibles, and we all went to that one church camp with the stinky counselors. Christians, don't you hate when a pastor named Douglas from Cincinnati eats too many chili dogs? His mother is still alive and always named Doris, and she drives a commercially registered truck with the license plate FARTMOM.

Brockway: Aw man, I’m well past the fart limit.

Hey, there’s a song on this album called “I Got A God,” which is a parody of “I Got A Man.” The original was about thoroughly harassing every inch of a woman in firm and unyielding spite of her repeated objections, while the parody is about struggling to resist the raw appeal of Mormon missionaries. Apparently this is a deep concern for Christians, who are constantly lured away by the sexy pull of, let me check again before I repeat this because it really doesn’t seem right, yes, it says right there: the sexy pull of Mormonism.

Seanbaby: There is nothing lower than making an enemy of Mormonism in a parody rap song and then losing. This is like rewriting "Regulate" to be "COVID's Fake" while you die on a respirator.

Brockway: There’s, holy shit, there’s a parody of “Lazy Sunday” by The Lonely Island. That was already a parody! It was parodying a whole subgenre instead of one specific song, but it was still a joke in the first place. Plus that joke was subverting hardcore whiteboy attitude rap to be about Narnia bullshit. That’s already Christian adjacent! You can’t make a parody rap of a parody rap that twists tough guy posturing to be about dorky Christ shit, and then make your own twist Double the Christ. I think that automatically becomes sarcastic by the rule of double negatives.

Seanbaby: "Dan, it says here you did a Me version of Lazy Sunday," said Jesus Christ as he thumbed through the Mediocrity section of His book of Unforgivable Crimes.

"L-let me explain, Mr. Christ!" stammered Dan, a dumb fucking piece of shit.

Jesus' hand snapped around Dan's neck. He screamed into his very bitch soul, "You think I want to hear more about a Lazy Sunday parody?" Dan Smith did not even try to answer. Instead he wondered if Jesus could read his thoughts. If the Son of God knew he just had the idea to change "Wet Ass Pussy" to "Moses Bushy."

"I can, you fuck," is all Jesus said.

Dan's final words croaked out, "I'm talking CLAP, CLAP, CLAP praise the burning bushy. Talking bush is very hot, that's some Moses Bushy."

Brockway: I admire the gumption but you’ll never write a worse parody song than Dan Smith. You would need decades of systematic failures by organized religion and the American education system, you’d have to hit rock bottom and simultaneously find Jesus and the comedy stylings of Scrubs, and then entire parts of your brain would need to be poisoned to death by the toxic metals in the Cuyahoga.

Like, look at this: “The Christians Who Pirate Everything” is fucking, is a fucking parody of VeggieTales? That’s also already Christian. And this is about how Christians are notorious media pirates? Dan Smith is deeply concerned about small bibles, sexy Mormons and Christian copyright protection? What the fuck is happening here? This can’t be any flavor of Christianity I’ve ever heard of. This has to be some bizarre Cleveland sect founded by a mutton-chopped dude named some shit like Hankeziah that started as a child bride Ponzi scheme.

Seanbaby: Does something like Dan Smith even interface with reality the way people do? Like, if he Googles his name and finds out I said "Dan Smith rewrites his sense of humor every time the Spencer's Gifts in Cleveland gets new shirts" would it affect his feelings? Would he even know I was trying to hurt him?

Brockway: I think if you told Dan Smith he’s like Mark Russell without the piano or the edge, you’d find that pullquote on his next album release.

Brockway: Dan Smith goes back to the “Me So Holy” well, this time basing a whole song around it. He knew it was too good to only use several times! This one’s about condemning churches who are TOO Christian? Okay, something is definitely wrong here. This is the part in the horror movie where you notice tentacles underneath the church pews but it’s too late to run.

Seanbaby: I would rather my daughter catch me sawing the feet off a hitchhiker than writing a song like this. Dan Smith is like if Corey Feldman dedicated his career to being a Christian parody rapper. If he tore his skin off to reveal this was step one in the skeletons' plans to destroy all music, I'd say, "Yeah, we figured you were something like that."

Brockway: Dan Smith really tried to make a career out of this:

He put out albums like Ill Eggs and Ham that- no, hold on a second. See, in old-timey slang “green” could mean nauseous, and Dan Smith thought he’d be very clever and use a synonym for nausea, ill, that can almost mean cool in a hip hop sense! Only the original eggs weren’t sick, Dan. They were literally green, so once again you have failed in a surprising direction right from the premise stage. You signed up for a 100 meter dash, lined up on the blocks, the starter pistol went off, and you violently shit yourself while laughing at all the idiots running away from the diarrhea competition.

But I guess it’s better than North Coast Patriarchs and The Caucasian Invasion which both sound like Cleveland Facebook hate groups.

Seanbaby: "I'm white," he's constantly reminding everyone. As if someone in his youth group for former gays and under is going to raise their hand and say, "White? But MC Pastor Dan, you spit the sick rhymes of the POC."

Brockway: God, I want so badly for Dan Smith to be somebody’s cool preacher, all trying to sit backwards on a pew with a pair of rollerblades slung over one shoulder, asking the '00 kids “so you like Sir Mix-a-Lot and old Simpsons episodes, right?”

Oh fuck, oh holy shit Seanbaby he’s ACTUALLY A COOL PREACHER.

Seanbaby: The local Mormon recruiters' eyes just turned to dollar sig-- wait, he was one of Cleveland Magazine's "Most Interesting People"? How did he go from "Cleveland interesting" to "what if a Garfield mug was a person"? How does a person with a Master of Arts in "Storytelling" live such a one-note life? Dan Smith is a beginner's improv class character. He's a banana Laffy Taffy wrapper with the same joke twice.

Brockway: Cleveland Interesting is like the opposite of LA Hot. A Cleveland 10 is a Missoula 4.

Look at this: Dan Smith isn’t just the cool youth minister, he’s the coolest youth minister. He does hip sermons about pop culture, even though everybody in his congregation seems to hate it.

Seanbaby: Oh Jesus, why are you still Googling Dan Smith. How are you still Googling Dan Smith? Google seems to think there are 700 more notable Dan Smiths. I am getting LinkedIns for Dan Smiths who died after holding one desk job in what was then known as Siam.

Brockway: I’m not even trying. The algorithm is just spoonfeeding me white Christian rappers who will proudly die in Ohio. We really fucked up giving them all those absurd art prompts, the AIs are starting to not just sort through human garbage, but understand it.

Seanbaby: I have to say, my teen sensibilities really respond to hip hop music and broad hit movies. Let's see where Dan’s going with this.

Brockway: Exactly where you expect, and yet somehow less. Dan starts this sermon by asking if anybody saw Spider Man: No Way Home and is answered with resounding, spiteful silence. Unphased, he goes into his ten minutes of stand-up material about it, so it’s too bad this is a forty minute sermon.

But right from the jump Dan is thrown by nobody seeing the movie, so first he has to nerdily explain the plot to something that people don’t know and also hate, just so he can later make jokes about it.

As the co-founder of 1900HOTDOG, I see no problems with this.

Seanbaby: Yeah, this is the exact type of crime we swore to report on.

Brockway: Self-awareness is not our strong suit.

Dan does a whole series of Pac Man Fever sermons, which I hope the kids love! Because the only thing worse is if he’s targeting 40-something Christian man-children. Which again, would be an excellent way to staff a fledgling bigamy cult or struggling Cleveland Facebook hate group.

Seanbaby: Oh no, you didn't Photoshop that. Oh no.

Brockway: Haha, yep – this one’s about Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! He’s tackling that in the year – let me check – this one. 2022. Really capturing the hearts and minds of the youth! Stay tuned for his Frankie Goes to Hollywood parody, Fortunatus Goes to Hebron.

Seanbaby: "Modern teens, avoiding the call of Mormonism is a lot like dodging a flurry from Piston Honda in 1987's Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!. I could never do it, and in many ways it was my only friend. Speaking of friends, drop a phat beat, Black Derrick!" Seriously, though; I want to know how a 35-year-old Nintendo game featuring a convicted sex criminal and cannibal ties into Christ's message.

Brockway: Oh, I’m glad you asked. Dan Smith isn’t, he was not prepared for that question.

See, uh, if you’re knocked down you have to mash the A and B button to get back up, and that’s kind of like life. Hey hold on, I think the Bible has a few sections that talk about falling and getting back up. Folks, we’re here for 40 minutes, let’s save those groans.

Seanbaby: "And speaking of getting knocked down and getting back up, gang... (now, Black Derrick!) H-He makes a pinot drink, He makes a riesling drink, He make moscato drink, He makes a white wine drink. He sings the psalms that remind him of the Israelites, he sings the songs of the me so holy nights."

Brockway: God this is that succulent, nourishing hate. I don’t need to eat a meal today. I would devour this man’s entire Instagram if he had one.

You’ll probably believe this.

He has one.

Seanbaby: Oh, god damn it.

Brockway: You might not believe this: He’s very proud of being cool Christian besties with the guitarist from Korn.

Seanbaby: "Yo, can you give me some black hair tips so I sound cool at the barber shop, guy from Korn?"

Brockway: This is getting uncomfortable. We shouldn’t be stalking this guy’s Insta, even if that photo of him falling in love as Head yuks it up with Christ is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. None of this invasive mockery is permissible unless he’s also some kind of shady grifter, but what are the odds, Seanbaby – hey, what are the odds the world loves us enough to give us a Cool Preacher Hip Hop Christian Weird Al Kornman Conman?

Seanbaby: I never even considered the possibility of this being a good person. The second I saw he made a song called "Baby Got Book" I knew Dan was the type of guy who would crash into an orphanage if he thought it would sell a single "HOW'S MY DRIVING CALL 1-800-JESUS" bumper sticker.

Brockway: Obviously I found his Twitter feed. It made me instantly sad that a human being would voluntarily classify themselves as “The Baby Got Book guy.”

Seanbaby: If you forced me to guess his website, I would have gotten whiteboyDJ.com within fifteen tries.

Brockway: But everything was okay again once I saw he was deeply into Opensea, the crypto marketplace wracked with insider trading charges. Generally not a good look for a preacher’s social media account to be RT’ing scam updates so hit-and-run that the original tweets have all been deleted. But he’s sticking to his guns and leaving ‘em up!

Seanbaby: After his "I Got a Man" parody, crypto fraud is nothing. Satan would not even bother bringing this shit up.

Brockway: What a wonderful, generous day this has been. I look on this world with new eyes. If this motherfucker was also a failed sketch comedian I think I would convert on the spot. I’d take it as a sign from God that I can truly have everything I want in Jesus.

Seanbaby: How are you doing this!?

Brockway: I now walk with Christ.

Heck yes, the Momentum Church YouTube channel is absolutely rife with sketch comedy starring Dan Smith! Bad Church Greeters! Frickin’ A, this is the hot dang observational Church comedy I need. Like, haha, you ever get that one church greeter who greets you too early? He’s all, welcome back to the loving arms of the lamb my brother and you’re like hey Jeff, wanna let me get outta my Ford Fiesta first? Haha, it’s the Ford Fiesta that sells that punchline! What a funny car.

Seanbaby: There is not a single coherent comedy idea in this entire bit. Untrained actors are sort of yelling at imaginary families as they enter a church? It's so aggressively joyless. It's like a supercut of every time the Dilbert writer demanded an order of mozzarella sticks get taken off his bill. What is the point of God if He doesn't strike you dead for exactly this?

Brockway: Only, wait, this one’s actually about church greeters who work for a bad church? That’s… that’s not how this works, Dan. You see, Webster’s Dictionary defines a premise as–

No, that’s way too advanced. Hey Dan, you know how when you laugh, it’s at something, and not nothing?

I might as well be explaining calculus to a dying veal calf.

We have to dial this back further. Okay Dan Smith, you know how you laugh when somebody farts? What if instead of farting, they didn’t fart. Would you still laugh? Your comedy is missing the fart, Dan Smith.

Take one more swing.

Seanbaby: I can't look.

Brockway: My god, this is desperate. This is an empty collection plate in the Church of Hack Comedy. This is worse than an empty collection plate – it’s a plate that came back to the pulpit missing the seed fiver, but with two buttons and a used condom. Dumb Couple Fights dares to mock how some couples can’t decide where to eat, and sometimes argue about the toilet seat position. Dan Smith filmed this sketch in the year – let me check – not 1972, the last year it was legally allowed by the Take My Wife Comedy Accords.

Seanbaby: This son of a bitch can't even hate his wife right.

Brockway: I once again regret my sudden religious conversion, and once again beg for readmission to whatever church the Power Team belongs to.

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