Perhaps you’ve heard of looksmaxxing, the online trend in which young men strive to become supposedly attractive, often through self-harm. Thanks to Clavicular, a young, fringe manosphere influencer, this term—and others modeled after it—has proliferated. You can be a looksmaxxer by soft maxxing (skin care or exercise) or by hard maxxing (plastic surgery or self-mutilation). Looksmaxxers often find themselves jester-maxxing, that is, using humor to gain the attention of women.

Maxxing can be specialized, too, and even modest, maximally speaking. A dude might be personality-maxxing instead of jester-maxxing. Less incel-maxxing versions might entail health-maxxing—what people called wellness approximately 10 minutes ago. Want your gut to be more regular? That’s fiber-maxxing. Want to build bulk? You’re protein-maxxing. Some so-called tradfem women want to bear more children through fertility-maxxing—a process our culture once understood as getting pregnant again. Maxxing goes the other way too, maximizing harm instead of benefit: Maybe you’ve got a drug habit, in which case you might be pill-maxxing. Anorexia, for some, is now starve-maxxing.

Everything worth doing seems to be worth maxxing. Want to use technology less and pursue human connections more? That’s friction-maxxing. What about relaxing or zoning out? You’re nothing-maxxing. Reading is book-maxxing. Going to bed is sleep-maxxing. Buying a pair of denim shorts for the welcome spring is probably jorts-maxxing. Think you’re reading an article right now? Nah, bruh, you’re Atlantic-maxxing.

The trend is irritating and stupid, but it also betrays a truth: The online life is an extremist one, and the result is fatigue-maxxing.

As with any trend, but especially in the depths of YouTube, Reddit, 4chan, Discord, Kik, or any of the other very online places, maxxing is overblown. Not many people are saying any of these things—at least not in large numbers. Instead, they are consuming protein, getting pregnant, and even reading books.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘Looksmaxxing’ reveals the depth of the crisis facing young men]

But an idea can become potent through its rapid depiction in culture—including in articles such as this one, which maxes maxxing even as it attempts to minimize it, somewhat. Online, our odd verbal tics—“Do better,” the figurative literally, “I can’t”/“I’m dead,” “THIS”—can seem like a mania. News about a mania can help make it a reality.

Writing at The New York Times, Nitsuh Abebe argues that -maxxing as a suffix is the love child of two cursed parents: the idea of optimizing a resource, which he attributes to video gaming, and incel culture, where he locates the origin of looksmaxxing specifically.

These two origins—gaming and incel culture—make maxxing seem perverse and fringe. Critic-maxxers hope Clavicular is, as my colleague Will Gottsegen put it, a curiosity—in other words, a freak. But a freak who might be dangerous, because his words and actions could spread. Perhaps they already have: Gottsegen’s concerns, for example, were affirmed by the hateful, violent, and anti-Semitic abuse he received from Clavicular acolytes after requesting an interview with the looksmaxxer in chief.

This version of online extremism’s story is a comforting one. A bad actor becomes radicalized online by other, prior bad actors, who then spread their particular gospel of badness further, online.

Radicalization really does work this way, sometimes. Colleen LaRose, a.k.a. Jihad Jane, became immersed in jihadist recruitment forums online, joined an al-Qaeda cell in Ireland, and became entrenched in a homicidal conspiracy. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American al-Qaeda propagandist, spread Muslim extremism among the English-speaking online world. Dylann Roof internalized white-supremacist messages from websites surfaced by search algorithms, and later carried out the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, was inspired by YouTube. So were Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques in 2019 after absorbing far-right ideologies from online forums such as 4chan, and Jake Angeli, the “QAnon Shaman” known for his shirtless, head-dressed appearance during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Though distressing, these well-known individual extremists offer consolation for aspiring normals, because they represent a perversion of norms, even while also threatening to erode those norms. So do categories of softer radicalism unattached to specific figureheads: “grindset” work extremists, manosphere red-pillers, disinformation-addled elder Facebookers, or “HODL” investment perverts. Life online appears to be neatly divisible, and indeed divided, into freaks on the one hand and, on the other, reasonable people such as yourself.

It is not. Online life is extremist in deep and broad ways. The intensity of internet life, even under ordinary circumstances, pushes us toward extremes on any topic—and every topic. No idea, belief, purchase, product, or event can be ordinary or innocuous. Everything must be done with absolutism, and those extremes must be performed in public, online.

When an influencer announces that she is “obsessed” with a makeup palette, slop bowl, or imported low-cost garment, her verbal tic spreads. Suddenly ordinary people also become “obsessed” with cleansers. They discover peptides they “can’t live without.” Mild enthusiasm doesn’t travel online. Intensity does. The algorithm, and the economy that supports it, first escalates speech that overstates the emotions that underlie it. As the speech spreads, the feeling follows. People truly come to believe that they cannot live without a particular peptide or a palette.

Over time, everything becomes either life-changing or irrelevant. Moderate positions can certainly be held, but only in the ordinary life one leads quietly and calmly offline—insofar as living offline is even possible anymore.

Fans no longer simply like a television show, film, comic book, author, quick-service restaurant, or any other cultural product. Instead, their enjoyment has become ramped up to a level formerly reserved for unhinged, extremist fandoms, such as Trekkies and Beanie Baby collectors. Fans feel the need to defend a work’s true meaning. They attack deviations from agreed-upon “canon.” They cease to interpret but instead draw lines in the sand. For every cultural good, identity has become fused with the object of interest, turning previously normal people leading unremarkable lives into Steak ’n Shake beef-tallow purists, Harry Potter moralists, or cast-iron-pan-cleaning radicals.

[Charlie Warzel: This is what it looks like when nothing matters]

On Facebook or Nextdoor, a missing package can never represent a simple misfortune or misunderstanding; it must instead become urban decay or a racist incursion. A loud car heard blocks or miles away represents social breakdown. A dog let off the leash becomes indicative of moral rot. An opinion offered offhand suggests a secret wickedness that must be exorcised. Platforms reward escalation with attention, and the audience also often responds. And so everyday life becomes overinterpreted, as local forums become symbolic battlegrounds.

You no longer buy or use or encounter goods, services, or events, but endure them with your whole person: I am a Moleskine journaler; I am a Stanley-cup commuter; I am a barefoot-shoe jogger. Advice or even just notions—only check email after noon; never do 10 reps of crunches—solidify into absolutism or vanish.

The speed, urgency, and constancy of online life amplifies extremism because posting, replying, and generally participating in the discourse is its own virtue enrobing all the rest, an internet-maxxing to rule all the others. Liking became fixation, watching became safeguarding, asking turned to prosecution, trying devolved to optimizing, noticing twisted into diagnosis.

Maxxing declares this state of affairs honestly. Finally, we can shed the pretense that internet life is reasonable, level-headed, or healthy. The whole internet is a machine for extremist thought, belief, and action. Maxxing could amount to its endgame—the final victory of full-throated extremism of any form and kind. But immoderacy online always ratchets up. Eventually, and probably soon, the max-maxxers will seem temperate in hindsight.

On Sunday, April 15, 1990, Americans got their first look at a daring new experiment in television—a sketch-comedy show intended to pose a direct challenge to NBC’s long-running Saturday Night Live. In Living Color was the brainchild of Keenen Ivory Wayans. He was the head writer and star, supported by four of his brothers and the rest of a cast—and dance troupe—made up almost entirely of people of color. Americans had never seen anything like it before. And they loved it. I sure did.

I was 10 years old, sitting wide-eyed beside my brother in our family’s South Jersey living room. It felt like someone had kicked open the door to a party I hadn’t even known I was waiting to be invited to. I’d seen Black faces on TV before, but rarely had I seen so many, all at once, being this funny, this free, this in control. In Living Color didn’t just make me laugh, it reflected the rhythm of the barbershops, family reunions, and cookouts I knew so well.

That wasn’t an accident. It was the product of a deliberate strategy set in motion when Barry Diller launched the Fox network in 1986 with a mission to disrupt the television status quo. Back then, the Big Three—ABC, CBS, and NBC—offered a steady stream of safe, interchangeable programming. As the scrappy new contender, Fox had to break the mold. Diller, along with the programming chief, Garth Ancier, set out to build a network that was alternative by design and saw being different as a virtue, not a risk.

The breakthrough, Diller told me, came with a script for a show pointedly titled Not the Cosbys—a reaction to the wholesome, top-rated sitcom The Cosby Show. That script became Married … With Children, that gleefully subversive sitcom that set the tone for everything that followed. “It was as alternative as you could get in terms of what the American networks were offering to viewers,” Diller explained. “Once we knew we were an alternative and that we had to be edgy, it dictated almost every decision we made.”

That ethos produced groundbreaking successes—The Simpsons, Cops, and a slate of other shows that challenged everything about what network television could be. But nowhere did it shine brighter than in the emergence of In Living Color and, soon after, Martin, two shows that would help transform Fox into an unlikely powerhouse of Black cultural creativity. It wasn’t a plan; it was a by-product of being open to voices, visions, and brilliance that the legacy networks too often ignored. “It made Fox the No. 1 network,” Diller noted.

What most of America didn’t realize at the time was that they were witnessing the dawn of a new era in entertainment, one where Black artists were flourishing because of, rather than in spite of, their Blackness.

In the months leading up to In Living Color’s debut, Keenen Ivory Wayans and the cast had been grinding, fine-tuning sketches without knowing which would make the cut. Fox, meanwhile, was on edge—eager for a hit but wary of just how much ground this groundbreaking show might actually break. Their fears proved unfounded. The premiere drew a staggering 23 million viewers—an astronomical number for a fledgling network that wasn’t even airing programming seven days a week.

Fox slotted In Living Color right after its two biggest comedies, The Simpsons and Married … With Children, but by then, the show was already a hot topic. The network had dragged its feet so long on airing the pilot that bootleg copies started circulating within the industry—and beyond. In New York City, street vendors were selling tapes of the unaired episode months before its official debut. One of those copies found its way to the Details magazine writer Martha Frankel, who wrote a rave review questioning why Fox was holding it back. The next day, Fox executives scrambled and finally green-lighted eight episodes.

A closer look at the sketches in the pilot demonstrates just how far Keenen was willing to go to upend norms and rattle people—and just how subversive his vision was. Keenen was eager to take down whoever he felt would get a laugh. “What was cool about those guys is that they’d mock the heroes of their community, which is a real threading of the needle,” Les Firestein, a co–head writer of the show, said of Keenen and his younger brother Damon. “Having the ability to make fun of yourselves as a culture is a show of great strength. One of the things that was seminal about In Living Color was that Black people enjoyed laughing at Black people. That was the seismic change. You had an entire culture getting to the point where they said we’re strong enough that we can laugh at the more ridiculous parts of our own culture.” That alone was new ground for Black comedy on television, which hadn’t been ready 13 years earlier for the strange, rebellious vision of Richard Pryor on The Richard Pryor Show.

One of the first things the audience sees in the In Living Color pilot is Keenen stepping onto the stage, introducing his cast—but, in true form, he doesn’t play it straight. “I’ll tell you what I’m most proud of,” he says, locking eyes with the camera. “Unlike other shows, I’ve got nothing but qualified Black people backstage making decisions.”

[Read: The Godfather of American Comedy]

With perfect timing, he swings open the door to the writers’ room—only for a swarm of panicked white writers to scurry out. Keenen, deadpan, assures the audience they’re just the cleaning staff. He then gestures toward a bewildered Black woman holding a mop. “And this,” he says with a grin, “is our head writer.” The bit lands perfectly—sharp, subversive, and hilarious. Then, without missing a beat, Keenen moves on and introduces the cast: “We went nationwide to find the most talented people in the country,” Keenen announces with a straight face—before rattling off a lineup that sounds more like a family roll call than a casting list. “Damon Wayans, Kim Wayans, Crystal Wayans, T. J. Wayans, Toney Wayans, Tommy Wayans …” The message is clear—and hilariously ironic. Many cast members would later (half) joke that the surest way to get on the show and thrive was to have “Wayans” on your birth certificate.

Keenen brags about how integrated the show is—and then opens a door that is labeled White Cast Members Only, behind which Jim Carrey and Kelly Coffield are shining shoes and ironing clothes while grinning and singing “Camptown Ladies.”

“Oh, those people,” Keenen says. “Always singing, always happy.”

From there, the pilot goes on to directly lampoon a Black hero: The first sketch, “Love Connection,” features Carrey as the ever-smarmy Chuck Woolery, while Keenen steps in as Mike Tyson, paired with Kim Coles as his new wife, Robin Givens. Keenen leans into the broad caricature—giving Tyson the signature lisp and playing him as a clueless, sexist ogre. From the jump, the show made its stance clear: No one was off-limits.

That particular Tyson impression became more common, but in 1990, Mike was still young, ferocious, and not yet a go-to punch line. (Remember, this was some 20 years before Tyson made fun of himself in The Hangover.) He had just been knocked out by Buster Douglas in Japan two months before the episode aired—though the sketch had been written before that stunning defeat. It didn’t take long for Keenen to learn that Tyson wasn’t amused. One night at a club, Mike spotted him and stormed over.  

“That was the scariest moment of my life,” Keenen recalled. “All I feel is this paw land on my shoulder. I turn around and it’s the heavyweight champion of the world. He stepped to me. He goes, ‘What? I kill your mother or something?’”

Tyson clearly didn’t like the impression. Months later, Keenen said he ran into Tyson again, and he was more relaxed. “He was actually really cool,” Keenen said. “He was like, ‘Yo, I was just going through some things. You do your thing.’”

The show never shied away from making fun of Black culture, as seen in the recurring sketch “Great Moments in Black History.” One of the most memorable bits claimed that a Black man had “invented” self-serve gas stations. The punch line? Cast member Tony Riley playing an apathetic gas-station attendant who yells at a customer, “Get it your damn self!”

Audiences loved it. The studio crowd for In Living Color’s pilot exceeded even Keenen’s wildest expectations. “Black audiences don’t just laugh at stuff, we stomp our feet, we high-five,” said Paul Miller, the show’s primary director. “People were literally running up and down the aisles during the taping, high-fiving each other. One of the executives turned to me and said, ‘Did you pay these guys to do that?’” Kevin Bright, a supervising producer in the first season who later co-created Friends, had never seen anything like it. “At Friends, I’d never seen a first taping of anything where the audience was that crazy,” Bright told me. “They were on fire.”

For Larry Wilmore, a writer on the show’s first three seasons who went on to co-create The Bernie Mac Show and produce The Office and Black-ish, working on In Living Color often felt “surreal.”

“In those days, if you worked on In Living Color, people went crazy,” Wilmore told me. “They would say, ‘So what do you do?’ I go, ‘Oh, I write for television.’ ‘Oh, really?’ They didn’t seem that impressed. ‘Well, what shows do you write for?’ ‘I write for In Living Color.’ And they go, ‘In Living Color! Oh my God!’ The energy they had for that show, it was so interesting. And I think because we were pushing boundaries at that time that hadn’t really been pushed before, especially in race and culture. And people were so excited to see that on their television.”

Those who had devoted their lives to making the show had other reasons to be excited. Keenen recalls having moved to L.A. with Hollywood dreams—only to discover that the industry expected young Black men to only play thugs or pimps. Even worse was when they wouldn’t get those parts because they were told they sounded too educated.

“I’m from a family of 10 in the projects, and I find out I’m not ‘Black enough,’” Keenen said.

In the summer of 1978, Keenen stood in line for his shot at a five-minute set at the Improv in Los Angeles. He met the only other Black guy there, Robert Townsend, and the two became inseparable. (Townsend would go on to become an accomplished comedian, actor, and the director of legendary comedy specials such as Eddie Murphy Raw.) Keenen bombed his first set, but it didn’t matter. “I bombed terribly. It was an out-of-body experience,” he said. “Still, I was looking at myself like, You’re doing it.”

Keenen studied other comics closely, analyzing how they wrote jokes. “Even as a young comedian, Keenen was kind of a master craftsman. He knew instinctively how to set up a punch, deliver the joke, rewrite the structure, make it funnier.” Those were skills that would serve him well with In Living Color 12 years later.

But when Keenen came home from Tuskegee in his second year to tell his parents he was dropping out to pursue comedy instead of engineering, they didn’t understand. Marlon, still in elementary school, was there to witness the moment. “My mother cursed Keenen out,” Marlon told me. “My mother said, ‘Boy, a stand-up comedian? I known you your whole life and you ain’t never said nothing funny. This shit is the funniest thing you ever said! You’re going to be a stand-up comedian? Let me tell you something, boy. You better go out there and get your engineer’s degree and a job with some benefits!” Keenen knew there was very little chance they would understand. “I might as well have said I was going to smoke crack,” he said. “But I knew deep in myself what I wanted to be. I knew I was going to do it.”

His biggest break came when he landed a spot on The Tonight Show in 1983. By then, he was five years into his stand-up career—seasoned, confident. He told a joke about his older brother, Dwayne, who, as Keenen put it, finds racism in everything. “He’s like, ‘The white man don’t want to see you make it! They don’t want to see you get ahead. They got a conspiracy out there!’ Does he think there’s some secret organization sitting around going, ‘Now, there are too many Black people making it in this country. They’re making too much progress. Now, let’s see … We got Malcolm X, we got Martin Luther King … Dwayne! He’s up for promotion at McDonald’s! Stop him!’” The crowd erupted. Then came the ultimate trophy—Carson called him over to the couch. They were headed to commercial, so there was no time for an interview, but as the show cut away, Carson’s voice could be heard: “That’s funny stuff.”

Keenen grew close with Eddie Murphy and even closer with Townsend. Along with Arsenio Hall and Paul Mooney, they formed what Mooney later called the Black Pack, a nod to Sinatra’s Rat Pack. When the time came, assembling the cast for In Living Color proved to be a challenge—even with Keenen’s siblings in the mix. Keenen saw SNL as a writer-driven show, but he wanted ILC to be performer-driven, where the writing would serve the cast. His plan was to build the show around his brother Damon and add the best talent he could find. “Damon was at a point comedically where he was the most brilliant guy on the planet,” Keenen said. “The way he thought, the way his point of view was completely different than mine or anybody else’s. He was really on the edge.”

“The Wayanses are kind of a comedy troupe in and of themselves,” Rob Edwards, a Black writer on the show who created “Great Moments in Black History,” told me. “They’d go out to dinner—they eat as a family all the time—and try to crack each other up.” The next day, they’d bring those stories to the writers’ room. “The writers would take as much of this down as humanly possible,” Edwards said. “They have incredible characters, timing, and a great sense of what’s funny.”

Keenen’s authority over the show was undisputed. He had strong ideas, and whether people saw him as confident and visionary or arrogant and dismissive, he commanded respect. He wasn’t a screamer or a tantrum thrower, but his presence was intimidating. He took input, but not dissent. “It was a dictatorship,” Keenen admitted.

And that dictatorship worked. Right before the premiere of Season 2, In Living Color won an Emmy for Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Series—beating The Arsenio Hall Show, Saturday Night Live, and Late Night With David Letterman. Keenen especially enjoyed besting SNL, which had unceremoniously dumped Damon. But Hollywood had no interest in rewarding the show beyond that—In Living Color never won another Emmy.

“Keenen is one of the true geniuses of sketch comedy,” says David Alan Grier. “Meaning, you do a scene, it’s all flat, and Keenen says, ‘If you pick up your pencil, look to the right and say the same joke, it’s gonna work.’ You trust him, you do it, and it kills. Most people don’t know comedy. They can’t fix it. You stumble on a great joke, you don’t know why it’s great. But Keenen had that ability. I’ve been acting over 30 years, there’s maybe two or three people like that.”

By the time Jamie Foxx joined in Season 3, the show had hit its stride. But breaking in wasn’t easy. “When I saw Damon walk in and Jim walk in, it was like fucking Jurassic Park,” Foxx recalled. “I was the eighth-funniest person in the room at any given time. I had to be quiet sometimes to learn my way.”

Black comedians had been honing their craft since the days of vaudeville, through the early days of television, and into the transformative decades of the 1960s and ’70s, despite segregation and institutional racism. Bert Williams, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy—these were artists who used humor to subvert the status quo and carve out space where there had previously been none.

By the 1990s, that legacy had taken root. And as Keenen Ivory Wayans assembled the cast of In Living Color, he sought talent outside the industry’s usual pipelines. “Minority talent is not in the system, and you have to go outside,” he told the press at the time. “We went beyond the Comedy Stores and Improvs, which are not showcase places for minorities.” He pulled in unknowns and rising stars—his brothers Damon, Shawn, and Marlon, alongside T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh, Kim Coles, and Tommy Davidson. Jennifer Lopez danced as part of the “Fly Girls,” with Rosie Perez as choreographer. There was one white guy: a rubber-faced impressionist from Canada named Jim Carrey.

The show’s success kicked off what would become a cultural boom. I didn’t have the language then to describe what was happening, but I felt it—this rush of pride, this sense that we were finally being seen not just as characters on a screen, but as full, complex people. The ’90s were the first time I remember being able to flip through TV channels and see Blackness represented in a way that felt real and expansive: in Martin Lawrence’s outrageous antics, the aspirational brilliance of A Different World, Living Single’s confident cool, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s blend of humor and heart.

[Read: I Watched Stand-Up in Saudi Arabia]

Of course, tensions simmered behind the scenes. The Wayans family’s bold vision for In Living Color eventually collided with the instincts of Fox network executives, who found the show too raw, too provocative—especially in contrast to the pastel wholesomeness of NBC’s The Cosby Show. But the irreverence was the point. It was what made the show matter. And it was what drew comics including Chris Rock and Jamie Foxx into its orbit. Rock famously left—or was pushed out of—SNL after growing frustrated with the limited roles he was given. “SNL is a pretty white show,” he later said. “And In Living Color was just hip. The shit was hot.”

It was hot because Black creative power was being unleashed across every creative industry—television, yes, but also film, fashion, and music. “I think a lot of Black culture was finding its voice during that time,” Larry Wilmore told me. “If you talk about Black shows on television [before that], many of them were created and run by white people.” That shift—from being the subject of stories to being the storyteller—is what made the ’90s revolutionary.

I am a product of that revolution. I came of age watching Black characters who reminded me of people I knew, who were messy and hilarious and ambitious and flawed. They shaped how I saw the world and how I saw myself moving through it. I’m a journalist now, but I grew up loving comedy because it was one of the first places I saw truth telling as an art form. Jokes that punched up, that slipped past defenses, that revealed something deeper while still making you laugh.

The boom of Black comedy unfolded against a backdrop of real political change: the end of the Cold War, an economic boom, and shifting demographics that made America more diverse—and more reflective of voices that had long been kept on the margins. The decade also saw a resurgence of Black political consciousness, inspired by the civil-rights generation and fueled by modern injustices—the beating of Rodney King, rising incarceration rates. Black TV responded in kind. Shows tackled racism, sexism, and classism. Even sitcoms, cloaked in laugh tracks, were often sly Trojan horses for deeper truths.

The audience was changing too. More Black people were attending college and joining the middle class, which created demand for more nuanced portrayals. Before the ’90s, TV ratings among Black and white audiences were nearly identical. But by the decade’s end, Black viewers had more options—and made different choices. Seinfeld, while beloved by critics, never broke into the top 10 for Black households. This was more than a shift in taste. It was a cultural realignment. And through it all, the lineage of Black comedy stayed unbroken.

Jamie Foxx named himself in tribute to Redd Foxx, the comic who went from performing in nightclubs where he was the only Black person onstage to his role on the breakout hit Sanford & Son as Fred Sanford. Arsenio Hall gave Chris Rock his big break, which led him to SNL. Arsenio also mentored Will Smith, paving the way for The Fresh Prince—and shared a screen with Eddie Murphy in Coming to America. That movie featured John Amos, who’d starred in Good Times, and a then-unknown Samuel L. Jackson.

By 1992, even as the golden age of Black sitcoms was peaking, a struggling playwright in Atlanta named Tyler Perry put on his first play with $12,000 of his life savings. Three decades later, he would be a billionaire, having founded the largest Black-owned studio in the country.

When you compare American comedy in the 1920s of Redd Foxx’s childhood with American comedy in the 2020s, one thing is clear: Black comedians have had one hell of a century. Many of these comics were more than entertainers. They were cultural translators and civil-rights figures in their own right. They didn’t change the world by marching on Washington or facing down fire hoses, but because they climbed onstage night after night, often in rooms where few looked like them, and dared to be brilliant.

Without In Living Color, and Keenen Ivory Wayans’s vision for it, we may never have witnessed the rise of Damon Wayans, Jim Carrey, Tommy Davidson, Jamie Foxx, Kim Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, David Alan Grier—even Jennifer Lopez. Without them, there would not have been any “golden age” of Black comedy. The path that led to a Secretary of State Colin Powell or a President Barack Obama might have looked very different. And I don’t know that I’d be sitting here today, writing this essay.

---

This essay was adapted from Bennett’s new book, Black Out Loud: The Revolutionary History of Black Comedy From Vaudeville to ’90s Sitcoms.

This is some boss-level forensic accounting demonstrating that Facebook secretly wrote and is shepherding the various "age verification" bills.

Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture:

How corporate lobbying, think tank infrastructure, competing model legislation, and obscured funding networks are shaping age verification policy across 45 states and Congress.

This investigation documents a national lobbying operation spanning corporate spending, think tank infrastructure, dark money networks, and competing model legislation templates. Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). But the operation extends beyond Meta. [...]

This investigation traced funding flows across five confirmed channels, analyzed $2.0 billion in dark money grants, searched 59,736 DAF recipients, parsed LD-2 filings, and mapped campaign contributions across four states to document the operation.

Previously, previously.

The October Horse?  By © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

The Divine Patronage System

Boons of Ephora, Goddess of the Hearth

Boons of Calderion, King of Phosmora

Discussion

I have long been a big fan of the Semiotic Standard developed for Alien (1979) by Ronn Cobb for "all commercial trans-stellar & heavy element transport craft" - in particular Artificial Gravity Absent is just so cheery. There should be lots of icons like that littering future settings, addressing problems we are not even considering yet.

Snip of Semiotic Standard by Ronn Cobb, recreated by Scotch and Soda

I have two particular cases in mind where there should be something like this about.
- Iconography developed by alien multi-species civilizations (Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5)
- Iconography still lying around from the distant past (Warhammer 40k's dark age of technology, Foundation)

Alien gestures

While noting that iconography assumes that one is communicating with other critters that also 'read' or similar, one would assume that if you are sharing environments closely enough that some hazards or information needs to be communicated passively, this would get worked out.

The key here is 'form' - but actually there is quite a bit of leeway - looking across our iconography, a sufficiently abstracted 'Predator' would look the same; even a very strange alien form would be renderable in most of these signs with minor modifications - it would still have 'standing' 'lying' 'floating upside-down' and 'suited-up' forms - albeit with a tail or six limbs or an octopoid form or what have you. Swap those out and all the rest of those icons remain comprehensible.

One would assume that a whole block of hazards that are not dangerous to humans would appear on such a set - perhaps warnings of 'large beings walking' for smaller creatures or a variety of dangerous atmosphere tags for things with less tolerance of pollutants or even certain atmospheric components than humans.

From the history of a far future

For 40k, there ought to be some iconography that roots in the dark age of technology that ought to be plastered all over everything - even recognising that the Imperium has its skulls-and-wings staples, there ought to be other symbols in there that have persisted alongside the quasi-magical technologies they have. Red and yellow hazard striping has been part of armour designs for as long as folk have been painting but it would be neat to have some other iconography too.

For all that the Imperium has lost lots of know-how and technology, simple icons ought to have persisted - things like 'psi hazard', various warnings for plasma, melta, las and other hazardous technologies and all the semiotic standard above for voidships. Maybe some kind of 'beware the Men of Iron' or the like.

I would think that Necromunda terrain and Genestealer Cult gear would have lots of these plastered all over the day-to-day objects they use and fight through.

A counter argument could be heiroglyphics - where the meaning of symbols became lost for a chunk of time until dedicated study restored it to understanding. This could well be a valid argument, but I posit a setting where enough time-lost spaceships, isolated colonies and long-lived organisations stuck around that such symbols have survived, even if only a fraction of them.

What use to you, a DM?

Maybe not a lot, maybe what I am probing at here is that in your far future setting there could be icons and indicators that have become common across species or persist through time such that the ancient site you break into is comprehensible.

I feel there is an exercise here of going, much like Ronn Cobb did, "what hazards do folk face in this environment, what needs to be warned against" and coming up with symbols for those. If you could create such a set, imagine sharing a map with your players where all the hazards and traps are fully explained in the iconography, the challenge is for them to figure out the translation and then map their path based on that.

= = = Joesky tax = = =

d6 Icons of a Future Yet To Pass
1. Arm intersected and shifted by an arc - "Danger, Reactive Energy Shields"
2. Triangular 'face' with spiral eyes - "Caution, free-will subverting entities"
3. Black human figure with light blue line around head in front of red/white spiral - "Wear psy-barrier equipment"
4. Human figure with right side dissolving into pixels - "No shielding beyond this point"
5. Human figure with head split diagonally, across split is squared skull - "Beware humaniform mechanoids"
6. Diagonal split vertical lines and dots (1/0 cascade) with triangles/circles/squares - "Data corruption / memetic contamination"

Bo Gritz is dead. One of the largely forgotten figures of the late 20th century, Gritz played a critical role in the development of the paranoid, conspiracy theory driven reality of today’s world. He is not worth remembering outside of this, as he was a self-promoting clown show of lies and propaganda, but he had an outsized role on late twentieth century American culture as it turned toward creating myths about why the nation lost in Vietnam and seeing big government and liberals as conspiracies to attack our liberties, all of which helped lead to figures such as Donald Trump rising in the Republican Party and to the presidency.

Born in 1939 in Enid, Oklahoma, Gritz was a tough kid with a tough childhood. His father was killed in World War II and his maternal grandparents raised him. He was a troubled kid and got expelled from school. The family did have some money though and he was sent to Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia to straighten him out with some military discipline.

Immediately upon graduating from high school, in 1957, Gritz enlisted in the Army. Although he was an enlisted man, people saw possibility in him and he attended Officer Candidate School. By 1963, he was a captain and was promoted to major in 1967. This put him in line to go to Vietnam. He was involved in some intense fighting in the Vietnam War. He commanded a detachment made up of a mix of American, South Vietnamese, and Cambodian soldiers that were basically mercenaries for whatever America needed. This meant special missions that included investigating shot down airplanes and recovering their black boxes if possible.

For all of this, Gritz was promoted to lieutenant colonel and became an important Army insider. He commanded special forces in Latin America from 1975 to 1977, became Chief of Congressional Relations for the Defense Security Agency, and worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense. But in 1979, he retired from the military. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t still involved. It means he was doing covert work that was easier to do outside the military structure, such as going to Afghanistan to train the mujahedeen.

As this went on, he became obsessed with the idea that the Vietnamese communists were holding any number of American prisoners of war. In fact, this is a good moment to consider the POW/MIA craze of the 1980s. It was so difficult for a lot of Americans to understand why we had lost the war in Vietnam. They were not prepared to say that the entire operation was badly considered from the beginning, that being a wannabe colonialist power attempting to intervene in a post-colonial civil war had a lot of potential to go very badly. So it had to be someone else who had cost the U.S. the war. It was the government unwilling to do what it took to win the war. Or maybe it was the anti-war hippies and their protests. Or maybe it was the unpatriotic media. But whatever it was, it was someone else’s fault, someone who had sacrificed a generation of young American men. Of course, the government had indeed sacrificed a generation of young American men, but saying the war was just a bad idea and all these people died for a stupid cause wasn’t something people were willing to say.

These ideas began manifesting themselves in some fascinating cultural ways. First, there was the idea that soldiers were spat upon as they returned home. This is both absurd and, today, is conventional wisdom. When I ask my students about this—students who often know very little about American history before they get to my class—they have almost all heard it. The problem is that there is zero evidence that it ever happened. None. Not a single documented case, as the scholar Jerry Lembcke explored in detail. And let’s be clear, despite the narrative that the media cost the nation the war, in fact, the media was extremely anti-protestor, especially early in the war. Had this happened, the media would have been all over it. But they weren’t. It doesn’t even get mentioned in any American media publication or other cultural product until the early 1980s. Then this became a core idea of Rambo and the narrative got set in stone. Moreover, this is nonsense because the antiwar movement was inherently pro-soldier. The vast majority of antiwar protestors didn’t care about Vietnam or communism one way or the other. They just didn’t want to go fight the war and they wanted to bring the soldiers home.

This was the kind of thing that led people like Gritz into resentment and crazy conspiracy theories. Part of this, also mainstreamed by Rambo and other early Vietnam reflections in the movies, is that the government abandoned unknown but large numbers of prisoners of war in Vietnam. In fact, Gritz may have been the inspiration for the Rambo character. Again, these myths about POWs was just flat out untrue. The Vietnamese government had a whole lot bigger fish to fry than to still hold American prisoners of war after the war was won. It had to build a society, overthrow the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and fight a war with China, all before 1980. But Gritz became a huge promoter of this idea. This became a mantra of late twentieth century American conservatism. Even today, you see POW/MIA flags up in all sorts of public places—even though there have not been any but a few American POWs in a half-century, despite our wars in the Middle East. But good luck saying we should take those silly conspiracy theory flags down! They are now part of American identity. This is, at least in part, Bo Gritz’s contribution to American life. Great.

Specifically, Gritz fundraised to take trips to southeast Asia to get the boys home. He got other right-wing loons such as Ross Perot and Clint Eastwood to fund these trips. At first, the Defense Department was at least slightly interested in making sure no one was over there, but the government soon realized Gritz was an unhinged lunatic. In fact, the only thing that came of it was that, while in Laos, one of his anti-communist Laotian guerillas he worked with was killed and one of the Americans in his search party, was kidnapped for ransom! If anything, Gritz created prisoners of war!

Moreover, Gritz was breaking all sorts of laws. He had to turn himself in to the police in Thailand for his operations out of that country into Laos for smuggling military equipment. Moreover, one of his comrades was later convicted for smuggling explosives around these operations; though Gritz was not prosecuted, there is no way he didn’t know about this and encouraged it. But although he faced up to 30 years in prison in Thailand and although the Vietnamese definitely wanted him imprisoned, Grtiz never served a day.

Now, Gritz was a massive self-promoter along the way. He was an extremely highly decorated officer. He just loved his own personal history of covert operations and he saw the world as needing more men like him. So he kept it up. He went to Burma in 1986 because he still believed there were POWs and also believed the huge Burmese opium baron Khun Sa knew where they were. So even though Sa was an international criminal, Gritz went over and interviewed him. He got Sa to get on video and make claims that leading Americans, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, were involved in his opium smuggling operations.

This all led Gritz into ever more wild conspiracy theories. He was smart enough to realize that while he was a right-winger, there were potential advocates for his ideas on the far left too and so he tried to bring conspiracy theorists of different political stripes together at various conferences, to some success. After all, when you are a conspiracy theorist, your actual politics on the issues really make no difference because they aren’t what are driving your engagement and your life.

By the early 90s, Gritz was all-in on the far-right ideas around the “one world government” under the auspices of the United Nations and represented in the U.S. by George Bush’s “New World Order” speech.Gritz became a total conspiracy theorist in domestic life too, the kind of that the Southern Poverty Law Center has followed for years.[1] He went into the deepest area of American horrors, the idea that there was a gigantic conspiracy that attacked the true Americans—the straight, conservative, war-loving, white man. In 1998, he wrote, “Do you see the sign, the scent, stain and mark of the beast on America today? … Are you willing to submit and join this seedline of Satan? … Look to those who are openly antichrist… . [W]ho in the world is promoting abortion, pornography, pedophilia, Godless laws, adultery, New Age international banking, entertainment industry and world publishing? Wherever you find perversion of God’s laws you will find the worshippers of Baal with their roots still in Babylonian mysticism.” Whew, OK then.

Naturally enough, all this led weirdo right-wing parties to nominate Gritz for their national campaigns. In 1988, something called the Populist Party nominated him for VP, but he dropped out when he discovered David Duke was the presidential candidate. He thought it was going to be the corrupt congressman from Ohio, Jim Traficant, who I guess was respectable enough compared to Duke! But this debacle didn’t stop him from becoming the party’s presidential candidate in 1992, and it was all very stupid with rants against the Federal Reserve and the New World Order. Naturally, he only got 0.1% of the vote nationally, but he cleared 2 percent in Idaho and almost 4 percent in Utah, demonstrating the power of extremism in the Rocky Mountains. Some of this is also explained by Gritz’s 1984 conversion to the Mormon faith, which has provided some of the most virulent right-wing extremism in American politics, including more recently, the Bundy family takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, one of the events that presaged the rise of Trump.

As he aged, Gritz moved deeper into anti-Semitism. He became a follower of Christian Identity theology, common among highly radicalized Mormons, which argues that the Israelites of the Bible are actually whites and not Jews and thus whites are the “chosen people.” That this is complete nonsense makes no difference, as it never does for racists and/or conspiracy theorists. In 2000, Gritz claimed, “Jews, feminists, sodomites and other liberal activists may install Gore over an apathetic moral majority. … Runaway abortion, anti-Christ/God and globalism are certain.”

In 1996, Gritz and his son Jim kidnapped two children in Connecticut. One of their other lunatic followers claimed her husband had engaged in “Satanic sexual abuse.” The Gritz decided to go save the boys. Of course all they did was get themselves arrested for it and there was zero evidence of this woman’s charges. Gritz later called the whole thing “the biggest mistake of my life.” Yeah, well, I can think of a few more you might want to consider!

None of this looney tunes conspiracy theories helped Gritz’s personal life. In 1998, his wife left him. He dressed up in all his military regala, took his truck from his community to the town of Kamiah and shot himself in the chest. He failed to kill himself. People noted the irony of a man who had bragged for decades on his excellent marksmanship had failed to shoot correct with the gun pressed against his own chest. Others thought it might well be a fraud, yet another publicity stunt or a way to get his wife back.

Didn’t make any difference in how he saw the world anyway. Gritz later created what he called a “constitutional covenant community” near Orofino, Idaho. This was hardly his first highly armed right-wing community. He first tried this near Kamiah, Idaho, bordering the Nez Perce reservation, in 1994, but he left it after the suicide attempt. Then he moved to Nevada to create something called the Fellowship of Eternal Warriors, merging his brand of right-wing off-Christian theology with anti-Semitism and homophobia, which had really risen in the right-wing crazy world by the early 90s, with attempts in Oregon and Colorado to create state law against gay people.

Despite all of this, Gritz was the guy people called when other crazy right-wingers were in trouble. He spent a week in the forests of North Carolina trying to get the abortion clinic and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph to surrender. But his most prominent moment was when he became the intermediary between the government and his fellow right-wing extremist Randy Weaver when the FBI descended upon the latter’s compound at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho. This whole thing was a disaster for the government. Weaver shot and killed a federal marshal, the FBI killed his wife and son. To his credit, I guess, Gritz got Weaver to surrender to end the blood bath. And in fact, Weaver only ended up serving 18 months in prison and that for the original charge that brought the FBI to his compound, not for killing the officer. I guess in this country, you can get away with killing the cops if you are a white right-winger. Other Gritz attempts to intervene in favor of far-right causes went less well. He tried to intervene in the next big standoff between the government and a right-wing extremist group, the so-called Freedmen, on their Jordan, Montana compound. Amazingly, Gritz thought the Freemen were too crazy for him and he bailed. And to be clear, this was a man who tried to invade the Florida hospital where doctors finally pulled the plug on Terry Schiavo in 2005.

But there was one thing that really mattered more than anything else—The Big Grift. He would sell anything to his fellow extremists. He had a deal called SPIKE — Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events. This was a 12 part video series that was supposed to prep you for the war to come. But the war to come, I mean who wouldn’t make money on that? He charged people an arm and a leg for these videos. And that really says it all, doesn’t it. Right wing revolution for profit!

Well, that’s Bo Gritz for you. This very bad, no good, terrible man is dead and so, in a sense, is an era of American history we have not really dealt with. Once we pull down the pointless POW/MIA flags, we will have moved beyond Gritz’s insanity. Until then? Bo Gritz remains with us in spirit.

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[1] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/bo-gritz

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