I think part of what makes the McElroys so lovable for millennials and gen z is that they’re a REAL underdog success story. All the ones about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs starting Apple and Microsoft from sheds and Jeff Bezos starting Amazon from a shed are wrong. They all came from well-off backgrounds with upper-class privilege coming out their goddamn ears, but the brothers didn’t.
They really were just three ordinary boys from West Virginia, and if you listen to Griffin’s Florida State lecture (the whole thing’s on youtube) he talks about how rough things were for them when they started their podcast. He mentions how they were in mourning over their mother, fighting all the time, and ready to separate forever, but held on and decided not to abandon each other in the thick of it. And things were still rough, because their father had to work stupid hours at the radio station to support himself, and the brothers were trying to make it in game journalism.
And then they started MBMBaM, a goofy bad advice podcast full of improvised bits and comedy segments, and it blew up. They started TAZ, a fun D&D podcast where they played with their dad, and were able to bond together and let him retire comfortably on the revenue it generated, and now Clint oversees the TAZ graphic novel series that’s still releasing issues and spends boatloads of quality time with his three sons. Monster Factory is just a funny game stream where Justin and Griffin try to destroy character creators as much as possible, but it’s one of their biggest IPs. Their TV show was short-lived but explosively popular among their fanbase.
They sell out entire stadiums and Lin-Manuel Miranda plays them We Didn’t Start the Fire parodies as they walk on and people lose their collective minds. Tom Holland fanboys over them at SDCC. People come from all over the place to hear them perform, and that performance never got less authentic. It’s just three brothers and their dad being goofy together and trying to make each other laugh. And the laughter and love they carried for each other was so contagious that it made an entire world of people love them, too.
Maybe they’re a bit weird, and their jokes don’t always land, but they’re not always supposed to, because it really is just a tight-knit family living in the moment. And in this world where our two generations may be close to each other but horribly disadvantaged socio-economically, the idea that these three boys carved out a way for themselves through the sheer force of their own happiness out of such a dark place is more hopeful than any “millennials are killing the mayo industry” article ever written.
