Welcome to ComedyNerd, Cracked's daily comedy Superstation. For more ComedyNerd content, and ongoing coverage of that 80's Adult Swim show, The Iran/Contra Affair, please sign up for the ComedyNerd newsletter below.
[newsletter]
If you ever find yourself playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and need to link Macho Man Randy Savage and Timothée Chalamet, boy do I have a gift for you. From 2011 to 2015, WWF Superstar Hulk Hogan and sensitive indie film director Greta Gerwig co-starred in China, IL, an animated Adult Swim show about the self-dubbed “worst college in America” (that wasn't Rutgers) and it was bananas.
Based on a series of animated shorts by Brad Neely, China, IL is one of Adult Swim’s most underrated masterpieces, combining the chaos of Superjail, the engaging character comedy of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and the high-concept sci-fi rigmarole of Rick and Morty. Though it ran for just three seasons and thirty episodes, China, IL wove threads of pure gold out of its simplistic animation and its devotion to wild, stupid, unfiltered fun.
Let’s do a deep dive into Brad Neely and the surrealist sitcom that brought together Hulk Hogan, Greta Gerwig, Donald Glover, Hannibal Burress, Chelsea Peretti, Jeffrey Tambor, and more. That list alone feels like the beginning of a joke.
Is this that Hamilton thing people keep talking about?
Brad Neely briefly attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and is not a trained animator. How, then, did he go from humble beginnings growing up in a religious household in Fort Smith, Arkansas, to writing and creating an animated show about the college experience?
Neely started working with roughly drawn humor in 1996 with his comic series “Creased Comics”, a collection of crude, irreverent, single-panel comic strips that slowly disseminated his bizarre comedic sensibilities around Arkansas before developing a cult following online. He described the art style as “self-consciously junky,” but something about his depictions of homoerotic superheros, a petulant Jesus, and plainfaced tableaus of bigfoot with his “superbaby” captivated his growing audience, which later led to him being described by the Arkansas Times as “our generation’s answer to Gary Larson.” (And that's far better that than your generation's Scott Adams.)
A few years later, Neely and his friends found themselves in an Arkansas dive bar watching a lone man wearing headphones and sunglasses play pool with no opponent. That man was not Shia LaBeouf. They postulated possible soundtracks for the man in the headphones who was not Shia LaBeouf, and eventually decided that the funniest option was that he was listening to a Harry Potter book on tape.
Neely began to ad-lib Harry Potter scenes while his friends doubled over in laughter, and an idea sprung forth. He said about the scene, “I had this semi-resolution to take any kind of ‘wouldn’t it be funny…’ that really killed the room, but usually died there, and go ahead and do [it].”