Michael Swaim

Michael Swaim is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, and comedian.

Michael Swaim grew up in San Diego County, California. His parents divorced when he was seven. Swaim's uncle is folk singer and Waterbug Records founder Andrew Calhoun.

At age nine, Swaim and his younger brother, David, survived a car accident that occurred on Thanksgiving Day. Swaim sustained a brain injury from the crash and subsequently suffered from panic attacks as a child. Soon after the crash, he developed depression, which has reoccurred throughout his life.

Swaim attended a Montessori school for sixth grade and Standley Middle School for seventh grade. Due to harassment that he received in seventh grade, his family moved to Ramona, California, where he finished his schooling.

Those Aren't Muskets and early writings

Swaim attended the University of California, San Diego, where he majored in theatre with a minor in creative writing. Before embarking on his comedy career, he contributed short stories to science fiction magazines. He also aspired to become a playwright. While attending UCSD, he served as an editor of the university's satirical publication, the Muir Quarterly, commonly known as "the MQ". In 2006, he began writing comedy articles on a freelance basis for Cracked.com. The website gave him a blog, called "The Specious", and during Swaim's senior year of college, he became a columnist for Cracked.

Fellow MQ editor Abe Epperson befriended Swaim when they were both UCSD sophomores, and the two have remained frequent collaborators throughout their careers. Together, shortly after graduating in 2007, they founded the internet sketch comedy troupe Those Aren't Muskets. Swaim continued during this time to be involved with UCSD's theatre program, producing his own original comedy play, Olympus Inc, from which cast members occasionally crossed over into Those Aren't Muskets videos. Within months, the troupe's content had attained over 100,000 views. Videos produced by the troupe were posted to thosearentmuskets.com (which is now defunct), in addition to websites like YouTube, Revver, Cracked, CollegeHumor, and Funny or Die.

Towards the end of 2007, Those Aren't Muskets began a partnership with Cracked. The first video produced through this collaboration, "Internet Party", found success on Digg and was featured on YouTube's homepage. The video quickly surpassed two million views. Gaining media attention, it was identified by The San Diego Union-Tribune as Swaim and Epperson's "first bona fide hit". Years later, Cracked video producer Breandan Carter identified "Internet Party" as the "breakthrough video" that "put [Cracked.com] on the map as observational humorists."

According to Swaim, a "symbiosis" quickly developed between Those Aren't Muskets and Cracked, and from this came the web series Cracked TV -initially announced under the title S.W.A.I.M. and later rebranded as Does Not Compute. By 2008, Those Aren't Muskets had grown to an official membership of six. Non-members were often cast in the troupe's videos as well. Notable guest actors included Katie Willert, a then-UCSD student, who, later in her career, would co-star alongside Swaim in numerous Cracked video productions. In 2008, Swaim's brother, David, guest-starred in "Chops", a Those Aren't Muskets video which placed fourth - over hundreds of submissions - in YouTube's Sketchies II competition. That same year, Those Aren't Muskets was featured during the "Kings of Dot Comedy" segment on G4's series Attack of the Show. Over the summer of 2008, Swaim and Epperson moved to Los Angeles together.

Cracked tenure and Kill Me Now

When Cracked decided to start producing its own video content, Swaim was enlisted to lead the effort. He and Epperson teamed up with Daniel O'Brien to create the first official Cracked web series, Agents of Cracked. The series began airing in November 2009 and ran for three seasons. Its first season won the "Audience choice award for best web series" at the Second Annual Streamy Awards. By 2011, the series had been viewed over seven million times online.

Those Aren't Muskets remained active for a few more years, producing the web series 8-Bits for Cracked, and in 2009, joining with several other internet sketch troupes for a two-week collaboration known as Genius Camp. One of the sketches resulting from this collaboration was featured on Comedy Central's series Tosh.0. Swaim also had a cameo role in a BriTANicK video that year.

By 2010, Swaim had become Head of Video at Cracked. He also starred in several original video series produced by the website, among them After Hours. According to The Huffington Post, Swaim and his frequent co-star, Daniel O'Brien, came to be known as the "face[s] of Cracked".

As Swaim became more involved with video production for Cracked, he wrote fewer columns for the website but took on supplementary work as a blogger for guyspeak.com. Swaim's work for GuySpeak was occasionally featured in Glamour. Offering humor-based relationship advice, Swaim contributed to GuySpeak for about a year, starting in late 2009.

In 2010, Swaim told The Huffington Post that he hoped his tenure at Cracked would be a step towards eventually making feature films. Later that year, Swaim and Epperson were contacted by filmmaker Travis Long, who expressed interest in working with the duo on a feature. Swaim and Epperson developed a story idea together, which became the horror-comedy film, Kill Me Now. Swaim, who starred in the film, wrote the screenplay and received a producer credit, while Long directed, and Epperson performed the cinematography. Kill Me Now was produced through Ketchup Media. It was shot in Effingham, Illinois. Filming occurred in October 2010 and lasted for twenty-one days.

Although Swaim did not initially intend to star in Kill Me Now, he took the lead role due to the film's short production schedule. The film's cast and crew included several internet sketch comedians, among them, Beck Bennett and Kyle Mooney, who would both go on to join Saturday Night Live shortly after appearing in the film. Kill Me Now premiered in Los Angeles on December 5, 2012. It then had a limited theatrical release through Tugg, a service that allows people to bring screenings of films to their local city when enough tickets are pre-ordered.

Swaim contributed to Cracked's 2010 New York Times Best Seller, You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News, and served as a Senior Editor on Cracked's 2013 release, The De-text Book. Throughout his tenure at Cracked, he often appeared on - and occasionally co-hosted - the Cracked podcast. He also co-hosted the Cracked-produced podcast Kurt Vonneguys with Alex Schmidt.

After the release of Kill Me Now, Swaim hoped to quickly continue his feature film career and grew dissatisfied with his position at Cracked, once it became apparent to him that the company's corporate owners were unwilling to fund any large-scale projects. A lack of creative fulfillment eventually prompted Swaim to relinquish his role as the head of Cracked's video department. Swaim later recounted that his depression, which he had suffered from since childhood, worsened during this stage of his life, and over time, he continued to reduce his role at Cracked. He resigned from the company in October 2017. A few weeks later, Cracked laid off much of its remaining staff. Speaking to the company's struggles, Swaim expressed his view that Cracked had squandered its "potential to become an SNL or a National Lampoon-type brand with feature films and so forth." Nonetheless, Swaim has spoken highly of the work that has been continued on by Cracked's current employees.

Small Beans

After Swaim's departure from Cracked, he and Epperson founded a new venture together, called Small Beans. Funded through Patreon, Small Beans is a podcasting network that also produces occasional sketch comedy videos. Swaim and Epperson were joined in the founding of Small Beans by Adam Ganser, who like Epperson, was a prolific director of videos at Cracked. Several other former members of Cracked have since come to join Small Beans or have contributed to Small Beans content.

Small Beans was first announced by Swaim on December 4, 2017. The following day, Swaim posted a video online, explaining his decision to resign from Cracked and offering further details about Small Beans. The formal launch date for Small Beans was on December 11, although the first Small Beans content debuted a week in advance.

Small Beans launched with four podcasts: Frame Rate, a movie review podcast hosted by Swaim and Epperson; 1Upsmanship, a video game review podcast hosted by Swaim and Ganser;Extree! Extree!, in which Swaim both reads comedic news headlines in character as a turn of the century newsboy named Jonny Papes and provides Small Beans-related updates; and Tales from the Pit, in which Swaim is joined by a guest each episode to discuss experiences with depression and similar issues.

As Small Beans has grown, more podcasts have been added. These are: Pop Culture Petri Dish, in which Epperson and Cristian Ramirez discuss the real ideas behind popular works of science fiction; Rough Stuff, in which Bridgett Greenberg, Sarah Griffith, and usually a guest regale each other with awkward stories about growing up; The Coen Brothers Brothers, in which Swaim and Epperson discuss the entire filmography of the Coen brothers; My Top 8, a podcast about friendship hosted by Maggie Mae Fish; What Dinosaur Real Good?, in which Swaim, Epperson, and Greenberg share their enthusiasm for the prehistoric era by conducting amateur research on dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals; Waveformed, in which Ramirez interviews a guest each episode about music; and Directorpiece Theatre, in which Epperson and Ganser analyze directorial decisions in films that they consider to be popular but artistically overlooked.

Small Beans also collaborates with Showing Up for Racial Justice on the podcast Bold (sometimes referred to as Bold: Conversations About Race), which focuses on racial justice issues and is produced by White People 4 Black Lives. The first season of Bold was hosted by Swaim and Dahlia Ferlito; the second season is hosted by Ferlito and Ivette Alé. Additional content released through Small Beans includes Q&A podcast episodes, original rap songs written and performed by Swaim, and access to screenplays for cancelled projects written by Swaim.

In a 2011 interview, Swaim explained his influences saying, "I'm sure The Simpsons is a big part of it, and I’d like to think there's some Vonnegut and even a little Shakespeare in there. Shakespeare for his appreciation of a good pun and his cavalier abuse of the language he so clearly loved, Vonnegut for his eye for truth and his brevity. I doubt anyone will see any of that in my writing, but I try, dammit."