“It’s All Bread, All the Way Down”: The Baby-Sitters Club Club as Hyperfanfiction

Abstract

In February 2016, co-hosts Jack Shepherd and Tanner Greenring launched their comedy podcast The Baby-Sitters Club Club. The “joke” at the center of the podcast was, of course, that two adult, cishet, white men were exhaustively recapping and dissecting a book series from the 1980s and 1990s that was predominantly popular with adolescent girls. What began as a podcast designed to poke fun at the co-hosts’ serious “fannish” analysis of a nostalgic series of novels for girls, evolved into an elaborate string of “fan” theories, literary close readings, and (inter)textual expansion. Building on Paul Booth’s discussion of hyperfans, this article theorizes the absurdist worldbuilding, mythology and character development, and intertextual play performed by the hosts of TBSCC as a form of hyperfanfiction.