This summer, Bobbi Althoff, mommy blogger, TikTok star, and elder Gen Z’er burst onto the hip-hop journalism scene and since then has continuously gone viral for her deadpan style interviews with major celebrities. Her humor is a carry-over from her deadpan TikToks about surviving motherhood.
In April, she decided to pivot her content to interview celebrities and offered $300 to the person who could get her an interview with a celebrity. Her first major interview was with the comedian Richard Glassman. Her next interview was with internet comedian Funny Marco, which got the attention of Drake; an interview with him soon followed, which essentially put her on the map and catapulted her into the hip-hop journalism zeitgeist with a speed never seen before.
At first, her humor was cute. At the very least, worth a prolonged smirk as she and Marco exchanged retorts with their similar deadpan responses. Funny Marco carried the majority of the interview with his usual sardonic style of questioning and seemed to fill the gaps that her novice interview skills left wide open. Her interview with Drake cemented her brand of awkward white girl, especially in Black spaces. During the interview, Bobbi and Drake lie in bed together, slightly reclining and slightly upright, with two microphones placed up under their faces. The duo are far enough from each other in the bed to keep an already awkward moment from being even more awkward. Drake, known for not taking himself too seriously throughout the majority of his career, smiles widely as Bobbi’s humor attempts to chip away at his ego; Drake seems to play along.
As expected, the interview went extremely viral.
Shortly after the interview drops, footage hits the internet of Bobbi standing like an awkward stone while two Black girls dance along to the rapper performing “Sicko Mode,” at his concert, with the caption, “really in my element here @ this guys concert.” Shortly thereafter, the two unfollowed each other on Instagram, and the entire interview was scrubbed from all platforms. While there was an allegation of a fling between the two of them, could it just be that Drake was not a fan of Bobbi staying in character a little too well? Calling Drake “@ this guy” might not have sat too well for the Canadian megastar.
Somewhere in between the opening and closing of her quickie friendship with Drake, Bobbi interviewed Lil Yachty, Drake’s bestie. After the interview, Bobbi commented that not only was she uncomfortable when she arrived at his home but that he and the interview were both awkward, alluding to him ignoring her for quite some time when she arrived, an allegation that he denied. She didn’t really give any specific examples of this awkwardness other than him making her wait, but she would know what is awkward better than most.
While Bobbi’s “The Really Good Podcast,” podcast features a wide range of interviewees, such as Mark Cuban, Charlie Puth and J. Balvin, and of course, the first interviewee Richard Glassman, the other six interviewees in the 10-episode podcast are all Black(ish), and a part of hip-hop culture. A clip of the latest episode featuring Offset went viral on Twitter. It showcases Offset hilariously choosing violence in response to every one of her attempts at making him appear less important to the culture than he is.
What once was a joke featuring humor that required the most serious brand of unseriousness has now gone stale, and the audience has turned on Bobbi, and honestly, can one blame them?
Over the weekend, Sukihana the Goat posted a video of Bobbi standing inside an Atlanta strip club looking extremely uncomfortable and awkward standing in long jeans and a white print t-shirt, in front of a pole, while Sukihana and another dancer danced mostly unclothed.
Neither Bobbi nor Suki provided any context of the interaction but Bobbi did post a picture on her Instagram stories of her actually smiling while at the same strip club with Sukihana, giving a completely different mood from her appearance in the video. However, just two pictures later (in between the flyer for her comedy tour dates with Funny Marco), she glares at Sukihana with an expression that can easily be interpreted as thinking someone is full of sh-t but not having the heart to tell them.
Maybe Bobbi did have a great time at the strip club and simply stayed in character for the sake of the Instagram posts, but at what point does ‘awkward white girl who acts too good to be in Black spaces,’ get old? While again, Bobbi has interviewed non-Black guests, the demographic overly represented in her podcast are men who are (at least half) Black. Even though there were no specifics given for her meeting with Sukihana, one can assume she might be up next.
Listen, I am a fan of deadpan humor. The Office deserved all the awards it garnered, and The Royal Tenenbaums is a genius film, but these are also professional comedians who didn’t just get their start by paying someone $300 to give them a career and access. Bobbi has no formal training and in fact, according to her interview with Cosmopolitan, she was quoted as saying:
“There’s no prep, and that’s the fun of it. I think that’s why celebrities are down to do it…we just wing it. It’s not a real interview. I’m not trying to get hard-hitting information about you—I’m not trying to uncover anything. It’s just a conversation. It’s really a parody of a good interview…I’m the worst journalist, and I don’t claim to be one. The podcast is supposed to be entertaining. It’s fun for fans to see my guests in a way that they don’t normally see them.”
Bobbi’s brand of humor may work great for 47-second TikTok videos, but the leap to an entire podcast interviewer, who does not know how to do an interview, does not seem to be translating as well.
Maintaining the “I’m too good to be here” schtick works only as well as the optics will allow.
Operating in spaces that are dominated by Black people and Black culture, all while even pretending to be too good for them, is much more cringe than any of her awkward interviews could ever be. At the end of the day, there is so much room for The Really Good Podcast to be really better.
