Matt Kessen Wants to Make You Laugh about Monsters

Full disclosure: I’ve been fortunate enough to be friends with Matt Kessen, known to most as the brainiac behind Reverend Matt’s Monster Science, for seven years. As a legitimately credentialed reverend—whatever that process entails—he’s able to perform weddings (including my own) and funerals (including my father’s). Years ago, I summed him up as follows: the Matt you see on stage with his tweed jacket and intricately carved pipe, gesticulating authoritatively at his cleverly timed PowerPoint slides, is the real Matt. The Matt who shows up in jeans and a T-shirt to help you move is the Matt that exists in the liminal space between the provisions of monster science.

With awards season winding down, I capitalized on an excuse to have a conversation with the good reverend himself. I got the scoop on his semiparody gala meets ensemble show, the Monster Science Awards, which were held at the Bryant-Lake Bowl last month—plus other performances and appearances that he has in the pipeline, where he gets his ideas and inspiration, and some resources for other aspiring monster scientists.

Courtesy of Matthew Kessen

TCG: How did you decide the categories for the Monster Science Awards, and how are the winners determined? What’s the category you’re most excited about?

Matt Kessen: I try to cover as many monster topics as possible—fiction, cinema, cryptozoology, paleontology, etc. Beyond that, it’s pretty much just monster stuff that happened in the last year that I want to bring people’s attention to and the stuff I thought was funniest. Some of the categories are fairly straightforward: Best Print Nonfiction, Best Picture, etc. Some are monster specific: Best New Dinosaur Discovery, Best Cryptozoology News. And some are just weirdness: Best Streaming Series with Gwendoline Christie in It, Best Dinosaucers-Adjacent Content. I pick the winners based on … what is the coolest? I make no pretenses of any sort of fairness or citable standards. For the unique awards, I’ll think of something I want to give an award to—say, Gwendoline Christie in Sandman—and come up with two other contenders after that. And I am always most excited about Best New Dinosaur Discovery.

TCG: How do you balance factual accuracy and entertainment value in your presentations?

Matt: Oh, they both insist on their own presences. I love these monsters so much, and I want to tell people facts about them—this is really the heart of Monster Science. But also, making a room full of people laugh is intensely, profoundly satisfying to me, and I will always do what it takes to bring this about as much as possible.

TCG: What are some of the challenges and rewards of performing live shows versus streaming, podcasting, or print publications?

Matt: The Bryant-Lake Bowl is taking very good care of me, as do most of the other places I work, and so honestly there aren’t too many challenges. Just the desire to get people to attend in order to make it worth my host’s while is all. Plus I have to, you know, drive to where it is. There’s one big benefit: I get to hear people laughing. I enjoy livestreaming, and people say extremely lovely things, but there is just no substitute for hearing the laughter right there on the spot. Both for visceral gratification and just so I know which jokes worked best.

Performers at the Bryant-Lake Bowl for the Monster Science Awards in March 2023. Hedy Rand-McKay

TCG: What are some of the most surprising or fascinating things you have learned about monsters in your studies?

Matt: I could go on and on about this, and, in fact, I do. I was surprised to learn recently that the earliest depictions of Medusa don’t have snakes for hair. The unicorn used to be considered just a more or less normal animal but came to be thought of as pure magicalness because its reality became the subject of debate, and, hence, there were a lot of people loudly proclaiming that unicorns weren’t real. This debate didn’t really happen for dragons or leprechauns; they just faded away. But the unicorns were a subject because apothecaries were making a lot of money off of selling their horns and, hence, defended their reality. And so: unicorns are magical because of 16th-century apothecary cash grabs. And, of course, new paleontological discoveries are always happening. In 2021, they discovered a pterosaur with opposable thumbs, which is the oldest known animal to have these. It was actually a large part of the reason I started the Monster Science Awards—I wanted to give it an award.

TCG: Can you recommend any resources for local monster enthusiasts to stay up to date on actual news that’s relevant to your shared area of interest? I know at this point, people mostly send lots of content directly to you.

Matt: People are often surprised to learn that I do almost all of my research using books. I love the internet, I love Wikipedia, but these things just don’t have the depth and breadth of knowledge about my obscure subjects that I am looking for. That said, A Book of Creatures is so perfect and beautiful that I more or less hate its creator for it. By way of authors, Darren Naish and Mark Witton are my favorite paleontological writers working today; cryptozoologically, I like Jonathan Downes, Karl Shuker, and Loren Coleman, though I rarely agree with them; and everyone needs to go read The Lady From the Black Lagoon by Mallory O’Meara immediately. Now.

TCG: Not gassing you up, but you are a bit of a recognizable guy these days. Have you had any fun or weird interactions with fans of your work in a surprising context?

Matt: I was going home from a wedding, and I was getting gas, and somebody asked if I was just coming from a show. I told him I’d been at a wedding; I in fact thought that he thought I was coming from the opera or something, and he was being a weirdo. It did not even occur to me that he was talking about my show, and this did not occur to me because I was wearing the wrong suit: it was my black formal-occasions suit, not my Monster Science suit! Completely different! … Subsequent chatting caused me to understand his meaning, and then, well now, who was the weirdo?

TCG: What do you have in the pipeline for this year? Can we expect to see you performing in a show or two this summer at Minnesota Fringe? Any non–Monster Science projects that you’re excited about?

Matt: I’m sufficiently low on the Fringe wait list that, if the Twin Cities metro area were entirely annihilated in a sustained nuclear exchange, I still wouldn’t get into Fringe. [Editor’s note: Since this interview, Reverend Matt has, in fact, secured a place in the festival. His show is being coproduced by Mermaid Productions.] I’ve put in for the Twin Cities Horror Festival, of course, and am hoping to get in to that. And I’m pouring a lot of work into the monthly BLB shows and the Patreon livestream. The former, in particular, will be featuring a lot of guests and collaborations this year, which always makes for especially fun shows. April’s show will be about city-threatening monsters, with covers of music related to the same by the amazing band 10 Items or Fewer! And I’ve got some stuff besides the stage show coming up as well, Monster Science in other media, but I don’t want to talk about them just yet—they’re all in the early, fragile stages. But once they’re more solidified I will not ever shut up about them, of course. So, you know, subscribe and follow and all that sort of thing.

Courtesy of Matthew Kessen

Kaiju Electric Battle Masterpiece: Reverend Matt vs. 10 Items or Fewer is happening April 6, 2023, at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. Tickets are $10 in advance or $12 at the door. The 30th annual Minnesota Fringe festival is happening August 3–13, 2023, with the full schedule yet to be announced.

You can learn more about Reverend Matt and his shows at ReverendMattsMonsterScience.com and follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, and Instagram.