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The longest-running program in the history of the Church of the SubGenius, and one of the longest-running radio shows of any kind: a weekly hour, broadcast without a meaningful break for thirty-nine years. This is everything of it that still exists, gathered into one place and made searchable.
The Hour of Slack went out every week from 1985. It was written, cut and hosted almost entirely by Rev. Ivan Stang out of WCSB in Cleveland, and it was never really one thing — part sermon, part tape collage, part radio drama, part answering-machine messages from strangers. Bands, ranters and mail-art arrived in the post for decades and went straight to air.
The show outlived its own distribution. Episodes went out on tape, then on syndicated reel, then to community stations, then to a podcast feed that only reaches back to 2007, then to a personal MP3 stash on a host that has since gone dark. Each of those was somebody's private copy of a public broadcast, and each was disappearing separately.
This archive is those copies, put back together and checked against each other. Seven independent sources were merged on episode number, so nothing overwrites anything — every claim keeps the archive it came from. Where a show survives in more than one place, you get all of them. Where the audio is lost but the Church's own broadcast log survives, you get the log — and the two sets turn out to barely overlap, which is the single luckiest fact in the whole thing.
Every file here has been checked against the source's own checksum. 1,550 episodes verified byte-for-byte against the Internet Archive's published MD5s, no mismatches, last run 14 August 2026. HOW THIS WAS CHECKED →
A year marked ≈ is approximate. Only about half the run carries a broadcast date of its own; the rest is placed by interpolating between the nearest dated episodes, which lands the typical episode within a few days but cannot be called exact. Where an outside collector's tape labels gave us a real month, we used theirs over our arithmetic.
128 episodes are still missing. Five of them can still be heard, inside later shows we hold that rerun them; three of those five are known only because those reruns refer back to them. The other 123 left no trace at all. They are listed here anyway, loudly, in the years they belong to. READ THE FULL STORY →
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The XXX-rated internet-only shows and one stray antipodean broadcast. These never carried a main-sequence number, so they appear in none of the counts above and in no episode list anywhere — but they are real hours of the show, and copies survive. The first four now have Stang's own logs, off a Church CD-ROM — and XXX-2's names it #845b, the only main-sequence anchor any of them carries.