Biography

Michael Swaim (born June 7, 1985) is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, comedian, and podcaster. While attending the University of California, San Diego, he became a columnist for the humor website Cracked.com, and after graduating from college in 2007, he joined with Abe Epperson to co-found the internet sketch comedy troupe Those Aren't Muskets. Along with Epperson and another frequent collaborator, Daniel O'Brien, he spent the late 2000s establishing a video department for Cracked. His subsequent tenure as Head of Video for the website produced several viral web series that he and O'Brien often starred in; these include the Webby Award-winning After Hours and the Streamy Award-winning Agents of Cracked.

The 2010 independent horror-comedy film Kill Me Now was co-written by Swaim and features him in a starring role. Swaim and Epperson are currently in production on their second feature film, Papa Bear. Two audio collections of short stories and poems by Swaim have been released, and in 2023, Swaim self-published a novel, The Climb.

Through his affiliation with Cracked, Swaim contributed to the 2010 New York Times Best Seller You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News. He then served as a Senior Editor on a 2013 followup, The De-textbook. Until his departure from Cracked in October 2017, Swaim was a regular feature on podcasts produced by the website. At that time, he co-hosted the series Kurt Vonneguys with Alex Schmidt.

Currently, Swaim runs Small Beans, an online comedy network funded through Patreon. Small Beans was founded by Swaim and Epperson together in December 2017; the two were joined from the outset by a co-worker they had befriended at Cracked, Adam Ganser, and Small Beans has since grown to include more Cracked alumni as both members and collaborators. In October 2019, Swaim began producing video content for IGN while continuing to operate Small Beans. From 2022 through 2023, iHeartMedia distributed Swaim and Ganser's gaming-themed podcast series 1Upsmanship. The A.V. Club, Collider, and Paste have all named Swaim's work as among the best in podcasting.