McElroy was born in 1980 to Clint McElroy, former co-host of WTCR-FM's morning radio show in Huntington, West Virginia, and his wife Leslie. McElroy attended Marshall University, and lives in Huntington as of 2011. He has been married to Dr. Sydnee Smirl McElroy since 2006. They have two children: Charlie Gail "Chuck" McElroy and Cooper Renee McElroy.
Career
Journalism
McElroy worked at Joystiq as a journalist from 2007 to 2012. During this time, he was the producer of the Joystiq podcast. In 2012, McElroy co-founded Polygon, a video game website, along with his brother Griffin and Christopher Grant, and was formerly an editor-at-large at said website. In 2018, Justin and Griffin both announced their departure from Polygon, in order to focus on their podcasting careers and families.
Podcasting
Since 2010, Justin McElroy has co-hosted the comedy podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me along with his brothers Griffin and Travis. The podcast began in 2010 as a form of "self-entertainment" before it was added to the Maximum Fun network. The podcast takes the form of a humorous "advice show", in which the brothers answer questions that have been directly submitted by listeners, as well as questions that listeners have found on Yahoo! Answers. In 2010, the show was consistently listed among the top 10 comedy podcasts on iTunes, and it has received positive critical reception. The podcast was later turned into a 2017 television show, which originally aired on Seeso and now streams on VRV. Since June 21, 2013, Justin and his wife Sydnee have co-hosted the podcast Sawbones, a "marital tour of misguided medicine" and a humorous exploration of medical history, focusing on the many ways the medical community has been wrong in the past. A book based on this podcast, The Sawbones Book: The Horrifying, Hilarious Road To Modern Medicine, was published by Weldon Owen on October 9, 2018. In 2014, the McElroy brothers launched a tabletop role-playing game podcast entitled The Adventure Zone. Initially focusing on Dungeons & Dragons, the show began to explore other game systems in later seasons. The first sub-arc of The Adventure Zone: Balance, named Here There Be Gerblins, was later adapted into a graphic novel in cooperation with artist Carey Pietsch, published by First Second Books in 2018. The book topped the New York Times' best-selling trade fiction list, becoming the first graphic novel to do so. The sequel was quickly confirmed and adapts the second story arc, The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited. It was released in July 2019 with the same creative team. Justin and his brothers also co-host a yearly podcast with Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery, released every American Thanksgiving since 2015, called Til Death Do Us Blart where they review the film . The brothers also host the documentary podcast The McElroy Brothers Will Be in Trolls World Tour, which ultimately resulted in the announcement that all three were set to make cameo appearances in the film. In 2018, Justin McElroy launched The Empty Bowl, a "meditative podcast about cereal".
Other programs
Beginning in 2015, Justin and his brother Griffin began hosting a gaming comedy show for Polygon called Monster Factory. The series—in which the two use powerful character creation tools from popular video and computer games to create hideous characters—was praised by The Mary Sue as one of the "funniest series on YouTube". The series briefly went on hiatus after the pair left Polygon, but resumed output in December 2018. Justin appeared with his brothers on the July 24, 2017 episode of @midnight, during which host Chris Hardwick publicly acknowledged that @midnight was ending.
Voice acting
McElroy has appeared as a voice actor in several animated TV shows. In 2017, he appeared as Billiam Milliam in the animated comedy series OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes. In 2018, he appeared in the Cartoon Hangover-produced animated mini-series Slug Riot. He also provided voice commentary for the 2017 video game100ft Robot Golf, along with Griffin and Travis. In September 2018, following a successful podcasting campaign, Justin and his brothers confirmed that they would be voicing the character Skyscraper in the film Trolls World Tour, with Justin also voicing Techno Drop Button and Tumbleweed.
