Gonzo versus Kitchen Sink

In which I pretend I can define terms that are older than I am, in a niche I haven't been part of for that long.

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The terms "gonzo" and "kitchen sink" are both used to describe fantasy settings with a mishmash of incongruous elements, but the two terms feel very different. DCC is often referred to as gonzo. It's not often referred to as kitchen sink. I feel like there's a reason for that, but it's hard to find much discussion about the distinction between the two. Sometimes, the words even appear to be used interchangeably.

A kitchen sink setting is, fairly obviously, one that includes everything (and the kitchen sink). There's cowboys and there's also aliens.

A gonzo setting is one that includes mismatched genres. There's cowboys and there's also aliens... wait a minute, how is that different?

Some games provide a setting with dozens of races to choose from and large distant regions with different themes and levels of technology. People argue about whether guns belong in D&D all the time but you can totally do it in a way that doesn't even feel slightly out of place. Easily, even. You can have a full tavern of adventurers where every character is a different species. How is that sustainable, anyway? There's not enough people of any one species to even reproduce reliably, let alone maintain a diverse genepool! My point is that the half-fish-half-goat-half-man tap-dancing in the middle of the room might as well just be a regular dude. The kitchen sink allows you to justify almost anything. That's the point.

Contrast this with a setting where 90% of the population is human. Just regular medieval peasants. One day they're all sitting in the tavern with like one dwarf, and this fishmangoat cartwheels through the doorway and starts tapdancing in the middle of the room. That's pretty weird, so the townspeople all pull out their shotguns and start asking who he works for.

That one is getting a little closer to gonzo. In this case, the incongruity is the whole point. It's bizarre but nobody seems to care. It's not a given that the fishmangoat or shotguns exist, but you can't definitively say they don't, so when one rocks up it might as well just be Tuesday.

The kitchen sink appears to be created with the goal of allowing anyone to do anything, to be anyone, to have full customizability. Some games try to give you everything to prove that you can do anything.

Gonzo is a bit harder to pin down, but to me it appears to be about subverting expectations, surprising the players (or audience, depending on medium). The contrast between cowboys and aliens is what makes it interesting when aliens show up in your wild west campaign. This isn't achievable in a kitchen sink, where everyone knows aliens are part of the setting because you can choose to be one during character creation.