My experience with steampunk obviously has been very different from you guys. The stuff I've encountered has been cool stuff like Wild Wild West (the TV series, which was basically a western, but with technology that was very steampunk-ish) and the group Steam Powered Giraffe, who costume themselves as robots that were built just before and during the Civil War (each of the three leads have fully fleshed out backstories for their characters), so they make jokes that are 19th-century related and are very family-friendly; their humor reminds me a lot of shows at SDC like the Saloon Show.