Upsetting Day: Boobs🌭

Two weeks ago, I showed you something called The Fart Video. It was an unrelatable series of observations about farts that have never existed; a unique artifact written by a man with no butthole or sense of humor. It would have taken more effort and been funnier if it came with a blank tape and a note saying, “Sorry I didn’t finish the fart video. Cancer.” So now I have a question. What would you say if I told you its creator, Herbert I. Kavet, was one of the most prolific “comedy” “authors” of all time?

A. God damn it.

B. I don’t like where this is going.

C. Please, I’m not ready for another of whatever The Fart Video was.

D. Fuck you, sir.

You’re right! Here is a tiny, tiny sample of Herbert’s body of work:

For decades, Herbert I. Kavet has been guessing wrong about how jokes work for books about farts, sex, or farting. And while all of those titles are fascinating in their own way, one of them caught my eye. Computer: isolate and enhance quadrant sector Boobs.

It’s only the word “boobs.” It’s not “the udder-ly ridiculous book of” them or anything. Just Boobs. And the cover is a child lost in an ocean of them. Why? What part of a man’s brain says, “Forty titties isn’t quite a joke. There needs to be some kind of contex– wait, I’ve got it. An abandoned child leering at two of them. You know, like a real horny toddler. And don’t expect some breast-shaped sand castle gag. I’m saying I will not draw anything more than a tiny boy staring at tits. How long are you going to let me talk? What the fuck does an illustrator need to do to get arrested in 1989?”

If the front wasn’t unappealing enough, this is what the back cover looks like. It’s barely the start of a titty idea. It looks like a shameful Hanna Barbera pitch for something called Lady Harlem Globetrotters. Any attempt to understand it is frustrating. You can tell Boobs is probably a list of different kinds of boobs, but not in a way your planet’s people would know as silly. And it does not bode well that of the four boob examples they give, one of them is already a repeat.

The book opens with, “What’s the deal with the attractive force between objects? When ladies lay down, WHERE do their boobs GO!?” It’s a textbook example of desperate Seinfelding, a technique used by inexperienced comedians where the setup requires both you and your listener to be stupid beyond reason. Herbert tries something unique by not adding a punchline at all and simply soaking in that faulty premise for two more sentences. He could have said, “I tell ya, gravity changes a woman. My wife lays down and suddenly she’s a ten-year-old boy choking out two water balloons, oh!” You add an exploding watermelon or a “cowa-bunga” to that, and you’re an ’80s sensation. But this? This is an incurious virgin asking questions with obvious answers. I promise this whole article won’t be me giving comedy writing notes to a man confused about boobs 40 years ago. Maybe it will help if we calibrate the rules of Herbert’s universe. Let’s check out page 2:

So Herbert’s idea of a standard boob is a swooping tube with a nipple at the end. Like a big toe you can milk. So far, I’d say this man has only seen boobs in two places– Penthouse magazine comics and dead bodies. This is a comedy book about boobs and the author is doing everything he can to communicate two things: I don’t write jokes, and what exactly are boobs.

So now we get where he’s coming from. It won’t help! Up next: Hard Boobs!

“What’s the deal with boobs getting harder these days, fellas? Must be the present fitness craze, right? What? I’m probably thinking of breast implants or push-up bras? No, stop interrupting! You’re ruining my joke about how nursing a baby after aerobics makes them s-strong? Never mind, that’s dumb. You know, you’re right, I might be thinking of breast implants. Sorry, I’m new to boobs and this is only my 78th humor book!”

– Herbert I. Kavet, probably

“I’m just going to say a bunch of random shit for this one, so draw whatever. Sure, inside out nipples on a very sad woman could work! Maybe add a teenager trapped in her cleavage? Yeah, nice. In fact, unless I say otherwise, let’s add a guy getting smothered, just surrendering to the oblivion of titty, in all of these.”

– Herbert I. Kavet, definitely

I’m starting to get this book. Pillow Boobs are the kind of boobs where a pervert author wants to return to the safety of mother’s bosom, to be absorbed by her milky flesh, to crawl into a world where only yummy mommy is. But at the risk of changing tones, va va voom, the busty owner of these fun bags doesn’t need to worry about a date on Saturday nights, zowee, when she swallows all of you in her womb, her loving cervix closing around you, the last of your suffering a shrinking point of light.

Sometimes you can’t tell what boobs look like because of sweaters or jackets, and it sucks. The author of this book must know: can a man sleep forever between your heaving breasts or are you just warm!? You can’t ignore your destiny forever, Enigma Boob!!!

You’re right to not know what’s going on. This went from a list of cartoon boob archetypes to trivia about a specific pair of real-life boobs Herbert is making up. And it wouldn’t be a good story if it was true. It is a haunting rant about mad doctors building a nest inside a woman’s torso. It’s a monologue you’d give to a hitchhiker as you inflated their chest with a bike pump for your murderous tableau. This is not how fucking books work, Herbert.

Oh no.

Herbert is already out of boobs.

Anyone with any foresight should have seen this coming. The second you realized what he was doing you should have thought, “Okay, types of boobs: big, small, hard, soft… pointy… let’s see… the biggest pair formed by the hubris of science, of course. Then… oh no, this is not a concept capable of filling a book.” You can feel the struggle here, the frustration of Herbert’s dull mind as it refuses to cough up boob jokes. Look at this subhuman shit. “Technically, Hidden Boob is different than Disappearing Boob!!!” is a thought a cow might have long after it’s been torn apart for food and industry.

As someone who has submitted many pitches across all types of media, I can tell you one of the worst things a writer can hear is, “Sounds good. Write it up!” It’s what someone says after they’ve heard your ideas and selected the emptiest one, the one you never thought they’d pick. But like most wisdom, it can’t be taught. It can only be earned. Before he pitched Boobs, Herbert never considered a titty joke book would be this hard. If you told him coming up with forty-six kinds of funny boobs and a little cute paragraph for each of them was fucking impossible, he wouldn’t have believed you. This book is a task a madman gave himself, and we are watching him fail catastrophically. If this was a magic trick, it would be like David Blaine never making it to the block of ice because he died a week ago between two tits and his final words were “This is the 9th time I’ve had diarrhea this week, oh look! Tits!”

His brain has run out of tit shapes, so in a panic, Herbert invents an entirely new kind of boobs. Then he gets to work describing them, badly and matter-of-factly. If any part of him notices he’s writing humorless observations from a universe that does not exist, he doesn’t care. Saucers: they’re like plates, but boobs, I guess. “Let the readers try to find meaning or joy in this bullshit,” Herbert thinks, for each paragraph puts him one step closer to freedom, to being able to get started on his next book. Which is, oh God no, 2002 Farts For Over 40 Cat Lovers.

Guys, you ever go out with a lady whose boobs are made out of unspeakable lumps? You know the type. The kind who puts on a thick sweater like we won’t notice. Girl, we know you’re hiding swarms and swarms of furious rats in those titties. Psh. We know your chest is is going to chew our face off while we lay down to rest forever in the serenity of your pillowy motherhood.

This won’t help make it any funnier, but Herbert was over fifty when he wrote about this “lovely young thing” and got super frustrated when her high school boobs never popped out of her dress. In a way, I appreciate how he’s keeping his terrible urges in check, but I’m so distracted by the wrongness of the line “In the history of the world… no boob has ever popped out of a prom dress.” It’s exactly the opposite of the logic of a prom dress joke. If someone said, “We need to get out of here like titties in a prom dress,” you’d know you were both sex criminals in a ’90s Jerry Bruckheimer movie, but you’d also know they meant “go fast.” I know I said I would stop giving comedy writing notes, but come on, you can’t fuck up a prom joke this hard unless you were breast fed through high school.

This nightmare might be as close to a joke as Herbert manages in this book, but I’m going to try to find one that isn’t about child boobs.

Okay, here we go:

Herbert can barely bring himself to write about saggy boobs, which is a problem because they are now the only thing he can think about.

“You are in a flopping titty prison of your own design,” hisses a voice behind Herbert I. Kavet’s eyes. He tries to think of something else, anything else. “Flopping titties, flopping titties,” laughs the voice.

Herbert concentrates. Curse these flopping boobs. With everything he has left, he forces his mind to imagine round boobs again. “Sure,” says his mind. “Two round boobs coming up! Flopping on the end of two long ones!” Herbert shrugs and gets to work describing them. He wonders if hanging upside down could fix them, then accidentally types that where he intended to write a joke. It seems so long ago those days when he thought a boob joke book could be fun. Herbert sits there for hours, trying to imagine something other than these insane ball-on-a-string boobs…

… and Herbert fails.

A sudden inspiration hits Herbert. What if they went the other direction, these boobs!? It still wouldn’t be funny, but he had long since given up on that. So he creates a fake girlfriend named Ellen who had high boobs. She got married and never left Hempstead, end of fun story. I’ve also met an Ellen, end of punchline.

These are the kind of boobs Ellen would have had if she was real. Oh, perfect Ellen. Eat that ice cream all day, my pimpleless, high-boobed queen. By this point, it had to have occurred to Herbert that he had used up the last of his meager creativity. He was changing the names on weird tits and writing self-insert fiction about the women attached to them. So he did what everyone incapable of creating does– he destroyed.

He came up with “Nubbies,” which are “small boobs of no particular shape.” Mathematically, it’s as close as a boob idea can get to the absence of a boob idea. “These boobs are probably on children,” Herbert says. “Damn it, you outsmarted us with that probably,” replies his local district attorney.

Herbert I. Kavet knows he’s (probably) on to something with Nubbies, the non-boobs of young girls, so he is now adding to the lore. He suggests “Ninnies” as the name for not having boobs should you continue not having them. This is no thought of a human mind. This is a scent an insect would secrete to convince predators it was dead. “Without boobs, you could go topless at gay beaches!” Herbert’s brain suddenly vomits in a fascinating misjudgment of all things. After many hours of staring at Herbert’s work, I thought of a cute way to put this: if you’re worse at anything than Herbert I. Kavet is at writing joke books, you deserve to rot in Hell.

Herbert has spent so much time building the featureless worlds of Nubbies and Ninnies that he’s having trouble picturing boobs again. “Hrrk!” his imagination grunts as it squeezes tiny tits onto several kinds of racism. “There, there,” Herbert says to comfort the woman he’s picturing with the tiny breasts. A lot of comedy writers wouldn’t think to do that. And in that spirit, nice try, flat-chested ladies. You did your best.

Sure. Muffins are community-minded, soft-nippled boobs for green shirts. I won’t entertain the idea of trying to engage with this like it means anything. Why bother? In a million years Herbert couldn’t explain why he said any of these words. He is writing jokes like a trapped coyote chewing its own leg off. My dentist is funnier than this on the security footage of him groping me.

A burst of inspiration! What if boobs were far apart! Herbert couldn’t come up with a funny angle on the idea, but he bought himself some time to think. All he has to do now is come up with something other than “far apart” that boobs can be. Come on, think, Herbert. You can do it.

God damn it, Herbert.

T-these are the same boobs only bigger. You goddamn son of a bitch, Herbert. We all see what you’re doing!

You stupid piece of shit, Herbert I. Kavet. I’m going to end this article before you inflate these tits out of control and crash an elevator.

No! Herbert! You won’t get away with this, Herbeeeeerrrrrrrrrt!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Supernaught, who could easily come up with 80085 more boobs without even trying.