Categories
Fucking Day: Captured by Love
Author: Seanbaby
Unlock with Patreon
Are there pterodactyls or ancient, extinct birds recently? What? That’s… huh? Congratulations, junior bird scientists, we’ve finished the thesis statement of PREHISTORIC BIRDS IN MODERN TIMES by Eddie Vuittonet, Ph.D. (2023).
Prehistoric birds haunt all seven corners of the globe! From The Amazon to Madagascar to Africa! From “New Zeland” to three different counties in Texas! They are here, maybe, some say, but surely the author doesn’t mean like… still, right? This isn’t a children’s book about uncorroborated dinosaur sightings is it?
Oh, fuck. This book is raw bird madness out of the gate. There’s no dedication, introduction, or table of contents. The unnumbered first page starts with “PREHISTORIC BIRDS IN MODERN TIMES BY EDDIE VUITTONET BIRDS: THERE ARE REPORTS OF SUCH BEASTS WEBSTER’S DEFINES BIRD AS ANY FLYING MYSTERY WE SHOULD BE SAFE INSIDE AS LONG AS NO ONE TOLD THE BIRDS OF THIS.”
So our first prehistoric bird is the Thunderbird, a purely mythological creature from Native American folklore. Is this author suggesting the legends are based on an actual lightning dinosaur who has survived for hundreds of millions of years? Maybe! He seems very confused and may have written this book by saying, “Siri, can i die to dinosaur, please print results.”
It shoots lightning arrows? And hunts sea whales? This is a jackhammer of Thunderbird madness. But I appreciate how Eddie has dressed up his outbursts in the language of science. As if saying “According to some reports, people have claimed to see giant birds” is less crazy than “Indian bird gods are just dinosaurs killing Nebraska elephants during thunderstorms.” This rules. If I made this up as a bedtime story, my daughter would say, “You are high as fuck; this rules.”
Wow! These ten one-sentence paragraphs screamed in no particular order finally explain why Native Americans famously refused to use bows and arrows! Allegedly, some have claimed. “Never do this, arrows are my thing,” said the mighty Thunderbird, reports say, to “some Native American tribes” who honored it by hunting sea whales with only bare-handed strangulation. Fact or fiction, one thing we’re all certain of is that this magic bird was completely real and a creature!
I wish every book was like this. It’s make-believe, but somehow also wrong? It’s like watching someone have a stroke after you tell them, “I’ve never seen scores as low as yours all my years of teaching kindergarten.”
It’s worth mentioning how gigantic this text is. For scale, here it is next to a jumbo X-Men valentine. PREHISTORIC BIRDS IN MODERN TIMES is the size of a magazine and each page makes room for about five sentences. If this was an eye chart, we’d be on the third line from the top and a legally blind person would be saying, “Ha ha this motherfucker is crazy.”
The second large and alaming bird in the book is the harpy eagle, which isn’t prehistoric at all. It’s only a big bi– I mean, what are we doing here? Are we listing birds that bird idiots might mistake for older birds? I don’t think Dr. Eddie Vuittonet quite came up with a book idea here. This is barely Scattered Bird Thoughts by The Dumbest Cat, much less PREHISTORIC BIRDS IN MODERN TIMES by A Human Doctor. Still, harpy eagles are pretty sweet. Let’s see what Eddie knows about them.
The harpy eagle is large and big with a need as to be quantified for us in comprehending the physical similarities of other prehistoric creatures which bear similar physical similarities? Well, I stand corrected. It seems Eddie is actually quite smart. This is all very science.
I’m glad you’re looking at it, because it’s hard to put into words how dumb this is. This sounds like a bully mocking the report you did on a harpy eagle book you didn’t read. It sounds like the transcript from a speech Donald Trump would give to the Junior Nazi Bird Watchers of America. It’s something a rat would tell a researcher before he wrote down “gen. 24-C: still unable to communicate” and slapped the incinerate button.
There’s no good reason for this next clipping, but I worry you think I’m taking the extra crazy shit out of context. I wanted you to see one of Dr. Eddie Vuittonet’s bird entries in its entirety.
Dr. Eddie writes with all the understanding and pacing of a baby falling down its first flight of stairs. This is panic. He is typing random, unformed thoughts in a way less respectful to his readers than if he had just copied Wikipedia. He’s making wild guesses, offering statements so broad they’re pointless, and seems to have no idea he’s repeating himself. And to make things weirder, he says “as stated earlier” during one of the rare times when he hasn’t stated something earlier. You may have clocked this as the hallucinatory stupidity of AI, but I don’t think AI would sum up its harpy eagle report by saying, “In conclusion, the harpy eagle is slightly less large or giant than a different and fictional bird, but I mean, you know, still. Pretty big.” Maybe he is working with a kickass robot that won’t shut up about Thunderbirds, but to me this has the stink of human idiocy.
Let’s move on to the very next two sentences, or as Dr. Eddie calls them, “paragraphs.”
As a man of science, this prehistoric bird book author is so skeptical about prehistoric bird sightings that he tells the reader not to believe people who saw a harpy eagle, a real bird which exists. Whatever they think they saw, there’s a decent chance it was only a weather balloon or legendary Cherokee bird harbinger. The point is, birds play tricks. And speaking of, did he say there were once birds larger than today’s ostriches? Let’s learn more!
The Titanis bird, a large bird-like creature, lived both 5 million years ago and about 70 years ago. It’s hard to know the particulars since reports of newspaper reports weren’t very particulat back then. All we know is some parts of the 1900s were terrified. How old is Dr. Eddie Vuittonet? I didn’t even know we had parts of America where you could still get an education this bad. This sounds like copy being read by a newscaster in the background of an all-chimpanzee version of Law and Order.
The section on the Titanis bird focuses less on its stats and powers and more on the fear people felt when it attacked them. People went hysterical for miles! At least until later when they found out it never existed! Nonetheless, it’s a good example of how paranoia and confusion can be as dangerous as dinosaur monsters. Nonetheless again, maybe the dinosaur monster was real.
Despite it not being real, the Titanis bird, which again was a bird-like creature, was seen across many times or places despite living only in prehistoric times. “It was gigantic yet only weighted 10 pounds,” Dr. Eddie told his anaesthesiologist who instantly knew he had made a terrible mistake.
Honestly, it seems like Dr. Eddie wasn’t quite sure how to explain the Titanis bird. It was big, yes, and very much like a bird, sure. But he needed us to know it was both extinct and also a terrifying threat to humanity, so here he is rewording it for the fifth time. And if you look at the end there, I think he’s also trying to explain it in Bird? Is that what’s happening? If you said this to me, I’d pull out my bird squashing mallet and tell you, “Clever disguise, bird, but not clever enough.”
Maybe I’m too quick to hit secret birds with hammers, but I don’t know how else to interpret “the bird was able to communicate” followed by the word “phausbddibidbidasushaci“. We are pioneers of an all new madman frontier here with Dr. Eddie Vuittonet.
There are only a few more Titanis bird facts to cover.
To wrap things up! The Titanis bird was probably frightening, abusive, and confusing with a long neck made for abusive and frightening grasping. We can’t know for certain, though. In fact, as Dr. Eddie concludes, the words he’s writing are really only useful as an example of how dumb people can be when they’re stupid. Speaking of, the Gastornis is extinct and no longer exists, but does it still exist today?
This is the question Eddie asks himself and never answers. Was this maybe meant to be a textbook? Was this the “chapter review” for his two sentences about Gastornis? The answer to this question is literally the previous sentence. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve run out of ways to call this book stupid. It’s stupid in ways that cannot be. This is the 1950s prehistoric bird attack of stupid. Anyway, here’s how Dr. Eddie answers the Gastornis question: with a story of two cops who saw a pelican:
Because of bird, there was an intense outbreak of pubic fear, the best possible typo for public fear, which refers to the little-known phenomenon of people getting scared (because of something). I’m sorry for getting so technical, but it’s important to know all these sociological terms being thrown around. It seems like the real danger of prehistoric birds doesn’t come from when they exist, but how scary it is when they could. If you told me a cop said he saw a large bird, I would light my entire neighborhood on fire. “Better to die this way than by bird,” I would tell them. “We agreeiiiiiieeeeeieieeeee!!!” they would agree.
Some other examples of fear are confusing car, disease, and eaten by bird. I guess the book’s only chapter, chapter “one” we’ll call it, is mostly about fear. Not the nature of fear, but the dictionary definition of fear and how a gigantic flying creature might feed upon it. The best thing about terrible writers is they can’t hide what’s wrong with them for long. It’s why the only thing I have to say in this sentence is Bloodsport and titties. But when an author stops their dinosaur encounters book to write about fear of birds, fear of birds, fear of birds, it’s what psychologists call “revealing.” Dr. Eddie continues…
You see, bird media, combined with bird encounters, creates something of a bird spiral which leads to the “monster bird” obsession. Okay, now that we all understand our bird fear and can work together as a community to keep it in check, let’s get back to the prehistoric bi– wait, no, it looks like Dr. Eddie said “MORE HYSTERIA:“. Let’s see what he means by that.
Oh, this old story. We were all taught in school how Henry Ford had to innovate around the rise of terrified automobile hunters. Millions of dollars (threes of millions in today’s money) were spent on the classic Ford ad campaign, “They Aren’t Monsters, They Are Cars– Machines Similar To Horses In Some Ways; It Is The Soggies You Must Fear.”
I think we get it. We all assume we’re smarter than someone, and in order for that to be true for Dr. Eddie Vuittonet Ph.D., he had to invent the ancient car hunters of Dinosaur Bird County. And it’s wonderful. Fantastic. I’m glad he did it. But it raises the question: what the goddamn fucking shit? This multiple mule kick survivor has a Ph.D.? Let’s skip to the ABOUT THE AUTHOR section.
Okay, that’s a disguise, possibly on a balloon or an ape, which would explain some of this. Not all of it, of course. This isn’t how a writer describes themselves. This is more like a template for a human-like thing to get started. “The author is interested in things and places. And if you read between the lines, wink, you’re looking at a guy who also likes subjects and locations.” This is why the other aliens don’t let you do the talking, Phausbddibidbidasushaci.
Let’s keep reading and see if his bio gets any bett– oh, fuck yeah:
He’s got his own martial art style! I have to look this up.
It’s real! And it’s even better! His style is for men only, and it’s just Yubiwaza, the comic book art of poking pressure points! I’m so happy. Finding out the bird maniac is also a touch karate maniac is the exact gift I wanted. Plus it explains his fear of birds– he is only trained on the death meridians of man. The dim mak is useless against a swooping flurry of talons and feathers!
Ha ha his karate taught him to write like this? Then I have never felt safer calling someone a fucking idiot. You can’t be all “Krav Mazoo is what taught me to turn my words into blades” and then use your eggborn paws to type “pubic fear is alaming overheard bird stories, I am a doctor.” You fucking idiot.
In the ’90s, Dr. Eddie gave up his martial arts career to dedicate his keen fac checking skills to words and art of all sorts. I looked him up to see what products he offered, but his website “mynetmuffin.com” forwarded me to the URL “greatsolutions4u.com” which is no longer online, but looked like this:
This sentence shouldn’t help anyone understand anything, but with the help of Pervert Pantyhose Captain America, Dr. Eddie sold collectible Presidential shapes, signed and dated by him, an unknown retired karate maniac. His site had its own Clippy, a superhero who would offer [username] hot savings if you clicked his dick. None of this is alaming. If I would have asked you if this author had a bizarre dropshipping and NFT website, you would have said, “Yeah, it’d be weird if he didn’t.” I think we’re all more interested in how a man this uneducated ended up with a doctorate. Let’s find his LinkedIn.
He got his Ph.D. from “External degree?” Does that mean it’s fake or from a dimension outside our ow– hold the fuck on, did the University of Texas-Pan American give him a Black Belt!? Wait, forget that. Did he list “Mexican nights” at a local restaurant as an extracurricular activity? This guy is the fucking best.
It looks like he also makes 3d animation, and he’s selling a “FULL LENGHT” movie called ETAL for $3.50. It’s about hot girl operatives taking down a New York terrorist cell, which does not explain the skeleton demons, and I don’t care.
He also has a YouTube channel where he does comedy(?) videos, like “Give me the cat!”. They are aggressively untethered from reason, and he has the comic timing of an eczema outbreak. Much like his horny skeleton fighters and commemorative superhero Nixon licensed art tokens, they’re what you’d expect from a karate master hiding from birds. Are these words still making sense? I’m worried the act of describing “Dr.” Eddie Vuittonet was a trap to destroy language and I walked right int– oh, shit! A video for his karate lessons!
It’s pretty long, so I sped it up 50x. It stars Jessabell and Ash, two sexy lady soldiers from his animated movie. They let you know “Dr.” Eddie is back from a “12 year absence from the professional circuit.” Because on top of everything else, this guy is doing a Frank Dux! He’s claiming, I think, to have won multiple secret underground ninja tournaments starting in the ’70s and continuing until… 1998? The porn commandos describe him as “the internationally known 10th degree red belt” of Muryo Waza. Oh my god, there are so many videos… how am I going to finish this article about his prehistor– HE HAS A RAP THEME SONG ABOUT HIMSELF.
“The Ballad of Eddie Vuittonet” is about how no one in the ’70s was ready for the combination of kung fu and karate he learned from the comic book ads of the ’60s. And not only can he not rap, I’m not sure he know when rhymes are supposed to ha– SHUT THE FUCK UP, HE HAS A BAND.
The band Eddie Vuittonet and The Time Travelers seems to be just Eddie Vuittonet singing to karaoke tracks, so either the Time Travelers are actual time travelers who went to 1980s Korea to be studio musicians or it’s an invitation to any future Eddie Vuittonets to join him here in the safest, most prehistoric birdless timeline.
I was a little disappointed to learn “Dr.” Eddie and the nobodies were mostly a cover band and not a karate band, but you haven’t seen vulnerable until you’ve seen a man incoherently afraid of pelicans sing “Say Something I’m Giving Up On You.”
Guys, do you know what I forgot about? PREHISTORIC BIRDS IN MODERN TIMES. Let’s get back to the book.
In early 1976, two teens saw a gorilla-faced “bird” and three teachers saw a pterodactyl. “That’s probably enough details,” thought the doctor who explained what “being scared” was for five pages of his book, or nearly 40 words.
Sixteen years earlier, only a few states away, a couple in a forest looked up and saw a bird. “Wait, no, it was a pterodactyl,” they said later. In the prehistoric bird world, we call this kind of story “pterodac-tight” because no skeptic can deny it. It is tighter than the vocals on Eddie Vuittonet and the Time Travelers’ cover of “Groovy Kind of Love.” You shouldn’t need more proof than this, and yet listen to this story of an actual dinosaur who, for only a brief moment, fluttered among man:
The only problems I have with this story, and they’re admittedly small, are that it takes millions of years to get trapped in limestone, and then another 65 million years to wait after the Cretaceous period to pop out and croak at railway workers, and I don’t think pterodactyls live that long. If this author didn’t have a Ph.D. from External degree, I’d swear he was a fucking idiot.
In 1890 a group of men shot down a dinosaur. They took a photo of it, but the paranormal community can’t remember where they saw it. Facebook, maybe? It could have been a t-shirt, theorize other researchers.
Speaking of Facebook, let’s do a racist boomer one. This is a story of a native who dared enter the forbidden dinosaur region of a forest, and sure enough, he got impaled on the beak of some kind of… strange bird.
The native carefully looked through the book of animal pictures and made a point to tell the colonizers, “I want everyone to see I understand the concept of books. Like when I look at this giraffe I know it is not a demon you’ve trapped inside this devil you call ‘paper.’ In fact, my nude, superstitious people utilize a similar technology in our savage caves. ‘Art,’ we call it. But god damn it, if I turn this page and see a drawing of the dinosaur that bit me I’m going to forget everything I just said and run into the night, away from what I will insanely assume is an actual monst– OH FUCK PTERODACTYLE! PTERODACTYL!!!“
Wait, what the hell? These are the same teachers who saw a pterodactyl from earlier. Did “Dr.” Eddie forget he told this story, or was he hoping we did? And now he’s embellishing it with this encyclopedia bullshit? They’re elementary school teachers and they had to look up “pterodactyl?” That’s like a prehistoric bird book author claiming he had to look up the best way to get pee stains out of underpants. A ridiculous lie from a pee-soaked liar.
What the goddamn fuck, “Dr.” Eddie? You’re telling the same story of the guys who shot a pterodactyl again? And now instead of being able to find the photo the newspaper article has disappeared? It wasn’t enough that a prehistoric monster was shot down and no trace of it remains; the newspaper article about it has to be mysterious? Can you seriously not wait for your nephew to come over and help fix your Internet before publishing your dinosaur book?
By the way, it isn’t “elusive,” doctor. You powerline-brained ape. It’s the first thing you get when you Google “Tombstone” and any combination of bird, dinosaur, or pterodactyl, Eddie!
Okay, we’re coming to the end, and here on page… I don’t know, thirty? Eddie casually drops a story about a miniature zombie pterodactyl who hunts corpse meat at New Guinea funerals. But his heart isn’t in it. He’s told and retold all these stories of massive flying reptiles, possible pelicans, definitely Thunderbirds, and for this third-hand, mid-level bat sighting he can barely manage any enthusiasm. “Pffff… I don’t know, it looks much like a rhamphorhynchoid,” he says. “Like a goddamn what,” it would be fair to counter with.
In the end, the only proof of this rhamphorhynchoid is “physical evidence,” an adorable misunderstanding of every part of science and language. He’s spent an entire book writing bird watching fan fiction, forgetting where he saw proof for long-debunked pterodactyl stories, and questioning the existence of real birds. And after all that, has he still managed to stupidly believe all these impossible, dumbass stories are true?
YES!
Special thanks to Troy Ryan Wood for discovering “Dr.” Eddie.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Josh S, who is called shuchapaboodathong in bird language. It means “Land Josh.”
As frequent hotdoggers know, Phil Hirsch was a prolific joke curator with the comedic sensibilities of a fartless cadaver. His books were weird collections of terrible jokes he didn’t write about tits, prostitutes, and, of course, hamburgers. But in 1974, he had his best idea yet: what if he took a stack of MAD Magazine knockoffs and photocopied the worst parts of them into a tiny paperback book?
Sick Magazine started as a flagrant MAD Magazine ripoff in 1960 and became at least twice that three years later when they changed their mascot to MAD Magazine’s mascot.
The point is, we’ve never needed AI to help us steal shit and make it worse. And this is a story about a man who did that twice to the same shit.
If we’re being generous, Sick Magazine was the “naughty” version of MAD Magazine. It was still rated very PG, but everything was more desperate and from the perspective of assholes. It’s tough to explain. It was going for edgy in an era where you could still find segregated drinking fountains. Maybe imagine a Daily Wire movie with no fracking investors and less coherent politics? Let me find an example. Oh, look, here’s one: the first article reprinted in the book.
The article is about Superman and his mission to “stop crime,” and the gag is that many of the things Superman does would be considered crimes like changing clothes in a phone booth, violating air space, vigilante violence… it’s sort of a reasonable premise. But look where the writer went with it. Four men see Superman looking all gay and beat the shit out of him for it. What the fuck? Why write that, and how would it work? The man famously known for being super loses a fist fight to park Nazis with no kryptonite? What the shit is going on?
So, here’s what I think happened. I think Superman was trapped by the logic of “stopping crime” which doesn’t include this since the author doesn’t see hate crimes as “crime.” They’re the outrageous jokes MAD Magazine is afraid to publish. And I’m worried now we all understand Sick Magazine. As for why Phil Hirsch published a paperback collection of aggressively random articles from it, we may never know. For instance, what the goddamn fuck is this?
This is from an article called “EULOGIES FOR MOVIE MONSTERS,” and maybe in magazine form that cop had hilarious things to say at Frankenstein’s funeral, but after Phil adapted it for book, it became an unreadably microscopic block of sideways text. If the Invisible Man’s eulogy didn’t look identical, I’d think that was the joke– that Frankenstein is made out of so many people his eulogy went on and on and on. That’d be fine! If you wrote a zany goodbye to the ones we lost in Frankenstein’s head, torso, penis, and legs, I wouldn’t call you a hero, but we wouldn’t be here calling Phil Hirsch the maternity center fire of comedy again. How do you look at that shit and think it’s okay? You can’t just copy unpleasant trash and paste it into a format that makes it worse. That’d be like publishing a book of unedited Denis Leary tweets…
Oh, Jesus. I thought I made that up.
Let’s see what Phil selected next. Oh, fun: sports! This one is about sports and suici– oh my fucking god, Phil.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but in “How to Be a POOR SPORT,” the entire premise was what if athletes killed themselves? And it seems like even the 1974 edgelord realized this wasn’t quite a joke, so they tried to rescue the bit by adding, “ha ha because we have too many people, right?” This is something you’d pitch if you were a nervous serial killer wearing a comedy writer’s face. Let’s see how it turned out!
Oh. Wordless suicides, sort of themed around sports. M-maybe it builds to something?
Oh. Maybe not. In fact, I think these are somehow getting further from comedy. At least with the 12-foot basketball player, we were looking at an ironic dilemma: his goal was to score, but if he dunked it would kill him. That’s… something. This is random, senseless death. We have a baseball catcher not catching a cannon, possibly volley, ball with a pane of glass, and a boxing match where a full electric chair has been set up in the corner. I’m not sure any punchline could save these, but at the very least we need some context. Even if it just said, “Sick Magazine pays me $8 per page and my nights are so lonely” that would help. As it is, we have some hockey player trying to shave with his skate? What? Is this from an unrelated non-suicide sports cartoon, or is this guy about to kill himself on accident? Because neither of those are the premise. This needs to be something like a runner shooting himself in the head with a starter pistol or a football player charging into a giant bear trap.
Right, like that. Thank you.
In a lot of ways, I understand what happened here. I spent several years at Cracked.com which was born from a MAD Magazine knockoff, and before that I was impishly naughty in a way few people would call “timeless.” And what can happen when you’re stretching a concept too thin is it becomes less about comedy and more about solving the problem you’ve given yourself. You need seven entries in your dumb list of sport suicides, and you haven’t done football, so the task before you is no longer the best joke, but figuring out how a running back would kill himself. So yeah, after your brain bounces off that impossible problem, it eventually says, “Fuck it, giant bear trap.” There’s no better answer because the only answer was abandoning this at the concept stage. This is fucked. This book is a prop thrown out by the Se7en production designer for being “not funny enough.”
Let’s look at the original, though:
Before Phil took scissors to it and mashed it into a book, this is how the article appeared in issue 97 of Sick Magazine. It’s still the dark act of a psychopath, but if we’re being generous, it almost works. When you see all the suicides together, there’s a tone approaching silly. You’d have to be so bad at comedy to think, “Let’s take that picture of a track runner with a gun to his own head and make it a full page. Let the reader really sit with it.” This is like taking an All in the Family bit and cutting out everything except the racist Archie Bunker lines…
Oh, Jesus. I thought I made that up.
Over several pages of gray text on gray background, this book reprints the time Carroll O’Connor’s character on All in the Family won Sick Magazine’s “COMEDIAN OF THE MONTH.” I honestly didn’t know Archie Bunker talked like this. I figured he hated affirmative action and mouthy wives, but this is… I mean, he claims Eleanor Roosevelt disobeyed her husband to discover black people like they were a lost tribe guarding a treasure map. We don’t need to get into it, but that might be everything except a joke. Maybe it’s meta comedy? Because if someone asked what the worst possible 1974 book could be, a funny answer might be “humorless Archie Bunker quotes next to cigarette ads,” and that is precisely what this is.
These quotes are so out of context, you can barely tell what he was talking about. “Shut up about Wyoming, wife. You’re like these fucking goddamn insurance companies and non-whites. And to answer your questions, pizza and maybe.”
By the way, that image isn’t a bit– like the cheapest paperbacks of the time, this book contains full color ads for cigarettes. Which means Phil Hirsch had the idea of selling 25% of someone else’s magazine as a book and then got less ethical.
This can’t be right. This one seems to be an ad for women who want to get sexually ambushed as housekeepers? It says they’ll train young and pretty women… okay, troubling, but certainly there’s some kind of turn coming. Certainly there will be a punchli– oh. Oh no. This gag is all premise and the premise is “you will be groped.” I don’t… maybe we should switch to that book of Denis Leary tweets? Let’s check the back of it.
Oh my god. Absolutely fuck that. Fuck Denis Leary’s publicist and the world that would allow them. We’re sticking with How Sick Can You Get?
I’m not sure this is anything other than a puzzle for historians. This is a haircut review of a fictional haircut, and the comedic reveal is “this was a drawing of a man the whole time.” I get this was an era where gender roles were more strictly defined, but I worry they’re giving the reader’s homophobia too much credit. This is like saying, “picture a drag queen for me,” and then ending your life with a hockey skate, buy cigarettes.
This kind of joke, a sudden and unpleasant reveal, seems to be a staple of Sick Magazine. Here’s the tiny-texted and sideways story of a girl whose mother told her to stay away from Herbie Klotz. For a number of vague reasons! Where are they going with t– oh, he’s her brother. Well, that certainly makes all the things she said strange.
We can argue all day about whether incest, suddenly and with no other context, is funny, but I want to talk about the other reason this sucks. This is a kind of comedy you don’t see anymore because it requires an intellectual dishonesty we strangled to death decades ago. You have to willfully pretend you don’t know the things you know for this type of bit to work. To explain what I mean, if ’90s Jerry Seinfeld appeared before us today and asked what the deal was with women putting perfume on their wrists or breakfast cereals having too many ingredients, we would know what the deal was. Or his phone would have told him before he asked. As a species we are simply too smart for bits like this. And like Jerry Seinfeld reading lines for Bee Movie, this Herbie Klotz story requires you to not ask the obvious question, “Why didn’t you tell me about the incest stuff at the beginning?”
This one is even worse. Look at the trauma 1974 comedy fans had to wade through to find out the man sexually beating you to death was actually playing checkers. I mean, what’s the deal with language? In one context you’re playing checkers, and the other you’re killing a hitchhiker? How are we supposed to know what kind of jumper you are? I’ll tell you one thing I won’t be jumping: to any more conclusions about the type of story I’m reading in this book!
This one is amazing because for it to work the reader has to start with maximum misogyny. Like, they can’t be a “women’s sports aren’t as good” type of misogynist. They have to be shrieking at their untouched boners and living under the fear of a The Great She-placement Theory before it became known as Ghostbusters (2016). And then -on top of that- they have to not know what an astronaut does. I don’t think it would be pedantic to tell this dumb fuck that astronauts are pilots and engineers who travel to the stars in between parades. And did the illustrator invent a pressure suit dick hole just to confuse the untrained lady astronaut? Even if you’re on board with the premise of women being useless boob transports, that seems unfair.
These are unsettling and confusing and I refuse to speak of them. You had thousands of pages to pick from, Phil Hirsch, and you chose these. Great work.
Finally, a bit that works! Sick magazine presents “SICK BEATS THE HIGH COST OF MEAT” and it’s just a picture of a butcher selling meat for very high prices. Fucking hilarious– completely makes up for the dick hole in the space suit and the haunting incredible living band-aid. I’m back on board.
Sick Magazine seemed to be operating under the editorial mandate of “be the biggest piece of shit possible,” which was probably very silly and apolitical in 1974. Today, though; it sounds like an ordinary Fox News segment today. Like this article about pollution where they argue on the side of pollution. I don’t really have a point, I’m just troubled by how modern right wing talking points were a bitter asshole’s best guess at comedy fifty years ago.
“I like pollution because it kills fish and I have to clean fewer of my husband’s fish who still goes fishing twice a week, and this is a coherent punchline and argument,” says this woman. “Noise pollution sure beats the sound of rock and roll music,” says another. “I am writing comedy jokes good enough to get published a second time,” says their author. “If only I were also racist,” he adds. “Oh, god damn it,” I foreshadow.
It’s a bit of a walk, but this is a fake article awkwardly clipped from a magazine and squeezed into a book about a farmer who likes D.D.T. because he picked up a bottle of it right as a man tried to shoot him. The assassin was an indigenous man mostly blind from nuclear radiation, but believe it or not, none of that has anything to do with anything. If I made this up as a bedtime story, my daughter would tell me, “Sir, I am here on behalf of the state to represent you in a very serious string of racially motivated killings and I am not your daughter.”
I’m now going to say five of the worst words you can hear on Upsetting Day: Speaking of Native American racism…
“A Sick LOOK AT THE AMERICAN INDIAN” is not what you’d expect. You’re probably picturing it as a racist take on something, but it’s so much less than that. This is a formless mass of racist jokes without the jokes, obviously, but sometimes without the racism. For instance, what the hell is this?
It’s hard to imagine the lack of imagination it took to get here. The author went through all the things he knew about Native Americans. One of them used to be on a nickel, and oh fuck, end of list. So now he had to come up with a bit around just the nickel thing, and I’d argue he didn’t. This is dick-biting madness written by a bathroom intruder who thinks peeing women disappear when he covers his eyes. The joke is that he’s waiting for a 6 cent coin because he once posed for a nickel? Fucking fuck you. That’s like watching a hockey player kill himself and saying, “Hockey players love to have one less head in the bathroom, it’s why their sport is played in the bathroom, headlessly, now and forever.”
Wait, nevermind, there’s more than just nickel stuff. The author looked them up and learned about their nomadic lifestyle and skin tone. Here he is doing a fun little riff on those things. “Is this a joke?” asks the dumb racist as he has Christopher Columbus comment on the color of a woman he hasn’t seen. “I’m worried it’s not,” he says to a spoonful of lead paint. “Add a CIA periscope,” suggests all the nearby asbestos.
“Indians are strange because they wear beads and makeup constantly” is such a toothless double hate crime. It’s practically apologizing for its intolerance as it’s doing it. And you’ll never find a more perfect example of the intellectual dishonesty I was talking about earlier. This little bitch references war paint and he’s all, “Hur hurr like fancy ladies wear.” What? How generous is an audience supposed to be with their stupidity to make your joke work? If ’90s Seinfeld was here, even he’d say “What’s the deal with gay warpaint jokes? You paint your face before you scalp your enemies with a tomahawk, and the novelization of a MAD Magazine knockoff calls you gay? If that’s gay what does that make the rest of us? We’ve all got zero enemy foreheads! I’d ask my girlfriend but she won’t get to American history until fourth grade!”
I think we can all agree we’ve had enough of Phil Hirsch’s favorite selections of directionless racial intolerance, but I wanted to include this one to help us calibrate Sick’s politics. Because I don’t think this was a right wing hate magazine. Maybe. At least sometimes. But look at the self-awareness coming through here. Richard Nixon asks “Chief” if his people will treat the White Man as well as we treated them, and he replies with a rare coherent joke: “What you think Indians are– savages?” It’s still a bit ignorant and the different font implies there was some kind of last minute change, but you don’t print this joke if you’re an actual white supremacist publication. A Gutfeld! writer doesn’t pitch this joke. No, if you were an actual racist you’d write the joke closer to how they did a single page later:
Buy cigarettes, everyone!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dot Supreme: Jared MountainMan, who posed for the new buffalo nickel. That’s not an Indian thing, he’s just buff.
If you were a Christian teen in 1979 looking for a 168-page way to say “abstinence,” you had a lot of options. And here’s one now:
DATING / Guidelines from the Bible by Scott Kirby is as close to exactly what you’d expect as anything will ever be. It’s a generic Guide to the Christian Ordinary by Default Whiteman, III. But like all Christian Ordinary, it’s going to unravel into madness the moment we start examining it. Speaking of, I might be the first person to ever read this book.
My copy comes from the Christ the Redeemer Lutheran Church library in Tulsa, where after three decades it was checked out by a total of zero people. It’s so pristine. It’s as untouched as your changing Christian bodies, teens, Amen.
DATING / Guidelines from the Bible by Scott Kirby opens like all good persuasive texts, by moving instantly into checkmate:
I think this is the best-case-scenario for the scientific method. The author hypothesized you could learn how to date from the Bible, and found out the Bible said nothing about dating. This is as perfect and conclusive as a conclusion can get. They’d never put it like this, but for scientists, these results are like looking into the face of God. So we still have 167 pages to go, and Scott Kirby has destroyed his own thesis. At least scientifically. But maybe he can also destroy it morally?
Scott makes a good point about how dating in the Bible is a lot like what you and I would call “human trafficking” today. How is Scott still typing? This guy looked to God for dating guidelines and the only advice He had was to buy 13-year-old girls. It’s over! Write a different book!
Regardless…
So, okay, the only dating in the Bible is child brides. Fine. However, it does have things to say about the “misuse of sex,” which I worry does not include the child brides, but His sex rules should help us get a vague idea of what God wants and let us extrapolate principles from there. It’s like when you find a little packet in your beef jerky that says BUY A CHILD BRIDE and you decide it’s God’s way of telling you to eat it.
Anyway, since God doesn’t have anything to say about dating, let’s hear from other moral leaders. Someone like Hugh Hefner.
Hugh Hefner said this stupid bullshit about never finding true love up until his death. A media-illiterate baby could see this was a cute part of a pornographer’s personal brand, and Scott Kirby used it as evidence that Christ wants thou to take naught but one child bride. I went into this book with a smug certainty it was going to be dumb, but what the fuck are you doing here, Scott? You said yourself we’re trying to draw dating principles here. Do you have any sources other than Hugh Hefner? Maybe one of Hitler’s scienti– no, Scott! I was kidding!
This is a fucking hell of a source, Scott. And you have some details wrong. Rene Spitz wasn’t German and he didn’t do this during World War II, but he did sort of scientifically prove babies needed love. Only it’s weirder than it sounds. He had one group of babies get raised by their mothers in prison while another set of babies were abandoned. And it went really badly for the second group of babies. I’ll… you know, I’ll let Scott explain:
Again, Scott got every detail wrong, but that’s basically what happened. We don’t need to get into it. The point I’m making is that Scott’s sources for dating advice are an ancient book with no dating advice in it, Hugh fucking Hefner, and a man Scott thinks was a Nazi whose contribution to love science was killing a group of unloved babies. With that in mind, let’s learn how to date.
Scott was a late bloomer; it is not good for a man to be alone. He was well into his teens before he even knew you were supposed to be attracted to girls; it is not good for a man to be alone. So it’s very lucky, even suspicious, that the one true religion is the same one with a church in his hometown where being a lonely virgin makes you the greatest and most special boy; it is not good for a man to be alone.
You’ve probably heard this, but God sculpted the first woman out of a rib He tore out of the first man to be his “helper,” a word meaning “child bride” after you adjust it for inflation. I’m bad at explaining it. I’m sure Scott has a sexier way to describe women and their holes.
Fucking hot. Speaking of, where does God stand on intercou– hold on, let me look up the Biblical way to say it… leave your father and mother to cleave your wife and become one flesh!? That can’t be right. Wait, no, that’s word-for-word how they fuck in the Bible. Hot.
This is a book for no one and nothing demonstrates that better than “many people think that God has put a hex on sex! But God is not down on sex.” This is an argument against nobody with no hope of convincing anybody of anything. I can’t prove it, but this is sex wisdom from a horny nerd who married the first woman to touch him. Actually, I might be able to prove it. Because this book contains several fantastic passages from what can only be called…
Let’s start with the story of Sue Ellen…
Like all stories told by preachers, specifically this one, everything here is probably a lie. But assuming it’s true, Scott (who wasn’t a Christian yet) wanted to get with Sue Ellen so badly he followed her to church. She had a boyfriend, but he knew if he became Christian enough she’d eventually leave him and become his. Unfortunately, instead of Scott, her next boyfriend was a secular lawyer. This detail is important because Scott wants to imply he used his lawyer arguing powers to talk her out of being Christian. Which sucks, because that’s what Scott was now. Severely. In fact, he was now so Christian, Sue Ellen told him to shut up about being Christian and kicked him the fuck out of her home. He could have told any story, and he told this!
It’s honestly a perfect origin story for this book. A boy dedicated his life to God for a girl, she rejected him for it, and now he’s declared war on all Christian love. Let’s do another one.
This is from a section on the dangers of dating a non-Christian, and I can’t stress enough how that’s the entire story. Scott was friends with a girl, and she was so hot you guys, but she ignored all his moves. And then she met some guy over summer break (who wasn’t even Christian!) and they fell in love. And you guessed it– nothing else! We don’t know if the relationship ended badly or if anyone went to Hell for it. There’s no moral judgment or point. Scott is just upset someone else got to fuck her and thinks that’s a story!
Scott seems to blame girls for his own teenage sexual frustrations, but maybe I’m imagining things.
Anyway, we’ll be here all day if we keep talking about all the Christian babes Scott Kirby almost asked out in high school. Let’s move on to why it’s important to only date Christians.
Non-Christians are spiritually dead. See the “X” on the two-headed arrow between the words “Spirit” and “Spirit”? I don’t know how Scott can make it any clearer. One third of them is dead, like a Nazi baby experiment proving love is real.
Scott has more important Christian dating data to discuss:
Some of this is 1979’s fault, but Scott is worse at fact checking than should be possible. He heard a preacher say “only one in 400 Christian marriages ends in divorce” and listed that alongside “recent statistics.” It’s been a long time since I had to do 6th grade math, but for both these facts to be true, wouldn’t about 147% of marriages have to be non-Christian? As sociology, it’s dogshit stupid. And as salesmanship, it’s like Fred Flintstone saying, “Barney! An evil wizard told me one in two boxes of Rice Krispies cereal contain a human foot! But Fruity Pebbles is the part of this complete breakfast that rarely contains even a single toenail!”
If there are other good reasons to avoid dating non-Christians, Scott doesn’t know them, so let’s assume you’re both Christian and jump ahead to Chapter 6: “What Makes a Great Dating Relationship?”
God damn it, we get it, Scott. Let’s assume everyone reading your Bible Guide to Entry Level Groping is fucking Christian. What do we do now? How are we supposed to resist Satan’s temptations?
What I’m discovering is this is not a good book, or a helpful book.
Scott has thrown himself between teenage hormones and cleavable flesh, and he has not thought it through at all. His only idea to resist temptation is to warn you Satan won’t send an ugly girl, and to take comfort in how God will make sure she’s not that hot. I mean, I wasn’t expecting a chapter on meditative boner suppression techniques, but I think Scott could have done more to protect the reader’s virginity than “It says here in Corinthians you oughta be fine.” Part of the problem may be that Scott seems to find it unthinkable that kids in high school fuck.
When I first read this I thought, “Jesus, they’re going to bang on the family couch while her parents are in the other room?” And then I saw Scott’s concept of “great lovers” was “two children with habit-forming petting.” It’s worth mentioning again how this book is not for anyone. There’s no teen boy in the world with his hand hovering over a bralette thinking, “I’d better not. It may lead to more titties, Amen.”
While we’re on the subject of petting problems, let’s hear a very real story from Scott Kirby’s ministries:
By his own description, Scott was a church camp counselor checking out the high school girls. There was only one real hot one, but she had, like, these crab claws, Amen.
I really don’t know what to say about this. The story is probably fake, but why tell it? To spread the message of accepting your body by dressing more modestly? By any standards, it’s desperate and incoherent. Who would find it inspirational? To whom would this make sense? Something about this weird story made me wonder what is motivating this creep. Well, I have a theory and it obviously goes back to Sue Ellen. Let’s take a look at one of his many half-baked arguments against dating non-Christians:
Scott argues you still have to spend time with heathens because it’s your “sober responsibility” to recruit them to your church. After all, that’s what Sue Ellen did to him and she will always be perfect. So sex, like all other things, is either a recruitment tool for Jesus, or a filthy sin. I looked him up, and it explains the man’s entire life. After the Iron Curtain fell, Scott Kirby started a group that spread his ministry across uninoculated Eastern Bloc countries like an evangelical virus. Tax Exempt World says he has recruited his way into 3.6 billion tax free dollars. Once I noticed it, I saw it everywhere. It’s the real foundation of all his arguments. For instance, here’s Scott telling you why it’s so important to be gentle when you reject “carnal Christians”:
Ladies, don’t tell him his carnal desires disgust you and your Rightful God, or he’ll never join your church.
And if you ever get asked out by a non-Christian, one way to avoid breaking his heart is to turn him into a Christian, bit-by-bit, and then go out with him. Notice I said “go out with him” and not some secular lawyer who convinces you God isn’t cool right after the first guy gets super into Him. Maybe a probably fake anecdote will help make Scott’s point.
Scott tells the story of Ron, a real person who suddenly called off his engagement with non-Christian Shirley. Her heart was torn in two, her future destroyed. But “the sad part about this story” is how when it got back to Shirley’s parents, it might have cost Ron’s church two potential members! This is how broken this man’s brain is. When he watched the OJ Simpson trial, Scott Kirby thought, “The worst part of all this is what must be happening to the property values around the Buffalo Bills stadium. Right, Sue Ellen? Oh, yeah… she betrayed me 30 years ago.”
By the way, you don’t have to leave your platonic sex partner heartbroken at the airport for there to be consequences. The simple act of petting alone might be enough for God to forsake you.
That’s a really gross way for Paul to put it, but it means exactly what it sounds like– if your lips have touched nipple or above, Jesus doesn’t want His name upon them. Scott Kirby explains several more times:
People are going to find out if you’ve been carnal. You’ll be out there like, “Please join us in our Christian fellowship! We do singing, reading, cake wal–”
“Let me stop you right there,” they’ll say. “Aren’t you the person who fucked?” Good luck getting them to listen to you now. And it gets worse.
Anyone who finds out about your teenage petting is going to take that to mean God isn’t real. Those are the stakes. I don’t think I’m being intellectually dishonest when I say the message of this book is how if you keep doing hand stuff, God as you know Him might die. You know what? Fuck it, YOU might die.
Okay, take it easy, Scott. This crazy shit is what I was trying to explain earlier. The only motivation Scott Kirby understands is spreading the Shaky, Uncertain Word of God. When he tried to come up with other reasons not to have premarital sex, one of them was “it’s habit-forming” and the other was just “DEATH???” with no citation. A real crusader would have made up a story about Sue Ellen’s lawyer boyfriend hanging himself from too much sex, and oh no, how did things get this dark? Let’s do a fun one.
Ha ha ha the only competency Scott presumes about his Christian reader is their ability to get rejected. As an example, he only includes two paragraphs on how to flirt, and both of them assume the reader has never talked to a person in their life:
I can’t be sure, but I don’t think this advice was in the Bible. You know what I can be sure of, though? This exact advice was in HOW TO PICK UP TOPLESS DANCERS by Don Diebel (writing as Derek Evans).
So congratulations, Scott Kirby. You set out to write God’s Teen Dating Commandments and you ended up sourcing Hugh Hefner, a secular baby-killing scientist, and the worst pickup artist to ever live to make The Incel Missionary’s Guide to Coping with a Dry Dick (Teens Edition). All we can do is hope no one used this book’s advice when they finally got near a woman’s man-sized void.
I stand corrected. This is a pretty good idea.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Good Satan and his Hot Witches. Satan: Don’t you want to worship a god who fucks?
Categories
Upsetting Day: Renovo Storytellers
