MAD LIBS are already one of the saddest ways to VERB with human language. They are designed to let pedestrian minds manufacture NOUN by clumsily beating reason to death– like putting on a play about laughing at a badly translated FOREIGN FOOD menu. But with a little effort they can still be ADJECTIVE, right? MAD LIBS are like an AI generating CONCEPT INCLUDING PREGNANT HULK HOGAN PLAYING TENNIS. They won’t replace real art, but what’s the harm in letting chaos VERB your silly idea? I guess what I’m saying is you get out of them what you put into them. It’s not like the author of a MAD LIBS book could PERSONALLY FAIL, right? I guess we’ll VERB ENDING IN “ING” see.
A woman named Stacy Wasserman wrote this book decades later than you’d imagine, in 2021. Her only previous published work was Royal Family MAD LIBS, so Barbie MAD LIBS may have been her punishment for violating lèse-majesté laws. It is as uninspired as an intentionally unfinished book of Barbie quotes can be. It’s one of the lowest forms of art made worse by indifference and stupidity. Still, let’s try to have a(n) ADJECTIVE time!
While navigating Barbie MAD LIBS, we’ll be using the three pillars of auto-generated comedy– silliness, unexpected horror, and wanton lewdness. I call this The Pizza Dismember Penis Gambit, and I’ve designed a tool that allows me to randomize even the randomness of this groundbreaking MAD LIBbing system:
The book includes a full page explaining how to fill in blanks and another defining adjectives and nouns, which is pretty revealing about its intended audience. If something markets itself as a “word game” and the first thing it does is explain words, you’re either too good for it or a below average ape. So with that in mind, this fucking thing is for FUCK ENDING IN “ING” idiots, let’s read “TRUE FRIENDS” by Stacy Wasserman.
This sucks. No matter what noun or adjective you pick, this “World’s Greatest Word Game” won’t mean anything. Barbie’s friends might mean the CHEESEBURGER to her. Or the INTRUDER’S ERECTION. Or the FAILED AIDS CHARITY. It doesn’t matter. Part of the MAD LIBS fun, maybe the only kind of MAD LIBS fun, is trying to ruin its intended fun. Which isn’t actually fun when the coherence is this poorly guarded. Unless you put in exactly the words WORLD and SPECIAL, it’s PROBABLY NOT FUNNY gibberish. So fun-wise, this is a hail mary– a desperate prayer that the reader puts in a hilarious sex act or gets tickled by gently wrong syntax. This is the comedy equivalent of looking around the room and saying words. Fuckin do better, Stacy.
What the shit is Stacy doing here? Barbie’s friend Teresa VERBs with excitement, but the thing she gets excited for is very specifically “mold?” What the fuck kind of tactic is this? Are you trying to do the silly part of the MAD LIBS for us, Stacy? It was a nice save there at the end to let me choose the animal and what they do at night. Because giraffes? Going antiquing at night? Get.Out.
The first blank in Renee Chao’s backstory seems suspicious. You don’t throw the word “motor” in front of a random body part unless you mean for that to get dirty. Even Stacy Wasserman should have had the foresight to know “motor-PART OF THE BODY” was going to end in either a turbo sex hole or mild confusion. Like what, is Renee going to be a motor-elbow? A motor-tooth? Fucking stupid. Stacy, you made Barbie’s other friend an amateur mold historian. The least you could do here is clearly establish Renee has an internal combustion vagina. But I guess I have to do everything, so here: “she’s UNHAPPY a lot. Renee JACKHAMMER-FUCKS up any room she’s in.”
Daisy is Greek, so she will VERB anywhere. This one is great! It has a high potential to be funny, and now you know if you have any problematic biases against Greek culture.
Barbie’s last friend is Nikki, who can VERB anything. This swings hard away from meaningless incoherence. Most verbs you put here will simply make sense in a mundane way. Unless you’re deliberately throwing penises in her path, Stacy Wasserman is laying the groundwork for a eulogy. She has the comedy instincts of a gas leak. She made Nikki a/an ADJECTIVE entrepreneur! That’s scientifically the least silly place you can put a blank in that sentence. That’s like saying “Nikki’s grandmother watched her sick cat finally die on HOLIDAY*.” You can’t hope for a miracle on every single blank, Stacy.
* FORD MOTOR DAYS SALE.
Let’s try a different one. “BARBIE AND KEN’S FAVORITE RECIPE.”
This is more nonsense. Barbie and Ken VERB each other’s recipes? Aside from squirt and strangle, what verbs would work here? And look at the last two blanks. Does that say “SILLY WORD?” And EXCLAMATION!?” Are you telling me the other words weren’t supposed to be silly? What the goddamn fuck are we even doing here, Stacy? And then, after that, you want me to give you an exclamation to be placed all by itself and used as an exclamation!? That’s not MAD LIBS, Stacy. That’s not goddamn anything, Stacy. “DuRr, reADER, tHiNk of an eXPreSsioN yOUrseLF and ThEN sAy iT!” Get back to Hell, Stacy.
Oh, this will kill. “One and a half cups of COLOR sugar?” Holy shit, what if they pick green? Or mauve!? And oh my god, “NUMBER teaspoons cinnamon?” Any number!? Can you imagine if they picked the funny one! If the military developed a PSYOP to destroy an individual’s sense of humor, it would look identical to the Barbie MAD LIBS manuscript. There’s a good chance they’d give it that code name too, and wait, hold on, I may have solved the mystery of Barbie MAD LIBS.
So Stacy finishes her SARCASTIC WORD comedy recipe by telling you to bake the cookies for NUMBER minutes. Really, Stacy? NUMBER again? In your wildest dumbshit dreams, is there a funny number of minutes to bake cookies, Stacy? Are you hoping someone cheats and puts in BONER SEVEN? Because that’s what I did. And I still hate it. Serve that with whipped INNOCENCE and enjoy!
Let’s do another! “SELF-CARE DAY!”
Stacy might have completely lost her mind. She’s having us insert a random LETTER OF THE ALPHABET into acronyms. Stacy, where you’re from, are there alphabet letters that are hilarious on their own? Ha ha, W, maybe? Are you hoping some random letter will be so evocative of a word that the reader’s brain inserts it into D-I-BLANK to create a joke? Are they going to see an S, somehow think “sex with stepfather,” and continue on this long train of thought to decode the acronym “do-it-sex-with-stepfather” in their head? That’s bad therapy, not bad comedy. Stop giving us your weird shit to unpack, Stacy.
But seriously, ADJECTIVE work with the last sentence here, Stacy. “Take NOUN!” No matter what you plug in, how could that be anything other than a limp drive off a cliff? What noun were you imagining your readers would take? Soup? Abortion? Anal, for example? The best -the best- case scenario here is that you have beloved pop culture icon, Barbie, screaming “Take titty!” Honestly, it isn’t a bad catchphrase.
I made a butthole mask out of ritually murdered yogurt and edible panties juice, which means Stacy has finally constructed a proper MAD LIBS sentence. Unfortunately, she simply cannot resist letting her readers fill in a hilarious blank NUMBER. Oh, do I rub tragic wet yogurt on my asshole for 11 minutes, Stacy? Terrific. That really puts a button on the gag. And good luck finding a punchline where you “VERB with cold water.” Juggle? Ejaculate? Interrogate? Never mind, those are all very silly. Nearly competent job, Stacy.
Combine half a cup of sea Nazi with four tablespoons of vomiting olive oil and two teaspoons of breast milk zest? Stacy seems to be getting better, because this is easy-to-steer madness. She can never quite land it, though. She ends this chain of potentially fun nonsense with “scrub ADVERB?” In what magical universe of possibilities are there silly ways to scrub, you stupid CAREFULLY NON-GENDERED INSULT?
Let’s do one more. “BARBIE’S GUIDE TO VLOGGING!”
Barbie is an internet PIZZA! A MISSING vlogger with over BONER SEVEN subscribers! This one is off to a good start. Even Stacy’s deranged need to include a blank NUMBER on every page sort of works here, because it’d be sort of strange if Barbie only had, for instance, BONER SEVEN subscribers. And I like how the final blank has the potential to disrupt the entire narrative. Barbie could give her personal tips for successful KIDNAPPING, or ABRUPTLY STOPPING.
There aren’t a huge number of verbs that can sensibly BLANK an audience. But all the big ones are there. Fuck. Mutate. Waterboard. A skilled MAD LIBber could make this work.
Jesus Christ, this went off the rails. SOMETHING ALIVE (PLURAL)? What the fuck, Stacy? Why do they need to be alive? Are you worried if Barbie interviewed UNIDENTIFIED REMAINS or OLD DIAPERS it would disrupt the tight fiction you’ve put together? Let her talk to a stapler or a ghost; it’s MAD LIBS. And nice job on “PART OF THE BODY (PLURAL)-up.” The purest soul in the world would instantly and confidently write “balls” for this, and only find out later an interview with their uncle is going to get “lots of balls-up.” Gross, Stacy.
And for the record, Stacy, adding the word “furry” to the front of yet another random NUMBER probably isn’t the secret code to unlocking its hilarity. Here, I’ll show you: furry 9/11.
By this point of the book I had lost my temper and I was filling in “fuck” for every blank. I knew it was going to cheer me up, but I could have never expected the magic of “Consider FUCK-off like ‘FUCK YOU!’” That’s a world-class catchphrase for any occasion. Imagine a newscaster signing off by saying, “FUCK-off like ‘FUCK YOU!’ ZOINKS! Keep FUCKING!” You would VERB ENDING IN “ING” shit. So on behalf of everyone here at 1-900-🌭, we thank you for your continued support, and FUCK-off like “FUCK YOU!”
…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Chance McDermott, who is the USURPING-est example of BRATWURST we have ever BUTT.
If you’re discussing the impact madmen have had on pop culture, you eventually need to bring up Godfrey Ho, which is what we did on this episode of the Dogg Zzone 9000. To try to make sense of Godrey (sometimes known as Bruce, sometimes Tony, sometimes Rogar, sometimes Felix) and his 155 ninja films childishly pasted together from the corpses of 593 non-ninja films, we talked to leading Godfrey Ho expert and host of the VH-US Podcast, Dirk Marshall. As the owner of most of them, we put Dirk in charge of choosing the movie: Twinkle Ninja Fantasy. It’s a fish-exploding ninja drug smuggler film, probably. We are the first people to ever try to understand it, and we don’t! Fucking, at all!
Patrons can also listen to a bonus podcast where Dirk and Sean’s daughters fight a proxy war in a Seanbaby’s Book Game that goes off the rails immediately. Like us and Review, you bastards! Dynamite us on Ninja! Thunder us on Gigantic Serpent! Enter the death challenge of our store featuring all new designs!
I have a friend Mark who shares my taste in cinema, so he invited me over to watch knife fighting instructional videos in his basement. We studied the shadowy virgins pretending to murder each other before moving on to increasingly unexplainable tapes. But I’m not here to talk about the time a gasoline company produced a VHS tape about a family’s road trip into Native American ghost country to sell no actual product or service. I’m here to talk about the far more cursed collection I found in a back room:
Mark’s partner Karly owns 19 vacation homes worth of puzzles, and there is not a sane one among them. Sexualized cheese sculptures, societies of taxidermied mice, ancient platters of sweaty meat, and so, so many distressed kittens. I started taking pictures of them and told him, “I’m doing an article about your wife’s puzzles, and I’m going to call it…”
I learned a lot about puzzles as I gasped my way through this haunted stack of mistakes. I learned art for puzzles is more about violent disharmony than composition. I also learned there never was a God; it has been mirthless chaos all along. So with what I’ve learned, I was able to come up with the perfect Jigsaw Puzzle Rating System. Each of my friend’s wife’s shattered nightmares will be rated 1 through 10 on two criteria: Ocular Shrieking and Creeping Darkness.
Okay, let me Google one quick thing and we’ll get started.
“WAX IMPRESSIONS” is 500 pieces of human parts. It’s the carefully stored hands and faces of… celebrities? Royalty? I don’t recognize any of these remains. This means they’re either not good wax sculptures or someone has replaced the wax museum’s storage room with the wax museum’s guests, again. Wait, hold on, I recognize one. Computer, enhance:
There. I’d know the front four inches of 1963 Ellizabeth Taylor’s feet anywhere.
Ocular Shrieking: 9/10
This seems like it should be a perfect score, but listen: it’s a closet full of nothing but human heads except for a single pair of feet named E. Taylor. It’s a little too perfect. It feels like a mostly sane jigsaw puzzle photographer said, “Ha ha, let’s make one of them just a labeled foot. Take away the Elizabeth Taylor head to make it look like they only sculpted her fee– no, chopped-in-half feet.” My point is, it’s a real non-maniac’s idea of what a maniac’s murder closet would look like. It *clap* is *clap* not *clap* hard, puzzle photographers: if you’re looking at a serial killer trophy case with no penises, that’s a decoy trophy case. You’re standing on a trap door.
Creeping Darkness: 10/10
If I put together this puzzle I would absolutely expect to be missing a single piece and find it later in the mouth of a dead body. This is fucked. A stain on our world. I mean, why did they even bother labeling the hands when they clearly crawl around to whatever spot they want?
BATHROOM, SWEET BATHROOM! is a passive aggressive argument between set designers. It’s like six refugee families moved into a 14 bed, 1 bath apartment and each of them has a different skin condition. What the shit am I looking at, BATHROOM, SWEET BATHROOM!?
Ocular Shrieking: 7/10
This is a vomit of unidentifiable shapes. If you were putting this puzzle together, you’d be saying things like, “I think this piece is part of the… Croatian sex driver? Maybe the klaarb lotion?” I have no goddamn idea. There are abandoned muffins and egg timers among the clutter of torsh scrubbers and chlorg tubes. This is something an idiot mermaid would build out of shipwreck debris after having surface toilets described to her by a lobster.
Creeping Darkness: 2/10
Maybe it’s the plastic flowers mashed into the moist landfill of discontinued Amway creams, but I almost get a pleasant feeling from this puzzle. At the risk of walking into a trap, I’d say the jigsaw puzzle photographer responsible for this has a reasonable explanation for all the cat parts hidden among it. See if you can find all 8 pounds!
A thing I’m learning about puzzles is there is more world building than you’d expect. For instance, look at how much you suddenly know about these teddy bears. They were posed and photographed by a pervert, and no second thing.
Ocular Shrieking: 10/10
I can’t even look directly at it. If I told the FBI about “BARE BEAR BEACH!,” I’m pretty sure they would shoot my friend’s wife. I legally became a bear sex criminal the second I published this.
Creeping Darkness: 9/10
If I heard a strange noise in my kitchen, I would rather find a hatching cluster of spider eggs than someone putting together “BARE BEAR BEACH!”. Let’s say you thought sexualizing children’s toys was cute, and are you hearing yourself, look at the bear with the binoculars. Why include him? Let’s say you thought sex crimes were cute, and oh my god are you hearing yourself, he is massacring this photo’s layout. And for what? “I’m very, very looking at buttholes,” he might tell you, but what his presence really says is there is nowhere you can hide from the dark perversions of a jigsaw puzzler, even in this land of magical toys.
Stuffed With Memories? More like stuffed with the souls of a lost Amish colony. “Putting together the puzzle won’t free us,” the boxwhispered. “Quite the opposite,” it explained.
“I know,” I replied. “You probably started as a puzzle of two ponies on a tablecloth, and these are all the bored souls who assembled you.”
Ocular Shrieking: 8/10
“Did you say something in there?” shouted Mark.
“Tell him. Tell them all, No one will believe you,” giggled the box.
Creeping Darkness: 7/10
“Your wife’s fucking puzzles won’t shut up!” I shouted from the vacant face of a chicken on a puzzle box.
“It is the year 2387 and I’m a different guy!” replied a new voice. “I think I hear sounds coming from this strange and dusty tomb!” said the doomed explorer.
If a clown or magician walks up to you and exposes their button dewlaps like this, get out of there. They have marked you for mating.
Ocular Shrieking: 9/10
I hate every square inch of “OH, DO YOU KNOW THE BUTTON MAN?”. What has The Button Man done? These are catch phrases from characters who don’t exist and he’s made them his entire personality. Five hundred pins is already how you tell strangers you’re weird about sex, and The Button Man still has too many cheeky buttons about touching his buttons. This man put pinback buttons on his bowtie, which is already a good enough reason to spray him with bear mace, but the three he chose were Erotic Lips, Piano Keys, and Playboy Logo. I honestly think those would place you in the top five of a nationwide Creepiest Bowtie Pin Choice contest. Fuck you, Button Man. Fuck what future generations of archaeologists will think about us when they discover your metal remains.
Creeping Darkness: 6/10
I gave this a six because there’s a six out of ten chance The Button Man is not an over-accessorized man, but a being of pure button and this is him peeling off the outer layer of his flesh. There is a six out of ten chance the answer to the question “Oh, do you know The Button Man?” is “Shhh! The Button Man hunts after he molts!”
This BUTTON TALK puzzle is promising because it shows The Button Man can bleed. And if he can bleed, we can kill him.
Ocular Shrieking: 8/10
Maybe I’ll never be able to get inside the head of a button collector, but you can just not keep certain buttons, right? Like, if a pin says “Try banana juice,” what happens inside you that prevents you from throwing it in the trash? To be fair, not all of the pins on BUTTON TALK are meaningless bullshit. I think we can all agree THINK FISH. My hair hurts. ESKIMO POWER. The word BITCH three times.
Creeping Darkness: 8/10
I do like how the badges of BUTTON TALK aren’t forming the skin of a horny juggler like they were in the “OH, DO YOU KNOW THE BUTTON MAN?” puzzle. Still, there are some unsettling things being said by these buttons. A lot of them are little jokes you tell when you also sometimes choke your wife. I have a theory that the button-making creative process is going fugue and pressing every last fleeting thought into a pin. So you might only find out later you’re a lonely, aging misogynist longing for the mouth of anyone– kids, family members, anyone. Oh, and you might be a militant Inuit nationalist? The point is, jigsaw puzzles have taught us nothing good has ever been expressed through button.
I don’t care what anyone says. “Deli Fare” is the perfect amount of old wet.
Ocular Shrieking: 6/10
A lot of jigsaw puzzles are abandoned slime farms stolen from “What Not To Do” chapters of food photography textbooks. This is an AI art generator trying to create a picture of “Moist Rusty.” If someone posted this picture on social media, you’d assume they were getting through a Resident Evil castle level, not getting lunch. Did they mean for this to be a sad tube graveyard, or was there a mixup at a colonoscopy screening? Because this implies there’s a proctologist somewhere studying a mound of deli meat for polyps. Fucking roasted, puzzle.
Creeping Darkness: 4/10
This isn’t an especially scary pile of sweaty food. If I saw this outside of a jigsaw puzzle, I’d tell the lead investigator the caterers had been slaughtered within the last 12 to 14 hours. So there is some menace to it, just not an impending menace.
I don’t care what anyone says. ORIENTAL CHOW is the perfect amount of mummified wets.
Ocular Shrieking: 4/10
ORIENTAL CHOW is what you name your Chinese food puzzle when you have no one in your life to bounce ideas off of. To make matters worse, this looks like the GrubHub thumbnail for a restaurant called Old Chang’s Diarrhea. There are 2300 items on the menu, yet everything comes out looking exactly like this (cup $1.76 bowl $5.93).
Creeping Darkness: 3/10
If a restaurant is serving food like this and it’s still in business, it’s definitely some kind of criminal peanut laundering operation. A litany of international crimes led to this dry smear of future leftovers.
I guarantee you the owner of “THE DOLL SHOP” is a seven foot cricket with human teeth.
Ocular Shrieking: 10/10
If you see a retail display that looks like this, don’t bother turning around. The exit door is gone, and everything behind you is dolls. I don’t even know why they make dolls like this. There’s got to be a more efficient way to store six gallons of innocent blood.
Creeping Darkness: 10/10
Come the fuck on, “THE DOLL SHOP.” What could this be other than a prison for child souls? It’s like the first slide in a lazy presentation on avoiding ghost kidnappers. More troubling than its creepiness is how there’s no attempt at being a second thing. You can’t relocate a bunch of baby graves to your sitting room and expect people to think, “Ah, ordinary dolls to be appreciated.” An 80-year-old Barbie collector would show this to her quilting club and go, “Ha ha look at this skin crawling shit. GIVE US YOUR FORESKINS ha ha ha. Cheryl, this puzzle is more haunted than your guest toilet after you make Oriental chow.”
I feel like Ahhh! would have been a better title for the last puzzle.
Ocular Shrieking: 3/10
This is about as non-refreshing as you can make a drink look. Ahhh!, just how I like my beer– 40% foam, placed next to its raw materials to help remind you this comes from a bunch of grains left to rot in a dystopian Missouri warehouse. I am less thirsty now, Ahhh!.
Creeping Darkness: 4/10
This obviously isn’t very creepy, but I wouldn’t underestimate the crushing sadness of finishing a puzzle of beer by yourself. It has to be at least as sad as finishing a warm crystal bowling ball of beer next to a wooden spoon of rice by yourself.
“OH! YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!” is what a serial killer makes when they’re self-aware enough to know they can’t outwit the FBI. No rational person has ever said, “For this room I’m picturing several thousand babies avoiding eye contact dressed in indistinct variations of nude, shape, and clown.”
Ocular Shrieking: 10/10
This is a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle, but there were 1729 people aboard the eighteen planes that crashed simultaneously the day it was manufactured. So you do the math.
Creeping Darkness: 8/10
Anyone encountering “OH! YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!” has plainly entered a world of terror, but it’s not the paralyzing unease of a normal doll collection. These aren’t the kinds of dolls who giggle from the shadows or pick up the phone to invite your wife into a trap with your voice. This is a marching army of baby soldiers– an immediate danger you either deal with or die. Do you have hand grenades? A firehose manned by exorcists? Then get the fucking fuck out of there!
When Karly learned what I was doing, she said the inclusion of MIDNIGHT’S DELIGHTS was non-negotiable. “Why?” I thought. “It’s only a cluttered fridge and I already have 211 food ones. What would the owner of the world’s most deranged puzzle collection know about weird puzzles?” Then I looked closer.
Ocular Shrieking: 7/10
My dear god. Some poor artist went in and designed “funny” food labels for all these products. All this work for a jigsaw puzzle and what did it get them? DULL PICKLES? DULL PICKLES!? Die nailed to your worst fear, you unspeakable monster. I hope your shitty puzzle gags impressed some 9-year-old who forgot to bring an iPad to Grandpa’s house.
Creeping Darkness: 10/10
The labels are sad on their own, sure. It can hurt to watch people struggle and fail. However, it’s when the labels all come together when they tell a story of grief. DULL PICKLES and EEL Helper are the dry heaves of a mediocre mind, but they have the energy of an unfunny person trying. But the others? No. Something happened early in this process that caused this puzzle designer to lose all hope. This is going to sound dark, but you don’t go from “GEE WHIZ” to “I don’t care… GOAT MILK” unless the police call you during the design process to tell you your family died. “Hello, Reliable Puzzle Shop, Silly Gary spea– oh. Oh. I understand. That’s sad news, but… but they would want me to finish this puzzle. Sniff. I guess… ReD StUfF? Here’s one: Green Things. And these refried beans are now… Re-Refried BEA— what? I can’t believe it’s LARD? That’s terrific, officer. I’ll use that one for sure. Okay, I’ll come down to identify them after I finish naming the frozen foods. BLUE EYED PEAS? Ha ha that one is going in too, officer.”
Let’s do a nice one. It’s I ❤ Hearts!
Ocular Shrieking: 0/10
Pleasant hearts placed perfectly in rows? Fine! Nothing here makes me worry for the safety of the artist, which is the bar I now use to appreciate jigsaw puzzles.
Creeping Darkness: 1/10
This is really unappealing and I’m not sure what you use the hearts for, but there’s only a tiny bit of sadness here. If I had to guess I’d say 63 years ago, an aunt with no hobbies or personality accidentally said she liked hearts near one of her birthdays. It’s almost sweet! She probably smiles at these and thinks, “Am I supposed to freeze them and put them in drinks? Swallow and pass them? Who started this stupid fucking tradition? Anyway, the puzzle maker who came by to photograph them sure seemed sad.”
I think jigsaw puzzles might be a fallback career when you can’t paint for shit. “Still Life #24” is clumsy ass garbage. It looks like the production background for an unreleased Christian cartoon about food cops. If you put this trash image on a birthday cake, rats wouldn’t eat it.
Ocular Shrieking: 5/10
“Still Life #24” looks like an unfinished photo collage done by a coal miner who dropped out of 7th grade because the photo collages were too hard.
Creeping Darkness: 5/10
“Still Life #24” looks like something a coal miner imagines ever since they quit their job as an art teacher because one of their students painted “Still Life #24.”
“Okay, Springbok creative team. You’re the best jigsaw namers in the business. We’ve got a picture of 210 ceramic figu– extremely random ceramic figures on a black void. What do we call it?”
“CUTTING A FIGURE?“
“What about simply… GO FIGURE!“
“Gentlemen, I’m only a mysterious intruder with a knife, but GRANDMA’S KITCHEN.”
“That’s the one. Great job, new guy. GRANDMA’S KITCHEN.”
“GRANDMA’S KITCHEN IS WHERE IT ALL BEGAN! GRANDMA’S KITCHEN IS WHERE THE BLADE FIRST SPOKE TO ME!” The End.
Ocular Shrieking: 7/10
What the f– computer, isolate sector A3, enhance:
What the shit is this? Am I looking at a dismembered middle-aged centaur with milking tits? What is wrong with Grandma?
Creeping Darkness: 6/10
There’s nothing like a couple hundred tiny ceramic things lined up in delicate rows to remind you how short our time here on Earth is. These will be the last faces Grandma sees when Oriental chow clogs her final blood vessel. These will be the miniature porcelain ears to hear her last words. “I… I should have… spent more time… asking the… hhhh… gift shop owner… hhhh… what you were, milking centau–“
“CHILI TODAY – HOT TAMALE” proves that old saying in the art world– when you take a picture of food too disgusting to print in a magazine, split it into 500 pieces and sell it to Mark’s wife.
Ocular Shrieking: 3/10
I love how at some point in the production process, someone thought it was necessary to give this picture a little sash that says “MEXICAN FOOD.” Why? For whom is it for? Assuming a jigsaw consumer couldn’t recognize Mexican food, in what way would this information change things? Was it a trick to get some pedantic nerd to say, “Actually, m’lady, a lot of these dishes are more associated with Spain or Argentina.” Who does this “MEXICAN FOOD” sash help? Maybe it was a writing prompt so no jigsaw puzzle designer named it PIZZA MY HEART or IF LOOKS COULD KALE? They could have written them a private note that says, “This wet scrap is Mexican food, so name it something like GRANDMA’S TACO or AVOCADO WHAT SHE’S HAVING! thanks.”
Creeping Darkness: 7/10
That seven score doesn’t really have anything to do with “CHILI TODAY – HOT TAMALE” itself. But I read over the paragraph I just wrote and I’m 7/10 unsettled by the effect these puzzles are having on me. I don’t remember typing GRANDMA’S TACO and I can’t make the case for it being a coherent punchline.
I’m not sure why I took a picture of this one. What a pedestrian level of madness. Oh, look out for TROLL-MANIA!, everyone. Fucking eighty dollars worth of ordinary toys dumped in a corner. The guy who made “OH! YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!” collected enough human toes to feed 900 doll soldiers! Either dedicate yourself to the craft or cry in the coal mine with the “Still Life #24” artist. It’s not a great sign I’m only making references to jigsaw puzzles.
Ocular Shrieking: 0/10
Oh, is one of you Trolls a silly pirate? Fuck you. Come back when you’re a ceramic miniature made of unclear smears and one of your arms was chewed off during a centaur milking accident.
Creeping Darkness: 0/10
Yes, if you look closely, a Wizard Troll and a Taliban Troll are watching a circle of naked Troll children. And yes, Cop Troll is about to arrest Dashiki Troll for talking to Kimono Troll. And okay, fine, each of these creatures has the face of Mary-Kate and Ashley. If the category was Problematic Decisions, this would be a 10/10, but it’s not. It’s Creeping Darkness, and who would be afraid of multicultural best friends? Besides Cop Troll, of course.
Look, everyone! It’s Yellow! Wait, no, that’s the whole thing? No. No.
Ocular Shrieking: Yellow/10
From concept to name to execution, “Presenting Yellow!” is a desperate grab for nothing. It’s a yellow way to tell everyone at the jigsaw puzzle factory you’re not handling your divorce well; you need help. It’s an idea you would tell a mad scientist to assure him his soul erasing ray was a success.
Creeping Darkness: Yellow/10
This puzzle is like a solid brick of void misplaced in our dimension. And more haunting than its existence is how it implies these monsters made a puzzle for all the colors. “Step Back… It’s Lavender!” or “It Gives Us Great Pleasure To Welcome Taupe!” but most likely, “My Wife Left Me For Blue And I Can’t Do This Anymore.”
I grew up during an era of history where finding adult material involved treasure maps and interpreting nipples from scrambled TV signals, but still, if you showed 13-year-old me the PLAYBOY Playmate Puzzle, I would have found it almost ghoulishly cruel to ask anyone to assemble a naked photo from a tube of puzzle pieces.
Ocular Shrieking: 1/10
I didn’t take this out of the tube to test this theory, but you have to imagine a used PLAYBOY Playmate Puzzle never comes complete. You don’t buy something like this and then NOT throw out all the pieces except the feet ones.
Creeping Darkness: 8/10
“Three words: Pornography Jigsaw Puzzle,” I say smugly to the wordy idiot going on and on about the stupid baby shoes that were never worn.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John Hector McFarland, who is the missing wax Anne Schedeen butt puzzle piece needed to complete us.
Here are the faxx: we’re still talking about Traxx. It’s Part 2 of Brockway’s investigation into the screenwriter of this forgotten movie abandoned by the broken timeline that spawned it (you can find Part 1 here). Best-selling author and Top Jason, Jason Pargin, joins us again to hear the harrowing tale of murder, intrigue, and shattered realities. Speaking of interdimensional mysteries, buy Jason’s new book, If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe.
The finale of this story is strange! Otherworldly! Listen here! Or wherever you get podcasts!
As the owner of a cursed library, I’m aware of literary genres that don’t get a lot of promotion in bookstores. One of them is Sad Parent Solutions for Closet Monsters. Dozens of authors and filmmakers have tried to sell anti-monster schemes to children afraid of the dark. They’re mostly what you expect– be brave, it’s all in your imagination, send $19.99 by check or money order for your official Dennis Rodman Monster D-Fence Shrieking Night Light. There’s no part of the human experience that isn’t being strip-mined for resources by opportunists and soon after, Dennis Rodman, but one artifact from this unfortunate genre is special:
MONSTERS in my closet But Not for Long! is a 2014 kid’s book for children whose closets are haunted, but fuck you, really. Their closets are literal portals to other worlds and they are visited at night by actual creatures. I am not making fun of horny writer Becky Fischer and her sopping wet illustrator Shannon Wirrenga– they really think some closet monsters are real monsters, and they set out to solve that problem. Oh, I’ll explain the horny thing, but first, the real monster thing:
Every night, young Caleb is haunted by monsters. Every night, they creep out of his closet to laugh at him. They laugh exactly like his favorite cartoons, no one else can see them, and at this point everyone other than writer Becky, illustrator Shannon, and dumb fucking idiot Caleb knows what’s going on. A little boy watched something scary before he went to bed. You don’t have to be an experienced parent to diagnose this. If you’ve ever shaken hands with a babysitter you have the expertise to know what’s going on. Only a goddamn maniac would hear these details and then decide the monsters were real. Only the craziest piece of shit would make these details up and then decide the monsters were real.
Caleb’s mom and dad, like they must every night, come into Caleb’s room and tell him he’s right– there were demonic beings laughing at him in his room. Right here, in the place where he sleeps, things from beyond our understanding crawl through the membrane of our universe. Caleb’s father commands him to ask God for help. Not to kill the monsters, but to remember he has a loving spirit and sound mind? What? I can’t imagine a more useless request. This is like running into a gun store during a zombie outbreak to beg for a compliment. Obviously, Caleb isn’t really feeling it, which is Becky’s idea of foreshadowing.
After sort of trying God, the dad is out of ideas. So he invites Pastor David into their home, hoping some Lutheran birdwatcher might know how to shut down a monster portal. He doesn’t. In fact, he wants to make it perfectly clear: those things are real, Caleb, and they are your fault. Without knowing it, his cartoons and video games summoned the enemy.
Caleb’s mom finds this preposterous. “We don’t have any enemies,” says the woman who probably calls the FBI when she sees a black ice cream man. “What enemy are you talking about, Pastor?” asks the woman who found a hole in the universe and immediately tried to feed it a priest. And this is going to sound strange, but here is where things start to get horny.
Feeling no sense of urgency sitting one room away from a real, live monster closet, Pastor David explains Caleb is being tormented by fallen angels. Beautiful, beautiful fallen angels. His words, not mine. I’m not a psychologist… well, I’m more of one than Pastor David’s writer, but I think it’s revealing if you immediately diagnose a closet haunting as a beautiful, naughty man hole. Like, if a child told me there were monsters in his closet I would get in there with a P.K.E. meter before I told him it was just fuckable Satan.
This is probably why Pastor David was free when these acquaintances of his from church asked if he could come right over and check their kid’s bedroom for laughing cartoons. “Oh, it’s early. I don’t need to be anywhere,” said Pastor David. “Let me tell you more about sexy Lucifer in your demon-filled home. He wore a purple vest, no shirt, shaved everywhere except for a glorious head of hair. And Caleb, you’ll like this– he was persuasive. Oh, young Caleb, think what that tongue of his could get me to do. Does he need me on closet monster duty? Um, yes please, Caleb. Yum.”
Pastor David, vastly overstaying his welcome, tells the entire story of dirty Lucifer’s hot war against God. This weirdo was called here to do a job, so Caleb finally asks him, “What does this have to do with the monsters in my closet?” It’s the kind of stupid question you’d expect from a kid afraid of an empty closet but perfectly comfortable with the preacher one couch away describing delicious hunks to him. A much better question would be, “Get that boner the fuck out of my house.”
Pastor David explains it all again to the kid who was too dumb to understand “your monsters are sexy angels, like from the Bible.” He adds a few more details the second time around, like how TV shows will summon demons if they have ghosts or magic… you know, things like that. Superheroes? Sure, maybe. It’s all standard Satanic panic stuff– a lot of very non-specific rules about things probably forbidden, and the stakes are your son being torn apart by demons in his sleep, and then also his eternal soul. And look, I get everyone has their own superstitions, but this author is really counting on monsters being real. They are not a metaphor, they truly exist, and they laugh at young Christians. And this is going to sound like I’m making fun of all religions, but if spooky closet sounds are not fallen angels sent here to mock children, which I think is possible, then Becky is inventing unlikely solutions for problems that can’t exist. There’s no cute way to put it. Either the most amazing and sexual impossibility happens inside the closet of everyone who owns the book Ghosts, or Becky is a stupid fucking idiot. We may never know which of these equally likely possibilities is true.
Careful to avoid sexual language after that whole Pastor David thing, Becky describes the family dipping their sinful fingers in oil and smearing it all over the bed and toys. Only after they lubricate everything in the boy’s room do they move on to step two: Christian music all night, every night. “Your son’s monsters are gorgeous, tantalizing demons. Now oil up the boy and put on some soft music,” said Pastor David, basically.
If I’m being honest, I thought this book was strange enough before all the lustful descriptions of Lucifer and furniture oil. If I wasn’t familiar with this author from her work with Magic & the Bible, I would have assumed it was a prank. There’s something too perfectly perverse about the word choice. It’s like something child molestors would write each other to sneak erotic fiction past prison censors. I don’t want you to misunderstand me: I’m accusing Becky Fischer of being an extreme danger to children.
Okay, let’s see if this elaborate plan worked!
No! After anointing the child’s room in the holy oil of Christ, burning all his toys and books, and suffering so, so much more Pastor David, the fallen angel sons of bitches still came back. In fact, they were worse than ever. The monster bullies laughed at Caleb even after his parents came into the room and told the empty corner to go away, in Jesus’ name. Hey, Becky, maybe it’s time to hang up the wolfsbane. Your dumb ass tried everything and couldn’t get rid of the tiniest imaginary problem in your own book. You stupid goddamn toy-oiling cow. I guess we’ll invite Pastor David over and see if he has any more ideas.
Pastor David isn’t surprised that none of this worked. He immediately recognizes the problem as Caleb not being Christian enough. You can’t just throw away everything you own except lubricant and expect Jesus to come pound the sexy men in your closet back through their filthy hole. Sorry, I’m making Becky’s words sound dirty. The way she put it was the little boy was excited about Jesus coming inside of him. Wait, hold on. She used a capital Him. Is that a Christ typo, or is Jesus asking the boy to come inside Him? This may be the least careful I’ve ever seen anyone use words. If you picked up a machete and accidentally cut off your other three limbs, people would describe your death “like Becky Fischer trying to type a sentence about Jesus and children.”
So after another Pastor David visit, this one with a lot more shame and touching, it should be over, right? No! Fucking no!
It was worse than the last time it was worse! Becky’s illustrator, Shannon Wirrenga, chose to represent this horrific escalation by horizontally flipping the same monster art from the last encounter. “Ha ha, I tricked God,” Shannon must have thought.
Caleb’s dad, in Becky’s careful words, “looked at his son with firmness.” Caleb alone had to scream at the empty corner! In Jesus Christ’s name, only an oiled boy’s trembling mouth could send the beautiful men back into the closet! How are you comfortable constructing sentences like this, Becky!?
The secret was humiliation all along. An angel, not the fallen kind, arrives to help Caleb mock the demons. The abs of the beautiful man’s purple chestplate ripple as they point and laugh. Becky, dropping another heavy hint this is all taking place inside a lonely child’s imagination, describes the monsters as “comical cartoon characters he had seen on TV.” If you remember, it’s how they were introduced as well. Which means Caleb imagined the exact creatures from a show he saw, his Christian parents told him they were bad angels, he imagined bad angels for a while, and then defeated them by imagining nice angels. It’s almost as if religion had nothing to do with this and tomorrow’s interdimensional intruders will be determined entirely by the last thing a little boy thought about before bed. Or, and this is equally likely, all of this is real shit the creator of the cosmos gets involved with. No one will ever know! Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Caleb’s parents don’t know what’s going on ha ha ha ha ha HA HA HA HA!!!
As if there was anything to wrap up after the perfectly structured tale of “child predator writes book about family losing mind,” there are seven bonus pages included with MONSTERS in my closet But Not for Long! called “Extra Notes for Mom & Dad.” Maybe this will help make sense of what we read.
No! Fucking, again, no! This woman, Jessica, only wrote a letter to Becky to complain about her bedwetting son and how he was haunted by laughing ghosts. This reminded her of Scooby Doo, so they threw away “all Scooby Doo materials” to impress God enough to fix her son. This story is so remarkably close to Becky’s book she either stole this moist boy’s trauma or made the letter up. It’s definitely the second one, but either way, Becky sucks. I don’t know which senator should spearhead this, but every parent who ever left their kids with this dumbfuck liar who writes book-burning propaganda about bedwetters should be chemically castrated. I mean, come on. Becky Fischer wrote a sock puppet letter to her own book that summarized the whole thing only with Scooby Doo and pee. I’m just not sure someone with this kind of judgment should be making guesses on how God would deal with closet hunks.
Reading the fine print of the Conclusion, it looks like anyone who owns a Tao Te Ching or a Scooby Doo DVD gives demonic spirits a “legal right” to “interfere in the lives of your family members in a variety of ways.” It sounds scary, but Becky also seems to be saying Caleb was dealing with a worst-case scenario. So before you transform your home into an empty tomb of soft Christian music and tongue-speaking, know that most demons will do something less traumatic than giggling.
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