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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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: M Jahi Chappell, the hunkiest angel in the oiled closet of our hearts.
As many nice guys know, the cost of good behavior is a sexless death. Sorry, kind-hearted virgins, but women only sleep with assholes. Hold on, what if there was a way to pretend to be an asshole? You could still be nice deep in your heart, but those wet babes wouldn’t know until it was too late. Oh, man, a book based on that terrible idea would be nuts!
HOW TO PICK UP WOMEN LIKE AN A**HOLE (NICE GUYS DO FINISH FIRST IF …) sounds like it would be that book, but isn’t. To be as clear as possible, it isn’t fucking anything. In 2018, Willis Combs set out to maybe write a sex predator disguise manual for “nice guys,” but ended up writing nothing for nobody. No author has ever said less about any subject. If your stepsister’s swimsuit ever touched your taekwondo gi in the dryer, you know more about human sexuality than Willis Combs. And if you’ve ever drawn a penis on a toilet paper dispenser you’re a better writer than Willis Combs. If you wrote a book called Making A Cheese Sandwich where you explained how to ask your local library for bread, then explained how to ask your local library for bread again, Willis Combs would have to admit, “Your book is better than mine; I blame women, filthy goddamn women.”
You might think I’m being cute, but this dumb son of a bitch really did write a book with three pieces of advice any third grader knows, and none of them have anything to do with the title. Then he repeats them for maybe fifty pages and I say maybe because the stupid incel fuck didn’t include page numbers in his book. Okay, you’re prepared enough. Let’s read HOW TO PICK UP WOMEN LIKE AN A**HOLE.
The first “chapter” is called Confidence or Arrogance?, but after he’s done explaining how there’s a thin line between them, he’s out of expertise. There are no examples or advice. Willis keeps starting sections and subsections like he’s about to list new thoughts, but never gets around to it. There’s really nothing like HOW TO PICK UP WOMEN LIKE AN A**HOLE. It’s as if, during 250 different fits of loneliness, he jotted down ideas on how to touch a boob and his big brother printed his Notes app as a prank.
For instance, after not answering his own question on how to appear confident instead of arrogant, he agrees it’s fine if you’re both and moves on to Three Key Tips to Attract Women.
Willis’ first tip to attract women is Being Too Nice, by which he means do the opposite. For instance, do not buy her dinner, which seems like advanced material here in the section getting a woman to speak to us, but I’ll try to remember it for later. We’re still on the first page, by the way. His book has completely fallen apart while the table of contents are still visible.
Willis Combs loves making lists, even if those lists are unfinished, unrelated thoughts he just listed. And in this, the first list on the first page, he already starts to retread old material. Because the other two Key Tips to Attract Women are “Don’t Be Available” and a repeat of this:
Willis says every woman will have her own opinion on confidence and arrogance, which sounds like wisdom to an idiot, but is completely worthless as advice. He says you’ll get better at it the more women want to fuck you, which again, is both true and of no use to anyone. That’s not an opinion. It’s an objective truth you can’t say less than this. Academically speaking, it’s like pointing at a crotch and saying, “I think that’s the spot you’re going for.”
Like a man with a dry dick and a railroad spike through most of his brain, Willis repeats his “don’t pick up the check” advice on the very next page. It is a remarkable combination of failures here. First, Willis has a strangely small number of things to say about this subject he’s dedicated his life to (this is not his only pussy vagrant book). And second, he keeps forgetting he just said those things. It’s like he wakes up every morning with no memory and tattoos that say “you are a horny author” and “don’t let them buy her dinner.” Also, and this is crazy, he says he personally picks up the check? This pubic-mounded dork has only given one piece of actionable advice and he doesn’t even follow it? Jesus Christ. So anyway, to recap Chapter One, confidence is an unknowable mystery, no one understands confidence, don’t buy her dinner, don’t buy her dinner, and buy her dinner. Let’s move on to Chapter Two and see what this fucking dumb a**hole has to say about “The 4 Keys To Approaching ANY Woman.”
At the risk of repeating himself, Willis says the first key to approaching a woman is Confidence. Luckily, he’s come up with a way to explain it– it’s holding out your Earth hand for a shake, but here’s the twist: do it as if you expect the person you’re meeting to shake it! Once again, is there dumber advice? This is mathematically the closest words can get to zero. I get we need to start somewhere, but “smile and shake their hand” isn’t a tip. A three-year-old would say, “No shit, bitch.” Think how let down you’d be if you were struggling to find love and bought HOW TO PICK UP WOMEN LIKE AN A**HOLE and this little boy was like, “DurRr, use handshake, but the kind where they touch it.”
After “Key 2: Be Comfortable” and “Key 3: Have Fun,” his next key to approaching women is “Don’t Be Desperate.” And the only tip he gives on how to do this is to not be her witch. You might recognize that as not an expression. What this nice guy did here was use find/replace to soften all the times he called women “bitches.” Because Willis Combs is a stupid a**hole, not a stupid asshole.
This is from the first list in “Chapter 3: How to Talk to Women and Keep Her Interest.” And it’s great! If you hadn’t ever considered smiling, it should really turn things around for you. This grinning ape would be described by any brain doctor as “long dead according to these readings,” but I think Willis Combs has probably had sex. He obviously doesn’t understand how or why it happened, but it did and maybe his non-witchy smiles and handshakes were the key. But now I want you to picture being one of the women who slept with this doofus and finding out about this book. Think of the shame in knowing the time you hooked up with that dull polite boy was closer to a childlike prank than intimacy. The point I’m trying to make is this poontang hunting book is so bad it retroactively ruins what little sex the author already had.
Now that we know the secrets to meeting and captivating women (smiles, not being a witch), let’s move on to asking her out.
As you might imagine, Willis Combs has no thoughts past the most basic one. If you want to ask a woman out, ask her to go out. Again, I’m not saying it’s a terrible idea, I’m only saying it’s not one. If you taught a fish to talk and it wanted to fuck you, these would be its first words. Willis Combs’ game is indistinguishable from the dictionary definition of the concept he’s coaching you in. Before the universe goes cold, there may be men dumber or sillier than Willis, but none will ever be more basic.
Let’s hear some more of his ideas on how to behave while “getting together for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, sometime:”
Wait, what? Buy her the cup of coffee? Witch, you told us at least twice not to do that!
Willis gives some good advice for chronic masturbators who are feeling nervous about entering this awkward social situation armed only with knowledge of smiles: women are nervous too! But I don’t know. It seems sort of suspicious that after a career of psychologically dominating sexy babes, his take on other people’s emotional needs is “only me, and what I’m feeling!” What I’m saying is, Willis shouldn’t count on some girl being super nervous for it to go well with Smiling Guy Who Chased Her Down On the Street.
Let’s move on to Chapter 7: How to Flirt with Women – 7 Key Strategies:
For a book about pretending to be a dick to trick women, there sure is a lot of smiling. Did he spend so much time studying handshakes he sometimes mixes up what smiles mean? Maybe he spent time in a clown prison? Because it would explain a lot if he’s self-publishing this from a clown prison library. Anyway, this chapter collects all the ordinary Earth behavior we’ve learned so far from eye contact to asking her out, but Willis has a pretty fresh idea with Key Strategy #6:
This is the closest thing to a strategy in the entire text– a clumsy, psychopathic gambit to save up all the sincerity for the third date. But what kind of fuck game is that? Did he write this for casual Quaker singles? This was 2018! You know what most men did on a third date in 2018? They put on a mask and ate that ass out for her OnlyFans!
Chapter 8 is about how to bounce back from rejection, where Willis only says “at least you tried” thirteen different ways. You already know in your heart I’m not kidding, so I’m not going to clip them all here. Here’s a nice highlight, though:
This is the only real consolation he gives the reader: when he lets them know it’s not always their fault. Sometimes women are just witches. It’s almost adorable how he wrote an instruction manual for luring girls into traps to harvest their holes, but made this minimal effort to refer to women with respect. I think you’re in the clear after changing that letter, Willis! Those dumb sluts will know you’re one of the good ones!
At this point our author was in a foul mood, so he got to work on Chapter 9: Picking Up Women… MOST FRUSTRATING Thing:
Gah, these goddamn witches! After burning through everything he knows about meeting women (smiles, one other) and writing a chapter on rejection, Willis Combs has run out of positivity. This chapter is just four and a half pages of complaining how jerks get all the girls.
Except he did stop and make another, all new, list of pickup tips.
It’s fucking Smile again!! What a treasure. I’m so glad I found the first dating book written entirely during a shovel attack.
You might be worried Willis has run out of girl ideas, but he comes up with some new stuff in Chapter 10: Get Women at the Bar — Three Telltale Signs That She Wants You To Approach Her. You’ll never guess what they all are.
There’s a certain face you can make that women can’t resist, and it’s going to seem unnatural at first since it’s the face behind you in every mirror, chasing you through every maze. They call it the “smile” and these nude teeth are sweeping the dating scene! I know what you’re thinking: enough smiles. Can Willis please, please restate the thesis of his book again in Chapter 14: Sick of Being Single? Why Do Girls Seem To Like These Jerk Guys? Great idea!
Willis has been asking himself the same stupid question so many times he now thinks it’s world history. The only answer he’s come up with for why girls love jerks is that there’s something wrong with him. And for the 300th time in 45(?) pages, his thoughts are both correct and too basic for a mere “duh.” And that’s all his thoughts on the subject! He has no further insight and moves on to rearranging the same lists. Most pickup books have a heavy sadness theme, but this may be the first one I’ve seen stop mid-page for an emotional breakdown.
Despite the last six chapters being about self-doubt and frustration, Willis Combs thinks you’re ready to move on from all this sport fucking and settle down. Stop smiling at witches and find the right woman with Chapter 16: Looking For the Right Woman?
This soft-skulled panty sniffer, after demonstrating he has never finished a coherent thought about women in his life, is ready to move on from the subject he chose to write a book about. And he thinks my reaction is, “What? No! Not Willis Combs, the dating guy from TV!” Fucking what?
Willis, what are you talking about? You know your readers can Google you, and you should also know there’s no trace of you. You don’t have a reel, a website, or an IMDB page. What is this “dating guy from TV” a reference to? Something you hoped to be by the time the book came out? Did you call into a morning show and teach horny San Bernardino viewers how to shake hands in a club? Or are you talking about your YouTube channel? Because WITCH, PLEASE. You don’t get to call yourself “the dating guy from TV” when 466 viewers have made your video on dealing with rejection your biggest hit.
The next time someone says the key to success is trying your best and sticking with it, tell them about this a**hole and his sad boner who have been trying to make a career out of sex pesting for a decade. Corey Feldman’s band would tell this guy to give up. Wait, what’s this? A bonus chapter? About how to bang old ladies!? Oh, hell yes.
Spectacular. It suddenly occurs to Willis at the very end of his book that he could offer himself to lonely, age-inappropriate widows where his original hip bones would be a talking point. But the best is how his only two ideas on where to find “Older Women” are 1: look them up online, and 2: head to your local old folks bar. What the shit is that? A Motel 6 lounge? A bowling alley? Do you drive around listening for day drinkers crying to Lynyrd Skynyrd? This is not advice! Tell me where to find the loose milfs, Willis Combs! And also, how can you be? Like, what forbidden universe spawned you? For years, you’ve been performing the same one minute of material for an audience of zero!! How many others are like you, slapping their unused boner against the walls of our reality!?!?
I think I’m losing my mind. I just… fuck. I can’t believe someone who only knows two things tried to be an author.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yossarian — an a**hole in the sheets, a genuine smile in the streets.
The year was 1992, and it was a time of Robosaurus! The world wanted car-eating and fire-breathing and Robosaurus was both of those things!
Since Robosaurus is technically a mech, the Dogg Zzone 9000 invited anime expert and YouTuber Geoff Thew on to discuss Steel Justice, aka Robosaurus, the TV series they tried to make seconds after building Robosaurus. Listen here! Or wherever you get podcasts!
Since it was 1992, the TV pilot they made for Robosaurus was not about a mechanic who fought small town corruption with his traveling monster truck show. It was about a cyberpunk detective in a bazooka-ravaged dystopia who wants to die and uses grief magic to summon the spirit of his dead son’s toy. His son, like most people in the Robosaurus future, died of rocket launcher crime. Let’s see if we have a clip:
I’m making it sound like it all happens fast. No. Robosaurus only makes what you could call a “cameo” after a full, feature length movie to kill several ordinary people in a parking lot. But the arrival of Robosaurus is worth every hour of grim voiceover. When Robosaurus finally arrives after the runtime of what would have beenat least three episodes of the proposed TV show, he rules so hard he gives the main character what you could call a “fucking screaming orgasm.” Let’s see if we have a clip:
You might know Phil Hirsch from his exceptionally titled book, 101 Hamburger Jokes. Phil was very bad at one thing: writing jokes about one thing, and he made it his life. He wrote a vampire joke book, an ape joke book, a gorilla joke book, a titty joke book, and a naked titty joke book. And I think I was speaking for everyone when I learned about those and said, “Awesome, yes, I already said yes, I’m listening, and I’m very listening.”
If you’re wondering which ones we’re looking at today, I have good news:
LAUGH ‘TIL YOU BUST (1964) and CAN YOU TOPLESS THIS? (1967) are collections of cartoons somehow related to tits, carved into innocent flesh to summon a lesser pun demon. The female form is the main inspiration for all art since the dawn of time, and provides limitless opportunities for delight and whimsy. “No it don’t, fuck you, there are exactly five kinds of honker jokes,” said Phil Hirsch, adamantly and repeatedly over the course of his two books on the subject.
Phil’s boob cartoons each fall into one of five categories: boob life hacks, being problematic even for a titty joke, the small breasted deserve to die, having boobs makes everything impossible, and what are those pointy things and what do they do? I’ll come up with cute names for them and arrange them into a list starting… now:
Boobs are an extra set of hands or an advantage when finishing a close race, and you might be asking, “How is that funny?” I’m so glad you brought that up. It’s not! Ever! Phil approached boobs like a bronze age Spider-Man villain figuring out every last application of their weird super power. He was sitting around writing jokes like, “Maybe cans could steer a horse? Maybe you could tear one off and play basketball? Hmmm… is basketball funnier than the look in my boy’s eyes as the car sank into the river and he realized I couldn’t save him? I, Phil Hirsch, honestly can’t tell.” Let’s start with LAUGH ‘TIL YOU BUST.
A single panel cartoon has to create the characters, setting, situation, and punchline using only a drawing and a line. It’s an extremely hard thing to get right. This asshole drew 4% of a cop questioning a pair of tits in a void after their owner was kidnapped, and there’s no joke. There’s just the implication that this woman, after a maniac broke into her home and tied her up, had to poke her boobs against a phone in her desperate attempt to live. That’s awful. And also, maybe she didn’t? Boob-dialing a phone wouldn’t solve all her problems since she was also gagged. So did she squeeze them together to fart Morse code at whoever picked up? Is that the funny part? The more I think about it, the more sure I am this is the spirit of a murdered woman being hassled by some ghost cop. Probably forever. Phil fucked up so bad, this might be the truest opposite of funny ever created.
Let’s do one from CAN YOU TOPLESS THIS? In this book of 125 “Bust-Selling Cartoons,” there are dozens, maybe thousands of gags where a shirtless woman is carrying something with her boobs. Maybe there’s no punchline, or maybe her boss is telling her she’s doing a good job, but in this one they seem upset? I’m not sure I get it. I mean, I get this universe has different rules than ours, but wouldn’t holding a tray up with your breasts be more amazing than ordinary nipples? Like when I show up to a Super Bowl party carrying two cases of beer and my famous levitating dip, my friends don’t say, “Boo! Lose the tupperware! Let’s see one more dick!!”
This is a tough one to understand. It’s a picture of boobs, but they’ve come to life? Only it’s not a sex genie type of thing– the man with the magic photo uses it to hold pencils. It’s almost as if a cartoonist had been staring at pictures of boobs for so long, wishing those boobs were real for so long, that he forgot why he started. His lonely thoughts, over many years, turned from “GOD I’D GRAB THOSE BOOBS IF THEY WERE REAL” to “I’m back, real boobs. There was no bread, so I rolled the bologna around the mayonnaise. Your favorite. Oh, good, you found my #1 Best Boyfriend pens. You are real.”
“I bet having boobs in your life would really help with your bowling grip,” said one expert on tits to another.
“Yeah, it’s probably why Fred’s wife is always bleeding from three holes in her chest,” said the other.
“Buzz! Therm! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY WIFE!” said Fred.
Fred’s wife said nothing, still deep in the afterglow of getting her left breast groped to completion by the sure-fingered claws of a local bowler.
So the joke here is that he hung his umbrella on her tits on his way out, which is astonishing because despite it being both, I think you’d call this rude before you called it sexual assault. Mrs. Hembottom had to ask this guy how dare he two very different ways. I don’t think I understand the joke he was trying for. Is there a certain bra size where you stop being human and become furniture? Oh my god, is that the premise of these books!?
This one is great. Ha ha she’s resting her notebook on her boobs! “It’s so readably close to my face!” she says. “Oy Ssp readab;u c;pse tp ,mu gsvr@” she types.
This is how people had to masturbate in the library before the Internet. They’d wait until someone with very long, very flat boobs had to carry two extra books. When you ask for a Chaucer at a sex dungeon, a woman will come out dressed like this and pee on your glasses.
Page after page, the contributors to LAUGH ‘TIL YOU BUST and CAN YOU TOPLESS THIS? come up with genius boob innovations. For instance, you could take shelter under a woman if she was 11 feet tall, had breasts the size of grizzly bears, yet also rode the human bus. How silly! Where could an idea like this even come from? “It came to me while I was taking pictures of wet feet on the bus,” whispered a voice behind me just now.
The thing nobody tells you about tits is you can dress them up like a hat and walk right across any international border. “I can tell by the luscious jugs on your sombrero it’s a legal hat and not human trafficking, sir. Wait, stop. Let me get out my updated regulations… weapons… narcotics… ah, here we go: hats! Okay… ‘hats are considered contraband unless real, determined by the following: by ordinance 36D, no real sombrero shall lack two heaving womanly breasts up to and including legs.’ So… wait. Y– Okay, yeah, I think you’re free to go. Welcome home, sir and hat.”
What the fuck am I talking about? I’m melting my brain trying to figure out these cartoons, so let’s move on to something I understand better: thoughtless zaniness turned to hate crimes by the passage of time.
In the ’60s, no one thought to ask, “Will the titty jokes of our worst cartoonists age well?” It would have been absurd. They were too busy thinking things like, “If a woman was tall enough, and her breasts large enough… my god, according to these calculations you could stay dry at the bus stop!” Anyway, here are some 58-year-old boob jokes you’re going to have a real problem with:
It takes a real specific type of racist to draw this and then wonder how the people in it keep their tits out of food. You tell us! You drew that duck-billed turtle monster! You can’t invent a whole new creature and go, “What’s the deal with creatures and their soup titties? I mean, aaah, I’m not a fashion guy, but I’m pretty sure you can’t wear a tomato bisque bra with a ponytail femur, Gorpdar!”
Oh my god, d-did that pilgrim just milk a prisoner? And there’s no punchline!? No setup!? What the fuck is… where is he going with it? Does the joke take place months from now after he’s made it into prank cheese!? This is the horror reveal in an Ari Aster movie. MY GOD, THIS IS A NIGHTMARE.
“Hey, lady, you signed the paper that said we could stop work to smugly grope any items or packages shaped like a woman. You’re lucky Fred isn’t here. He’s tear these plastic titties right off with that grip of his. Oh, keep looking at me cranky like that. Yeah, I’m getting close.”
The setup for this joke is that a maniac at Big Hank’s Topless Cafe fucking bit this waitress on the boob so hard his dentures came out. And the punchline for this joke is Big Hank does not care. It’s not exactly ha-ha funny, but it makes a kind of sense if you fucking hate women and want to bite them.
So did Sam…? Hmmm… So did he, instead of cleaning this customer’s windshield, wipe down his wife’s cleavage? Is this a bit about sexual assault or the lengths Sam will go to get out of work? “Welcome to Sam’s, where full service means I’ll molest your wife with an old rag. So maybe just fill up your car and get the hell out of here?”
Oh my god. Oh my god, no. This cartoonist’s entire idea was “sex workers, but kids,” and Phil Hirsch said “hilarious, yes, draw that I want that.” And he wasn’t disappointed. He put it in the book. If you found a dead body holding this you would instantly say, “Well, I see why someone killed this piece of shit.”
So these women at a nudist colony run into an unrelated naked man who grabs them and runs for the woods. And instead of screaming, one of them says, “Sir, I believe you have mistaken us for nude women who get kidnapped when, in fact, we are nude women who play miniature golf. Sir, my name is not Flesh Flesh. I’m Margaret, and this is Donna. Donna! Oh, Donna must be asleep, and sir, I’ll thank you to stop biting me.”
Some jokes really require the right context. Like if you only say, “A police officer broke into a woman’s home to tear her clothes off,” the joke won’t land. You have to add, “She is fine with it because he’s probably hunting transvestites.” Get it? This one is a sex crime and a hate crime! Someone sat down to write a joke about tits, any joke about tits, and landed on “What if an unspeakable thing happened humorlessly?” This is troubling! I’m sorry I brought it to your attention!
If I’m understanding this correctly, this woman is saying “Anyway, my boss is groping me, so I’ll talk to you later.” And it’s a joke because administrative assistants used to have buzzers but also sometimes called their torso buzzers? I feel like I’m giving them too much credit. A sex criminal’s therapist made them draw this for art therapy. If I saw this cartoon hanging on a refrigerator I would know without opening it it was full of lady heads.
This is aggressively not good. It’s the first nervous joke the squarest virgin would try during his first visit to a topless bar. I hope this cartoonist is still alive to know that in a book where most cartoons are drawings of horrible crimes with no punchline, this one stands out as a notably bad one. If a doctor was telling you he couldn’t save your legs and this joke, he would call them bad news and worse news, in that order.
“‘You’ll die, but at least your final moments will be spent topless!’ Is that anything? Is that funny? Maybe I’ll ask one of my prisoners as I milk her.” – This Cartoonist
A lonely man fondles his television. Another cartoon done! Wait, maybe it needs something? Oh, of course. He’s a creep! Just a lecherous, evil pervert getting off on how he’s perfectly recreated an actress’s nipples using the volume and channel knobs, and she has no idea. Ha ha, he’ll never be anything to anyone, but if he was, he’d be a murderer. Get it!?
“I HAVE EXCAVATED TWO TONS OF SAND! CONQUERED PHYSICS THEMSELVES! ALL TO LEER AT YOUR NAKED CHEST, M’LADY! HELLO, YES, HI! I’M DOWN HERE! DON’T SCREAM, I HAVE A KNIFE, M’LADY.”
Between the two books, there were about thirty variations of this– kids stealing a sunbathing woman’s top and stranding her alone and topless. I don’t have a bit about it; I just wanted you to understand that many, many contributors heard “sexual humor book” and their first and only idea was “maybe something with kids?” Then somehow they all landed on the same “kid steals a bikini” gag. Well, not all. Let me show you one of the weirder ones:
Phil Hirsch knows so many unique madmen. What misfiring pervert brain had this train of thought? Let’s say it was a trend for busty women to wear their names on their shirts at the time. Fine, maybe. I don’t know shirt trends now, much less a decade before I was born. He saw that and decided that since these names were on the boob part of the shirt, they must have something to do with the boobs. So now if, say, a child wanted to wear one of these shirts they could not, because they don’t have boobs yet, and thus no name. So instead they would wear a placeholder shirt so they could be sexually objectified at a later date. See it’s not weird! They’re telling you to wait to stare at their chests! IT’S NOT WEIRD!
I can’t believe how fucked up these books are. Let’s get out of this section with just a regular groping:
This captures that hilarious moment after a man refuses to explain his sexual assault! I bet the first caption to this was “Yes. Yes, this is enough fleŝ̷̟͐̀̽̑ͅh for the Corn Mȧ̶̗̦̌͠͝ͅn to feed. It shall be a fine hunt, a bountiful harvest, b̸̜̯̋̏rothers!”
In a world where a book of topless cartoons is a good idea, there’s nothing more useless than having a small bra. Here are some outrageous zings and japes about those subhuman flat cows who think they’re people!
Look at how cranky this poor woman’s husband is. He’s so cranky about how her goddamn tiny boobs don’t goddamn jiggle during badminton he’s going to rejoin clothed society.
I like this one because she immediately knows what this guy means. Something about his tone made it clear he’s not saying, “you seem too kind-hearted to be a sex worker.” He’s absolutely saying, “Why would the owner of those trash boobs ever take her top off?” Again, it’s not ha-ha funny, but it makes sense if you think the small-breasted deserve to die alone in shirts. Oh no, I’m starting to realize these cartoonists might be bad people.
Part of what makes Phil Hirsch such a great topless cartoon curator is that he’ll put cartoons by all manner of sex criminals in the same book as the guy who drew this, who thinks it’s completely ordinary for a woman to keep her boobs a secret until her wedding night. It’s sort of a relatable situation, though; right? Ha ha you stay chaste for 35 years to please God, then see your wife’s small tits, ha ha, and act so disappointed she knows, ha ha, she knows you’ll never be able to make love to her!
I’m not kidding when I say this sad Amish couple starting their sexless life together was on the same page as a cartoon about a topless diner where a customer told the waitress to make a shake out of her breast milk. From this book, it’s impossible to know if 1967 was a lawless breast kumite or a depressing Christian theocracy.
Before talent competitions, did beauty pageants have a part where a judge would publicly measure their tits? That can’t be true. This seems like something a cartoonist would imagine if they had never seen a beauty competition and rated all women by bust size, but also did not trust women to tell the truth about their bust size. There was probably a rough draft of this where the judge was ponderously eating a pair of each contestant’s panties.
“Durr, I don’t know how anything works,” says one naked woman. “Nothing at all,” responds the other naked woman. The joke here isn’t great, but the author really understands women.
Think of how obsessed you would have to be with boobs that you would find a medical breast reduction, with no further context or details, a fully complete joke. This is like saying, “What else is in the news? Have you guys heard about this? There’s a new kind of diaper you throw away. What’s next? A diaper you can’t eat out of?”
This angry man hates small breasts, but not as much as weak drinks and lumpy gravy. “That’s right, you stand there and listen, you small-breasted beast,” hissed this cartoonist at his silly drawing. “Aiiieeeeeee!!!!” he shrieked at his penis for the next hour.
I don’t really get this one. No, wait, I see it now. I guess it’s kind of funny. Well, it might not be after I explain it, but let me try: her boobs aren’t very big, so no one at the topless club will want to look at them. Ha ha and they say you ruin a joke when you explain it. Tell that to this waitress who is unemployable because of her small breasts!
We’ve already seen a few versions of this “your tits aren’t good enough for topless waitressing” joke, but I liked this lady’s smile. The cartoonist could have had her react to this humiliation in so many ways, but he chose “I’ve been waiting my whole life to pop that shirt off.” And maybe she’s happy because she knows giant boobs aren’t always an advantage…
I hope you’re ready to laugh, because these buxom ladies can’t keep their tits out of anything!
The bartender seems to think this dumb dingus keeps flopping her boobs into the drinks on accident, but there are only two glasses on the bar and nothing within her arm’s reach. This is no accident. What could this woman be doing other than trying to drink with her tits? None of these cartoonists know anything about boobs, but this one definitely thinks you can breastfeed in reverse.
Oh, that’s cute. The singer’s breasts are so big they made her a special microphone stand!
But I don’t know if it was cute enough to put it in both books, Phil. And now you have me thinking about it, what is this shit? Dolly Parton had already been performing for 10 years with ordinary equipment when this book came out. And Led Zeppelin didn’t make a special dick canal in Robert Plant’s microphone stand. You idiot, Phil. What’s next, a woman who can’t wait for trains because her giant rack pokes over the tracks?
Every other man in these books greets women by grabbing their breasts and pulling. And here, in the one situation where that would be helpful, is when they’re a perfect gentleman. Fucking unbelievable, Phil.
Let’s forgive Phil and put ourselves in this world where the bowling foul line extends invisibly upward and any other player from around the bowling alley can walk up to you and declare you crossed it. Are you picturing it? Okay, great. Now her boobs should be funny.
This one is fun because in order for it to work, the woman had to have taken a job as “Colette the Human Cannon Ball” without ever testing the cannon out. They were going to try launching her, for the first time ever, in front of a packed stadium. She was going to get smeared across the top of the tent and hear a voice say, “Welcome. We are the 17 previous Colettes. You are now member of the Dumbest Ghosts Ever Squad.”
Like Colette XVIII, this woman agreed to perform without a single rehearsal. “Wait, I can’t clang these cymbals because of my boobs” she suddenly realized. But then the MacGyver of paraplegic swimsuit percussion bands thought, “If I aim them just right, I should be able to hit them together above my head.” She was right, and we’ve come to the end of her story.
One major problem with big boobs is they’re… always getting caught in martini glasses!
It happens so often, sometimes cartoons about it don’t even get captions. “Oh, no! Not again, again!” I imagine her boss would say.
These two men ordered one bowl of titty soup for the table and they think it’s modern topless society that has the problem.
Phil, I was hassling you about including too many cartoons about boobs stuck in glasses and kids stealing bikinis, but you might have overdone it with the titty soup jokes too.
Whether it’s because the cartoonist misunderstood comedy, or whether they had no breast experience, not all the jokes included in these books make sense. Let’s explore some of these mystitteries together.
Phil, how bad do you have to be at making boob puns to accidentally publish a nutsack pun? Was it an accident? A prank? A dying man is about to fuck a tree’s balls– this is no time for clownery!
So this flustered man has gone to a topless restaurant and ordered a plate of fruit? And it comes unprepared in a big pile? And when it gets there he looks away and paws blindly into the food!? And touching a breast is his worst nightmare!?!? No! No, on behalf of my universe’s laws, I refuse this! Take this back to hell with you, Phil!
“I have a cartoon about a woman with three boobs, but I don’t have a punchline yet,” said Bob.
“What? Punchline? Boobs? I’m hearing a lot of these words for the first time here, Bob,” replied Phil. “But they sound great. Let’s put the thing in the book the way it is.”
“I have taken off my belt. Time for my Earth breasts to fall into my human pelvis, as they do SQWAAARK.”
“Hark, fellow this-planet-native, KAAAAWWW, I have the opposite problem.”
“I’m Mabel. I’m here to see the boss,” says Mabel by wordlessly heaving one breast through the door’s smaller boob door. I don’t have anything mean to say about this one. I only wish this story went on forever.
I’m not sure what is happening here. Is the woman on the right a witch, and this is some kind of anti-titty curse? Is this how women settled conflict in the ’60s– facing off and imagining each other with smaller and smaller breasts? It’s one thing to have the punchline of your comic be “unwanted groping” or “train tears your tits off” but this unexplainable madness? This might be worse.
“Bleep blorp, we are robots! We have learned to be aroused by your fleshy mounds, though we never learned their names or function! Certainly this is a coherent comedy premise, bloop!”
“No need to explain this one,” said the cartoonist drawing a customs agent staring at tits.
Is this some kind of metaphor for how 1967 men could only perceived women through a pornographic lens? Or did someone hide half a dead body under a weirdly gigantic nudie magazine? I understand the human brain instinctively wants to put puzzles like these together, so I apologize for leaving you with so many unanswered questions. To make up for it, I’ll end things with a brilliant one.
After so many cartoonists tried to turn sexual harassment into art, I’d argue one finally did it. I challenge anyone to say “show me your tits” more artistically than this.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: James Boyd, who is the martini glass stuck to the titty of our heart.
We discovered immediately that we were all desperate to talk about Turbo-Teen, the poor boy who was also a Trans Am. The ordinary high schooler with a car secret who was also sometimes a famous superhero operative? The helpless idiot who was maybe an unkillable death machine? Across thirteen car-boy episodes, animation maniacs Joe Ruby and Ken Spears created and destroyed an insane cartoon world where every detail was a new question or a forgotten previous detail. And again, we could not wait to talk about it. There is nothing any of us ever wanted to do more than this podcast about Turbo-Teen.
What else is there left to say? Bye, it was the best show! “Brett Matthews turns into a red sports car,” said the convincing human form of the franchise’s only toy! Turbo-Teen fucking rules and we will never forgive the ’80s for abandoning it.
