Imagine a box in your own home that could play computerized video arcade games! Now imagine they were outdated, poorly made, and designed under oppressive restrictions written by a Nazi’s coolest friend. Also, that box I mentioned? It doesn’t exist, but you can pre-order one with a $100 deposit. Also, that box you pre-ordered? It got delayed! Sorry, we meant canceled! Today on the Dogg Zzone 9000 we try to make sense of the extremely cursed Intellivision Amico with Internet Nintendo Game Champion, Pat “The NES Punk” Contri!
Pat is a true podcasting professional who brought his own sound clips and far more knowledge than Sean’s pathetic ten hours of research managed to uncover. And thank the dunk shoots of Flazer, because the Intellivision Amico’s fall from bad idea to failure to embarrassment to scandal to fraud has spanned several years and 280,000 hours of YouTube drama. You will be astonished at how many bad ideas it took for Tommy Tallarico to turn 17 million dollars into nothing. Speaking of astonishingly bad ideas, patrons get a bonus podcast where Pat and Brockway try to decode the language of foreign phone games from 2005 in a very special Seanbaby’s Book Game.
Throw the ball at the pins. A second bowling tip. These are the traditional ways people do bowling. But what if I told you your very mind held the secrets to even more bowling success? What if I told you your brain could be rewritten to achieve anything and yes, yes, that includes better bowling. Better bowling! What fool would squander this gift on anything else!?
HOW YOU CAN BOWL BETTER USING SELF-HYPNOSIS by Jack Heise, author of HOW YOU CAN PLAY BETTER GOLF USING SELF-HYPNOSIS, is a 1961 guide on tricking your subconscious into playing your favorite sport for you. And yes, I know that sounds dull. “This doesn’t sound crazy at all,” you might complain to the recent critic of NINJA MIND CONTROL and HOW TO MAKE THAT BITCH SQUIRT. You’re wrong, though. As you’ll see, the author of this book is filled with the most shrieking demons, but first, look at the back cover:
Since the title already explained the book better than perfectly, Jack Heise had no more words to sell you on the idea of hypnotizing yourself to bowl better. So for the back cover, all he did was put eight frames of Buzz Fazio over the words “Buzz Fazio in action.” “Dear fucking God I’ve created a masterpiece,” he must have said. “I will give this child the name of a star pirate in a bowling cartoon,” Buzz Fazio’s parents must have said. “It’s a no on Strike Dakota: Bowling Commando,” Hanna Barbera must have said.
Speaking of Buzz Fazio, like I will be for the rest of my life, the book opens with bowling tips from the bowling stars. Buzz tells readers to relax, but to never give up in the battle of wills against the pins. Buzz Fazio has seen too many spineless weaklings give up before the ball has even been thrown, and has no further advice. Buzz Fazio comes complete with ball and war saddle; Tenpain the Bowlsteedâ„¢ sold separately.
Next we hear from Therm Gibson, which is what a FAMICOM SUPER BOWLING programmer would call you if you were the 9th reserve member of USA BOWL STAR TEAM.
Therm Gibson (Member, Brunswick Advisory Staff of Star Bowlers)’s bowling advice is complicated, but if I’m understanding him correctly, he thinks you should knock over the pins you goddamn idiot. And if you don’t get them all at first, get the rest next time you fucking son of a bitch. And also like Buzz Fazio, Therm Gibson says you should relax because I don’t think there’s a lot of bowling tips available. Once you know which direction to throw the ball, you’re mostly done learning. All that’s left is to look within… to find that which isn’t bowling, and destroy it. But first, Don “Anxiety Hunter” Carter:
The author of this book asked “Mr. Bowling” Don Carter for some soothing hypnosis tips and got back a declaration of war against Tension. Strangle it with your concentration! Relax until it’s begging to die!! “Mr. Bowling” Don Carter never really came back from World War II!!!
Jack also asked honorary “Queen of Bowling” Marion Ladewig for her take on concentration. And since it was 1961, Marion said, “Us dames don’t think we can do anything right, and maybe we’re right. Not about most things, but probably that. What was the question?”
You’re maybe wondering, “What does any of this have to do with self-hypnosis? These are dry bowling tips from 63 years ago!” Slide a bayonet into that tension, pal. Sometimes crazy hides in a dark maze behind 63-year-old bowling tips.
After the celebrity bowling essays, Jack includes several pages of basic bowling instructions. If you’ve ever had bowling star Therm Gibson impatiently tell you to, just, knock the fucking goddamn pins over, you know all these, so we can skip to page 27 which is when Jack finally begins Chapter 1: Here’s A Promise For Better Bowling.
As someone who has recently read the distilled wisdom of every top mid-century bowler and a twenty page bowling manual, I find myself instantly out of my depth. Three paragraphs into the first chapter, I’ve discovered I don’t understand about 40% of bowling words and I was expected to have had multiple bowling instructors before reading this. This is like opening your lovemaking book with, “Look, we’ve all unmonned a pubis during a double penetration. Maybe your wife can’t sit still on strangers or the chili was room temperature. Hi, I’m Buzz Fazio.”
What I’m getting at is author Jack Heise is absolutely certain every person reading is a Grand Ballsman or higher bowler. He’s also pretty sure you are terrified of bowling in front of people, so the first chapter is mostly about the coward living inside you.
Not to make it sound too scary, but Enrico Marino, who is named both Hank and Bowler of the Half-Century, says the fear of competition will “make a bowler a stranger to himself.” That’s where the obvious and only solution, self-hypnosis, comes in. You have to go deep inside your own mind and plant hypnotic bowling suggestions. You have to put yourself into a trance science can’t explain and replace your anxiety with strikes.
Here is where Jack starts to reveal what’s wrong with him. He knows you don’t believe in this hooey, so he’s going to prove it works. Not by teaching you how to bowl, but by teaching you how not to stand up.
So now you either can’t get out of your chair or Jack has shattered your faith in his mind powers. And it’s a great example of how the rest of the book is laid out. An avid bowler struggling to overcome his bowling insecurity with hypnosis gets very insecure about whether the reader is believing him, so he’ll pivot to desperately proving himself. For instance, he thinks bowling scores are determined by mental focus alone. Which means the next twenty pages are him explaining how there is no correct way to physically throw a bowling ball. It’s like stopping halfway into a book on lovemaking to say, “I’ve asked around, and no one knows what any of these holes do.”
Lee Jouglard, holder of the 10-year best average, and Eddie Lubanski, accolades unlisted, both teach bowling, and both agree you shouldn’t listen to them. This is only a small sample of the anti-bowling data Jack has collected. He is working backwards from the conclusion that hypnosis is the key to bowling, and he doesn’t care how many pages it takes to prove it. It’s what a logician might call “inductive foolishness” before smugly countering your fireball sorcery. And while I have you interested, ladies, let’s get a woman’s take on things.
Both women bowlers told Jack the same thing. “We’re not strong, or good at bowling, but our disproportionate interest in dance makes us strong bowlers!” It’s not a great point, but it supports Jack’s theory that the only measure of skill in this sport is how well you can hypnotize yourself. In fact, if good bowlers tell you they aren’t hypnotized, they’re liars. I’m not doing a bit. We’re at the point of Jack’s logic where unhypnotized bowlers actually are, even if they don’t know it.
This is madness, and may explain why Buzz Fazio and Therm Gibson’s essays were so strange. I think Jack asked them for hypnosis tips rather than bowling tips since he’s decided the latter is useless for bowlers. He’s now spent about 60 pages trying to prove it. This is like a book about making love with 11 chapters dedicated to drawing Sonic the Hedgehog, and what do I mean by that?
A: It absolutely works.
B: It might work, but not how or why you think.
C: Something terrible happened to you in a bowling alley.
D: You’re still hypnotically stuck in the chair from earlier and can’t quite get his ears right.
As I mentioned earlier, Jack is very insecure. He’s worried you might not believe him when he claims every bowler who isn’t hypnotized is lying. So now his book is about that.
“Those fools think relaxing and coordination aren’t hypnosis,” Jack complains. I mean, how else would someone get good at bowling? Rhythm? Like a woman!? Jack can’t fucking believe the reader is still arguing with him. “SELF-HYPNOSIS IS THE ONLY ANSWER,” he screams. This is the angriest a bowling book has ever been with me, and I left Marion Ladewig’s Adequate Bowling For Sad Girls at the altar.
Jack eventually wraps up his argument that all success is hypnosis even if you don’t call it that or it’s something else.
So to sum up: nonsense, incoherent straw grasping, insanity, IT’S THAT SIMPLE don’t MAKE JACK REPEAT HIMSELF. So now that you know there’s only one secret for better bowling, self-hypnosis, let’s move on to Chapter 7: Here’s the Real Secret For Better Bowling.
Do you know why Bobby Layne of the Pittsburgh Steelers was a good bowler? You have until after 1.5 Buzz Fazios in this sentence to guess, which means Buzz F– THE ANSWER IS SELF HYPNOSIS. All athletes use it, especially the ones who say they don’t, which gives them an advantage in bowling no bowler would have. This point is reworded more times than most people would consider possible, until finally Jack moves on to actual, real hypnotic techniques. On page 79, Jack finally gives three tests you can do on yourself to see if you’re capable of hypnosis: making your hand heavy, putting yourself to sleep, and desperately needing to swallow. Together they are the three pillars of bowling skills. And maybe it’s all this mental focus, or maybe it’s because his book is finally doing something, but this chapter has given a surge of confidence to our once sheepish author:
“I’VE SEALED YOUR THROAT AND GIVEN YOU UNLIFTABLE HANDS, MAYBE STOP ASKING ME FOR PROOF,” says Jack. And good for him. Unfortunately, this conviction doesn’t last long.
Jack is worried most bowlers won’t have time to induce a coma before every frame, and you might try to just “picture” bowling better to save time. First of all, nice try– that’s self-hypnosis, dummy. And second of all, m-maybe time isn’t constant? Oh no, Jack is losing a weird argument to a strawman. That means it’s time to spin it off into its own chapter:
TIME MOVES DIFFERENTLY WHEN YOU’RE HYPNOTIZED! This means you lose again, ceaseless voice telling Jack he’s wrong about bowling, wrong wrong about everything. And this time Jack has indisputable proof of how time distortion exists and will help your bowling score! Well, not proof, but some very convincing anecdotes. Okay, one anecdote, and it isn’t about bowling. Or sports. What Jack has is a Linda Darnell story about a time she ran lines with her doctor before a play:
Jack never provides another example of time dilation other than an actress flying her Beverly Hills physician halfway across the country to read her a script. “Oh, it felt like time was just dragging? Yeah, that was definitely some… metaphysical aspect of t-the, the hypnosis!” said Rosemary Casey, writer of Late Love.
So we’ve established all bowling success is determined by self-hypnosis, and all things are self-hypnosis when you think about it. Also, self-hypnosis slows down time because one -only one- actress used it once. “The bowlers will still fail,” hissed a voice from inside author Jack Heise. “No! You’re not listening! You don’t get it!” Jack howls at the reader.
Jack has explained this basic concept as many ways as he can. He’s answered every single one of your goddamn questions. So he’s only going to do it for one more chapter. And then another. He has lost the argument over whether this exists, and if it does if it works, a thousand different ways. You might be thinking, “Wouldn’t this drive a person crazy?” Yes. And finally, on page 119, his mind has had enough.
Jack ends his book like he wrote it. By screaming at some ignorant fool who knows he’s a liar. HE IS DONE ARGUING WITH YOU, UNHYPNOTIZED BOWLERS. Hold on, it looks like there’s an addendum where he… oh my god, no. No. It’s an entire chapter where he answers difficult questions he imagines the reader is asking him. This was already your whole book, Jack! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, JACK!?
Is Jack “certain” self-hypnosis is this simple? Um, try “absolutely certain.” Go ahead and check the other books! Any of them! They’ll all tell you the same thing: THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BOWLING BETTER AND A SECOND THING! aaaiiiIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!
Imaginary reader, I have imagined a friend for you, but they have called our powers IMPOSSIBLE! Oh, is “science” now “impossible!?” THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT! STOP FUCKING LISTENING TO THEM, THEY’RE IGNORANT! I SHOULD NEVER HAVE IMAGINED THEM IN YOUR LIFE!!!
He shouts at himself like this for eight more pages. Eight. And then, without warning, he informs us this was all some kind of crucible and we are now members of Bowling League, a fraternal hypnosis free bowling league. The book has a third ending and it’s a reveal this was all a trap!
Congratulations, Bowling League brothers and sisters! We watched a man wrestle his demons and lose for an entire book, but we leave not with pity. We leave with official documentation of how we’ve “attained the upper level in bowling thinking.” Oh, and I bet you think that’s nothing? Well, IT’S NOT NOTHING MAYBE IF YOU’D OPEN YOUR MIND TO BOWLING SCIENCE YOU’D LEARN IT’S EVERYTHING ELSE THAT’S NOTHING, OH, TORRAK SHALL HEAR OF THIS, I KNOW YOU THINK TORRAK IS NOT AMONG US, BUT YOU’RE WRONG; YOU AND YOUR FRIEND WHO QUESTIONS TORRAK WILL ANSWER TO TORRAK.
In our ongoing series of ’00s reality shows that took all the fun out of immorality, the Dogg Zzone 9000 takes a look at Fox’s The Moment of Truth with beloved scholar and funnyman from the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast, Alex Schmidt!
Alex is our most kind-hearted and positive friend, so we invited him on to discuss this lie detector-based interrogation show designed to humiliate families and mirthlessly reflect our own darkness back at us! Listen here! Or wherever you get podcasts!
Thanks for listening! If you want to support the podcast, please like and subsc—
Perfection. I’m speaking, of course, about the title of the 1978 book by Phil Hirsch and Don Orehek, 101 HAMBURGER JOKES.
101 HAMBURGER JOKES. There are no other three words so descriptive and fun, and I will say that right to an Aliens Versus Predator poster. If I was trying to come up with a funny name for a fake book and my brain landed on “101 Hamburger Jokes,” I would take the rest of the day off to buy trophies. 101 Hamburger Jokes is what we should have called this website. It’s a careless shrug from an accidental genius. It says both “keep your expectations reasonable” and “I’m from a better world, where Zany is the only language.” It is both a wink from a magical comedy pixie and a tired sales pitch from a man holding 70 hamburger jokes.
Betrayal. What is this? Phil Hirsch dressed a burger up like a cat. Then he asked you what he had done. Then he explains, yes, you guessed right: cat-burger, but not some kind of burger-cat like you’re thinking. He’s a cat-burger (burglar), because the burger part is a pun on a concept we didn’t establish. And how dare he. This is many things –many things– but a hamburger joke is not one of them.
Well, yeah. Sure. I mean, what else would it be? This isn’t a hamburger joke. It’s not even a hamburger riddle. This is what you would draw if you were playing a sad Pictionary game by yourself. Sorry, let me translate that into burger. This is a Pictionary clue Veal Armstrong would draw if Bun Aldrin abandoned him on the moon!
Phil published this the year “Cheeseburger in Paradise” was the 32nd most popular song. The song “I’m Your Boogie Man” was literally the number one hit while he was writing it. And there he was in a world of burger and burger soundalike songs expecting readers to think, “A hamburger’s most familiar song? Oh, oh! It’s got to one about range! Something about range, come on, think.” Get the fuck out of here, Phil.
They feel at home on the ra– oh, god damn it, Phil. So even the “101” part of 101 HAMBURGER JOKES was a lie!? Fuck you.
I really wanted to love this book. Let me see if I can find a good one…
No. This feels like the world’s greatest lawyer making a case for why puns should carry the death penalty. Someone really thought they could turn 40% of all words into forced meat references and simply carry on communicating like a human. Oh, and it looks like Phil tried cat-burger (burglar) again, somehow not making a reference to burglary a second time. Phil, if cat-burger (burglar) is your punchline, the set up is either “What kind of a burger steals?” or “What’s the most popular food (and most common occupation) in Cincinnati?”
Phil, you son of a bitch. Don’t make this about meat type.
Oh, very funny, Phil. You’ve made the hot dog the ugliest girl at the meat ball, over in the corner talking to ham. I’m not going to go back and forth like this with you. You know you were wrong for “cat-burger (burglar)” and for trying that desperate “Home on the Range” bullshit two different times. Can we get back to a normal article where we just enjoy your perfectly-named book, 101 HAMBURGER JOKES?
I’ll take that as a yes. Thank you, Phil.
Now that we’re being civil, I want to try to understand what’s happening here. There seems to be a way of things in this hamburger joke world. Is that a human priest marrying those food monsters? If so, it implies they live among us and we legally recognize their love. We share a God and can break His laws together. Maybe if we can understand this universe the jokes will start to make sense?
First off, let’s verify the scale of things. Is that really a full-size priest, or did these snacks climb to the top of a wedding cake to play make-believe with the topper? Is it a world where humans are burger-sized? Let me find one with some hard numbers.
Okay, this is great. I’m not sure what anyone would do with this in any other context. Not laugh, probably, but it does establish the burgers in this book are roughly human-sized and have combat sports. Does that mean a person can box a cheeseburger? If they get hurt do they go to a human doctor or are there meat medical scho– wait, hold on. In this world, do man and meat fuck?
Whoa, that’s closer to a definitive yes than I was expecting. You might notice there is no pun or wordplay in this one. Phil just changed an entire unrelated word to hamburgers, which is cheating even by his loose code of joke ethics. He had to keep those patty holes in his book at all costs. He wanted us to know they were there. Because a kid’s joke book could never come right out and say, “Human men sexually dominate these burger people, and here’s a picture of it.”
I was wrong. I’m so happy I was wrong!
This one is troubling. I think it’s a nightmare Phil has about falling and realizing everyone can see his tampon string (plus he’s a burger dog). We’re offered six (6!!!) choices for the “punchline,” and not a single one of them describes what is plainly a dog burger. If that thing walked onto a cartoon, you wouldn’t have to introduce it. That’s fucking Dog Burger, maybe Puppy With-Cheese. If anything looks at this and says, “Wow, a football stadium with the seats removed,” hit it in the head with a hammer. But forget all that. It’s frustrating and I hate it, but forget it. This one tells us these burgers have smaller, animal burgers as pets! And, maybe more importantly, you leash a burger by shoving one end of the leash inside them where an “asshole” might be found on you or me.
We’re learning a lot. Not about comedy, but about what it takes to build a world where meat can walk and love. Today, if someone started up a discussion about defining burger gender you’d brace yourself for something worse than shitty wordplay, but remember, these burgers live in 1978. And maybe a darker one than ours, because here’s one about blackface:
Let’s give as much credit to a man making blackface burger puns as we can– that picture of hamburger Al Jolson could have been a lot worse. Now, for a lot of reasons, I want to get back to burger fucking.
“Draw me a burger who fucks people,” said Phil, right before Don Orehek won nothing less than the Nobel Prize for Pervert Burger Illustration. Why do they sign headshots afterward? Patty, if you have to ask… look, the point is, anything goes in this world. All burgers are men, horny fuck-champion men, and they don’t care if you’re hot dogs or people.
Or barely lega– wait, oh no. I know how this question is going to sound, but what is the age of consent in a world where you can have sex with cheeseburgers? Because, and again I know how this is going to sound, I’m not going to fuck a burger more than 3 years old.
Let’s ignore Phil’s sloppy reach for a pun here. Phil Hirsch couldn’t write a joke with a burger and a dick hole, and he’s proven specifically that. But he can offer up fascinating ideas. Does this hamburger joke mean the buns are women? How does that work? Is there penetration, or is their reproductive process more like hermit crabs changing shells? How do these living, working, sentient burgers make more of themselves?
Oh my god. Are the burgers made from the remains of the humans? I need to know if that hamburger is going to grind up meat that can beg him to stop or if being ground up is a normal part of a meat’s work day. Is this a ritualized death ceremony? You can’t casually draw a picture of a hamburger walking into a slaughterhouse.
So they’re meat made from flesh, but their blood is catsup!? And some hamburgers rise from the dead to feed on it? And they feed by freaking out at Burger King until someone gives them a medical ketchup transfusion! To think Phil created all of this, a sudden world of hungry burger vampires terrorizing fast food restaurants, just for that gasping beached whale of a punchline… it’s almost beautiful in its tragedy. It’s like lovingly nursing a sick tiger back to health only to sell it to Mike Tyson.
The rules of the hamburger world seem mostly defined by the whims of Phil’s strained puns. So burgers go to school, but either for 1800 years or just to get grilled alive for a few minutes. Their flesh comes from cows, but they have sex with teen humans named Patty. And speaking of, if you live in this world, know this about the burgers, and still name your daughter Patty, what are you doing? No, answer me. Why’d you name her Patty, meat fucker?
I guess the problem with a world built around a dumb idiot’s dumbest wordplay is that Phil keeps squashing meat into words where it doesn’t make sense.
See, look at this stupid son of a bitch. He added the word “meat” to a word but didn’t change its meaning or function. This is like saying “What kind of ball of meat did the meat become? A meatball (meatball)!” A regular thermometer will tell you the temperature of your burger, you fucking dumbshi– oh wait, I just now realized we haven’t established whether or not these burgers are still food.
They are food! But they don’t want to be!? Dear god, when people go through the buffet line, does that baby burger beg for his life? You might think I’m doing a bit where I’m overthinking 101 HAMBURGER JOKES, but I’m not. I genuinely think you need to establish the basic hamburger rules of life and death before it’s funny to kill them. Or maybe not, because look at this fun mess:
So that burger dressed up like a rooster to have sex with chickens, or maybe dressed up like a rooster for another reason and this is a happy accident, but then, in addition to that, a man is stalking him with an axe. To kill the intruder in his chicken coop? Or is he also fooled by the disguise and his intention is to eat what he thinks is a rooster? And if you do kill a chicken who happens to be a burger in disguise, are you disappointed? Do you say, “Oh, gross! It’s not a raw chicken, but a fully cooked cheeseburger! Aww man, and his balls are absolutely drained.”
Jesus Christ! So in the 101 HAMBURGER JOKES world everyone is food, including the reader? This is… fuck. I don’t know what to do with this. It’s like a dad joke you’d tell if you and your son were eating a hitchhiker. Let’s maybe change gears and do a desperate overreaching pun one…
Unidentified? Phil, you have identified hamburgers twice a joke for over fifty jokes! And UFOs don’t “fry” unless… oh damn it, is this more racism? It was a bad idea to try to figure out Phil’s comedy. I’m going back to trying to figure out his worldbuilding.
So hamburgers watch human entertainment, but weirdly translate actor names into their own language? Like Spanish class? What happens if someone has a name that can’t be meat punned like Mads Mikkelsen? Never mind, Meats MikkelSous-vide. One second, though; what happens if a different burger names him Wads Meatelbun?
Now I’m confused. This burger has a human name, but plays baseball in a burger-pun town, and he only throws fastballs? I’m never going to figure this out. Let’s skip to the last hamburger joke and see how Phil wraps this up.
I have to hand it to Phil. This has a clunky set up, but would not get you fired from a mid-tier popsicle stick copywriting job. And what’s this? Some kind of final hamburger joke quiz? Oh, hell yeah.
It’s pretty bold to open a quiz with a repeat of a joke the reader saw one page ago, but it’s even bolder to make the answer to every multiple choice question the write-in option of “I’m a fucking stupid meatball.” Phil Hirsch is an anti-comedy golem built from the sadness of a thousand war crimes, but I can’t remember the last time I read a book with this many surprises.
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Chris Brower, the real meat broilwer who, lettuce say, char beefins the range-iest pickle hams we know!
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