Now that we here at 1900🌠have perfected the podcasting format and risen to the top of the talking industry, we’ve invited our old boss Jack O’Brien, creator and host of The Daily Zeitgeist onto the Dogg Zzone 9000 to show him what we can do. And we blow his entire fucking mind. “You guys are the absolute best,” he probably thought.
Join Jack and Brockway on their Seanbaby-led journey from the very first issue of MAD Magazine in 1952 through every imitator leading up to 1958’s Cracked, the knockoff Jack would help adapt into one of the largest and most influential comedy websites where nothing bad ever happened and our legacies will live on forever as hilarity legends. Listen here! Or wherever you get podcasts!
And now for some foot-nooooooootes:
Below are all the clippings pulled for the show. Hate-read them all now, or scroll slowly along with us as you listen! We don’t care! Aside from buying five pieces of merchandise from our store, there are no rules in the Dogg Zzone 9000!
First, here is the two page pro-Apartheid Lionel Richie parody “All-White Song” from Mad Magazine #263 (1986), and yes, you read that correctly:
And here is the haunting final page of the story “Blobs!” from the very first MAD Magazine.
Moving on to 1954’s Panic, here is the baffling letters section of their first issue:
From that same issue of Panic comes these hilarious moments from the story “MY GUN IS THE JURY!“
And still from Panic, here is a zany panel from “THIS IS YOUR STRIFE!” and four wacky ones from “THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS” featuring fan-favorites Butchered Elephant and Actual Blackface Santa.
This is how Panic advertised itself:
Next up is Stan Lee’s take on MAD, 1955’s Snafu featuring Irving Forbush. Here is the three page gag we discuss where Stan Lee asks, “What’s HAPPENED to our Male Singers?“
Moving on to 1956 and Lunatickle, here is the ad for the Fatsex tube designed for watching men change out of their pantyhose!
And here is 1957’s From Here to INSANITY and “The Misfit,” with their take on what Archie would be like if he was a murderer! Also included from this issue is their outrageous ad for Smellzo, which is a pack of wild boars or maybe a can of bad smell? It’s hard to know!
Also from 1957, here is This Magazine is CRAZY‘s knee-slapping take on toothpaste, GLUM! They also did a shocking EXPOSE’ on what four Hollywood starlets would look like if they were secretly men? Wait, no, not how you’re picturing it. They look exactly the same. We don’t get it either!
Now for the 1958 funnybook Zany! You won’t believe how badly their premise of “cows getting drunk on milk” falls apart!
And our last historical document is John Severin’s 789th version of the 1950s’ favorite joke, Loco Magazine’s “SWITCHEROONEY.” In its entirety!
And now you know the dark history of MAD Magazine knockoffery which led us to where we all are today. You’re welcome. Review and subscribe.
It’s Fucking Day, fuck fans, but that’s not what we’re doing today. We’re doing whatever the Japanese word is for the opposite of that. We’re reading the language study guide and hate crime, HOW TO PICKUP JAPANESE GIRLS PHRASEBOOK by 2 Faced Publishing.
This is “BOOK 3 OF 3” in the “CRAZIEST & MOST CONTROVERSIAL SERIES EVER WRITTEN.” A unimind of undiagnosed personality disorders named Giacomo d’Byron wrote it in 2019 as a companion to HOW TO ATTRACT & MEET JAPANESE GIRLS and HOW TO ATTRACT & MEET MORE JAPANESE GIRLS, which completed a slightly hornier version of a book trilogy he already wrote about how to say naughty things in Japan. Basically, a lonely fart fan taught himself how to speak Japanese and hate women and then wrote six books about both things he knew.
I’d be surprised if you saw the title HOW TO PICKUP JAPANESE GIRLS PHRASEBOOK, and didn’t know this, but it’s a sex predator instruction manual for idiot virgins who prefer their bitter loneliness with a touch of racism. There’s no way it would be anything else. So there was no need to open the book with this warning:
In the current era of human history, it’s rare to see this kind of edginess in the wild. This is the bio of an undercover reporter exposing the dark underbelly of what your kids are calling “The Four Chan.” Giacomo is taunting the reader of an Asian girl hunting manual with, “Oh, does the word FUCK offend you, gay dummy grandma!?” You might be barking up the wrong tree, Giacomo. I feel like your readers* passed the psychopath test the moment they opened your book, buddy.
* According to sales statistics, I’m personally about 17% of his “readers.”
The author has a bit more to say before we get started, mainly about how great he is and the hugeness of his massive dong. He’s terrific, and you’re lucky to be here. This kind of desperate insecurity obviously betrays a couple things about Giacomo d’Byron: he doesn’t know he’s dumber than everyone and his dick sucks. He is self-publishing made-on-demand grifter books about how to say titties in Japanese and he thinks you’ll believe him when he adds, “… but I’m actually very wealthy and cool? The best at sexing, and g-giant penis as well?” He was going for cool and confident and missed so badly he skipped right over unlikably cocky and landed at “childlike psychopath.” I’m not saying he can’t fuck. I’m saying if you’re an eighth grader who once got to second base during a game of truth or dare, Giacomo would have so many questions for you.
Like all great thought leaders, during his meandering intro, Giacomo d’Byron stops to quote himself. It’s a quote about how every Japanese woman wants your cock if you smell good, but despite spelling almost all the words right, this feels more like a magical wish than a racial stereotype. But, and this is real, when he calls them “snow white cum dumpsters” two pages later, that feels more racially charged. In fact, maybe we should speed through this intro. Let’s see… hairy assholes… bust their nectar juices… no, let’s skip this page:
Giacomo seems to think Japanese women are balloons of sex fluids waiting for some, please any, Western-cocked man to come burst them. This isn’t a guide for casual hookups– this is a fan fiction of human relationships written from a Japanese prison. It is unspeakable. If a woman beat a man to death with her shoe and then planted this book in his home, no district attorney would prosecute.
The introduction loops around like this for 16 full pages. We learn that Japanese women are too shy to function, too horny to believe, and will stop the sex entirely if your Japanese accent is inauthentic. Giacomo also reminds the reader they’re very lucky to have his book because these demure sex machines “wouldn’t in their life help you practice these phrases, so don’t even think of asking them.” He repeats this several times, so he seems to think it’s important, but I only mention it because he forgets about it instantly.
The very first expressions Giacomo teaches us are “IMPORTANT PHRASES FOR CONSENSUAL AND SAFE SEX,” which, given his tone, heavily implies there are other types.
I knew -we all knew- going in, this was going to be a dark and stupid book. But maybe not this dark and stupid. This maniac sat down to think about which romantic phrases he’d heard the most and he came up with “STOP IT!” and “NO YOU CAN’T!”
And the first, the very first, supplementary advice he offers is, “if you’re clueless, just ask the bitch,” the thing he explicitly told you was never an option. And his second dating tip is to role play sex crimes with a stranger– no wait, that was his third tip. His second tip was “Japanese pornography is dull.” Which means his opening dating advice is create a sexual assault vibe until you recognize the words STOP IT, and then watch so much pornography you get bored. It’s everything you could want in a sex coach, and holy shit, I guess I should have mentioned by now, Giacomo uses the word “bitch” like it’s a casual, medical term. It’s very, very rare he calls women something else in any context.
This sociopath filled his book with accidental confessions like this. Even his pronunciation guide is psychologically revealing:
He could have chosen any words or phrases to demonstrate those vowel sounds, and he chose the thing he covets most, the thing he hates the most, the only thing he thinks about, the thing he says when he thinks about himself, and fuck you. If you showed this to a chimpanzee, it would sign, “Narcissist. Borderline personality disorder. Incel. Too easy for Dr. Bananas, too much easy.”
Giacomo immediately forgets the premise of his book, and instead of writing a collection of seductive phrases, he just writes whatever with no real structure or reason. A section translating days of the week might be next to a section about butt stuff followed by a second section translating days of the week. There’s also no appendix, so if you forget a butt stuff line you’ll have to thumb through the book randomly while your lover holds her asshole open, waiting for precise commands. Here, let’s go through them in the order they appear!
So in this section on THANKS, he writes ordinary variations of thank you like “thanks” or the classic “thank you more than anything.” Sometimes he’ll remember this is supposed to be a book for tricking horny and confused imbeciles into sex, so he’ll add one about dicks. In this case, he suggests “don’t thank me, thank my cock!” which works with any waitress or hair dresser. No, but let’s be real. This boy has been spending his whole life working on the perfect thing to say after he finally has sex and the best he came up with was “don’t thank me, thank my cock!” It’s like typing, “Guys, if the Rock comes to my 35th birthday party, I’m going to tell him, ‘The Rock… you ROCK!’ he ha! But seriously, Dwayne, thank you more than anything.”
I was promised phrases that would have dripping girls begging for it, but with the line “I love fat girls,” I feel like I either insulted someone or told her she’s not my type. It’s hard to imagine a clumsier pickup line. Maybe “Ass juice?” Just the phrase “Ass juice” and nothing else?
Oh, I was kidding, but there it is right between “Pussy juice” and “Orange Juice.” I always have been a natural lover. Ass juice, ladies.
Here’s what’s stupid about me. I knew almost immediately Giacomo d’Bryon didn’t know anything about women, but I took it for granted he knew something about Japan. And yet look here at the HOBBIES section. He wants me to ask babes in the club if they can teach me to be a ninja? If they can fucking teach me Karate like Miyagi-san? These are things the dumbest fourth grader would ask a Japanese exchange student in 1990. There’s a near 100% chance this goddamn idiot has never been to Japan and he’s running his imaginary conversations with sex-starved Japanese girls through Google translate. Let me check something…
Hmmm… looks like “oshiri no shiru” translates to “Know your butt,” not “Ass juice.” But there are hundreds of typos in his English. Maybe he fucked up his Japanese too? Let me check something else…
Okay, there we go. If we assume he mixed up the vowels in both words we get “Soup butt” which is as close to “Ass juice” as any phrase could possibly be. So now we can be pretty certain he’s a dumbshit in both languages, can only get laid in a make-believe universe where Japanese girls jump on any cock they smell, and most of what he knows about their culture comes from American ’80s movies. He knows nothing about nothing, and if he wasn’t an aspiring subway groper, you might consider his writing of this book to be an act of bravery. Let’s learn some more of his seductive HOBBIES phrases.
Wait, he wants me to ask if she can “teach me Kimono?” What the fuck does that mean? It seems like this phrase would translate to, “I am confused: bathrobe?” We are watching a slow American brain scrape every last Japanese thought from its long term memory. “Hey, girl, can you that one wave painting? Where is fried octopus ball, Subaru?”
I can’t lie, “My favorite hobby is fucking” is a good line, and it’s what all ladies want to hear. If she still has her panties on after you tell her this, you must have accidentally said “Soup butt,” which is possible since Giacomo doesn’t speak very good Japanese and nobody proofread this.
Their eyes meet across the bar. She is dressed in a Sailor Moon skirt and drinking ceremonial tea through a straw in her Godzilla head, the traditional garb of her people or “hito.” He is in a Dragon Ball Z full print silk shirt with special large bulge pants for boys. Her keen nose picks up on the scent of penis in them and the moist membrane restraining her girl juices bursts. She readies her ancient “katana” or ninja sword in case it is a ronin trap. The best stranger opens his mouth. “MY FAVORITE HOBBY IS SUCKING,” he blurts. A gallon of her vaginal gelatin splats against the floor or “look up Japanese word for floor later” and she thanks her ancestors it is not a trap, but the super cool American cock.
After teaching us the seductive names of the months of the year, Giacomo gives us some handy HER TASTE IS GOOD OR BAD phrases. And maybe I’m being too critical, but does a pickup line book really need the phrase “Your pussy tastes bad?” It seems like it actually undoes a lot of the seduction if you stop the lovemaking to tell her she’s disgusting. Plus, couldn’t I communicate this with an unpleasant face? I feel like holding my nose and pretending to puke has the same delicacy and works in any language. But as for all the other lines here, great work, Giacomo. I’ve always seduced mainly in English, but I’m sure the phrase, “RAAHR, LET ME PUT YOUR CROTCH IN MY MOUTH” travels well across cultural divides. You fucking impotent clown. You might as well run into the room screaming, “Pee on me!”
Ha ha ha ha… amazing. No, but seriously, I want to make sure I get this one exactly right. Boku ni oshi…
Okay, he didn’t seem to make any mistakes when he translated “Pee on me!” So feel free to try it out during your erotic travels!
It’s impossible to overstate how awful Giacomo is in every way. Even in his wildest fantasies, he’s a stupid dick. He advises you to brag about your money by telling single women, “Um, maybe it’s YOU who doesn’t have any money?” And I know there aren’t any stakes in writing books like this, but why did we even invent chemical castration if not for this exact occasion? He is selling a book suggesting you fly to Japan, walk up to innocent Japanese women, and tell them, “Your mouth smells like sushi, you poor bitch. Ass juice.”
Giacomo surprised me with a section on NEGATIVITY/RACISM, mostly because it wasn’t hilarious names for other races. Instead, it was mostly unpleasant ways to call other people racists followed by “I’m so glad I love all people on earth.” It’s a strange line for a book about penetrating foolish strangers by any means.
You may have noticed this in that clipping, but the line about loving others was so disruptive to Giacomo’s writing process he forgot where the fuck he was and his next line was “I’m so happy I have a massive cock.” And then, seemingly to himself, he writes “You should try having more pussy, then maybe you wouldn’t be so fucking bitter.” I can’t tell if he’s having an emotional breakdown or if he’s trying to process a trauma by translating his most embarrassing conversation into Japanese. Either way, I find it hard to believe these phrases will help crush all that ass he promised. This little dipshit is bringing Sonic subreddit argument energy to sport fucking.
In his section on SIZE, Giacomo gives some phrases you can use for both shopping and seduction. For instance, using these figures, if you’re buying sneakers you can tell the clerk you need a shoe exactly 50% longer than this, and pull your dick out. Or if you’re me, fold it in half six times and say, “I’ll take the widest canoe that will fit in a truck this big.
These are interesting moments to prepare for in a Japanese conversation. Giacomo has never had a relationship, but when he does, he wants it to be toxic and built around guilt. I am certain you will have better luck with women by never, ever learning how to say these phrases, but this type of bitterness is central to the Giacomo d’Byron seduction method. He hopes someday he will go to Japan, find a lucky, ungrateful woman who hopefully doesn’t have a tape measure, and tell her which parts of her smell like fish. You know, it just occurred to me you might think I’m making this book up. I’m not. I swear by all the soup in your butt I am not. This is real. Before he had his first kiss, this future murderer looked his pirated copy of Microsoft Word right in the face and typed all this. Okay, let’s learn how to trim our dick hair abroad:
I’m worried even if I say these phrases precisely right, my seduction target will be sure she’s misunderstood. How do I say, “Open your fucking ears, sushi mouth. I NEED. TO WAX. MY ASS AND BALLS AND BACK.” Sorry for the rough language, everyone, but we’re trying to get our dick wet here, not buy a pen.
“How much is this pen!?” How is this a pic– what? What’s the followup to this line? The phrase “Pen!?” Which is the Japanese word for Pen!?!? Look, I’ll come right out and say something controversial: it might be unrealistically optimistic to think the word “pen” alone will lead to sex with pen salespeople.
You know when you’re writing a seduction book and you don’t include a section on selling your semen door-to-door? Giacomo didn’t make that mistake. I guess when you don’t fuck, you figure people who do offer it as an insemination service to single women? This one sort of feels like a first aid instructor making sure everyone knows what to do if a drowning woman is trying to buy your sperm.
There’s an infamous pickup artist technique known as “negging” where you give backhanded compliments to a girl to damage her social status and confidence. The key is hiding the insult so it’s imperceptible, and when done right it can trick a girl into subconsciously seeking your approval. It’s insidious, but effective, and I’ve never seen it done as masterfully as “Your ugly.” Giacomo is the best at UGLY I’ve ever seen.
I sort of ran out of ways to make sense of this book. I thought it was a nerd playing make-believe, but this section is about how much he jerks off. Could we be dealing with some kind of Liar Liar curse? I don’t care how lonely you are, no one thinks “I masturbate my cock everyday” is a good conversation starter, much less a pickup line. Is he bragging? Does he think she’ll be impressed by his training discipline? “I masturbate my cock everyday” is something an unprepared person says during a job interview when a dairy farmer asks about their qualifications. It’s something you add after announcing, “I’m Giacomo d’Byron and I’m here to say.”
As a responsible real sex-haver, Giacomo includes a section on PROTECTION. It includes how to say “condom,” how to ask the girl if she has a condom, and then a series of increasingly stupid excuses for not wanting to wear a condom. Again, this is a person who has never had sex of any type, but he knows enough about himself to know if he ever does, he wants it to be as unsafe and dishonest as possible for everyone.
I was starting to pick up on that, yes, Giacomo.
Hold on. Is this book a prank? When you’re clearly a psychopath, using The Talented Mr. Ripley as your placeholder for a hypothetical favorite movie is a little too perfect. I bought it when his section on racism was mostly about his giant cock, and it seemed organic when he listed 25 toxic ways to call a girl ungrateful, but I see right through this. This is parody. What’s next, a section called THE JOKER showing you how to complain about cancel culture in Japanese?
Whoa, I was really close.
Wait, I take it back. This is real. Only an actual sociopath would think to list generic racial terms under FUNNY NAMES FOR PEEPS right after asking both possible menstruation questions. I love how after 166 pages of increasingly predictable bitterness, this book can still surprise me.
Giacomo really gives you a look inside his head during the MISCELLANEOUS SHIT sections. In an absence of context, his mind starts with “I want to fuck” and in only eight sentences he has flubbed a line about his masturbation habits, had a fight with at least three people, and clumsily begged for sex from four others, one of them filled with actual spiders. It’s incredible. You can’t be worse at anything. This was meant to seduce girls in Japan, and all it did was humiliate Delaware’s crankiest weeb. Speaking of cranky, I think Giacomo’s last good idea for a pickup line was “My only lover now is his right hand. Can you help me?” So the rest of the book is mostly a temper tantrum.
The nuances of language are so interesting to me. For instance, with only the addition or removal of an exclamation point, the Japanese pickup line “baka onna” can mean both “Dumb bitch” and “You are a stupid bitch!” And I speak a little Japanese, so I know the “yo” in “Shabure yo!” asserts direct meaning, but somehow it translates to the very mysterious “Go suck my cock!” Why isn’t your cock here? Is that why you’re angry? How far do I need to go to get to it? Are you sure no one is sucking it already?
On page 194, Giacomo includes a list of EGO TRIP phrases for the confident gaijin about Japan. He shows you how to say you’re the best man, the sexiest fuck machine, the most understanding lover, she’s a bitch, you’re a loser. Hold on, what? No. No, I’m right, that’s what he did. Let’s see if he calms down in the next section called, oh no, TACTICAL LINGO FOR USE AGAINST THE STALKER BITCH.
I’m troubled by this entire section, but unrelated to Giacomo, I don’t like how the English phrase “You should just go off yourself” is only one word long in Japanese. Still, as an experienced non-virgin haunted by many unwanted lovers, Giacomo knows it doesn’t always work to tell women to kill themselves. Luckily, he has come up with four other schemes to get rid of the extra ladies. Well, almost four schemes. Closer to one. And maybe “scheme” is a strong word. He suggests having a friend call her and tell her you’re dead:
None of this will be funny when Giacomo is arrested trying to break into a Wilmington Curves with a hunting rifle, but at this moment in time it’s almost cute how dumb this is. His only idea to escape a situation he’s never been in is to fake his own death, and he plans it out the same way four different times changing no relevant details. He’s obviously a real danger to others, but in many ways Giacomo is a kitten getting its head stuck in a yogurt cup over and over.
We really need to wrap this up, but I have three more fun ones. Here’s COCK SIZE/BALLS:
Fantastic in every way, perfect, flawless.
I want you to picture the most loving, generous, and loyal Japanese woman. You ask her to borrow money and she, of course, says yes. “Your Japanese is so good,” she might add. Now picture her opening this book and finding your exact words in the section called ASKING YOUR BITCH FOR A LOAN. She brandishes her traditional nunchaku. “Oh, thank God,” you think as she gets distracted by the next section, FARTS/QUIEFS.
I’m not sure if it’s another typo or if Giacomo forgot the Japanese word for “Ho” in the middle of his list of farts and queefs, but it’s another perfect collection of pickup lines from “the world’s go to Player / Playboy / Gigolo gentleman” who “fucks loads of pussy every day.” We’ve already gone on a journey together on this Fucking Day, so I leave you with Giacomo’s author bio presented without comment:
It’s a very special religious studies Dogg Zzone 9000, as foretold by Abraham who beget fish which is the Hebrew word for maybeseamonster. We’re joined by science-brained superguest, Katie Goldin, from the Creature Feature Podcast to go through an entire subsection of Sean’s library – Christian Dinosaur Apologetics. She is very frustrated by it!
We used four books as a primer – What is CREATION SCIENCE? by Henry M. Morris and Gary E. Parker, The Great Dinosaur Mystery SOLVED! by Ken Ham, DINOSAURS: THE BIBLE BARNEY & BEYOND by Phil Phillips, and DINOSAURS: Exploring the Scientific Mysteries of God’s Creation by Michael and Caroline Carroll. They don’t all agree on why the Bible got everything wrong, but they all agree it’s the only thing that’s right! Again, Katie found this reasoning very irritating.
Once a general knowledge base was established, we moved on to three enlightening texts. We began with DINOSAURS AND THE BIBLE by Brian Thomas to learn how ancient holy men really only had one word and it meant everything from hippo to quetzalcoatlus.
Next up we read Dinosaurs and the Bible by Ralph O. Muncaster to learn more about how secular dummies are so stupid. Katie was not thrilled with his scientific conclusions.
And finally, we completed our studies with DINOSAURS and the Bible by David Unfred. David Unfred wants to see us all burn, whereupon he and God, Our Loving God, will laugh at the mountains of our ashen bones.
In 2007, a comic book company was formed that set out to make something different– comics about whatever the fuck. Bluewater (who later changed their name to StormFront who later learned that was a Nazi name who later changed their name to TidalWave) published adaptations of ancient novels, profiles of celebrities, reimaginings of 80-year-old science fiction movies, and an entire series about politicians and right wing propagandists called ★Political★Power★. Which means they published an illustrated biography of serial sex criminal Bill O’Reilly.
You’re probably thinking, “A comic book about the cranky guy known for saying racist things from behind a desk and nothing else? How does it open? With him saying cranky, racist things from behind a desk?” W-whoa. That’s exactly how it starts.
This non-fiction tale of heroism opens with the main protagonist screaming at Geraldo Rivera about how America needs to deport a specific drunk Mexican. Geraldo tries to explain to our hero how exile is not how you punish a misdemeanor, but Bill won’t listen. Geraldo tries to ask why Bill is so mad about this guy being Mexican, but Bill won’t listen.
It’s a good example of how subtle modern racism can be. When our grandparents were on the lookout for bigotry, they could simply ask, “I saw the WHITES ONLY sign on your STRAIGHTS ONLY asbestos store… is there any wiggle room there? Because I’m almost positive one of my kids is half Italian.” Today you need to pay closer attention. No one comes right out and says “I’m racist” anymore. They might do something more understated like go on TV and tell a Latino man, “I don’t care what the rules say. Those laws are for white people and Mexicans should go back where they belong.” I mean, it’s sneaky. You have to really be watching for it.
By the way, the first seven pages are like this. Seven pages of Bill O’Reilly arguing with guests on his TV show, getting most of the details wrong, but being noisier. Here’s his interview with Barney Frank where after several minutes of screaming they disagree to disagree about which word they’re fighting about:
Look, adaptation is a difficult skill. Taking something from one media and translating it to another requires a deep understanding of both. And say what you will about this being a dumb idea from the very concept, as an adaptation, it’s maybe not possible to fuck up more than this. These people were turning a cable news show into a comic and their idea was “Maybe a verbatim transcript of an argument furiously scribbled into dozens of word bubbles? Over a picture of them sitting?” It fucking sucks. I dare anyone to read this panel of Bill O’Reilly’s interview with Al Sharpton:
As the only person who will ever live to read that, let me sum it up. Some study came out about fourth graders in Sudan being bad at reading, and Bill O’Reilly blamed Al Sharpton because he’s also black. Well, not “blamed” exactly. Bill was just pointing out how he’s a hypocrite for protesting some black issues while ignoring what’s going on in Sudanese grade schools. Again, it’s “racist,” but only after it’s “stupid,” “insane,” and “belligerent.” The point is, Bill O’Reilly thinks he’s proven he cares more about Sudanese kids than Al Sharpton and he’ll never listen to how he’s wrong, which means blacks shouldn’t be allowed to protest, so who’s the real racist now?
It’s a terrible argument, made even worse when you consider it was chosen as one of his greatest hits for this biography. How empty and meaningless has this guy’s career been that they included the time he screamed at Al Sharpton to ignore Burger King’s civil rights violations because of African elementary teachers? So, yeah, okay, it’s the bigoted trolling of a delusional idiot, but would a delusional idiot also add this detail to the story?
Al Sharpton secretly, after the cameras were off, privately admitted Bill O’Reilly was right.
But so far the comic has only shown us the Bill O’Reilly we knew from TV. He’s a bad listener. A bully. An idiot. A total asshole. A full-blown racist. Smugly confident he’s not any of those things. I was starting to suspect this was a sarcastic hit piece so I looked up the author, Jerome Maida.
Jerome isn’t a prolific comics writer and these batshit ★Political★Power★ books seem to make up most of his work. He focuses mainly on right wing nutbags like Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, and Donald Trump, so it’s safe to say these aren’t sarcastic. Jerome Maida was just the only freelance writer who said yes to the question, “Are you available for a 3 hour contract adapting white nationalism for kids?”
So he’s a bit of a Nazi apologist for money, but Jerome’s real passion is martial arts.
Specifically, Jerome is passionate about The Martial Arts Kid, a 2015 film starring Don “The Dragon” Wilson and Cynthia Rothrock. It very much sounds like a fake movie where a caterer was murdered on an episode of CSI, but The Martial Arts Kid is real, and all 47 articles Jerome Maida wrote for martialartsentertainment.com are about it. Jerome wrote a feature article on every casting decision, press release, and soundtrack choice. One of them was simply called “The Martial Arts Kid Will Be Great Movie.” I’ve extremely never seen anything like it:
I’ve been on the Internet a long time and I’ve seen a lot of articles built from IMDB searches, but I’ve never seen anyone write forty seven articles based entirely on a single IMDB Full Cast and Crew list. It’s unthinkable. It’s a fake mental disorder you’d make up to explain why the killer targeted The Martial Arts Kid on an episode of CSI. It’s also very distracting from why we’re here– to talk about Bill O’Reilly’s heroic origin story:
Bill had an angry and abusive father, but in a… let me see if I’m understanding this comic’s tone properly… a cute way? “MY FATHER WAS THE KUNG AND I WAS THE FU!” jokes Bill O’Reilly, who I was starting to have more sympathy for until he said that.
Starting from the whimsy of a father beating his son, Bill’s journey starts to get darker. Let me show you one of the pages they chose to represent Bill O’Reilly’s childhood:
It’s relentless images of rage, torment, and fascism coming together to make an angry, bitter, fascist. It’s Bill O’Reilly’s origin story, so I don’t know what else I expected. I guess I only find it interesting because my expectations were met so precisely.
This panel of young Bill having a shitty meal actually helped me understand him. Bill O’Reilly finds this strange pride in his misery. It lets him complain constantly while thinking of himself as a tough guy who never complains because he thinks he’s bragging. For instance, his family rarely went out to restaurants, and when they did, they were awful and had no appetizers. This obviously isn’t interesting enough to tell anyone, much less include in a comic book. Bill tells it because he thinks it taught him the quiet dignity of meatballless spaghetti, but what it really did was teach him to hate decadent spaghetti cowards, humiliating America with every calamari for the table. It’s stupid, right? This is a guy who, multiple times, has dropped millions of dollars trying to jam a thumb up a co-worker’s butt and here he is judging you for wasting $4.99 on jalapeño poppers. Shut the fuck up and suck your sad spaghetti, sex pest.
As if you needed to be told this, there are a lot of panels of young Bill O’Reilly alone and angry.
For pages and pages we see how sad, bitter, antisocial, and constantly violent Bill was, but we also learn how self-reflective he can be. For instance, the angry, racist young dick was kicked off his little league team because the coach didn’t like him “for reasons unknown to Bill to this day.” What a mystery! We may never know why this likable team player spent another baseball season alone and angry.
Bill’s childhood story continues through more random images of trauma and fascism…
I didn’t doctor that. This page of Bill O’Reilly’s origin story really does go from Mussolini to child abuse to vandalism to snowballs to the time Bill yawned in church. In storytelling, this is what’s known as raising the stakes.
Bill’s life story just keeps fucking going like this. Like all true patriots, he attacked a kid for trying too hard in school, blew up his neighbor’s house, assaulted a kid with a firearm, and even gave his father a dirty look. And maybe it’s because Bill O’Reilly is a known liar, but it’s hard to believe a lot of these things happened when they’re categorized together like this. No one tells a story like “I once threw a bomb at my neighbor” and then adds “I didn’t give a shit– I’d yawn in church, shoot people, look my dad in the eyes! By the way, my dad was a Nazi who punched my arm and I have a little joke about it: he was the kung and I was the fu. Do you get it? Because I don’t! I say it a lot, but is it a pun? Maybe some kind of unformed racism? This is how you put together a biography, right?”
Anyway, here’s a probably mostly fake story about the time young Bill O’Reilly tormented a kid so much the boy’s father chased Bill into his own house. Right in front of Bill’s dad.
I bet you know what happened next! Bill O’Reilly’s father, the abusive Mussolini of Hitlers who never bought appetizers… calmed the man down! Asked him to leave! Told Bill he needs to stop being a bully! Wait, something doesn’t– holy shit, wait, is the dad not the villain? Ohmygod, is Bill O’Reilly the bad guy in this Bill O’Reilly comic?
The next story is about Bill assaulting yet another kid.
Bill O’Reilly famously called his show the “No Spin Zone,” so I think he’ll appreciate how I’m not spinning this story. Some guy said, “NICE JACKET, BILL!” and then didn’t finish his next sentence before Bill punched him in the face. This is a poorly made book by a disinterested karate master, but his decision to give young Bill the same face, shirt, and haircut as his father is a pretty good way to artistically represent a cycle of abuse. It was definitely an accident, but maybe Jerome Maida is also starting to figure out Bill O’Reilly is the villain.
The next story is one of betrayal.
Bill couldn’t find a date to a high school dance, so he asked some guy to go with him “so the girls would think he’s cool.” The guy said no, but then that “so-called friend” went to the dance anyway. Doing “the twist” like a madman! How could this so-called friend do this!? It’s a real question! Before you read the next panel, guess! Guess why this so-called friend told Bill O’Reilly he wasn’t going to the dance!
You were right! They weren’t friends and he didn’t want Bill around because he didn’t like him and nobody else liked him. Honestly, if this happened to me I wouldn’t tell anyone about it, much less my biographer. How empty is this fucking piece of shit’s life that we’re 23 pages into his story and he’s still sharing every last teenage drama? These sound like the stories of a loser who peaked in high school after you take out all the sports, academics, popularity, drugs, and girls. You’d think a wealthy TV personality who has publicly spent $45 million in sexual harassment payouts would have led a more interesting life than this.
As if you needed to be told this, Bill O’Reilly had trouble getting laid. But actually? A-actually, he’s glad! Yeah, he is glad he had no “moves” and waited until he was more mature to have sex. But enough about Bill being a violent, lonely incel and how honorable that is when you think about it. Let’s move on to the origin story of Bill’s racism.
As if you needed to be told this, content warning: Bill O’Reilly’s comic about himself from 2010 has several hard-r n-words.
Growing up around only whites, Bill didn’t really have a chance to be racist. In fact, since he attacked, shot, and tried to explode many of those whites, he’s statistically less racist than Liberty Medal-winner, Muhammed Ali, who punched a much higher percentage of black m– hold on. I went into that sentence sarcastically, but I think I accidentally wrote a real Bill O’Reilly argument? Do I now “get” Bill O’Reilly?
Bill knew of blacks from his television and was such a champion of civil rights he liked Willie Mays even more than “the white New York Yankees superstar” Mickey Mantle. Bill loved Willie Mays so much he was known around his all-white town as the non-racist, and out of respect for Bill’s famous “No Spin Zone,” I won’t try to spin this story. When the local children accused him of liking black people, Bill O’Reilly would punch them in the goddamn face. How could that be bad, everyone? Why, it’d be almost vulgar to call that racist.
Please remember, this story was proudly told by Bill and included in his biography to demonstrate his dislike of bigotry. And like all colorblind champions of equality, he includes an exact headcount of all the blacks in his stories:
I’m not leaving anything out of this one. This is the whole Bill O’Reilly adventure. He once met four black guys and got to know half of them. If a person had weird issues with skin color would they waste 5% of their biography on that story? Ridiculous. So this person who saw all people as equals but still kept careful track of how many times he met blacks and how many there were on each occasion, tells the story of the second time he encountered non-whites:
The second “experience with race” Bill had was when he met Nate, who didn’t like Bill as much as two of the four first blacks he met (who were funny guys if you can believe it).
Nate was right to hate Bill, who sat next to Nate as part of an undercover sting operation to expose “reverse racism.” See, Bill “heard a rumor” there was a teacher who gave a B+ to every black student which means someone on campus, for some reason, was keeping track of the black people and their suspiciously white grades. I have a suspect, but for now let’s assume it was not angry racist loner Bill O’Reilly, but one of his many friends who uncovered this suspiciously racist data. “Please look into this, bitter liar who tried to grope my roommate! You’re the only one I can trust with my shameful secret prejudice!” they probably said.
So anyway, the bad races were getting B+s in a compulsory course, and College Bill was on the case!
Sure enough, the “sensitive” teacher gave Nate a B! Oh, a B? The “rumors” said he was supposed to get a B+, so never mind. I guess the “rumors” were wrong. You know what, though? Maybe Bill should write a column for the school newspaper about how black people don’t deserve Bs even without the plusses. It’s what any non-racist would do.
Later, off the record, Nate sort of admitted he didn’t enjoy the “jive-ass” class. Busted! From his own account, Bill was more right about race than one of the races again! Ever the journalist and storyteller, Bill kept track of Nate after he dropped out of school and yadayada he EVENTUALLY MURDERED A POLICEMAN.
Over the course of a person’s life, there should be at least a few incidents where, especially with this level of embellishment, they were a hero. Like maybe you only called in a noise complaint when your neighbors started arguing, but if you tell that story right, the cops got there just in time to stop a murder. My point is, Bill has been alive more than two decades at this point and -in his own opinion- the closest thing he’s come to heroism is working to ensure one black guy couldn’t get an education. And when offered the opportunity to make up any details he wanted, he said, “That guy I harassed out of school, I can’t remember what color he was, he went on to… I don’t know… kill a cop, probably? All I know are the facts: twenty percent of blacks go on to murder policemen. Forty percent are funny guys, though.”
After a successful(?) college career, Bill O’Reilly got a job as a teacher.
Once the bitter, stupid asshole arrived, there was an outbreak of graffiti. It wasn’t about Bill, though! It was about a whore named Susan and Mike O. who… what did those rascals say about their fellow teen, Mike O.? Oh, right, he “takes it in the keister.” What I’m saying is the sudden graffiti did not focus on the smug, unloved bigot who has ruined every life he’s touched since he was born.
So what did Bill do? He did what any obvious sex expert would do: he told them there are studies proving people who write graffiti can’t fuck.
“What a genius you are for making up those sociological studies linking graffiti to sexual confusion!” marveled the students and teachers.
“I didn’t fucking make them up!” said the man who made them up to characters he made up.
In many ways it’s the perfect story to end on. It’s dumb, it didn’t happen, and it wouldn’t happen, but it shows how Bill O’Reilly’s mind works. He starts off by making up a story where he solves a complicated issue with his brand of no-nonsense verbal abuse. He then creates straw men who adore him and praise his craftiness, but then he gets mad at them because he’s not playing some game! It’s basic, no-frills, white wisdom! Later, all of the vandals would go on to be immature about sex and murder a policeman.
And that’s the tale of Bill O’Reilly! He attacked many children, has a lot of holes in his stories, wasn’t good at anything, met five blacks, got most of one of them kicked out of college, and told some kids they can’t fuck. And nothing could have trained him better for a life of right wing media. The comic wraps up with a few panels on unrelated tragedy, unexplained deaths, and two soldiers getting torn apart by bullets in a war Bill did not attend? I don’t know why.
After waiting until the last page of his biography and their deaths to describe his five closest loved ones, Bill leaves us with one last thought:
“I was a fucking dick, I did some great racism and punching, my only friends were lost in Vietnam or ‘found dead from some rare illness,’ and I’ll die alone. Bye!” – Bill O’Reilly
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpottyReception, who is going to great movie the The Martial Arts Kid!
No ordinary human mind can comprehend The Grabowski Shuffle, a behind-the-scenes VHS tape about the making of a music video starring non-musicians hoping to recreate the exact careers of Super Bowl champion novelty rappers without the football or charm.
So we did what any Grabowskis would do. We invited Ty Franck, author of The Expanse novels and writer and producer of The Expanse TV series to help us understand it. Could his keen mind decode this ancient riddle of antimusic unfootball? No, but being a Grabowski is not about understanding, probably. Which is why we now legally honor him with the title of Ty Franck Grabowski, GbSki, the highest recognition Grabowskis can bestow on a podcast.
Listen here, or wherever you do podcasts! For more Grabowski reference, read Seanbaby’s article about The Grabowski Shufflehere, and the Chicago Reader article he cites here.
Real Grabowskis who give us money on Patreon are in for even more Grabowski when Brockway and Hugo Award-winning author and Official Grabowski, Ty Franck, try to seduce Sean using pick-up lines from the incel classic, 1001 Best Pick-Up Lines. It’s by Don Diebel, America’s #1 Singles Expert! It gets as awkward and horny as a Grabowski photo shoot!
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