Mixing two concepts together has been a part of our life since an industrious australopithecus invented Murder Stick Murder Rock, but the terrible power of one-thing-plus-a-different-thing was never fully felt until 1985 when Joe Corley, karate champion and world famous instructor, created Self-Defense Aerobics. You know that dull terror you feel when you read the news of Man and worry civilization is in a decline? It is. We peaked in 1985 when karate champion and world famous instructor, Joe Corley, created Self-Defense Aerobics. Hi, hot dog readers. I’m Seanbaby, karate instructor famous world champion, and there has never been a more perfect fighting system for eliminating an attacker during a barely contained state of arousal. Let’s get this out of the way right now, Self-Defense Aerobics: 10/10.
Self-Defense Aerobics proves art doesn’t have to be clever. If your fighting system is perfect for fitness and the office, you can say that with a picture of a lady sidekicking at the gym and then later at her accounting firm. It’s what photography critics call “Gasp, perfection.” The minimalist design is broken up by an extraneous, composition-destroying clutter of office supplies, as if the artist wants us to dread the chaos that comes from hiking up your business skirt and kicking a lobby intruder through a window and into the street. “Looks like you’re trying to take my job,” jokes security guard Gene as your attacker’s head is crushed by a taxi, long removed from your eyeline and interest. It’s art that says, “Self-Defense Aerobics is fucking stupid in the good way. And white-hot erotic.” It’s art that belongs in a museum.
The video begins with Joe Corley introducing no one, including himself, and instead explaining the very basic concept of exercise. He and the girls run in place, and if you think there’s something better than ’80s leotards mixed with a horny cameraman, congratulations on being the wrongest dumbshit.
After running in place for a few seconds and doing several burpees, we learn Cindy and Donna’s names after Joe asks them if they’re breathing. Like all good instructors, Joe assumes you have escaped fully-formed from a cloning pod knowing only hunger. For instance, in the next part of the video he introduces everyone to “jump ropes.” As he explains, and I quote, “The idea is to get this little skinny rope under your feet.” Donna is just terrible at this, but it fills her with a joy that’s almost obscene in a karate setting. She is so wonderfully happy, very wet, and if you had to pick only one thing to look at for the rest of your life, Donna sucking at jump rope would be a very good choice.
With only a half hour to teach you self defense, Joe dedicated ten entire minutes to explaining girl push ups and toe touches. I cannot stress enough how little martial arts there are in this video. Any viewer who walked away from this VHS tape thinking they could defend themself is either dead from poor judgement or extremely dead from attacks. But judging by the camera work, I don’t think the main goal of Self-Defense Aerobics was birthing mighty warriors.
The camera work in Self-Defense Aerobics is powerful and engaging. It looks like full creative control was given to a stranger who listed “Special Skills: Poontang” on his resume. It looks like a producer said, “I can tell by the boner you get what we’re going for here, kid. Follow those instincts and go to work.”
After 13 minutes, Joe teaches the ladies their first punch. A punch critic might notice a flaw here and there in Joe’s instructions or Cindy and Donna’s execution, but as far as winning smiles go, these are five star haymakers. Maybe you were way ahead of me on this, but I am just now realizing I have a weird hot girls doing bad karate thing. And I am not alone.
The word “gratuitous” gets thrown around a lot when a camera cuts to jiggling cleavage in the middle of a martial arts workout for the 17th time. But are pointless karate boob closeups “not art” simply because they were photographed by a moist leotard-sniffing pervert? Thirteen minutes and fifty five seconds ago I would have said, “of course.” Now I say, let’s see that footage you’re talking about, right away if possible.
Look at Cindy and Donna just fucking wrecking enemies from every direction. My gut still tells me it’s pornography, but it’s also lethal or worse martial arts. Can you imagine getting hit by one of these backfists? With human bones? Psh. Dead. Your friend too. And you again.
After four short rounds of punching, Joe teaches the girls karate’s greatest weapon and fitness’ fittest exercise– twenty or so low blocks. It’s honestly irresponsible to put this much power into the hands of someone when all you know about them is they own a VCR. If you watch this video more than three times and try to change a diaper, you will tear that baby’s legs clean off. That’s awful, I’m sorry, but my brain is doing everything it can to compensate for all my sexual impulses firing at once.
I swear I’m not exaggerating when I say the entire last third of this self-defense video is Joe, Cindy, and Donna laying down and gently kicking from the floor. The cinematographer, having trained his whole life for this, captures many generous closeups of Cindy’s groin and crotch. Cindy could send this tape to her gynecologist and save herself a trip to the health clinic. If you showed me the bumps on the head of Cindy’s newborn, I’d say, “Hey, I recognize those shapes.”
The video ends with a brief cooldown where Cindy and Donna, and I want to make sure I’m explaining this correctly, lay down on the ground as if they were dead. Joe explains this technique in slow, painstaking detail, stroking each part of Donna’s body as he names it. He has been wedged between these sexy women for a half hour of soaking wet, filthy karate and he’s by far more horny than you or I have ever been. As his fingers slide up Donna’s leotard, it is legitimate, edge-of-your-seat suspense when he starts to get near her titty. Scientists could calibrate their electron microscopes by how close Joe comes to groping this model in the middle of her workout cooldown.
So now we’ve learned what fitness is, sort of punched, very blocked, barely contained our boiling desires, and taken a nap. All that’s left to do is thank the people who made it possible…
… obviously with titties. What a perfect video cassette. Happy Punching Day, everyone!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, NickH: The slow pelvis touch of Nicks.
As fans of the site know, in 1991, a talentless hack named Gregory Godek published 1001 Ways To Be Romantic. It was a poorly edited list of song titles and saccharine cliches useless to anyone except prison guards trying to de-escalate active sex crimes. But it was also a huge hit, so two years later, a less talented hack named Joe Magadatz published his “comedic” take on it: 1001 Ways NOT To Be Romantic. In several minutes, you will fucking hate Joe Magadatz. He is a bottle of novelty Fart Pills who wished to be real on a magic bottle of novelty Fart Pills.
The book claims to be “For Real Men” and “Frustrated Women” and “Couch Potatoes.” Wait, ha ha, did he say Couch Potatoes!? He went there immediately! If the inside of the book is anything like the cover, nobody is safe from the zings of Joe Magadatz who an unattributed quote calls “the Al Bundy of romance– the Homer Simpson of love.” And for a total fabrication, it’s pretty honest. The author absolutely has the sense of humor of a popular sitcom viewer with ordinary interests who strongly identifies with everyman characters. He might be closer to the “Andrew Dice Clay Album Owner of romance– the Bottle of Novelty Fart Pills Joke From Earlier of love,” but the point is he’s what any wacky dad joke enthusiast would call banal and contemptuous.
The back cover has five more unattributed quotes taken from rave book reviews Joe never went on to receive, and there was still some space left so Joe listed some chapter titles. They’re descriptive of nothing other than Joe Magadatz’s pedestrian zaniness. They’re from a production designer’s list of “MICHAEL SCOTT MUG IDEAS — MAYBES.”
This motherfucker named titles in his book “Excuuuuuuuuuuse Me!” and “Go Ahead, Make My Day!” and “Beam Me Up, Scotty” and was proud enough he put them on the back cover without context. He also has chapters called “Burp!” and “Going Bonkers” and “Hooters!” and “Aaaaauuuugh!” because once a writer realizes they’re satisfied with unaltered catchphrases from Saturday Night Live being complete jokes, they are free to simply type random words and sounds, schwing(!) queef ambulance.
Anyway, ugggggggggghhhhh, let’s get started with this bullshit.
Joe opens the book with a very indulgent About the Author section chronicling his adventures in leading an uninteresting life and never learning how to construct a joke. Which is a nightmare since he set out to write a 178 page “NOT!” joke and thinks “parody” means “sincere attempt at recreating the exact same thing but for less pleasant people.”
Joe is governed by one rule: if it has ever been on TV, saying the name of it is humor. In some ways this is a great parody of 1001 Ways To Be Romantic because it’s a panicked author, probably with a weird dick, but definitely out of ideas with 973 entries to go. And like Godek, once Joe has found a structure with modular parts, he will keep adding songs and TV shows until he has strangled all the joy out of it. He will set a joke in a world where “celebrating 7 Days of Superbowl Week” is a thing just to get one more precious step closer to finishing the thing he obviously hates. That’s what comedy is supposed to be, right? A cranky person grinding their teeth through a huge project any idiot could have known would be a nightmare? Anyway, I have several hundred more entries from 1001 Ways NOT To Be Romantic to get to.
Every now and then the book achieves its stated goal through open cruelty or passive aggression. If you think calling your wife fat and decorating your kitchen with pornography are, all by themselves, a complete punchline and set up to a joke, the word for that isn’t “Unromantic.” This is more like the answer to the question, “Ma’am, were there any warning signs leading up to your husband stabbing you?”
This was meant to be a hilarious skewering of a romance guide, but here we are reading a transcription of Jeff Foxworthy’s audio notes. “Note to self: something about The Three Stooges? Come on, Jeff– think.”
This dipshit gave himself the task of listing four cute differences between men and women and this is what he came up with. This is nothing. It’s not possible to say less about men and women than this. Of all the things women don’t do, the funniest ones he could think of were “read on the toilet” and “Air Guitar?” What about celebrating Superbowl Monday? What about celebrating Superbowl Thursday? What about stabbing your wife!?
I’m not actually sure where Joe was going with this. I only wanted to point out he’s wrong about comedy, but also everything. This would be a lazy entry in a book called Dumb, Pointless Things To Say About Drinks. In a book meant to hilariously skewer romantic advice it’s possibly the worst thing he could have written. There’s no whimsy or edge or truth. It’s less than not a joke– if a child found this on a candy wrapper, they’d assume they won some kind of Laffy Taffy Find-The-Jokeless-Wrapper Sweepstakes. Joe isn’t 10% done with his book and he’s already landed on the perfect closing argument for why he is incapable of writing it. He has utterly failed at a task with the lowest of expectations. This line is like an oil technician looking at your car and saying, “I’m going to fuck that big red bird with my ponis.”
From his chapter BURP!, Joe writes “Onion bagels.” as a complete thought. “So true,” thinks a hypothetical reader. “I can’t wait to see what he does for number 126. Oh my God, can you imagine?”
The other thing about Joe is that he’s a pedant. A lot of the book is spent attacking romantic cliches with the smug logic of a FOX News guest explaining how it’s actually the races who are the actual racists. Look at Joe fucking dismember champagne with the weapons of Aristotle. You ladies don’t like burping but you like champagne? Well, ha, let Joe tell you girls something you never knew about bubbles. Oh, and you say want men to help with the cleaning? Then explain why you get so mad at us when we sneak into your home and lick your bathtub spotless, so spotless. Check, um, mate.
Joe Magadatz looked at what he had done and thought, “One hundred forty nine jokes about relationships! That’s got to be a record for an oil technician’s lunch break!”
He began his ritual of dry masturbation on the break room toilet before returning to work when a 150th idea for a relationship joke occurred to him. Desperate to capture fleeting inspiration, he rushed back to his notebook and scribbled down his idea before it was lost to the workday bustle of fucking all those big red birds with his ponis. “Could it be this simple?” Joe said aloud. “Have I cracked the start of my next chapter!?”
The words seemed to glow on the page like a lost treasure. There it was. The perfect joke. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
If you were wondering how long it would take for Joe to bring up the holocaust and start telling racist jokes: 153 entries. Although it’s hard to call these racist “jokes.” They’re more like racist references. And even that’s not quite right since these aren’t traditional stereotypes. For instance, the intolerant don’t list their grievances with Latinos as “33% of them are bankers.” What Joe is doing here isn’t being racist– it’s suggesting the notion of racism itself is enough to be funny. Like how Eskimos.
“I mean, where’s the challenge in being romantic to a life-sized blow-up Barbie doll?”
– Joe Magadatz, 1993
I wanted to show you this one so you could see Joe’s remarkable decision, in a satire book, to include plugs for real sex devices. Any other writer would have made up a silly, outrageous romantic product, but Joe has chosen to say “Get a load of this wacky thing! Can you believe anyone would pork an inflatable woman? I wouldn’t! I wouldn’t ever! Anyway, here’s how you order one; the ‘Tina’ model has a waterproof milk reservoir in the butt! Don’t trust Tina’s idea of ‘waterproof’!”
Um, and guys, here’s a tip from ol’ Pedantic Joe: if your woman says she wants to be treated like an Equal, ask her if she really wants you to tear off her head and pour her into your coffee. You see, “equal” shares a name with a zero calorie sweetener, and I kill women.
I get we’re only having big laughs here, Joe, but let’s go over the premise. I need a woman who has dated me long enough to have a least favorite tie, but not long enough to introduce me to her parents, for whom she is planning a romantic evening which involves me. And I ruin it by smuggling in an unlikeable necktie. These are the unlikely circumstances that have to come together for this to be anything other than a stupid fuck stringing together random letters, Joe.
I have no notes for these three. Great stuff, Joe. I bet when Joe Magadatz sees a sheet of “I HATE MONDAYS” stickers he genuinely says out loud, “Oh no they gave this to the wrong guy! Ha ha ha, oh man. OH NO.”
Another wacky foible of this kidnapper-vibe scamp is that he seems to think Gregory Godek, author of 1001 Ways to Be Romantic, is some kind of high class sophisticate. Gregory J.P. Godek is the man who gives his wife a “Good for one free pizza, any toppings!” coupon every anniversary. He’s the man who gives his wife a “Good for one small pizza of YOUR choice (because you’va gotta pizza ov’a my heart)” coupon every birthday. He’s fucking trash. But to Joe, Godek is the fanciest of pants. I say all this because it will help you to understand Joe better if you realize he thinks parody means sneering at rich boy shit like “adult” dates who “tolerate sex” and eat at restaurants with silverware instead of “chili gloves.”
Here’s the thing: I’m both a leading genius and the only person who will ever read this book in its entirety, and I have no idea if Joe means “personal computer” or “political correctness,” or why he thinks “Partly Cloudy” is some kind of punchline. This entry, more than any others, is a genuine mystery. Was entry number 403 (buy a pool table) such a struggle his mind gave out? If this was published to give encoded commands to “Unromantics” embedded in our book stores, that would actually explain a lot. I admit I’m making a lot of wild speculations about who Joe is and why he wrote 1001 Ways NOT To Be Romantic, but it’s only because the simplest explanation -a man tried to be funny and missed by this goddamn much- seems too impossible to consider.
You might remember this one from earlier. Joe often returns to the rich comedy well of “You aren’t as pretty as the women I masturbate to, you bitch. You fat bitch.”
You have to consider how when Joe was writing this book, People Magazine gave the title of SEXIEST MAN ALIVE to Nick Nolte (left below). This had to have given average-looking men more unearned confidence than normal, which might explain why Joe feels comfortable implying how fat his wife is so soon after telling his fat wife she’s fat.
Okay, sure, this entry is basically the same as the last two, which are all the same as several others from earlier in the book, but Joe has added a bit of Fat Wife Science to explain how calling your wife fat in mid-February is more hurtful than, say, late-June. It’s still not funny, but all great comedians have to go through a phase where they humorlessly abuse women for a couple decades. I believe it was Mark Twain who once said, “The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue” while giving a thumbs up and then, “Your sad tits, my dear,” while giving a thumbs down.
“I’m barely halfway through this piece of shit book and I’m already so out of ideas I’m listing novelty gifts from novelty gift catalogs,” thinks Joe in a rare moment of self awareness. “Oh, did I do fart pills yet? Let’s see… what else is funny. Beavis and Butt-Head? Okay, but, like, how do I make it work for this book? Let’s see… oh. Oh my god, Joe. Joe you’ve done it again!”
Joe called his publisher and got the answering machine. He screamed, “Fuck you, Geraldine! Fuck. You. You told me you were going to need the advance back if I didn’t get you the 521st and 522nd entry by today? Well, fuck you, I crushed them. A mistletoe belt from a catalog I found, and listen to this, you cow: 522. Not romantic: Beavis and Butt-Head. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. You’re welcome. I’m keeping the money, Geraldine.”
He hung up, missing wildly and smashing his gross, weird dick. “Bitches!” he blamed.
This is not a gag, but a true story. Earlier in this very article I had a line where I said, “Call Joe whatever you want, but don’t call him… late for dinner!” It’s my standard placeholder for “character makes a dad joke to be determined later,” and then I saw he actually, sincerely wrote it. I know he’s probably still going through his Funny Side Up catalog from 75 entries ago and stealing more ideas, but however he came to be this thing he is, no God or science will ever create a more perfectly terrible sense of humor. Joe Magadatz is a world-class decathlete of funereal zaniness. He is a worst-case-scenario of a person reading bumper stickers out loud in a souvenir shop.
Once he got into the 600s, Joe went all-in on the premise of romance being for uppity snobs and unromance being for the workin’ man. And even that gets shaky. He is a weird, lonely man declaring cultural divides and assigning two groups of people who don’t exist to one side or the other without comedic observation. This book is the gasps of a drowning mind who saw a bottle of fart pills and thought, “This is exactly me! Why didn’t I think of this?” and then fucking found out. Imagine the existential terror Joe must be feeling at this point. Going into this, he was certain he was a “funny guy,” and now reality had proven how wrong he was, 604 times in a row and counting.
“Why won’t the ideas come? Where is my fart pills?” he whispered to his bathroom mirror. “Unromantics prefer steak to swordfish,” his reflection hissed back. “Go type it, you piece of shit. Go tell your readers Unromantics prefer steak to swordfish.”
Joe is so bad at joking, fucking, and writing, this book should have been a tear-soaked polaroid of his penis that says, “Go ahead and let it ruin your day, you fat, frigid bitch. It’s all it ever does. It’s all it will ever do!!! You want swordfish, but I don’t even have steeeaaaak!”
What the shit? This man spent two hundred entries explainin’ how real Unromantics like a little tractor grease on their ‘taters, and now he makes a sudden reference to Cubism and Giacometti? This is not a tone change. This is like stopping a wedding toast to pull off your face and shriek, “Your Trevor has been harvested, Emily and David beasts! Behold our true form!” Unromantics prefer Giacometti? How the, what? I don’t even know what is happening; I guess this one’s for the museum curators who love MADLibs but hate love? But the joke doesn’t work on them either. Does Joe think Alberto Giacometti took so much effort to vitalize the negative space surrounding his figure sculptures to not make passionate love within it!? Ridiculous.
I’m not sure if I’ve made it clear yet, what with all my comedy romping, but of all the troubling things in this book, the most troubling is how Joe Magadatz seems to think it’s the sex part of a relationship that’s particularly unromantic. I’m not saying I have enough to convict Joe of any sex crimes, but it’s suspicious how he finds the idea of any woman enjoying sex to be unthinkably absurd.
If you’re anything like me, you might have thought, “huh?” But assuming this isn’t another coded message for when the Unromantics are supposed to strike, April 15th is the day Lincoln died and the Titanic sank. It’s also the birthday of some other major tragedies– the Boston Marathon, America’s bombing of Libya, and the publishing of The Fountainhead. So, sure, Joe. If you have any of these dates memorized for some reason, you’re right. And as any comedy-head knows, being right about the date many people died is a sure laugh every time. December 8th! Wait, no, the 7th. Sorry I fucked up the joke.
With only 24 entries to go, Joe picked back up his Funny Side Up catalog, selected a random item and literally only contributed the words “Need I say more?” This is like the slowest NASCAR driver stopping after 196 laps to have sex with his sister. You could never have predicted such a total and insane failure, but you guess it sort of makes sense after it happens?
Let Joe make it very clear: he did not buy Sexual Positions: A Sensual Guide to Lovemaking at the, hey look at that, affordable price of $24.95 to share with a lover. Joe is too impish to type the word “tits,” but he absolutely wants you to know he jerked off to this video by himself. Remember 980 entries ago when you thought this would be a lifeless parody of the self-help/romance genre? Well it turned out to be one man’s war on women, and like all men who wage that war, it ended with him giving up, angrily pulling on his own dick to pictures of them, and vowing revenge. How hard would it have been to just do some silly or outrageous versions of those free pizza and backrub coupons?
Oh, he did. And they fucking suck too.
Edit: 11:30am 11/20/2020 Hot Dog reader Joe Dacey discovered something from the transcript of a podcast about “selling disruption” that will make total sense after you hear it: Joe Magadatz, the author of this parody of Gregory Godek’s book, was Gregory Godek himself. That’s how completely and perfectly awful Gregory Godek is.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Adrienne Hisbrook: who prefers IBMs and swordfish and actually likes Brancusi. Haha YOU know what we’re saying!
Nerds! Others! Come listen to EpiSSoDDe FiVVe of The Dogg Zzone 9000, the official podcast of the popular jokes n’ fun browser-page, 1900hotdog.com. Seanbaby and Brockway are joined by gentleman bastard, Brendan McGinley, comic expert and author to help explain the insanity, awesomeness, and goddamn stupidity of comic books.
From the Golden Age, Brendan brings us The Puppeteer, a gentle carver of puppets who works as a Puppeteer selling puppets of The Puppeteer, yet he hides a secret– he is actually the crimefighter and falconer known as The Puppeteer!
From the Modern Age, Brockway takes us on a journey through the mind of a tortured, moronic comic writer trying to make sense of his own script as he tackles organized religion using the best tool to do that — a teleporting elf! It’s one of many things inconceivably written by the comic’s disgraced and dumb-as-fuck author, Chuck Austen!
And from the Bronze Age, Seanbaby talks about the greatest story in the history of literature: The Time All the Avengers Died and Had to Fight Each Other and Also Dracula for the Fate of the Universe.
And of course, Dogg Zzone Ffans, Brendan and Brockway face off in the high-stakes world of SeanBBaby’s BOOk GGame. Who can plan the saddest meal for one in their Microwave? Their instincts, along with the recipes of tragic culinary fishwife, Sonia Allison, will decide! They’re doing battle inside MICROWAVE FOR ONE!
They cured obesity in 1987 and you fools missed it. I’m, of course, talking about Lose Weight Now: VIDEO HYPNOSIS WITH SUBLIMINALS, a VHS tape from the series Dick Sutphen’s Life-Changing VIDEO HYPNOSIS. For $19.95, viewers could allow Dick into their brain to reprogram them to be thinner in a half hour. It was never harder than that, yet here we are 33 years later inventing larger and larger sizes of pizza to satisfy you. Giant? Screaming Cowboy Giant? Life Raft Party Pie? We Let You Eat The Delivery Car? Come the fuck on, people. Let Dick Sutphen’s bewitching video cassette into your mind so he can help you replace these pizza names with Dick.
The cover Dick chose seems to be a human butt floating in a dream. I like this because it seems like something a sarcastic person would say if someone asked, “Does anyone have any ideas for the cover of this hypnosis weight loss tape?”
The copy on the box is less elegant. The back has 400 words about what hypnosis is, what subliminal messages are, a full transcription of the video itself, and a description of weight loss. Its stated goal is reprogramming your mind to lose weight which sounds unlikely, so the most important thing to establish to your audience is that you’re not fucking crazy. This does not do that. I’m not even sure what the title of this goddamn thing is. Going by AP Stylebook, Dick technically named this: “VIDEO HYPNOSIS Plus Audio & Video Subliminal Suggestions Lose Weight Now Generates an Eyes-Open Altered State of Consciousness. Two Kinds of Hypnosis and Two Kinds of Subliminal Programming Make This The Most Powerful Self-Help Programming In The World.” If it takes you that long to name and 40 times longer to explain an idea no more complicated than “weight loss hypnosis,” my first instinct is to not trust you to rewire my brain.
According to the sprawling wall of text on the back, the viewer will be hypnotized two different ways. One is with mesmerizing instructions and swirling colors. The other is with quick flashes of text commands. And even assuming these techniques are a real thing, I worry Dick doesn’t have the brevity required for subliminal commands. For instance, if he wanted you to “KIDNAP THE MAYOR” he would flash the words “My Trusted Love Companion Has Betrayed Me and Left Me for the Corrupt Mayor, Three Psychic Curses Upon His Penis, Which is to Say I’d Appreciate It if By Force You Brought Him to Me Using Ropes, Alive (Ropes are Like Rocks But Softer and Longer).” Jesus, am I still talking about just the box? I think Dick might already be in my head.
Nothing has ever been as exactly as you expect it as this VHS tape. It is some spiraling stars and shapes with Dick, an untalented voice actor, doing a bland take on psychotherapist cliches. And in true Dick fashion, he opens with several minutes of unnecessary explanation of how the fuck to watch TV. Want to hear his helpful tips! Look at the screen and “feel as you normally do when watching television.” It seems like there can’t possibly be more, but there is. He explains how TV watchers have clear minds fully open to alpha waves and subliminal messages, which is absurd because in 1987 TV watchers had frantic minds wondering what trouble Alf would find himself in next.
I suppose there’s no way to get around this since hypnosis is an exact science, but the first ten minutes of VIDEO HYPNOSIS Plus Audio & Video Subliminal Suggestions Lose Weight Now Generates an Eyes-Open Altered State of Consciousness. Two Kinds of Hypnosis and Two Kinds of Subliminal Programming Make This The Most Powerful Self-Help Programming In The World., which I’ll abbreviate to VHPA&VSSLWNGAE-OASOC.TKOHATKOSPMTTMPS-HPITW. from now on, is nothing more than “relaxing” breathing instructions. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen too many Super Friends fall prey to this, but when I hear a very slow, affected voice commanding me to obey, my first instinct is to attack before they can raise their psychic shields. It’s why I’ve never woken up in the middle of a bank robbery holding bags of cash while my eleven partners whisper, “One of us has left the hive. Find him.”
After 10 minutes of this, I’m starting to worry the pounds might come off too fast. I can’t wait to tell people the secret to weight loss was right there in front of us for 33 years– telling your TV to moan about relaxing until your brain is stupid enough to learn the dangers of food. It makes me wonder if Dick ever got bitter after he saw our sloshing avalanche into a national obesity crisis. Or did he feel responsible? Did he think, “This is all my fault. I should have made the tape that could have fixed all this a more inviting $14.95 (Higher in Canada).”
Thanks to the power of technology and my immunity to, kidnap the mayor, hypnotism, I was able to capture one of the video’s subliminal messages. In VCR Settings font it says “YOU EAT SMALLER PORTIONS AT MEALS” That’s it? Why not hypnotize me into hating ham? Or liking the taste of amphetamines? This is such a waste of unlikely sorcery. One other message is “YOU NOW CONTROL YOUR WEIGHT,” which seems like the only one I’d need. It also commands “YOU QUIT ALL SNACKING,” but you don’t need a degree in monkey paw studies to see how reprogramming a brain to be incapable of a common, ill-defined thing could lead to danger. If I’m on a hike do I have to bring candles and place settings to eat a granola bar? If it’s 3pm do I need a psychic notary to declare a sandwich a “late lunch?” Is anyone else’s mind screaming? Excuse me, is anyone else’s mind screaming, mind screaming?
Most of the messages are basic diet advice reconditioned for hypnotic commands, and when I say basic it seems virtually impossible to say anything dumber about dieting. If you grunted angrily at a plate of nachos any nutrition scientist would say, “That is the exact level of fitness expertise demonstrated in the hit hypnosis film, VHPA&VSSLWNGAE-OASOC.TKOHATKOSPMTTMPS-HPITW..
Despite owning probably more books and tapes on hypnotic suggestion than any living person, I wouldn’t say it’s my area of expertise. That being said, I don’t think this is good hypnosis. Dick jumps between first and second person a lot, which seem like big differences when your subconscious is planning a mayor kidnapping, excuse me, weight loss, snackless weight loss. He also seems to have no care for keeping a steady pace or tone. He’ll often stop and say, “That’s right!” as if he just blew the viewer’s mind with his idea of wishing really hard to be thin. And one of his subliminal commands is “THIN IS YOUR KEY WORD FOR CONDITIONED RESPONSE.” What the shit does that mean, Dick? That is merely the promise of future menace. What is going to happen to me when I am commanded to “thin,” Dick? And don’t say kidnap the mayor because, how did I get here, the mayor is already in my trunk! I am very thin and the mayor is in my trunk!
You already know this from all the times you’ve accidentally killed someone by misunderstanding tango instructions, but the body is lined with “pressure points,” or invisible buttons that control organs with magic. It isn’t much more complicated than that, but George Dillman still makes it easy in PRESSURE POINT KARATE MADE EASY.
Fifty years ago, George Dillman was “U.S. National Karate Champion” four times, whatever that means, and he’s husband to a woman who wears pajamas to Karate Book Picture Day and tells photographers, “No, I’m good. I ran a comb through it a few days ago.”
Before we start, let’s talk a little bit about George Dillman. This book was published in 1999 which came at a unique point in George’s Karate journey. It was six years after the debut of the Ultimate Fighting Championships, which as you may know, suggested the hilarious inadequacy of Karate when the other person is allowed to do non-Karate. This forced people with careers in traditional martial arts to pivot from “WE’LL TEACH YOU TO KILL WITH YOUR FUCKING HANDS” to “we will watch indoor children at affordable rates.”
Instead of starting daycares, some insecure Karate masters tried to rebrand themselves as wizards. George did both. His Karate evolved from punching potential muggers to teaching kids how to poke a body’s forbidden death spots. Long story short, this combined with his narcissistic personality disorder to convince himself he could knock people out without even touching them. And six years after he published this book, he was so deep in the delusion he seemed genuinely unprepared for it not to work in front of a National Geographic film crew. George stammered out a series of excuses about how the test subject who resisted his mightiest Karate waves must have had his toe or tongue in the secret force field spot. Karate analogies are not an exact science, but this was like a mechanic guessing your engine light came on because of un-journaled dreams and reading your confusion as a signal to put his penis in your husband’s hand. George unleashed such a profoundly embarrassing string of lies, the exact quote takes up half his Wikipedia page:
“The skeptic was a totally non-believer. Plus — I don’t know if I should say that on film — but if the guy had his tongue in the wrong position in the mouth, that can also nullify it. You can nullify it — you can nullify a lot of things. In fact, you can nullify it if you raise those two big toes! If I say I’m going to knock you out, and you raise one toe, and push one toe down… I can’t knock you out. And then, if I go to try again, you reverse it. If you keep doing this, I won’t knock you out.”
What George did here was incredible because the thing about martial arts is they don’t have to work. If you’re the shittiest Karate master in the world, the worst thing that can happen to you is a second Karate master has a different opinion about how you should kill hypothetical ninjas. And yet in an industry where there is no fail condition, George Dillman managed to do it. So as we read, keep in mind that after sixty years as a Karate celebrity and author, what the writer of this book is mainly remembered for is how his Karate doesn’t work.
Meet an eagle! He’s an unnamed Karate eagle who appears every few pages with a very stupid person’s idea of wisdom. Here he’s saying, “You want to BE a black belt, but are you willing to BECOME a black belt?” This intimidating message is a bit undercut by the picture of two little girls who seem to be saying, “We come here after school and wait for our dad to finish his Karate job. He said these belts normally cost $84, but he gets them for sixty. What? Seventy four? My sister says he still has to pay seventy four.”
Now that PRESSURE POINT KARATE MADE EASY has set the bar you need to clear at “mightier than a full-time sixth grader,” it’s time to learn Pressure Point Karate, easily. Well, not quite yet. A lot of this book is George Dillman’s personal photo album. And I don’t mean recent or relevant photos, but random vacation pictures and every single time he’s met a movie star. It seems indulgent past the point of sanity, but you don’t want to buy a book on combat acupuncture and find out on page 30 the author has never even met Billy Blanks.
The Photo Album section eventually ends, but George keeps including giant, pointless pictures of himself long after he’s started talking about Karate. Here he is going on about the philosophy and history of his once secret style of karate-jitsu and he can only fit one full paragraph on the goddamn page because he dedicated 3/4 of it to a glamor shot of him pulling some guy’s hair. Looking good, George. If this is your ancient style of fighting, it explains why 12-year-old girls excel at it.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone so unphotogenic force this many pictures of themselves onto the world. He has the features of a baby who kept a vow to never let his bones change shape and the figure of a baby without a funny second thing.
After this instruction book opens with twenty seven pages of instructionless narcissism, the Karate eagle appears to tell us “Real masters don’t brag! They are too busy learning more.” It’s right under a caption written by George Dillman explaining how George Dillman is one of the most respected and sought-after martial arts teachers in the world. This fucking guy looks like Estonia tried to make their own Gremlins 2, but as real master of comedy, Seanbaby refuses to mock a mentally ill person’s appearance. He is too busy crushing ass.
Finally, some pressure points! Here’s the chart for death-touching your enemy’s right arm. Want to shut down their large intestine? Okay, there are ten spots that do that. Number seven is “halfway between the elbow and the wrist” and it must be pretty big since there are starting points to start measuring from either of those locations. You can tell this is a real thing and not made up because of all the times you’ve seen volleyball players receive a serve and die there on the spot, blasting shit out of their mouth and pores.
Not all of the pressure points are meant to destroy organ function or cause cramps. Some of them are more like puppet strings? For instance, if you rub the Triple Warmer #11 up and down, it will make your enemy straighten their arm. This is great for after you kill someone and need their body to wave as if to say, “I’m fine! No one has killed me!” Anyway, I think it’s great this man who teaches children has created an elaborate fantasy world where he can kill with his fingers and, maybe unrelated, control exactly how bodies move by rubbing them.
The book limply tries to convince the reader that this is a special kind of Karate with practical combat uses, and the reason the old Karate never worked is because of a conspiracy to teach school-children bad Karate intentionally to keep them safe. This is what the rise of mixed martial arts did to the brains of Karate teachers. George almost certainly believes this because the alternative, that he’s spent his entire life learning a style of fighting he can’t use in a fight, is unthinkable.
There’s not even an internal logic to this shit. If school-children aren’t safe around effective Karate, why is your job teaching it to school-children? What changed your mind about putting the power of life and death into the hands of kids? You could have cut twenty pages of your photo album to explain why you were a part of this century-long conspiracy. And it seems outrageously irresponsible not to include a chart of which states allow you to shut down someone’s liver with your finger.
Here’s a great example of karate-jitsu, the secret style finally available to hopefully-not murderers. If an attacker grabs you by your elbow, put your arm four inches to the right and wait for them to run away and trip. When they say “EASY” in PRESSURE POINT KARATE MADE EASY, they mean you’ll be facing opponents who lose control of their nervous system near gently moving children.
I’m not saying this is a bad fighting move. I’m saying if scientists grafted Stephen Hawking’s cells onto chicken DNA to make an eyeless wad of feathers and all it could do was scream, it would instinctively respond to an attack more effectively than this karate-jitsu move. I’m saying if every government on the planet required its citizens to dedicate a year of their life to mastering this maneuver, all human life would end before it knocked over a single person outside of George Dillman’s beginner’s Karate class. If I saw this happen I would assume that guy stepped on his own tampon string.
Not all of George’s moves are as well thought out as “maybe just kind of throw your elbow-grabber with your elbow?” Here he demonstrates how to force one of your students to give you a footjob after they kick you in the dick. Karate eagle says, “The less handsome the Karate student, the less they’ll expect it!”
This is the kind of move two gentle brothers would invent when they’re six and eight, and love each other very much. I don’t think you need to be a champion kickboxer to know that if someone kicks you in the leg and you give theirs a cute hug, they got the better end of the deal. And now each of you is hopping on one foot for reasons George never explains. This isn’t the set up to some second sweet move– it’s just George not wanting to waste a super sweet picture of himself from his hairline’s good side. Plus, hang on a second– if a little girl can throw you into the ground when you’re attached to her elbow, imagine how far a grown man is going to send you flying with his whole leg. If karate-jitsu is to be believed, this is basically loading yourself into a catapult.
George reminds the reader many times how karate-jitsu is the good kind of Karate unlike karate-do, which is a trick played on children by long dead Okinawans. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s not like anyone can prove he’s wrong. He’s betting his career on how no one will ever do a blind study where they beat the shit out of kids to see which Karate instructor was right.
Fun Fact: That watchful man whose name George misspelled is Bob “Pit Bull” Golden. He helped develop this fighting style from “pressure point touching” to “no touching at all.” So if you were wondering how any of this could get any dumber, that’s how. These dumbshits invented “The Force.” Which brings me to my main point: there is no place on Earth more safe than directly in front of George Dillman after you’ve made love to his wife through the hole in her pajamas.
The Karate eagle has an “important secret of self-defense” here about how you can bend your own elbow. George doesn’t really make it clear how that’s helpful, but if you go into a kidnapping armed with the knowledge that bendable elbows are some kind of secret weapon, it will be your second unpleasant surprise of the day.
After a few pages listing general areas you can tickle to take command of someone’s organs, and a few almost sarcastically bad Karate moves, George forgets what the shit he’s doing in his own book. The entire last third, forty fucking pages, is taken up with a step-by-step kata. Not a modern karate-jitsu take on a kata, but the exact same imaginary fist fight our grandmothers performed to earn their yellow belts and then took to their grave without ever meeting the specific man it was choreographed to defeat.
Look at that fuck. George Dillman looks like something Willy Wonka would point to and say, “Here’s one of our finest soldiers guarding the peppermint brook from ghosts,” and then lean in close to whisper, “THERE ARE NO GHOSTS, BUT THAT OOMPA LOOMPA’S SKULL IS TOO SOFT FOR SLAVERY.”
Let’s go over what we’ve learned: several questionable battle techniques, which ’70s kung fu stars are actually really nice in person, and which dots on a woman’s body controls her elbow. George suggests you now know more than some black belts. This dork really thinks his badly edited photo album of children he failed to kill is his magnum opus. He thinks he’s given you a new future in this dying industry of grifters and nerds. Then, after finally wrapping things up, he adds one more thing. It’s, of course, a full-page glamor shot of himself pulling someone’s hair.
Okay, now, after finally wrapping things up and adding one last full-page glamor shot, he adds that same full-page glamor shot again, and I’m not kidding:
This time he’s really done, and the Karate eagle’s closing statement is “Some people say, Practice makes perfect. They’re wrong. Practice makes permanent; perfect practice makes perfect.” And speaking of, what a perfect thing to say after forty pages of a disgraced liar showing you still photos of how to practice fighting against an opponent whose moves you know ahead of time, who can’t give you feedback, and who also doesn’t exist. This is like Billy Blanks’ barber putting up a sign that says “Subtlety is an angel’s soft kiss; all hair should be very round on the top.”
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Doug Redmond: Who is both Billy Blanks Flat Top 2 and 6 – the most powerful flat top duo in history.
In 1982, Pac-Man was so popular one genre of book was “something, fucking anything, about Pac-Man.” This perfectly describes THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK. It’s a deconstruction of the entire concept of “something.” This is Plato’s Cave if the shadows on your wall were Pac-Man and everything behind you was Pac-Man. In fact, Plato should have called his stupid allegory “the cave adaptation of THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK.”
I talked about this book once before in a Cracked article, but never stopped thinking about it. There is not a single sane page within it– not one coherent riddle or joke. This is a decapitated head trying to add the sounds “pac” and “dot” to words with the last of its escaping brain blood.
This one is only to help ease you into what you can expect in THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK. I don’t have a joke about how Mike Thaler “America’s Riddle King” changed the name of a different video game to make a vague reference to Pac-Man’s own video game. Or maybe I do? Let me try. It’s sort of like if a Star Trek joke book said Captain Kirk’s favorite movie was Star Wars but they meant a star like you’d see in Star Trek, not the “Star” from the title of Star Wars? No, no, I was right. I don’t have a joke about this.
This is the least fun thing I’ve ever seen from the least functional fun delivery system. It is almost suspiciously exactly what I would put in a Pac-Man riddle and joke book if all I wanted to do was hurt children. We all knew what we were getting into, but try to imagine the disappointment of a bright-eyed 1982 Pac-Man fan. They opened this book for joy and saw the inventor of the pasteurization process, punned three different ways with the same word, illustrated by an artist any physical therapist would call, “My quadruple amputee who draws like he’s also missing a fucking mouth.”
Winni-Pac Canadot? More like “Dot-phisticated word-plac!” What’s it like getting annihilated like this, Canada? This is devastating– a masterclass in the power of satire. No matter our politics or beliefs, every lie we tell ourselves gets laid bare once we see something sacred to us get words from Pac-Man mashed into other words.
Nobody tags a joke like Mike Thaler “America’s Riddle King.” Look how he assaults you with his sense of humor. You’re still reeling from “Pac-Pong,” and he adds that, in addition to the pun, you should consider how Pac-Man’s known attributes of eating things and nothing else means he’s bad at the sport name he’s lampooning! There’s not really an industry term for this kind of hilarity combo. It’s the kind of comedy you normally only see when someone says something in Tagalog you can’t understand and then a nurse translates, “The doctor, he say both bullets in your liver. You die here in the Philippines.”
I wasn’t expecting “Pac-Man Goes to the Dentist” to be funny, but I definitely wasn’t expecting the dentist character to immediately reject the joke’s conceit. Why are we here if he doesn’t have teeth? Why would, in a universe where Pac-Men go to the dentist, this not come up until this stage of the dental appointment? This is like saying, “Welcome to the 72nd annual World Fart Championships! I’m Burp Peppers, and thanks for sticking around after the 73rd annual Chili Cook Off!” and having your friend respond, “What? No, I think your name is Frank something and this is an improv show in a bookstore! And it’s not even really that because the guy who screamed ‘fart contest’ is your co-worker! You’re both cops and I’m only here because my parole officer, the fart contest guy, said it would be a bad idea for a convicted child molester to also be an unsupportive friend. So here I am! Do you want me to come up there and, like, make up a song or something?”
Oh, fun; let’s do this one! Number One has got to be Half-“PAC!” And Four is, oh cute! That’s a back-“PAC!” And number 6 is… oh my god. Sperm PAnC? This is a Pac-Man sperm, right? B-but it can’t be from his balls since he’s made of just this one shape, so are you saying Pac-Man himself is one giant testicle? Are you fucking telling me that if Pac-Man turned his gaping mouth toward us, we would see a gnashing swamp of Pac-Man sper– wait. Rat “PAC.” My bad, I see it now. The Rat PAC with, like, I don’t know… Frank Sin-DOT-tra and Sammy BLINKY Junior? PACter Lawford? Dean… Dean Ms.-Pac-Man? Ha ha I can’t do it. It’s why you’re the tops, Mike! The Riddle King, baby!
I think it’s a bad sign when you see an abomination and you think, “Oh, thank God, this creature is part rat, not all sperm.” But these “What Kinds of Pacs Are These?” quizzes continue through the book and only get more perverse and disgusting.
How is Combover Centaur Pac-Man (5) more disturbing than Hairy Gonad Pecked By Bird Pac-Man (3) and Uncircumcised Pac-cid-Man (2). Combover Centaur Pac-Man is not a riddle– it’s a ritual marker for sex druids. It’s the birthmark on a newborn crawling out of a mass horse grave. If a stranger ever handed me this filthy thing…
… I would immediately start fighting for my life. And God help the cursed traveler who finds it on my dead body. My final words to you are these: You have five days to tame The Stallion and his frothing has already begun.
This isn’t all the way “racist,” but it’s as close to the line as I think a Pac-Man riddle book should get.
Here’s the, I guess, official Pac-Man origin? It seems like in 1982 they let writers do whatever the hell they wanted. I’ve written for some big IPs in my career and it’s absurd how many days I spent going back-and-forth with creative directors and their bosses about whether Dolph Ziggler would eat a human heart or if we could make it so Salacious Crumb has three spear-like penises that penetrate anywhere on his lover’s body like a bedbug. Mike just casually adds to Pac-Man’s canon, “he was formed when, I don’t know, a cheesecake came to life and murdered a waitress? suck my ass who gives a shit.”
W-what? So he’s the moon only… only a-also Pac-Man? No. No, I refuse this. As a representative of this Earth, I reject Pac-Moon. I declare whatever -this- is to be the enemy of my people.
Never at any point did Mike Thaler, the author of THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK, think, “Maybe this one doesn’t work.” If a word had any sound close to “dot” or “pac” in it, it went in. If a word had a “d” or a “p” that was fine too. No thought was given to whether something was funny or clever or appropriate for children. If Mike would have walked past a holocaust museum during the writing of this book, he would haverushed home repeating, “DOTschwitz, DOTschwitz, DOTschwitz, don’t forge– is that a new Pizza Hut? Oh my god, more like Pizza DOT! Don’t forget, Pizza DOT, Pizza DOT…”
I’m sort of being serious. The way Mike handles sensitive subjects with zero context and a childlike understanding of puns is grotesque. It’s like he’s trying to show his wild side in a Marmaduke fan letter. For instance, say someone was famously kidnapped and, after a series of sex crimes, forced to commit armed robbery. What’s the clumsiest way you could handle that with a Pac-Man pun? Oh, that’s an insane thing to try? An unthinkable thing no one would ever do?
Boom. This is why Mike Thaler is “America’s Riddle King” and we’re not. You and I think things like, “What a terrible loss it is when a child dies.” Mike Thaler thinks things like, “PAC-iatric cancer? Whooping DOT? Crib DOTh? There it is. Crib DOTh.”
Here’s a fun look behind-the-scenes of a 1-900-HOTDOG article. That joke is the end result of several minutes of wedging Pac-Man puns into tragic childhood ailments. I was all… “DOT-arrhea, small PACs, PAC-io, unDOTagnosed DOT-ism,” and when I stopped at “crib DOTh” I thought, “Jesus, I’ll definitely come back and soften that. I’m not sure a Pac-Man joke book warrants crib DOTh.” But then I got to this page in THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK where Mike actually published three of my less funny childhood DOT-sease ideas, and then repeated one of them.
So whether you agree with my criticism or not, here is very literally what happened: I tried to think of a joke the laziest, most humorless, pun-loving piece of shit would write about sick children. That was the task I gave myself. And the author of this book, Mike Thaler “America’s Riddle King,” published, word-for-word, three of the things in my maybe pile. So he’s not the worst writer I can imagine– he’s the deleted drafts rejected by that worst writer. And I’m truly humbled he went beyond my wildest imaginations by writing “Chicken Pacs” a second time, separated only by “Small Pacs.” It’s breathtaking. Beyond any wonder I’ve ever seen.
Psssst, children! Children, do you like riddles? You do? Oh, good! Grand!! Wonderful!!! Listen closely now: What. Pac-Man. Was a famous… murderer. Ha ha ha ha ha haaaa!!!
What? No, not Jeffrey Dot-mer, but that would have been good. No, not the Zodi-“Pac” Killer. No, I don’t mean A-“Dot” Hitler. O-or “Pac”mann Göring. Okay, stop, it’s not any of the Nazis, okay? Oh, it’s not Charles Pac-Manson but that’s better. Who’s Coral Eugene “Dots?” No, it’s not “Pac” Kevorkian eith– holy fuck what is wrong with you kids?
As you can see, most of the book is Mike performing the minimum amount of wordplay to legally count as a pun, but he eventually launches into a stream-of-consciousness story about what would happen if Pac-Man escaped his arcade cabinet. This could be interesting, right? Pac-Man is an immortal being of infinite hunger with no remorse or understanding let loose in a world of a silly writer’s imagination! Anyway, I’m not a psychologist, but from among the limitless possibilities available to Mike, the first activity his author surrogate selects is, “SNEAK UP ON A FAT WOMAN AND EAT THE CLOTHES OFF HER.”
It keeps going with Pac-Man eating a kid’s yo-yo, a leopard’s spots, a clown’s nose… if it’s roundish, Pac-Man takes it from you with no remorse or understanding. Each event is completely without whimsy. Did Mike Thaler ask a kindergarten class to name things that look like dots and think, “These fools are writing my entire book for me!” Is it a cautionary tale of what will happen when we unleash artificial intelligence? Is it the pornography of a man with a dotless fetish? Because it is not fucking anything close to riddles and jokes.
It is a relentlessly pointless series of events until Pac-Man eats a fruit stand. The cops had nothing to charge Pac-Man with when he was harassing animals and women, but they absolutely went after him once he started harming fruit. Pac-Man evades justice because he apparently brought arcade escape tunnels with him into this world, a terrifying hint at how the breach between our realities could have more serious ramifications than simple clown mutilation. And sure enough, the story ends the only way it ever could: an unstoppable Pac-Man heading straight for our delicious sun with no remorse or understanding. Have a nice “DOT,” I guess!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Timmy Leahy: The PACster of his DOTmain whose PACking a huge DOT.
