In 1994, EA published Shaq Fu, a terrible fighting game about Shaquille O’Neal traveling to another dimension to rescue a boy from a kung fu mummy. It’s, to this day, the most bad ideas anyone ever had at once without dying. It’s absurd, but a dark, clinical type of absurd like a birthday clown who can only do impersonations of your grandparents’ last words. Needless to say, I have been captivated by Shaq Fu for many years and adapted it into the children’s book you’re about to fall in love with.
Fans of the game may notice I’ve taken some liberties in The Unauthorized Child Novelization of Shaq Fu in order to help the reader explore what it means to be Shaq on a kung fu rescue quest. For instance, you, the reader, are Shaq. It’s not the first Shaquille O’Neal book I’ve written in the second person, but it is the first one written for someone who was not specifically Shaquille O’Neal. As he, his publicist, NBA great Horace Grant, and several housekeepers already know, I’ve been writing the exciting You (Shaq) & Me (Seanbaby) series for over 30 years.
You’ve seen them everywhere: adult psychics. They bend our local spoons and hide messages in our worst cookies. But how did they get here? Can anything stop them? Let’s answer your first question first: In 1988, Litany Burn wrote a book called Develop Your Child’s Psychic Abilities. It was so effective I have some bad news about your second question: my parents were one of her customers and I will crush your mind with the spidery legs of your own nightmares.
Litany Burn is a clairvoyant and healer who represents herself with this drawing on the Nyack section of goop.com. Incidentally, thephrase “Nyack section of goop” comes from the sound Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina makes as it is lowered around a hand-dyed ostrich egg. In the intro, Litany claims to be “accredited to teach psychic awareness by the New York State public school system,” but I found no Google results for “accredited to teach psychic awareness” or “psychic awareness accreditation.” This can only mean after she became the first and only “Official New York Public School Psychic Teacher” she then erased all traces of it from our minds. The other possibility, that it’s a dumb fantasy told by an obvious grifter financially incentivized to lie, is simply too impossible to consider.
Before Develop Your Child’s Psychic Abilities, Litany wrote Develop Your Psychic Abilities, and then she wrote each book again. And then wrote the psychic child one a third time. She went five books without ever having a second idea and her first idea seems to be hoping someone will one day be born with powers and then claiming they owe her 15% of them as an agency fee. After thirty years as a psychic teacher in a world with no psychics, the only thing Litany has taught anyone is that hard work and perseverance are pointless if your head is up your own delusional ass. Which itself is just a knockoff of the lesson we already learned from Corey Feldman’s music career.
This is the only time the reader hears about the amazing Kaarlo and this is his story told in its entirety. About a third of the book is little anecdotes like this– definitely made up yet still dull and inconclusive. Litany has a con-artist’s instincts to keep her tales of the fantastic believable. She doesn’t invent a boy named Kaarlo who can fly. All Kaarlo can do is guess who is on the phone and imply it’s supernatural. This makes the reader feel like their good guesses might have been psychic powers this whole time. There’s also a theme of oppression in all of Litany’s stories, as if Kaarlo would still have magical caller ID abilities today if his family wasn’t a bunch of unsupportive dicks. She complains about things like how schools don’t nurture psychic abilities like they do academic or athletic talent. The overall message of the book is how you would have been able to read minds if you had grown up around people who let you try. It’s like saying you would be a centaur right now if your stupid parents got you the horse and sewing machine you asked for.
Litany builds a fortress of excuses around her psychic learning program. She opens the book by saying all mutant children are different and the lessons are only “possibilities and suggestions that aid insight.” Usually a disclaimer tries to waive liability, but I guess when the thing you’re talking about doesn’t exist you waive disappointment instead.
You need to understand, any child can be psychic. Litany says psychic children can be “black, white, yellow, and brown” which is a turn of phrase used exclusively by and for the second color in that list. She herself has had a number of ordinary childhood experiences she interpreted as fantastic abilities. For instance, her dad once woke up “calling out the name of his favorite uncle, who was dying in an accidental fire three hundred miles away.” That’s all she mentions about that event before she spends a page bragging about how she sometimes played with a ouija board. Did her dad kill her uncle with deadly fire powers or simply sense him burning alive with useless death-sensing powers? She doesn’t say because she is a dingbat with the storytelling skills of a dog who watched you fall in a well and decided you belong there.
Please remember psychic science is not an exact science. If you use telekinesis to force a coin to land on a certain side, you’re going to fuck it up about half the time. But like all good science, Litany starts by knowing psychic powers work and dedicating her life to making excuses when they don’t. For instance, if Kaarlo guesses Cookie Monster is on the phone and he’s not, it might indicate ley line interference or -and this is a worst case scenario- you’re a fucking idiot. Or a cookie wizard is on your upstairs phone? The nice thing about psychic powers is there are no wrong answers.
It’s fun to imagine every coincidence as a psychic phenomenon, but there is some danger in believing whatever you want and explaining away all your wrongness with conspiracies and the supernatural. For instance, Litany has a large section of the book where she theorizes the rise in learning disabilities is tied to unreleased psychic powers. In other words, if your child doesn’t start levitating, it might cause autism. So if you went into this book thinking you and your kid were going to be doing fun card tricks, the stakes just went up.
It’s 87 pages into the book before Litany finally starts giving us exercises to train our powers. This one has you choose a time, say 6:23 am, and then see if your kid can heal a sick pet or a healthy tourist with their mind. But the line, “Check results when possible,” at the end sort of gives away her lack of confidence in us. If you want me to really believe I’m shooting healing waves into the night, maybe don’t add, “Oh, and if you have time, check to see if you’ve made veterinarian medicine obsolete, magic boy.” Is this sarcasm? Irresponsibility? Is my vet going to call at 6:24 am to say, “YOUR CAT! I-IT EXPLODED! EXPLODED!!! WHAT HAVE THESE HANDS DONE!?!?”
Most of the exercises involve staring at things and panting or telling your baby to place their hands on an object and release their negative energy into it. Assuming your baby understands what you mean by “negative energy” or “hands,” what then? Do I use a tire gauge to measure how much is left? Wouldn’t it require a +1 tire gauge or higher? What if my Jiffy Lube doesn’t have a Draenic blacksmith? Are my baby’s cursed psychic rays the reason my computer can’t ever find the printer? Litany was so certain none of this bullshit would work she didn’t bother answering any of these questions.
In Chapter 3: Invisible Friends and Visitors, Litany suggests imaginary friends are actual beings only your child can see. Holy shit, right? She even proves it by telling this story about someone named Cara who dreamed about a flying coach in a yellow hat. Still not convinced? Well, tough, because that’s the entire story. Look up in the night sky. Every moving light you can’t explain is a shard of Cara screaming upon reentry. You let her leave Earth with the yellow-hatted one before she finished her training and now you must watch her return from the stars in shattered pieces! I– look, I honestly can’t tell the tone Litany is going for sometimes. Cara might be fine.
There are a lot of ordinary things linked to psychic abilities in this book, but being able to point your wheelchair towards the one basketball in the room might be the least supernatural of them all. Is this an unthinkable skill? Is there a wheelchair basketball coach somewhere watching his players shoot off in random directions and shouting, “This is HOPELESS! I’d give my left nut for just one of you wheeled fucks to have a single precognitive mind power!”
Pablo saw his teacher reading a book on developing psychic powers and knew she would believe anything. Then Pablo, and here is the clever part, cheated on his math test. It worked so well the dingbat witch used it as anecdotal proof of metaphysics. “I don’t know what antelopal meat physics are,” said Pablo, “but I know you don’t need to be good at smart to trick a witch. Witches are five out of pizza stupid.”
I’m not sure what Litany was going for with this story, but who among us wouldn’t trade our intelligence and eating ability for a single moment of knowing when the bus is going to be late? As for Eddie knowing what his mother is thinking, that’s not so incredible. She only ever thinks the one thing: “Must resist! The temptation! To exploit my son’s bus powers!”
After 209 pages of astonishingly pointless stories and ways you can pretend to use the Force, Litany simply ends her book with an unexplained and unnumbered chapter called A CHILD’S WORLD. It’s five letters from kids, absolutely written by Litany herself, about dreams and imaginary friends. The one from “Tony, age 10” is addressed to himself and it’s about riding a big fluing hors with Jonney and then woking up. Why? In what world is this a suggestion of psychic ability? In what world is this anything? You won’t see me wrapping up an article by saying, “I saaw the worlds most stupid psycick lady pretend she wuz the worlbs dummest forth gradest. Uncomfable story nad then book did end.”
During my distinguished career at Cracked.com, I wrote several articles questioning the romantic competence of Gregory J.P. Godek. He is responsible for the best-selling 1,001 Ways to Be Romantic featuring tips like “buy her a pizza with her choice of toppings” and “hire a local youngster to teach you and your lover Nintendo.” Godek rewrote that same book many, many more times, and every single one had tips for fucking near food or the exact words “Go miniature golfing… in your wedding dress and tuxedo!” His mind is a clogged Pizza Hut toilet, but he has the heart of an aspiring clerk who was “a bit too much” for the Hallmark regional manager. You will never love again after reading the 27th version of Godek’s only and dumbest idea: Romantic Essentials – 401 Ways to Show Your Love.
Before we get into Godek’s sexy romantic tips, let’s talk about the cursed lore of my particular copy. It was previously owned by someone named “B. Haechler” who highlighted none of Godek’s ideas for “free backrub” coupons or any of his weird lists of popular love songs. In fact, there were no signs whatsoever B. read a single page. Andrea McMillam, if this gets to you I want you to know your friend “B.” threw your garbage wedding shower present away. You deserve this pain for what you’ve done as a terrible friend and a worse gift giver. It would have been kinder and less confusing if you gave B. a $7 gift card for “Fat Bitch Medicine.”
The introduction says “Hide this book” because it’s your “Romantic Secret Weapon” and its power will be mitigated if your partner discovers you’re using it to cheat at love. I wouldn’t worry about it, though. Romantic Essential Tip #77 is a reminder that women are still horny… still sexual after menopause. Try bringing that up and see if your date cares what the source was. Romantic Essential #300 is just the word “Care.” Is Godek concerned someone is going to find this in your scrapbooking drawer and scream, “Care? CARE!? I knew you stole that idea!” Maybe. He does take for granted the reader is and is dating a cartoonishly nerdy fuck machine with every learning disorder. Still, it might be fun for us both to keep in mind the dumbshit who wrote this thought he was writing some kind of emergency handle you can pull to get out of any romantic trouble.
If a woman wants to sleep with you after you do this, great, but keep in mind you’ve just clinically proven she will have sex with anyone who asks under any circumstances. There is nothing less romantic or sexy than putting a pun on a calculator. It’s what a think tank of geniuses would come up with if you gave them an unlimited budget to define unsexiness. It’s a Hemingway legend from an alternate dimension where he was challenged to dry the panties of a nation in only twelve words.
Remember how this book was meant to be your secret romance weapon in case of emergency? Well, romance emergency lovers, one of the entries is “here are two novelty Three Stooges gifts that exist.” And since he came up with the idea of buying the wristwatch and the necktie, Godek counted it as two separate entries. I don’t care how low your expectations were for a cute little relationship book for squares, but no one could have gone into this imagining “maybe a Three Stooges product?” would be two of the 401 essential romantic tips. If this was a blank page under the words “BITE OFF HER TOE AND PLACE IT HERE,” it would be less strange.
So I page my lover with the message “0-1-1-3-4.” And then what? She calls to ask, “What’s so important!? I’m at work!” and I explain “0-1-1-3-4” means HELLO and it is, in fact, quite romantic? And then what? I wait on the line to see which of her ovaries collapse into sand? Godek, did you fucking just tell me to use a communications device to fucking say “HELLO” to someone I’m already fucking!?!? I’d call you a basic bitch, but Romantic Essential Tip #366 has proven there is literally no instruction manual for a beeper more basic than you. Tell your lover HELLO? I need you to take a look at yourself here, Godek. You’re worse than a failure. The government should tie you to playgrounds to prevent local child predators from ever getting in the mood.
One of Godek’s worst features, and he sucks hard, is his inability to distinguish between “romance” and “anything.” Suggesting pizza is romance. Saying HELLO on a pager is romance. A Three Stooges watch is like a dear friend watching you slap his wife’s tits from the other couch. In only the second tip of this book, he’s taking some troubling trend in American employment scheduling and duct taping it to the concept of love with the unsupported desperation of a YouTuber explaining why Alita:Battle Angel disproves feminism. Give an extra calendar month to your lover? Godek doesn’t suggest how you might achieve this in even the broadest strategy. He simply suggests you work 160 hours less every year and spend that time at couples pottery classes or walking tours of the Cuyahoga Falls historic downtown district. How!? With what shall we slow the passage of time, Godek? A Three Stooges chrono-lamp “eye gouge! silly face!” available for only $79 at timecandles.com?
Godek does this a lot. And when I say “this,” I mean he starts talking about really crazy shit as if you were already in a conversation about it. I’m not leaving some transition out between Romantic Essential Tip #2 and Romantic Essential Tip #3. He went from time sorcery to heart waffles and linked them with the words, “and then, of course.” These things aren’t related, Godek. You can’t shriek, “Time is a construct! Quit your job to pork and furthermore: did you know breakfast can come in shapes!? Visit appliances.com and put in offer code SLOW-TIME-AND-THEN-OF-COURSE-HEART-WAFFLE.”
Godek learned Pun as a second language so he could seduce Laffy Taffies. He sits at his desk with a bowl of candy penetrating cubes of banana after whispering to them erotic homonyms. “What’s the best day of the week to open your wrapper, my sweet?” he asks. “Hump day!” he giggles, playfully not giving it enough time to answer. “And what cut of meat did the romance writer buy Bazooka Joe? Chuck steak- wait, no, I meant ‘fuck’ steak. ‘FUCK‘ stea– no, don’t leave, bowl of candy! Did you see my note? Check your wristwaaaatch!”
Sure, go for it. It’ll help remind your lover which one of you is always needy and horny and which one of you does chores.
Jesus Christ, Godek. Maybe attach a note to your face: “Fuck me and everything about me.”
The world has a few empty slots it will always need to fill for the role of “romance guru.” For instance, every daytime talk show or radio station needs a love expert in their media contact database to give sexy Valentine tips or explain which anal beads make the best Grandparent’s Day gifts. Any, any, horny idiot with a passing knowledge of cultural stereotypes can stumble into this job. And once you have it, Godek demonstrates how this job has no fail condition. You can’t “debunk” folksy romance wisdom. Oprah is never going to grab her love expert guest and scream, “Imposter! Virgin! These are all cliches from edible arrangement packaging!”
When you start to believe you’re smarter than everyone else, you lose your grip on what’s wisdom and what’s too obvious for anyone who has ever lived to disagree with or not know. Godek maybe isn’t stupid when he says, “Women are not men. And Men are not women.” But, and I made a similar point earlier, say something dumber than this, Godek. It’s impossible for this to be anything other than duh to anyone. Pick any words about any subject and arrange them in a less necessary way. If you spent 30 minutes explaining how you always give farts Halfling names like “Elevator Cloudberry” or “Pop Beandigger” it would be no more or less wise. It would simply be a different kind of pointless fart noise.
Maybe… sure, sometimes? Was there a study to discover how often this is true? And if not, how is this more helpful than saying, “When I fart on my wife I call it Eggsy Hogpen!” And speaking of Godek’s wife, he has one, so he’s only really scientifically tested his love expertise on the one subject and its cervix gets wide when exposed to pizza or calculator puns. That’s no challenge, Godek. And whatever, get after it, stud, but it means your entire identity is no different than entering a kitchen for the first time, following the instructions on a Hot Pocket, and declaring yourself a master chef. Incidentally, readers, microwaving a Hot Pocket counts as foreplay in Godek’s house if you hiss, “Nyuk! Nyuk! This is only the first warm crust of cheese my tongue will tickle tonight! But first meet, hrrnhh… Poofnik Proudburrow!”
Okay, dickhead. Feel. Thanks, I’ll try this one while I look at the Three Stooges necktie you told me to buy. Oh. Oh god, is j-joy? I feel like I understand heart-shaped waffles. Oh, god, I get it now! The note on the wristwatch! Everything!
Fucking why? Are we trying to outsmart the ghost of a dead florist? Is this type of Garfield-in-sunglasses zaniness honestly easier than developing a personality? I get you’re only 25 entries away from finishing your book, but have some self respect. This forced goofing like a robot intruder pretending to understand the hu-mor of a novelty tennis mug. This is cuteness black face.
It’s in every book. Every fucking book he has ever written. To Godek, there is no single piece of wisdom or act of affection more worth mentioning than this, his idea of playing miniature golf… while dressed in your wedding gown and tuxedo! If tomorrow you watch your roommate scald his dick on 45 different Hot Pockets, you’ll now be able to say, “I’ve only seen one other person be so certain a dumb idea was a brilliant idea this many times in a row.”
Thirty five entries ago this pizza fucker thought I didn’t know what a woman was, and now he’s just tossing me four blank lines and telling me to go crazy? Fine.
“An authentic boomerang?” Bitch, only you would brag about how interesting you are for buying yourself an airport gift, but I do admire your bravery in writing a note this unlikeable on something designed to be thrown at you.
If I wrote this note on a boomerang it would also say, “Consider this note part one of your PUN-ishment for touching my weapons. Part two is duck. Too late. This was not my only authentic boomerang and the rest of this note is now for the people who find your body. Hello Mister Police duck. Too late. Why do you idiots keep thinking I’m out of boomerangs? They’re like four bucks at any gift shop!”
Technically, by editorial mandate, arcade games fall under the umbrella of NERDING DAY. But you know who never starts their sentences with “technically?” A goddamn hot dog. “Technically” is a word for carrot cakes and tomatoes. And today we are speaking from our beefy loins about no ordinary arcade game. This is the first entry in a new feature called…
The early ’90s were a Golden Age of street gang punching video games. At any pizza parlor or bowling alley you had your choice of Double Dragon, Final Fight, or Vendetta. Or Burning Fight. Or Combatribes. If you were unl- oh shit, Bad Dudes! If you were unlucky, your local arcade had D.D. CREW, a game worse than everything it was ripping off in such a blatant, intentional way. This game is like barging into a man’s house nude with a copy of his wife made out of garbage bags, and then failing to perform sexually with it. Which is to say it’s so brash and confusing in its failures there’s no elegant analogy for it.
Let me try to explain better: this game is a work of unexplainable lunacy. If you asked the animator of D.D. CREW how to punch, he would put one leg over his head and swallow his own face, which is how he thinks you shrug. If you asked the writer of D.D. CREW what the fuck is going on in the plot, he would say, “Unspeed police diarrhea,” which is how he thinks you say, “please repeat, slower.” And if you asked the designer of D.D. CREW how this game happened, he’d say, “They turned that into a game? I thought we were designing software for analyzing police diarrhea.”
Like everything in D.D. CREW, the opening cinematic sucks so hard it creates a masterpiece. A man in an orange Party City pimp costume calls the LAPD to say, “YO GOTTA BOMB IN YA PARK !!” and an empty carnival explodes with no injuries or damage of any kind. It’s sort of cute, like the karate heroes asked their kids to put on a play about what they thought their daddies did at work. The bad guy never gets a name and if any of the characters are the second draft of an idea, I will eat five evidence bags of police diarrhea. The theme song is a mashup of audio samples that, and I swear this isn’t a joke, go, “SHUT UP, ALREADY. DAMN. SHUT UP, ALREADY. EVERYBODY FUCK IT!” Your first guess might be it was chosen randomly by someone without access to a Japanese-to-English dictionary, but the lyrics describe D.D. CREW’s design process a little too perfectly to be a coincidence.
Most fighting games have you leaping around the screen in a whirlwind of kicks and baseball bats. Here, you waddle stiffly and poke your hands and feet in every direction other than horizontal. It’s an entire system of martial arts designed around showing new smells to your dance partner. For example, one guy’s main attack is a high five. Do you have any idea how deeply you need to penetrate the space of your enemy to hurt them with a high five? Depending on your penis length, exactly one penis.
No person involved in the making of this thing gave a shit. All the technical parts of D.D. CREW like “collision detection” or “controls” or “not making 25% of the enemies Wario” fail, but it’s a weird kind of failure like it was done on purpose. It’s not impossible SEGA hired a staff of real muscle men, Warios, and carnival murderers to make this more authentic and they turned out to be poor programmers and project managers. The enemies all look like a total badass drew sarcastic character designs and said, “This is how a pussy draws leisure wear! Ha ha ha! Put it in the game, you fuckin’ nerds!”
The first boss you encounter is a nice man with sticks and a mustache who shouts “YOU’RE IN FOR SOME ROUGHIN’ MAN!” because everything in D.D. CREW is expertly wrong. There was obviously a big, wobbly gray area between super tough and anal play that 1991 was still trying to figure out, and “YOU’RE IN FOR SOME ROUGHIN’ MAN!” is such a perfect thing to say to eliminate any certainty you thought you had about whether this stranger came here to fight or fuck.
The second boss is Bruce Lee because once the D.D. CREW writer came up with “my dad with sticks,” he was out of ideas. Try to imagine saying something dumber during a martial arts video game brainstorming meeting than, “I have an idea: Bruce Lee!” Maybe you could just blurt out, “A karate guy,” but that’s ridiculous, right? What kind of a creatively bankrupt trun would think “a karate guy” was an idea? And who would have such a generic take on such a tired joke structure to build all this hypothetical “karate guy” outrage for a limp reveal every reader will see coming?
D.D. CREW is constantly pushing the boundaries of what your brain will accept. After you beat the third boss, the main bad guy shows up in a helicopter, shoots you with a bazooka, and drops you twenty stories onto the back of your neck. You’re the same flimsy clutz who has been dying every three punches for 12 dollars worth of quarters, but you get up from this certain death instantly and break into a full sprint. By any logic, real or digital, you should be dead. The machine should charge you three tokens just to look at your closed casket. It should be a game over screen with a forensic dentist looking for your teeth in a bog of gore presented by SEGA. Look at this fucking insanity:
Speaking of falling, here’s something the antidepressants industry doesn’t want you to know: the key to happiness is fighting an enemy near the edge of something and knocking them the fuck off the world. If you add up all the hours I’ve spent waiting for video game bad guys to walk between my kick and a pit, I could have read eleven books on being happy and all I would be is dumber and sadder. The only reason anyone is miserable, ever, is they haven’t thrown enough Abobos off a conveyor belt. D.D. CREW tried to include this, the best element of video games and life, but like every other thing in D.D. CREW, it’s so maniacally stupid. There are holes for enemies to fall in, but they seem to have no idea they’re there, so casually stroll to their death without any involvement from you. It’s fun, but fun like a vagina made out of pizza– a wrong kind of too much fun. It’s a video promising only NASCAR crashes that also follows each driver to the hospital to watch his widow cry. Maybe it’s both. D.D. CREW is a vagina crash racing a pizza widow.
Doris Sanford wrote illustrated children’s books for every conceivable trauma a child might go through. She wrote a book on being a loser, one about making friends with the Japanese soldiers guarding you in a prison camp ,and one on the struggles of getting rubbed with chicken in a Satanic pre-school. Ha ha, what funny joke concepts, right? Those are real. Those are faithful summaries of actual books she wrote. So get the fuck ready because it’s UPSETTING DAY at 1-900-HOTDOG and Doris Sanford is an abusive clown riding a molested elephant through a shit-your-pants-in-class circus.
Let’s look at two of her books from the HURTS OF CHILDHOOD SERIES, because a week of reviewing products from the wrong dimension has already left me unable to feel the pain from just one devastatingly illustrated tale of childhood anguish. We’ll start with Something Must Be Wrong With Me: A Boy’s Book About Sexual Abuse, and it’s worse than it sounds. If a Costco factory chicken had anything like a beak left on its featherless, shit-covered head, it would describe Something Must Be Wrong With Me as “a bit too sad for me.”
Normally, Doris Sanford likes to write a lot of details about her main characters before she traumatizes them. We get to know the children, and maybe learn about their hobbies a bit before they get abducted by a human centipede scientist or pulled apart by robots. Something Must Be Wrong With Me moves a little faster than her other books. It’s about a boy named Dino who loved bask– Dino’s basketball coach takes nude pictures of them together in the showers. Sorry, that’s how fast this anguish unfolds. We know Dino for exactly six sentences before Coach Tom is rubbing him in the shower. This is the second page of the book:
Doris usually works with an illustrator named Graci Evans who has a gift, or maybe a curse, for drawing intense, longing stares. Whenever two of her subjects are looking at each other, there is a palpable sexual magnetism and it is never appropriate. This woman is obviously a romance cover specialist, but her career ended up taking this path and now she draws wet molesters staring into the eyes of little boys. Dino should look afraid or confused, but Graci’s colored pencils can only render one thing– unrestrained desire. I am not comfortable explaining any of this, and any number of people in the publishing process could have stepped in and said, “Proofs look great, Graci. One note, though: Can you make it so every single character doesn’t look like they’re quivering in anticipation of true love’s kiss?”
Another strange thing Doris likes to write into her books are talking animals. The main character, even if they have parents, therapists, or any other kind of loving support system, will run off to be alone with their trauma and get visited by a wise animal. The artistic intent of this isn’t is clear as Graci’s illustrations insisting every character is about to fuck. Is it magical realism? Hallucinations? Each of these books seem so delicately designed to be used as bibliotherapy for one very, very specific trauma, so it seems irresponsible to throw in something as batshit crazy as, for instance, a sexual abuse advice pigeon.
The “amazing” sexual abuse advice bird who visits Dino at night to tell him which touches are good or bad is named LOVE-DOVE (capital letters theirs). He’s not named Your Body Your Choice Dove or It’s Not Your Fault Bird. He’s named LOVE-DOVE. It’s weird, right? It’s like telling a kid his parents died in a drunk driving accident and leaving him in a room with the amazing BEER-DEER. I just think a bird speaking in the tongue of man is the last thing this kid needs to help wrap his head around the concept of love. And speaking of love, here’s how Graci drew LOVE-DOVE and Dino’s last goodbye.
People search their whole lives for someone who will look at them like a little boy and bird look at each other in a Graci Evans illustration. How did she make the bird look so horny? You can’t train this. There are no aviary anatomy books on how to draw yearning in the red eyes of a dove. It’s something Graci has in her soul. She couldn’t draw a sexually uninterested bird if you held a gun to her head and said, “If the pigeon wants to fuck I pull the trigger.” That’s not a LOVE-DOVE, that is a THIS HOTEL ROOM WILL NEVER BE CLEAN AGAIN-DOVE.
It’s nice to think all this incoherent narrative illustrated by longing gazes between a boy and his sex bird helped some kids. I can’t speak for the others, but my copy was previously owned by a community center library in Whitehall, Michigan where it was only checked out one time. So I hope the woman named Narngry Illegible didn’t find it as uselessly ridiculous as I did.
For Your Own Good, A Child’s Book About Living in a Foster Home is upsetting for a few reasons. One, the main characters, Jerome and Jamin live a terrible life of neglect and abuse before being taken by the state and placed in foster care. Two, it’s a sad tale of mostly nothing. And three, Doris is not exactly equipped to write black characters. I’m sure she would be quite surprised to discover this, and have a few objections, but it’s pretty racist.
At first the racism is subtle. The main character be narratin’ without ever endin’ any verbs with a “g.” This may not seem like much, and it isn’t, but I have the library of a madman, so I own all 20ish of Doris and Graci’s books. This is the only one with this type of narrative voice. Suspiciously, it’s also the only one with an African American lead. She was right not to pull the trigger and go full, what was called in 1993, “Ebonics” but what she certainly would have called “Jive,” but her decision to have Jerome narratin’ his struggles like ‘dis is a tough thing to look at.
Before they meet, of course, a talking dog, Jerome and Jamin have a tough time adjusting to life in the foster home. For instance, they don’t like to wear or seem to understand clothes, and Jamin instantly destroys the shirts he’s given for school. Look, I’m not saying that the only black people Doris had ever seen were on National Geographic and Def Comedy Jam, but it would explain why the other things her black characters couldn’t wrap their heads around were “how to use the silverware at dinner,” and “how to do things on time.”
The story is a nightmare. Jerome and Jamin are bumbling fish-out-of-water fuckups in every situation and their deadbeat mother doesn’t bother to show up to their scheduled visitations. And look, as a white with a country upbringing and at least 73 untreated concussions, I’m not immune to racism. For instance, when I meet an Asian stand-up comedian I say, “Based on the two things I know about you, 10 minutes of your act is screaming in your mother’s accent.” And every Asian stand-up comedian I have or will ever meet thinks I’m Sherlock Holmes. Also, I am barely kidding when I say if I was a black crime fighter my superhero name would be Karate Ivory Wayans. So yeah, I get not getting it, ethnics. I so wholeheartedly don’t get it that when Starbucks writes “Let’s talk about race” on my cup, I do. And I always ask why I’m not allowed to say it. Always. So if you’re writing a kid’s book about foster homes and I, the man who typed this paragraph, say, “Hold up, this shit is racist,” you fucked up.
Luckily, not many illustrations called for characters to look into each other’s eyes, so Graci Evans kept her colored pencils in her pants for most of the book. I say most of the book because it does end with this picture of Jerome and Jamin with their foster dad sniffing them like he wants their scent to be his everything. SNIFFFFF…
I started tellin’ Bob “I love you… ‘Dad,'” but all he said in return was “SNIFFFFFFFFFF.”
Jamin was gazin’ into his beard the whole time. Just fallin’ in love like a straight up sex pigeon. “SNNNNFFFFFF,” Bob continued.
“SNIFF. SNIIIIIIIIIFFFFFF.”
I tried breakin’ the silence. “We should be gettin’ go–“
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” Bob interrupted with a 40 minute sigh before starting again. “SNIFFFFFFF...” The nearby animals were ordinary, non-talking ones. No one was comin’ to help us.
INSPIRED BY DORIS SANFORD AND GRACI EVANS with apologies to, I guess, everyone else
In 2002, three years on the heels of Star Wars prequel mania, nutty cutup John Byrne released Star Roars: The Outer Space Joke Book. It’s riddles and desperate Star Wars puns along with some generic astronomy and robot stuff, but it’s mainly adapted from the day he watched his family drown as they said, “This is what all joy turns into. Never let go of this terrible suffering for even a moment.” It was a terrible mistake to read.
This is an example of one of John’s better puns. He bet on you finding it funny how turnips have a syllable in common with a different word, and sure, that’s a bad bet and a miserable way to live your life, but there was no outrageous stretch of linguistics to make the pun work. As you’ll soon see, he often changes five or six syllables in a word to squeeze one last pun from his tired mind. He has no problem making many more space vegetable stews out of Celerybacca or R2Rosemary2 and Jabba the IDon’tKnowFuckinPotatoIGuess. He writes jokes like it’s a game of Boggle and you can just add an “s” to the last one and it counts. Each sad variation of the same pun is a view into the witless struggle of his writing process. It is the children’s joke book equivalent of adding slightly different toilets to a 1,001 Best Places to Fuck guide.
This isn’t really fun; it’s more like a touching thing to say to your dying robot whom you’ve never called “friend” before. It shoots way past humorless to be truly sad. This man, John Byrne, sat down to write cute Star Wars jokes and ended up just pouring his loneliness onto the page. It’s nothing but violent, unexpected grief, like a wedding singer pulling the pin out of a grenade and saying, “No one will remember u–.”
John… I mean, we’re sort of splitting hairs, but the 4th is three days away from the practical joke day in April. Why not say “On April Force day?” It’s bad and wrong still, yes, but it’s pretty much the same number of incorrect letters and it could really punch this joke up from a “huh?” to a “go fuck yourself.” I get you’re going for disappointed groans, but this is just the least funny way to ask your audience to explain calendars.
C3-Hoho and Laugh2D2 describe themselves as, and I quote, “the funniest robots in outer space (although we don’t actually spend much time in space – most of our time is spent in the repair shop, ‘cos we’ve split our sides laughing!)”. They never interact or play off each other. They are merely names pasted in front of 8 or 9 of the standard riddle structure jokes that make up most of the book. Neither of them are the straight man or known for any personality traits. They add less than nothing. C3-Hoho and Laugh2D2 are a stop sign writer’s idea of zany characters.
An as-droid? Motherfucker did you just write “ass droid” as a punchline and expect the joke recipient to think it was funny not because the moon is home to some kind of droid for your ass but because the word “asteroid” was missing a “ter?” This is criminal comedic negligence. Your wife could show this to a judge to demonstrate your children are in an unsafely joyless environment. And when the stenographer giggles, the judge will stop the proceedings to say, “No, Gladys. The defendant meant A-S-dash-droid, like an asteroid without a ter. Not a butt robot.” And poor Gladys will spend the rest of the day, the rest of her life, scowling at you, you fuck. You as-droid fuck.
Who can forget the hilarious connection vampires have to full moons? Like the great Martin Scorsese said while making Apocalypse Now, “An apple away keeps the dentist gay– take it from me, Steven Speilberg!”
I get this zaniness was built backwards from a simple man going, “Let’s see… Empire Strikes… Black? Banana? Bank? Bok-bok-bakaw? Wait, bok? Bach! Like the musician!!!” But why bother writing a full movie treatment? This asshole is perfectly content asking you to jump right into a bizarre premise like a Jedi making vegetable stew or a moon rock fucking a robot, but in this case he needed to establish a plot line for his film about space hunters going after Johann Sebastian Bach? Don’t mistake this constructive criticism, though; John. You should burn this joke, John. There’s no salvaging “The Empire Strikes Bach.” You have the comedic instincts of a dusty skeleton being ignored by vultures and the self-editing skills of one of the vultures saying, “I’ve got a bone to pick with this chef!”
I… holy shit, I don’t hate this one.
From the writer of “as-droid” comes a joke hoping to find that sweet spot of cognitive development between “able to talk” and “old enough to learn contempt.” If a policeman asked, “What’s the smelliest planet in space?” he’d get a bigger laugh if the punchline was, “I can’t do this. We found your wife dead.”
A hoarse-tronaut? What the shit is a hoarse-tronaut? If you’re going to cheat at your wordplay, why not just GeeIFeelSick-onaut or NoneOfThisMattersI’mBankingOnYouBeingFour-onaut. Plus, they’re in space. You get a cold in space, you’re not a cute pun. You’re Robitussor, The Virus Who Walks As a Man. And I don’t want to keep telling you how to be a shitty asshole, John, but astroSNOT was right there, and it wouldn’t have required you to shatter your spine stretching for the pun.
Well, sure, the six-eared alien probably has good hearing, but you’re still calling him, John. There’s no circumstances where this joke lands, John. The dumbest child on the first day knowing what an ear is would respond to this with, “Aren’t you… I mean, that’s just calling him. Jesus Christ, man, what are you doing here. Why are you doing this to yourself? You know you can get rid of some of these ideas when they don’t pan out, right? You want a joke? Here’s one: this book reminds me of your mother– tired, but still incoherently sucking.”
Are you sure that’s what he had, John? A Darth attack? In what Illuminati-conspiracy-rotted brain does the word “Darth” seem like a play on the word “Heart?” A Sith lord is in critical space condition and you’re sitting around inventing some new kind of pun that doesn’t use similar letters, sounds, or themes? This isn’t a pun or a zany wisecrack. This is the only incorrect response to the phrase, “Someone here is a shapeshifter. Say something in coherent Earth or I shoot you in the face.”
You know how the robot from Luke Skywalker’s pottery class knew this article was done? Just Luke-y, I dress! Thanks for everything, space!
