Author: Seanbaby

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Boobs🌭

Two weeks ago, I showed you something called The Fart Video. It was an unrelatable series of observations about farts that have never existed; a unique artifact written by a man with no butthole or sense of humor. It would have taken more effort and been funnier if it came with a blank tape and a note saying, “Sorry I didn’t finish the fart video. Cancer.” So now I have a question. What would you say if I told you its creator, Herbert I. Kavet, was one of the most prolific “comedy” “authors” of all time?

A. God damn it.

B. I don’t like where this is going.

C. Please, I’m not ready for another of whatever The Fart Video was.

D. Fuck you, sir.

You’re right! Here is a tiny, tiny sample of Herbert’s body of work:

For decades, Herbert I. Kavet has been guessing wrong about how jokes work for books about farts, sex, or farting. And while all of those titles are fascinating in their own way, one of them caught my eye. Computer: isolate and enhance quadrant sector Boobs.

It’s only the word “boobs.” It’s not “the udder-ly ridiculous book of” them or anything. Just Boobs. And the cover is a child lost in an ocean of them. Why? What part of a man’s brain says, “Forty titties isn’t quite a joke. There needs to be some kind of contex– wait, I’ve got it. An abandoned child leering at two of them. You know, like a real horny toddler. And don’t expect some breast-shaped sand castle gag. I’m saying I will not draw anything more than a tiny boy staring at tits. How long are you going to let me talk? What the fuck does an illustrator need to do to get arrested in 1989?”

If the front wasn’t unappealing enough, this is what the back cover looks like. It’s barely the start of a titty idea. It looks like a shameful Hanna Barbera pitch for something called Lady Harlem Globetrotters. Any attempt to understand it is frustrating. You can tell Boobs is probably a list of different kinds of boobs, but not in a way your planet’s people would know as silly. And it does not bode well that of the four boob examples they give, one of them is already a repeat.

The book opens with, “What’s the deal with the attractive force between objects? When ladies lay down, WHERE do their boobs GO!?” It’s a textbook example of desperate Seinfelding, a technique used by inexperienced comedians where the setup requires both you and your listener to be stupid beyond reason. Herbert tries something unique by not adding a punchline at all and simply soaking in that faulty premise for two more sentences. He could have said, “I tell ya, gravity changes a woman. My wife lays down and suddenly she’s a ten-year-old boy choking out two water balloons, oh!” You add an exploding watermelon or a “cowa-bunga” to that, and you’re an ’80s sensation. But this? This is an incurious virgin asking questions with obvious answers. I promise this whole article won’t be me giving comedy writing notes to a man confused about boobs 40 years ago. Maybe it will help if we calibrate the rules of Herbert’s universe. Let’s check out page 2:

So Herbert’s idea of a standard boob is a swooping tube with a nipple at the end. Like a big toe you can milk. So far, I’d say this man has only seen boobs in two places– Penthouse magazine comics and dead bodies. This is a comedy book about boobs and the author is doing everything he can to communicate two things: I don’t write jokes, and what exactly are boobs.

So now we get where he’s coming from. It won’t help! Up next: Hard Boobs!

“What’s the deal with boobs getting harder these days, fellas? Must be the present fitness craze, right? What? I’m probably thinking of breast implants or push-up bras? No, stop interrupting! You’re ruining my joke about how nursing a baby after aerobics makes them s-strong? Never mind, that’s dumb. You know, you’re right, I might be thinking of breast implants. Sorry, I’m new to boobs and this is only my 78th humor book!”

– Herbert I. Kavet, probably

“I’m just going to say a bunch of random shit for this one, so draw whatever. Sure, inside out nipples on a very sad woman could work! Maybe add a teenager trapped in her cleavage? Yeah, nice. In fact, unless I say otherwise, let’s add a guy getting smothered, just surrendering to the oblivion of titty, in all of these.”

– Herbert I. Kavet, definitely

I’m starting to get this book. Pillow Boobs are the kind of boobs where a pervert author wants to return to the safety of mother’s bosom, to be absorbed by her milky flesh, to crawl into a world where only yummy mommy is. But at the risk of changing tones, va va voom, the busty owner of these fun bags doesn’t need to worry about a date on Saturday nights, zowee, when she swallows all of you in her womb, her loving cervix closing around you, the last of your suffering a shrinking point of light.

Sometimes you can’t tell what boobs look like because of sweaters or jackets, and it sucks. The author of this book must know: can a man sleep forever between your heaving breasts or are you just warm!? You can’t ignore your destiny forever, Enigma Boob!!!

You’re right to not know what’s going on. This went from a list of cartoon boob archetypes to trivia about a specific pair of real-life boobs Herbert is making up. And it wouldn’t be a good story if it was true. It is a haunting rant about mad doctors building a nest inside a woman’s torso. It’s a monologue you’d give to a hitchhiker as you inflated their chest with a bike pump for your murderous tableau. This is not how fucking books work, Herbert.

Oh no.

Herbert is already out of boobs.

Anyone with any foresight should have seen this coming. The second you realized what he was doing you should have thought, “Okay, types of boobs: big, small, hard, soft… pointy… let’s see… the biggest pair formed by the hubris of science, of course. Then… oh no, this is not a concept capable of filling a book.” You can feel the struggle here, the frustration of Herbert’s dull mind as it refuses to cough up boob jokes. Look at this subhuman shit. “Technically, Hidden Boob is different than Disappearing Boob!!!” is a thought a cow might have long after it’s been torn apart for food and industry.

As someone who has submitted many pitches across all types of media, I can tell you one of the worst things a writer can hear is, “Sounds good. Write it up!” It’s what someone says after they’ve heard your ideas and selected the emptiest one, the one you never thought they’d pick. But like most wisdom, it can’t be taught. It can only be earned. Before he pitched Boobs, Herbert never considered a titty joke book would be this hard. If you told him coming up with forty-six kinds of funny boobs and a little cute paragraph for each of them was fucking impossible, he wouldn’t have believed you. This book is a task a madman gave himself, and we are watching him fail catastrophically. If this was a magic trick, it would be like David Blaine never making it to the block of ice because he died a week ago between two tits and his final words were “This is the 9th time I’ve had diarrhea this week, oh look! Tits!”

His brain has run out of tit shapes, so in a panic, Herbert invents an entirely new kind of boobs. Then he gets to work describing them, badly and matter-of-factly. If any part of him notices he’s writing humorless observations from a universe that does not exist, he doesn’t care. Saucers: they’re like plates, but boobs, I guess. “Let the readers try to find meaning or joy in this bullshit,” Herbert thinks, for each paragraph puts him one step closer to freedom, to being able to get started on his next book. Which is, oh God no, 2002 Farts For Over 40 Cat Lovers.

Guys, you ever go out with a lady whose boobs are made out of unspeakable lumps? You know the type. The kind who puts on a thick sweater like we won’t notice. Girl, we know you’re hiding swarms and swarms of furious rats in those titties. Psh. We know your chest is is going to chew our face off while we lay down to rest forever in the serenity of your pillowy motherhood.

This won’t help make it any funnier, but Herbert was over fifty when he wrote about this “lovely young thing” and got super frustrated when her high school boobs never popped out of her dress. In a way, I appreciate how he’s keeping his terrible urges in check, but I’m so distracted by the wrongness of the line “In the history of the world… no boob has ever popped out of a prom dress.” It’s exactly the opposite of the logic of a prom dress joke. If someone said, “We need to get out of here like titties in a prom dress,” you’d know you were both sex criminals in a ’90s Jerry Bruckheimer movie, but you’d also know they meant “go fast.” I know I said I would stop giving comedy writing notes, but come on, you can’t fuck up a prom joke this hard unless you were breast fed through high school.

This nightmare might be as close to a joke as Herbert manages in this book, but I’m going to try to find one that isn’t about child boobs.

Okay, here we go:

Herbert can barely bring himself to write about saggy boobs, which is a problem because they are now the only thing he can think about.

“You are in a flopping titty prison of your own design,” hisses a voice behind Herbert I. Kavet’s eyes. He tries to think of something else, anything else. “Flopping titties, flopping titties,” laughs the voice.

Herbert concentrates. Curse these flopping boobs. With everything he has left, he forces his mind to imagine round boobs again. “Sure,” says his mind. “Two round boobs coming up! Flopping on the end of two long ones!” Herbert shrugs and gets to work describing them. He wonders if hanging upside down could fix them, then accidentally types that where he intended to write a joke. It seems so long ago those days when he thought a boob joke book could be fun. Herbert sits there for hours, trying to imagine something other than these insane ball-on-a-string boobs…

… and Herbert fails.

A sudden inspiration hits Herbert. What if they went the other direction, these boobs!? It still wouldn’t be funny, but he had long since given up on that. So he creates a fake girlfriend named Ellen who had high boobs. She got married and never left Hempstead, end of fun story. I’ve also met an Ellen, end of punchline.

These are the kind of boobs Ellen would have had if she was real. Oh, perfect Ellen. Eat that ice cream all day, my pimpleless, high-boobed queen. By this point, it had to have occurred to Herbert that he had used up the last of his meager creativity. He was changing the names on weird tits and writing self-insert fiction about the women attached to them. So he did what everyone incapable of creating does– he destroyed.

He came up with “Nubbies,” which are “small boobs of no particular shape.” Mathematically, it’s as close as a boob idea can get to the absence of a boob idea. “These boobs are probably on children,” Herbert says. “Damn it, you outsmarted us with that probably,” replies his local district attorney.

Herbert I. Kavet knows he’s (probably) on to something with Nubbies, the non-boobs of young girls, so he is now adding to the lore. He suggests “Ninnies” as the name for not having boobs should you continue not having them. This is no thought of a human mind. This is a scent an insect would secrete to convince predators it was dead. “Without boobs, you could go topless at gay beaches!” Herbert’s brain suddenly vomits in a fascinating misjudgment of all things. After many hours of staring at Herbert’s work, I thought of a cute way to put this: if you’re worse at anything than Herbert I. Kavet is at writing joke books, you deserve to rot in Hell.

Herbert has spent so much time building the featureless worlds of Nubbies and Ninnies that he’s having trouble picturing boobs again. “Hrrk!” his imagination grunts as it squeezes tiny tits onto several kinds of racism. “There, there,” Herbert says to comfort the woman he’s picturing with the tiny breasts. A lot of comedy writers wouldn’t think to do that. And in that spirit, nice try, flat-chested ladies. You did your best.

Sure. Muffins are community-minded, soft-nippled boobs for green shirts. I won’t entertain the idea of trying to engage with this like it means anything. Why bother? In a million years Herbert couldn’t explain why he said any of these words. He is writing jokes like a trapped coyote chewing its own leg off. My dentist is funnier than this on the security footage of him groping me.

A burst of inspiration! What if boobs were far apart! Herbert couldn’t come up with a funny angle on the idea, but he bought himself some time to think. All he has to do now is come up with something other than “far apart” that boobs can be. Come on, think, Herbert. You can do it.

God damn it, Herbert.

T-these are the same boobs only bigger. You goddamn son of a bitch, Herbert. We all see what you’re doing!

You stupid piece of shit, Herbert I. Kavet. I’m going to end this article before you inflate these tits out of control and crash an elevator.

No! Herbert! You won’t get away with this, Herbeeeeerrrrrrrrrt!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Supernaught, who could easily come up with 80085 more boobs without even trying.

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: The Fart Video

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FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: More of What Women Want

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PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Weapons of the Street

Thugs approach you with all manner of street weapons, the weapons of the street! Pipes, shards of glass, unshapen rocks, none, flamberge! Quickly! Read this!

It’s Weapons of the Street, 1984’s toughest guide to dick crushing. Like hundreds of other books, it was written by Dr. Ted Gambordella, and since I’ve already mentioned the dick crushing I am 80% done describing it. It’s what any karate expert would call “a perfect book.” Its cover looks like a game called Bash Stormers 2 for the Azargo Vextrack, and sorry I need to Photoshop something real quick…

… okay, I’m back. Where was I? Right, the sweet cover, but also it has the tone of a kick murderer’s alibi. Let me show you what I mean:

“There are a few instructions in offensive techniques,” is what Dr. Ted says right before he shows you 200 pictures of him turning his friend’s penis into a memory by way of stick and fist. “I do not condone any harm to your fellow man,” is what Dr. Ted says before building the largest, most beautiful monument to harm. Like many books before and after it, Weapons of the Street seems to think a disclaimer is a magic spell making all extrajudicial executions legal. And he’s right. I do not support any of this rad penis trauma. But fucking do it. Spin kick every problem you’ve ever had in the balls, which I do not intend nor condone.

So as we read, keep in mind that Dr. Ted wrote Weapons of the Street only for de-escalating club attacks peacefully. I’m not setting up some bit where he actually caves in every attacker’s dick and throat, I promise. Anyway, here’s the first move of the book, a standard non-harm defense against a stick attacker:

Step one: kill this fuck with his own stick.

I was lying, and so was Dr. Ted. The book contains only one defensive tactic and it is lethal vengeance. Here’s the second move of the book:

If someone is killing you with a bat, step on their dick. It is great advice and better karate. I’d tell you more, but the end of Dr. Ted’s sentence is missing. It was a stomp so powerful the text describing it was sucked into the vacuum the groin left behind. Or maybe this one was written by the attacker? “Hit the karate doctor in the head with a bat, wait, he’s throwing me into the ground, I should still be okay, hold on it looks like he’s lifting his foot to oh n”

Okay, we did two counter moves to never be used against stick maniacs. Enough defense bullshit, and that’s both me and the book saying that. It’s time to move on to situations where we are the stick maniac.

It’s only the third move of the book about never using karate to hurt someone and we are charging a man with a club, “preferably” one we stole from him, and breaking both his arms with a move Jackie Chan would need three days of rehearsals to land. Like I said, “a perfect book.”

Most self-defense manuals assume you have never heard of violence, much less this exotic style from the Orient. Not Weapons of the Street. By page eight, it is advising you to take a guy’s bat, knock one of his punches out of the air with it, and then snap his arms off at the shoulder. Well, not “advising” if a cop asks you where you learned how to do this, the sweetest goddamn shit he and the boys downtown have ever seen.

If you were worried all these moves were going to be complicated, don’t be. Sometimes Dr. Ted’s advice, well, again, not “advice,” you know what I mean, is to just hit the son of a bitch in the knee with your club. When someone’s kneecap is in fifty pieces, you can consider your punching issue with them resolved. If you’re a baby-penised coward. Dr. Ted is only halfway done with this move:

I think this is my area of expertise, and I’m genuinely confused. Dr. Ted wants you to use your stick to take away your enemy’s ability to walk and pee, and now he’s built some kind of lever on the remains of his dick? I’ve been staring at this picture for hours, for days, and don’t know how or why two men would find themselves in this situation. It looks like an alien improv team after an audience member suggested “Earth humans fucking!” It looks like Dr. Ted had this item in his inventory the whole game and his desperate guess at “use stick on balls” somehow did something. From concept to performance it is glorious, and sorry, I need to Photoshop something real quick…

… okay, I’m back. Where was I? Oh, fuck yeah: karate.

For information on how to squeeze the life out of a man with a chair leg, excuse me– detain a man’s neck until help arrives, please see figure 18a or 18a again. I don’t know why this picture appears twice. There’s no way it could be a simple error. Dr. Ted doesn’t make mistakes because missing any of these moves by even one penis length would mean certain death. So I think doubling up this photo was a last-minute idea after the publisher saw how Dr. Ted finishes a choke. It would take a Photoshop genius to recreate the original, but luckily I know one:

I’m having a fun club choke messaround, but seriously, look at Dr. Ted’s next club choke:

That head is coming off. Weapons of the Street has assured me many, many different ways it’s only going to demonstrate how to peacefully deflect sticks, but this is how you turn a headed man into a spurting torso and grim trophy. Either I or the author are going crazy. The section on stick choking even ends with a man being pulled into two parts under the words “NOTE: I am not showing offensive techniques with the club.”

“Control the attacker till the police or help arrive?” This is how an excited spokesperson changes the way you slice cheese forever. And this is going to sound like I’m splitting hairs, but I’m not sure we needed a third stick strangle variation in a book explicitly about not hurting people with weapons. If you want that, Dr. Ted suggests you “refer to [his] book of karate weapons.” And now we have a whole new problem because I’m looking at the Dr. Ted Gambordella section of my library and he’s written “book of karate weapons” so many times I’m only 20% sure he’s talking about this one:

I know I keep getting distracted this article, but there’s no way we’re not going to open The Complete Book of Karate Weapons. I’ve seen how Dr. Ted uses karate weapons. The section on Karate Knife is going to be “easily use a foot kick to the dick.”

Holy shit, no penis kick guess has ever been so right so hard. But let’s get back to his book about not hurting people.

This plainly rules. Dr. Ted is suggesting we catch a baseball bat with our hand, easily, because we have sufficiently trained our hand. I’m going to pretend I know what that means so I don’t look like a pussy in front of Dr. Ted, but I’m worried I die if I miss this, and spend six months in a cast if I don’t. “Shut the fuck up and punch their stick in half,” says Dr. Ted, and it brings me so much joy to tell you I’m not kidding. The second part of this move is punching their stick in half with your non-shattered hand.

I imagine you’ll want to practice this a few times before you have a club suddenly swinging at your head, so the combo is club catch, club punch, club steal, twirl, club stab, side kick. Blue belts and above may want to add a flame cyclone or wolf summon, and remember you can triple twirl if you go into the combo with your jeans meter fully charged. Let’s move on to defense against chains.

Dr. Ted uses the standard ABCD defense for chain attacks. A.void the chain, B.lock the chain, C.ute dick attack, D.estroy the neck. People may criticize this for being too complicated, but not cool people who survive chain attacks. This is all you need for any manner of ropey attack, but for purely academic reasons, let’s take a look at a chain attack defense with fewer steps.

Is this simple enough for you? Field goal kick their fucking face. There’s no need to add a groin attack and a murder to every single one of these. That being said, there’s a couple more steps to this move. Let’s add a groin attack and a murder.

The best thing about Dr. Ted is he can’t help himself. Something inside him won’t let him say “use a back kick to create distance and escape.” If you swing a chain at him, he’s stomping on your heart until it stops. He can write “never do this” all he wants, I know Dr. Ted will be so proud of me when I kick someone’s heart out. “I didn’t teach you how to do that,” he’ll say with a tear in his eye. “In fact, what are k-kicks? You say they’re called kicks?” he’ll add after his lawyer whispers in his ear, then giving me the subtle nod of a withholding father.

Like he keeps doing, Dr. Ted forgets his book’s thesis and shows us how to kill someone with the weapon we’re defending against:

This one is a pretty technical defensive maneuver; you’ll know you’re doing it right if your enemy makes a gurgling sound followed by silence forever. But once again, enough defense. Now that we have that dead guy’s bike chain, let’s fuck some shit up.

Dr. Ted escaped from a Nintendo game and has no idea our world doesn’t work like this. He screams things like, “a chain can be used in place of hands for a +2 to all clinch moves I never showed you how to do this,” and no one has ever been brave enough to correct him. There is no other explanation for this:

Lure him into a trap so we can lasso his leg and pull him into a groin stomp!? This is a God of War quicktime event. Dr. Ted is teaching us special moves like we’ve spec’d ninety points into Whipmaster. Can you imagine the final thoughts of the poor bastard who brought this weapon to this fight? “I’m going to hit that unarmed guy with this, because what are the odds he’s specifically trained in bike chain and I’m upside down hold on it looks like he’s lifting his foot to oh n”

Let’s go over some broken bottle defenses, and by that I mean I stab you in the face with a broken bottle, which you’ll block, but it was all a trap so I can stab you in the dick with a broken bottle. It’s worth reminding ourselves again what we’re supposed to be doing here– NOT HARMING ANYONE. I feel like even without all the strangulations and donkey stomps to the heart, if your book on non-harmful weapon defenses includes any more than zero broken bottles in someone’s dick, you blew it.

I don’t know why you need a second attack after it occurs to you to introduce a broken bottle to someone’s penis, but here’s an idea: you could try stabbing someone in the punch with your broken bottle? The only danger with this one is that if I perform hand surgery slower than a punch, as unlikely as that is, I get punched. But I’m starting to think I might deserve it? I maybe started as the good guy in some of these scenarios, but that is not how any of them ended. When the police find me in a room with all these human heads, it’s hard to picture the conversation that leads to my Best Hero Citizen Medal. Sorry, I’m going to duck away for one last Photoshop…

… that was a fast one because the Humanitarian Service Medal already had a karate chop on i– where was I? Oh, right! Defending ourselves against broken bottles! Did Dr. Ted ever consider grabbing one and pushing it into our prisoner’s eye so the filthy worm can get a reeeaal good look at how we’re going to carve him into minute steaks? Oh, he did? Fun!

So now we know the three basic ways to defend against a broken bottle– hog stab, punch stab, and I’m not bluffing please make me prove it I’ll fucking kill you eyeball-first. So with that dickless scumbag’s life in your hands, let’s move on to Intermediate Pootie Tanging.

In another masterful understanding of time and how it flows, Dr. Ted suggests responding to a stab by taking off your belt and whipping your stabber’s eyes. He’s obviously dead from this, a corpse with no idea what killed it, but the move’s not done…

… pull your belt back and slap your attacker in the eyes a second time. By now, regret should be reaching their dark heart, so use this opportunity to whip your belt again, locking itself around their neck the way belts work. Pull them by the improvised noose and bash their dick with whatever hands and feet you have free. Some Kung Fu fans might recognize this deadly technique, but not from the style of martial arts.

I think it might be time for a fun one.

Dr. Ted has gone fully karate hysterical. This is choreography for a movie called Hollywood Cat Cop, not a self-defense option. This is the base instinct anyone would have; it’s literally your only option here other than waiting to die. I’d also argue that despite finding ourselves in this unlucky situation, this move counts on a lot of things going our way. Here’s the next part:

None of this plan comes together unless your bashing is being carried out by Burpy and Clod Bulges, two twins playing themselves in Hollywood Cop Cat. An eight-year-old knows this wouldn’t work, and I know because I showed it to one and she laughed. With the honesty of a child, it truly didn’t occur to her these men could be serious. It’s so beyond the boundaries of possibility that even these men, who have dedicated their warrior lives to the impossible, are starting to realize how it must look. From this point forward, Weapons of the Street is a scrapbook of best friends henchman-goofing. For example, here is this combo’s finisher:

“Ha ha ha this is fucking stupid,” says Ted’s friend. “Ha ha, guys, let me do a dumb one,” says the other one.

This is what street weapons are all about. Sharing a laugh while you accidentally stab a dear friend. It’s my favorite book. “Alright, shut up, you knuckleheads. We need to get serious and wrap this thing up,” says author Ted Gambordella, Karate PhD…

… “Just kidding! FOOT AND STICK TORNADO!” Dr. Ted screams as he demonstrates the stupidest, button-mashingest idea. They took dozens of pictures of him flopping any limb in every direction and included every single one of them. There’s no way to know if they’re in the right order, nor any reason to care. This is how (spoilers) Hollywood Cop Cat drowns in a bag, not how you fight a crowd of men.

You could almost forgive this if it said, “Go nuts, die like a man,” but Dr. Ted has every detail of your battle planned out from the opening jumping jacks to the finishing eye poke. He’s calling out specific positions of these hypothetical gang members after multiple stick bashes. It’d be like a palm reader telling you, “Watch for the color green, and kick the man that’s to your left with a back kick into the stomach. You can then smash your club into the eyes and mouth of the man in front of you as you jab your fingers into the eyes of the man to your right.”

In the final move, the final move, Dr. Ted introduces the one thing his karate will never survive– comedy, comedy. And I don’t mean it messes up the timing by repeating the setup twice on the same page. I mean, does he think these self-defense moves hold up in a world where absurdity exists? The fact that any of these moves could be a joke means they all might be, right? Was he kidding this whole time? I don’t think so, but Dr. Ted being secretly sarcastic for 170 straight books is more plausible than someone using this karate to defend themselves. Still, it changes nothing. The fact that Dr. Ted botched a joke about shooting his friends only adds to the perfection of Weapons of the Street. Let’s go out on one last karate photo masterpiece. I love you, and karate blessings.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Vooster, who is always ready to kick dicks and stomp hearts.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Miss Castaway 🌭

One of the inadequate ways we describe our hot dog site is “we create joy by excavating the debris of a broken world.” That’s not what we’re doing today. This isn’t one of those times where I find a wonderful catastrophe, where an artist’s ambitions and talents disagree hilariously. This is heartache translated into madness. Today I excavated only tragedy. Let’s talk about 2004’s Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls.

The movie is a spoof of seventy things across all genres, and I doubt I need to explain any further. It is random references to whatever with an almost cruel lack of jokes. It has the plot of every fourth grader’s first movie and the tone of that movie screened at their memorial service. The actors in it had no prayer of knowing which words from the script were meant to be the funny ones, so they deliver every line with a mix of boredom and wild guess. And it doesn’t help that their co-stars are untrained bikini girls and the future site of Pakistan’s most affordable CGI monsters. It’s worse than you could ever imagine, and some of that is failure, but a lot of it is foundational. If you were born after 1970, your sense of humor is simply too sophisticated to accept God from the Bible meeting the Incredible Hulk and R2D2 as a complete joke.

Let me see if I get my point across faster.

The auteur behind it, Bryan Michael Stoller, has directed four films starring Eric Roberts. One of them is about a Christmas dog, and another one is about a president dog. If you met someone who directed four Eric Roberts movies (two non-dog, two other) and also someone who married their 12-year-old niece, you’d remember it as the day you met two perfectly equal pieces of shit. But I bet there’s something on those movie posters you have questions about. Computer, enhance quadrant sector Michael Jackson.

What the fuck is Michael Jackson doing in this. There is no point in Michael Jackson’s career where you could approach him with a half-finished bikini script and say, “We still need to add a few Chewbaccas, somehow find $14,000, and come up with a name for our dinosaur pig, but this is a part you were born to pl– oh my god, JURASSIC PORK. Looks like shooting can start tomorrow! I assume you’re available, Michael Jackson?”

In the movie, Michael Jackson plays “Agent MJ” who is also the regular Michael Jackson and is… probably a spoof of his role in Men in Black II where he very briefly appeared as an alien named Agent M. It doesn’t matter. Michael wouldn’t know, and Bryan Michael Stoller wouldn’t know how or try to make it funny if it was. Maybe I should just show you; here’s 80% of Michael Jackson’s appearance in the film:

As I said, Agent MJ is also Michael Jackson, so when he appears in the sky, everyone’s reaction is “Hey, there’s Michael Jackson.” One of the bikini girls spurts, “Can you teach me how to moonwalk!?” Michael reads his lines like someone bought a Mark McGrath Cameo to tell you your grandfather got moved to hospice. And if it looks like Michael recorded it from an armchair in his den it’s because he did. But even still, how? Why!? Michael Jackson had been the most famous person on the planet for over 30 years. He may have acted like a squeaky little innocence sprite, but he was also a hard-working sex criminal who never met anyone who didn’t want something from him. You couldn’t trick him into this kind of gig, and he surely turned down things much better than this a million times. Why finally say yes to this unspeakable no-budget fart comedy written and directed by a man who argues with Eric Roberts’ manager about dog karate scenes?

I promise I’ll explain, but first, take a look at this fucking movie’s finale:

It’s frantic, inept shapes. A vomit of submediocre impulses. Michael Jackson could do anything he wanted, and he proved that by dying nowhere near any prison, so it is insane he chose to be a part of this. Did he get threatened? Blackmailed? No, Bryan Michael Stoller lured Michael Jackson into this trap by honeypotting him with his main weakness– childhood trauma. And I know this because Bryan accidentally confessed to it in the DVD extras. We’re done talking about the movie, by the way. Absolutely fuck that movie. We’re going to look at the dark manipulations that spawned it.

In the DVD extras, Michael Jackson and Bryan Michael Stoller share the same chemistry as Michael Jackson and someone who chased him into an airport bathroom. And that’s fine, there’s no way around that. If I was hanging out with Michael Jackson for the fiftieth time, I would say “Holy shit, you’re Michael Jackson; what’s it like being Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson!?” This is a real story: When I was a freshman in college I got second place in a fraternity beauty contest and my talent was Michael Jackson impersonation. I have been Michael Jackson at 19 costume parties. I took my wife and 18 less historically important women home dressed as Michael Jackson. I loved him so much, and the world will fall into the sun before we get another Michael Jackson, but my point is this: it is brutally obvious Michael wasn’t doing this movie as a favor for a close friend. He’s four thousand plastic surgery procedures being held on with aviator glasses, so it’s hard to read any of his expressions, but he does not seem to know or like this Bryan Michael Stoller guy.

Bryan tries to explain the complicated special effects they used to make it look like the Michael Jackson in the movie was not a frustrated, poorly lit man in his own library. It is a fascinating look behind the scenes at Hollywood magic. A real eye-opening treat for movie fans. Then they play all three of the lines Michael lazily recorded a few times. Not different takes, just the exact shots viewers saw in the movie, over and over. Bryan Michael Stoller took this seven seconds of footage and turned it into twenty minutes of DVD featurette and one third of the movie poster. Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls is a tiny morsel of Michael Jackson pulled tightly around the shattered bones of an idea, which is confusing because that’s also how you would describe Michael Jackson’s face in 2004. Again, I loved him.

This making-of featurette also lets us see a little of Bryan and Michael’s creative process. For instance, Michael sees his lines for the first time and Bryan goes, “I was thinking here, where you’re saying ‘she’s out of your life’ you could sing it, like in your hit song ‘She’s Out of My Life’?” Then Michael rehearses it, and because he’s a cute pixie baby with no clue how people behave, he fakes a little giggle. It’s brutal. It’s the same pity laugh you would give if a child’s last words were a knock knock joke. If you, as a writer, gave Michael Jackson a joke and he let out this condescending snicker, you would not only throw that joke away, you would vow to never write again. And yet Bryan Michael Stoller used this exact take, this rough footage of a cold script read-through that ended in his devastating humiliation, in the final film.

I don’t want to explain how hard the joke doesn’t land in the finished scene or how much a sudden Michael Jackson quip undoes the movie’s logic. It all sucks. Every time Michael Jackson appears it’s like they stopped the movie to play a slideshow of the director’s awkward trip to Neverland Ranch. But here in the extras, after they replay each second from that trip many times, from the same angle, we finally get an answer as to what the shit Bryan was doing in the King of Pop’s house. There’s no gentle way to put this, so here we go. Bryan says he wrote a screenplay based on They Cage the Animals at Night, an autobiography of a traumatized orphan, optioned by Mel Gibson to be co-directed by Michael Jackson. If I spelled everything right there, you should now feel the touch of Many’KinToo, Dark Lord of Bad Ideas.

So Bryan brought the author of the book, Jennings Michael Burch, out for a meeting with him and Michael. And surprise: it was so goddamn weird.

Jennings’ only friend as a child was a stuffed dog named Doggie, who he still had and brought with him to this business meeting. He introduced the filthy old thing to Michael Jackson who, to his credit, had no idea what to do with it. Jennings really thought Michael would be excited to meet it, but sentimental value doesn’t translate even to a magical love imp like Michael Jackson. He looked at it like it was somebody else’s birthday card and their name was Hitler Williams. If he still had lips we might have been able to read them, but his body language seemed to be saying, “Did you need one of my guys to throw this away for you, or…?”

The two men sat down to talk sadness, and Jennings gave Michael a second chance to give a fuck about his old stuffed dog. “Seriously, no thank you,” repeated the then-living legend. And this is where the fun ends. For all his talents, Michael Jackson did not know how to run a meeting, or have human conversations. The next words out of his mouth were, “I have a question. Um, with all the pain. And the stress, and the pressure. That you had to cope with.. did you ever? In your childhood… think about… it’s not worth it. Did you ever try and…”

Jennings finally understands what Michael Jackson is getting at in this casual meet-and-greet. He blurts out, “Suicide.”

Michael Jackson shrugs. “Suicide, yeah.”

Jennings says, “Definitely. Definitely.”

Michael Jackson patiently waits for his conversational skills to kick in. And after they don’t, he goes, “Yeah.”

And that’s the end of this fun behind-the-scenes look at the making of Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls, because Jennings has an emotional breakdown. Not about his attempts at taking his own life, but about the 1972 song about Michael Jackson’s pet rat, “Ben.”

“You brought me Ben. You brought me Ben,” he cries into the stuffed dog that failed to impress the King of Pop. And I’m not making fun of Jennings. Take away the toy and pick a better song, and this is identical to how most people probably talked to Michael Jackson. I simply want to remind you that every vanishingly precious Michael Jackson moment from this Eric Roberts sex “comedy” was shot right after this and from the same chair.

There are no right words to say to a man blubbering into a stuffed animal about the Jackson Five at work, so Michael hugs him and tells him, “That’s beautiful. That is so beautiful.”

With the hug complete, Michael tries to leave, but Jennings clings to him and whimpers, “Will we always be friends? Will we always be friends? Will we?” This is one question into their first fucking sit-down, and they have already Timecop-touched into a sadness blob. No production meeting has ever gone worse, and I was there when I asked Bas Rutten if he thought we should kiss. It is too much emotional trauma for a DVD extra on a straight-to-video titty romp by the writer/director of The Amazing Wizard of Paws. And I don’t know if this makes the story more or less tragic, but they never got around to making the film. Michael got groped by a hysterical man and coerced into the worst movie of all time for nothing. It would arguably be the saddest Michael Jackson story if Corey Feldman hadn’t written a chapter about their friendship in his book, Coreyography.

What is this story? Corey Feldman could have lied! We’ve seen pictures of him and Michael Jackson together! Corey could have said, “Yeah, we hung out a lot, I taught MJ how to navigate difficult conversations.” Or even, “We spoke on the phone, on a number I knew and did not have to guess by process of elimination.” He didn’t need to spend two pages detailing the process of going through every number, one by one, to find the one that reached Michael Jackson. Corey Feldman was friends with Michael Jackson the same way I was friends with exciting insurance rebates in 1998. This is a story about how one clever mathematician stopped The Cold Call Strangler, not a story of two best pals on the phone. Oh no, it’s not done.

If I’m understanding this, there’s a really good chance Corey Feldman has never spoken with Michael Jackson on the phone. By his own admission, Corey tried every number and most of them were not Michael Jackson, but if he did get lucky and someone picked up, he only knew it was Michael Jackson after 15 minutes of silence. And if the person who picked up started smashing the phone? That was Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee. Unless it was Michael Jackson himself, which Corey Feldman did not appreciate. It would arguably be the saddest Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee story if La Toya Jackson hadn’t visited Bubbles in 2010 to tell it Michael had died. Oh damn it, I carefully transcribed the whole thing.

In her 1089th desperate grab for Michael-adjacent attention, La Toya Jackson filmed herself shrieking for his chimpanzee to remember her, and it refused. It’s every kind of sadness at once, but its tragedy is eclipsed by the segment title Entertainment Tonight chose. “The Queen of Pop Visits Bubbles,” they called it. This is like saying “The Queen of Pop Pays Her Respect” to describe Michael’s nose glue lady dialing random numbers to find out where they’re holding the funeral.

After threatening to spit on her and then pointedly ignoring her, the ape has run out of ways to tell La Toya Jackson to fuck off. “Bubbles! Bubbles, bubbles!” she screams. “Bubbles!”

As panic sets in, La Toya tries screaming her own name at the chimp. It doesn’t work, and some long forgotten feeling, something close to self-awareness triggers inside her. “People can see you,” it tells her. “Make an excuse for this,” it pleads. “He– when Michael called my name he would– h-he… LA TOYA!” she stammers.

After screaming her own name doesn’t work, and her excuse for doing it trails off into gibberish, La Toya tries one more cope. She claims the chimpanzee, like many humans it is so like, is too shy to remember La Toya Jackson. It is not going at all how she pictured it. She is La Toya Fucking Jackson and was expecting the full ape enclosure celebrity treatment. These chimps and their bizarre game of pretending not to be familiar with La Toya Jackson disarmed her so much she completely forgot to tell her brother’s chimp he died.

Bubbles needs to hear this terrible news from a friend, so La Toya decides she can’t leave without doing what’s important. She goes back to the cage alone, and…

… grovels for Bubbles to remember her. Bubbles, you remember her. You remember her. You do, Bubbles. You do. Tell her, Bubbles. Bubbles? Are you not listening to me either, Bubbles? Bubbles? Bubbles. Bubbles.

Bubbles, don’t do this, Bubbles.

Bubbles.

Bubbles.

No one knows what La Toya was looking for that day. Maybe she expected the chimpanzee to turn to her and say, “La Toya, of course. I remember you from several head shapes and nine faces ago.” But it never happened. She begged, cried, and demanded, but the ape refused to remember her. She worried there was something she was forgetting to do, something having to do with this fucking dick monkey, but whatever it was couldn’t be that important. You remember her, right, Bubbles? It’s La Toya, Bubbles. La Toya!!! You remember her, Bubbles. Bubbles? Alright, forget it, Bubbles. Bye, Bubbles. You remember her, Bubbles. Bubbles. Anyway, that’s my review of Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls! ★ ⯨

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpaceJamFan, who legally cannot discuss their time on the Miss Castaway island.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Adventures of Ronald McDonald 🌭

One of the great things about garbage archaeology is bringing life to forgotten or broken art. Why, with a pioneering spirit and state-of-the-art image manipulation software, I can add whimsy or even zaniness to something as worthless as a 58-year-old McDonald’s comic book! But something strange happened while I did that. I don’t know if it was clown magic or marketing forces beyond my understanding, but no matter how many times I edited Ronald McDonald’s word bubbles to say something funny or even zany, they kept changing back.

So I don’t know what to do. I guess I’m going to upload what I have and hope it still makes sense with all of Ronald McDonald’s dialog still exactly as it first appeared in 1967.

Ah, comedy! That beloved lady of laughs! Nggh. She inspires zaniness even in the most unlikely of places! For instance, what’s this!? Huh? A 1967 Ronald McDonald comic!? N-no. Oh my, this is the kind of outrageousness that has so many like yourself dialing 1-900-HOT-DOG for laughs! Hrrk!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: toasty god, a mayor of quejustthebe ginningjus, tthebe ginn i ngju st thebegin ning!