Category: UPSETTING DAY
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Upsetting Day: Get Swank’d
For more than thirty-five years, Iâve always begun this column with the same words: âAll joking aside.â This has traditionally been used as a facetious overture before laying satirically into the various causes celebre with which I take umbrage. Itâs really quite funny, if youâre smart. If you donât find that funny, thereâs a good chance you are considered the dumb person in your area. But even you, your areaâs dumbest person, must have it within you to imagine how serious I am when I throw aside three decades of tradition to say what I say to you nowâŚall joking really aside, my partner and I are pregnant with our first child. Neither a bit, nor a government experiment, nor the culmination of a Romani curse, the human baby currently in a parasitic relationship with my wife will soon be among us. Thatâs going to happen. Itâs too late to change that now. I asked.
In my own estimation and that of the state, the least I can do as its presumptive father is learn what I can of the proper feeding, clothing, schooling, and defenestration of the modern baby before its ejection from the womb. For example, a brief skim of the first parenting book in my collection – Oxfordâs English Dictionary – informs me that I didnât mean to say âdefenestration,â and am probably confusing that word with a different one. Good. This is going great. Letâs reset.
Babies! Everybody loves babies. As you join me on a continuing journey of learning by doing and discovering by googling, my hope is to leave my joking days aside for good and all, and pick up instead the heavy mantle of the pater familias. My goodwife is presently nineteen handspans across and our local vet is busy hobbling horses until the spring thaw, so weâve got some time yet. For an easy start on our road to fatherhood, where better to turn our attention than things sartorial? The kid will need clothes, thatâs certain. Fortunately for me the internet has some, and all it took was a quick survey via the Shopping tab to educate myself on the subject. For example, did you know onesies can be worn by children even before age one? Or that pirates will not constantly attack your baby to try and steal their booties? That time in our history has long passed.
What seems to be hip these days, see, is –
uh, okay, haha. well jeez –
ew, do i have safesearch off? No, thatâs not it. What if I –
wow
holy fuck
holy shit
I kind of donât understand how the F.B.I. arenât knocking on my door right now.
After further research, it looks like there are five main types of baby clothes available online, which Iâm now going to present in order of how painful it will be for you to learn each category exists. Please treat this inventory not only as a crash course on clothing your baby, but also like your own personal episode of Hot Ones with implied pedophilia in place of wing sauce. Okay? Please do that. Here we fucking go.
Horror Level 1 – For the Memesters
Babies are essentially our attempt to project the best of ourselves further into the future, so itâs hardly surprising to learn that people like to get a little cheeky and slap pop culture references on their babyâs clothes. Itâs a fun way of showcasing their own taste, and signaling the kind of cultural legacy they hope to pass on. It hardly matters if the baby âgets it;â in fact, thatâs a part of the fun! Do you think this smiley boy understands the significance of combining Van Goghâs Starry Night, Munchâs The Scream, and the killer from Scream into one painting? How can he? I donât!
What I do understand is the reference below, uttered over thirty years ago in a film that child will absolutely never watch unless forced to, and the subtext of which is âhey, come over here and try to shoot me, letâs fight to the death with our guns, this statement is an open invitation to attackers.â
Another thing it is fun to mock babies for is their ignorance. Thanks to the toddler shirt below, we adults can share a good laugh about the fact that the baby wearing it obviously doesnât remember that time RoboCop shot that dude in the dick. Hopefully they also forget that we dressed them like this, then stood around with our adult friends laughing at them.
Oh, and it says âdickâ on it, too! Thatâs extra funny, because traditionally babies are supposed to be shielded from profanity. I wonder how far we could take that idea and still think it was very, very funny? This far?
Nope, too far! Letâs pull the lever in the opposite direction.
Oops, I pulled the lever in the same direction so hard that now itâs just spinning around and around! But in its defense, the intended joke of this shirt isnât strictly that the toddler understands proper blowjob technique, merely that they can hang with dank memes enough to [child removed from the home by social services].
Horror Level 2 – For the Hipsters
Snobby baby clothes are just like meme baby clothes, but one notch worse because they require effort to understand. Prove your superior intellect by turning your baby into a puzzle that reveals the word âHORNYâ if you stare at it long enough!
Now, strangers will stare at your baby for a long time and then go âOhhhhhâŚhorny,â and you and your kiddo can laugh and laugh as they receive swift mob justice. Come to think of it, this is a great way to punish anyone that solves the puzzle. Congratulations, your baby is the Lament Configuration.
This other toddler shirt from a completely different shop nevertheless utilizes the same puzzle design, which by its very nature encourages strangers to ask you things like âmay I raise your babyâs shirt up a little, just to fold it up, just to see? I just want to see something.â In video game design this is referred to as âludonarrative,â and is illegal in forty-six of the contiguous United States.
Or hey, maybe you just want strangers to photograph your babyâs chest? I can understand that. With this handy tee, anyone who points their phone at the fruits of your loin will be linked directly to the results page for a google search of the phrase ârock out with your cock out.â So, you know, if anyone takes a picture of your toddler and then starts to take their cock out, be careful – the rock music might wake the baby!
Horror Level 3 – For the Edgelords
Thatâs right, bitches. Not only have all the baby shirts up to this point not been explicitly trying to offend you, weâve now reached levels of offensiveness so grimy that Iâve unconsciously transitioned from my intellectual comedy writing voice to the comedy writing voice I do where you can hear my real voice in your head saying the words as you read it. Dude, check this shit out.
You can tell itâs for girls because itâs pink! Hereâs another one you can tell is for girls, because of the deep folkloric connections between elephants and fertility in both Hindu and Buddhist cultures.
Or perhaps Iâm the one with his mind in the gutter. âSquirterâ does seem like a pretty fucking wild thing to print on what youâre explicitly marketing as an âembarrassingâ toddler shirt, but maybe the manufacturer means that the kid pees during diaper changes and embarrasses you. Thereâs still wiggle room here! Humanity could still be worth saving! Cue next shirt.
Itâs cotton though you guys, at least thereâs that. Not a single hair of synthetic fiber will rash up your poor kidâs skin as they suck titties, shit themselves, or take an important business call.
If youâre uncomfortable printing swears right directly on your kid, fret not! There are several other options that allow your child to theoretically maintain their innocence while still achieving your core goal of automatically telling every single person who looks at them to fuck off. Hereâs a shirt that takes âflipping the birdâ literally, and âthe sanctity of childhoodâ lightly!
This of course opens us up to a whole range of visual puns, neatly circumventing social norms and allowing for even the most obscene aspects of our shared cultural lexicon to shine through. Think of your baby as just another social media feed – a place to post some funny images to let everyone know how funny you are.
Oh yeah. If I saw your baby wearing that shirt, I would immediately know exactly how funny you are. And thereâs no limit to how much âget to know yaâ information can be transmitted in shirt form! Thanks to fine outlets like Brisco Baby, your childâs shirt can indicate everything from where they just came fromâŚ
âŚto a bit about their cultural backgroundâŚ
âŚor even some of their favorite hobbies!
Naturally, true edgelord maniacs wonât want to stop at sexual innuendo when thereâs a whole world of woke snowflakes to offend through the medium of child abuse. Why wrap your son or daughter in basic filth when you could be denigrating a whole civil rights movement at the same time?
The further down the unwell you go, the more the offensive toddler shirts do away with any semblance of design sense or wordplay until we finally reach the bottom, a thin stack of tiny black tees with big block letters spelling generically awful things presumably written by an A.I. thatâs been fed the entire rotten.com forum archives.
And in case youâre sitting there thinking âwell, that could just be a normal edgelord slogan aimed at adults and mistakenly printed on a tiny tee,â wrap your fractured mind around this shirt, clearly designed for a baby to wear by someone who understands at least the rudiments of how babies work (ie, they come from whores).
Please note that this particular shirt can be tricky to deploy, since itâs only at its most funny if you hold the baby facing a particular way. If you donât, itâs less funny, but still quite funny.
Horror Level 4 – Donât Molest My Kid!
Now, however, Iâm afraid weâre moving past funny and into offensive. I know Iâve used the word âoffensiveâ many times already, but what Iâm about to show you redefines what offensive means to the degree that the âsmells like slutsâ shirt is, in retrospect, actually totally fine. Like, I would much rather clad my child in the sluts shirt than a shirt that invites people to, say, show them their butthole – however classily.
My concern, see, is that Iâd end up in a situation where Iâm telling a judge that someone showed my kid their butthole and the defense attorney pulls out a little vacuum baggie with this shirt in it marked âExhibit Aâ and they drop the case. Fortunately for people like me, there are a number of toddler shirts that explicitly warn people away from their precious, developing junk.
See? Youâre thinking of that boyâs scrotum now, but not of touching it. Youâre thinking of not touching that little boyâs scrotum. Isnât that a much nicer kind of way to be thinking about that boyâs scrotum? Sure it is.
Hell, the kid rocking this tee couldnât be clearer! Their eighteen months on this earth have already taught them that life is one non-stop ass-reaming, so molesting them would just be overkill, ya dig? Stay away, stranger! Just maintain your distance and look at that teddyâs expression, for its dead eyes are the perfect avatar for the baby whoâs seen it all, the jaded newborn already well aware that existence is one big diaper and weâre all the poopoocaca.
Horror Level 5 – Donât Molest My Kid đ
That was the end of the article. The title above this line is a misprint. You can click away now, or do one of your little comments, or call your congressman or exorcist, whatever you need. The rest of the stuff below here is not even content, in fact, but rather a handy device I invented to quickly ratchet up the level of disgust you are able to feel inside of you at one time. The more you scroll down, the worse it gets. Ready?!
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-
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-eeeeeeeeeeeeâre so cooked.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Vooster.
Well its kinda weird if you think about it that there was only ever one Halloween 1987. Ever! Now Im not tryin to pretend one year is objectionally better than another, i just personally happen to have a fondness for some more than others, due to nostalgia you see, and well, just think about that October. Lookin back on a summer of Robcop and Predator and Lethal Weapon and did you hear: the guy from Moonlighting is going to be in a action movie!? And then lets make it more specific and suggest that on this paticular halloween you happen to be a college student in LA. Oh yeah, Summer School was also 1987, so we know pretty much exactly what you might look like:
So your too old for trick or treats and maybe even costumes but that dont matter because your bud calls you on the dorm phone and says i got us two tickets to the hottest halloween party in town; that young new comedian everybody loves from Saturday Night Live and movies and who is becoming a superstar is coming to film his new special on Halloween Night right here at UCLA!
Haha no not THAT SNL superstar,
the OTHER one:
Yeah him. I honestly have no idea if I need to explain him or not to you, so real quick thatâs Joe Piscopo, he was on SNL with Eddie Murphy right after the whole first group left or got fired and some people thought the show would end, but nope, it kept getting popular and Joe knew it was probably because of his killer Frank Sinatra impressions that saved the day.
So you can see why Joe had the showbiz juice that would make the shoulder-padded suits at HBO say: âLetâs give this man full creative freedom to do a Halloween comedy music show with a costume party for the students and we will broadcast it live to the homes of America.â
And thank goodness one of those homes had the prescience of mind to VHS record it and many years later post it for me and you and this guy to watch:
Joe wastes NO time in lettin us know what were in for. Maybe we were expecting just a hour of the best Jerry Lewis impersonation we ever seen in our lives but this aint that, he declares that we are in for some BAD BOY comedy by ridin out on the stage on a harley davidson motorcycle and wearin a harley davidson shirt that shows us his muscles AND sets off his hair real nice.
I believe that particular mullet variety is referred to as the Jersey Tidy.
He bellows a welcome to us and the crowd and then IMMEDIATELY suverts our expectations of what were in for by putting on a outfit that signals to us that we are about to see: some Rap Singing.
I been watchin this pretty closely and have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that he actually does seem to be scratching for real there. You may scoff and doubt at me about that right now, but I invite you to stay with me and see what you think when we finish up here today.
So Joe raps for second about how rap is so easy, you just say stuff! And then he does a on-stage costume change into WHITE BOY RAPPER
So a rough start, I know, for you and me, but the crowd responded with like ecclesiastical levels of ecstatic hollerin on this one.
Youâll maybe join me in the dilemma I had watching this one: It would be very bad if there were only white people in the live audience, but also any black people who were there could probly use a kind thought or prayer.
He finishes the rap sketch, makes a joke about UCLA parking tickets that KILLS, just as much for me at home as it did for the students, and then introduces John âThe Toozâ Matuszak
(who for real I just learned played Sloth in Goonies, and who sadly would not live to see a 90s Halloween) The Tooz is on loan from the Raiders tonight to judge the costume contest, winner gets $1000, which back then was enough to buy about half a three wheeler! Letâs see our first contestants!
I thought haha thats funny, a person with their whole face covered up as a mummy is lip syncing, I wonder whos the 80s celebrity under there, I hope so much its Balki, but nope it was just a student dressed as a mummy.
I wish i could fully communicate the FRANTIC pace of this thing so far, Joe and and the kids and everybody seem kinda terrified about taking too much time on the live broadcast so everyone is just HUSTLIN.
Next they have some primo â87 high-cut and bethonged babes rush out and dance and the announcer yells please welcome to the stage WHAT HATH GOD ROTH to complete silence from the audience and then Joe comes out and shows us why doin impressions of singulurly physical performers like David Lee Roth is a bad idea.
Its like when your biology teacher would get a little loose on a friday afternoon and try out his Jim Carrey bits for the class. Hes a nice enough guy and its better than doin more pundit squares but lets not pretend its as good as the original.
Again, we are movin at a pace here somewhere between frenzied and panic. KEEP IT MOVING, I imagine the director yellin, WE ARE LIVE PEOPLE NEXT SET NEXT SET
Oh no. This is probably what you think it is, Joes doing a extended vocal impersanation of a black musician. Who he insists he has full respect for.
You can maybe see why at first I thought he was actually doing black- and possibly blind-face on this one but thats just a artifact of the poor recordin quality and Joeâs immence perspiration. Heres the thing though; if you watch that part, youâll see that even though hes âjustâ doing the voice, that doesnt make it any better. He enlists a bandmate to join him, perhaps to provide some sort of cultural cover an counter-fire by showing us âSee, even there laughin!â
Oh nope i guess i gave joe too much credit, its not even that, its just his white friend who is also real good at talkin like a black guy i guess.
If you listen close you can hear John Hughes screamin with laughter
But then here comes another curveball! That saxophone is not just a prop, Joe actually starts to play it!
With the same high-level enthusiasm and mid-level skill (ahem) he brought to the turntables, Joe makes that puppy wail, mournful and soulful such that we can clearly hear the intended message: âI AM NOT A CLOWN!â We draw a respectful veil over comedy for the moment, the show is now just two sensual sax buds tradin the most stanksome of jersey-flavored licks with each other.
Back to the costume contest: we get a skit with that olâ halloween chestnut of one frat boy dressed up as Sherlock Holmes hitting another fratboy in the nuts with a hockey stick again and again and again.
Just inexplicable. Possibly brilliant in its moronery.
Joe returns, transformed in our eyes from when he played the sax so good. No cheap jester, he!
He does a Phil Donahue impression that is mostly wig and he interviews George Wallace dressed up as Oprah.
Every line Joe says is a fat joke. He does it 8 times.
Oof, this is getting a little rough, letâs take a little break from the special. Here, letâs rest our chemistry with this video of Joe hollerin a bob seger love song at his fiance who he met when she was 17 and his sons nanny and he was already married and makes her come out on stage and give him flowers and say she doesnt mind when they go on Howard Stern together and he pervs on her:
Okay breaks over, back to the special. The next costume contestants run out and sing their song and then a man dressed as a tongue comes out and licks them up.
Spoiler: they win.
And then we have a bit with two kids who are trick or treatin but when they knock on a door, its Joe Piscopo in a spittin image of Bruce Lee.
Again we all of us remember the david lee roth lesson. In this case its that Joe hasent yet learned that you have to be at least a little bit good at karate to be good at making fun of it. Hell aint that the way for pretty much anything? Anyway you can maybe see it comin that their gonna lean real hard into 80s Asian accent humor.
Im sure your brain is fillin in the blanks on how he says Halloween. The child actor is forced to say Tlick or Tleat my god for real what are we doin out here. I need another break, here lets watch Joe do the white boy rap at a recent Mike Lindell rally:
Okay another long saxophone thing from a special guy Joe flew all the way out from Atlantic City, and i dont know whats worse: if he thought the LA kids would actually like it or if this was his way of expressing California Hate-Spite as only a jerseyman can.
Then Joe and a lady that i think is supposed to be madonna come out and sing a song with no jokes. Just singing and dancing, but i guess hes supposed to be Dean Martin and thats all you need?
Still at a nicotine + cocaine speed, all of this. But then, all of a sudden, time slows. We enter a pre-recorded bit, shot in majestic black and white and moving at a stately pace.
Dignified.
We watch (and I guess the audience in UCLA did too on a screen or something?) while Joe once again transcends the bonds of base and vulgar comedy to show his breadth, depth, range, and reach of being able to play 4 different Robert DeNiros!
Uncanny.
Its so long, and totally ununcumbered by jokes. Joe seems to believe that his savant impersonation skills will carry our tired bodies for as long as needed, or perhaps this part was meant for Martin Scorseseâs eyes alone. Whateverâs going on, it just keeps going on.
We realize they were compressin the rest of the show so hard to make sure that this thing could be shown in its entirely.
It made me say a complicated prayer by the end, i could tell this part was finally about to end with as much nothing as it began, and just kinda the agony of it and thinking about all the unlaughin young faces there at UCLA realizin that they gave up the only 1987 Halloween theyâd ever have? For this!? So help me, folks I found myself askin God: please, make it that Joe wrote a joke to end thisâŚ
A button, a crazy creditâŚ
âŚanything to wrap this one up. Please.
Nothing. It feels like God did this to test how much iâd debase myself and abandon dignity in the face of despair, and I failed. I feel just like the end of 1984. Lets take another break with this old Joe Piscopo Miller Lite commercial.
Goddammit that was just the worst parts of the bruce lee thing again that wasnât no break, fuck it i guess were just white knucklin through the rest of this one. Take each others hands and exchange reassurin nods were almost there.
The live show continues. Joe returns to the stage to accept the adulation of the audience about his cinema artistry and gives the fans what he knows they want, a lil live recap of what we just saw:
Its time for a finale and Joe has the consummant entertainers awareness of how to knock the socks off of these college kids with all the neon heat that only a live show in â87 could muster:
Yep, I probably donât need to tell you but thats professor Tom Tomlinson playing focaccia and fuge on the world famous UCLA Royce Hall Pipe Organ!
You can tell he knows he has finally won the admiration and respect of the youth. But this aint your grammas phantom of the opera: In a move Andrew Lloyd Weber could only dream of, Joe Piscopo, renossance man, rises from the below the stage and joins Tom Tom to just EXECUTE on the rock and roll drum set!
Wildly, Joe pounds, he sizzles, he kicks, his grip on the sticks as firm and unyieldin as a step-fathers on your neck when you start to mouth off.
The rest of the band and professor tom valiantly strive to match and follow his, um, unconventional rythms.
Holy shit you guys, they fuckin did it, they came in at the hour, roll credits, high fives in the production booth, the costume kids and bikini babes and george wallace return to the stage as the crowd rises and roars at the spectacle recently beheld. But whereâs Joe? Surely, heâs well-deserved restin among the laurels and panties bein hurled up on the stage in his honor, right? Hot Dog, if you believe that, I worry you havent been payin attention.
Back on the drums, sacrificing his body, emptyin his life essence out on this stage, this time with a Garth Brooks headset mic to make sure his voice is the loudest one singin Louie Louie. I was worried this would be where Joe blew up his big, tanned, veiny heart right there on the stage for the public, but he thoughtfully added a lil bumper at the end so Iâd know that not only was he ok, he was still cool as hell.
Thank you Joe, thank you for what you did for them back then. I bet they never fully appreciated it, I hope I get to ask you about it one day. Well I did try to ask him, i got up real early and tried callin into his AM radio show he does for 4 hours every morning, but they told me Joe doesnt want to talk about old halloweens, this show is more for talking about the stuff fox news said to be mad about. Iâll keep tryin tho, I know the ol Joes still in there somewhere.
In the name of jesus christ amen.
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Upsetting Day: Blah Girls
