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Upsetting Day: The Magic Christian
Category: UPSETTING DAY
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Dollhouse culture has really taken a turn recently. Dollhouses were always for either ordinary little girls or adult serial killers, but lately, one group is far outpacing the other in their dollhouse furniture manufacturing and purchasing. If you Google “dollhouse organ,” the internet won’t respond, “Lol, nope!” Your cursed search will return, “You want a Phantom Of The Opera-style organ or a miniature pile of human organs, because we’ve got both, baby!”
Whether you want your dolls to play mournful arias and hide in the walls of your tiny home or own a loose pile of human organs, either option is available to you, and so many more. For instance, is your doll a vegetarian, or should they crave raw meat? Not only do they sell so much packaged doll meat, but it’s in high demand. Four people have bought it in the last twenty-four hours! Hurry, purchase the meat for your dolls. Purchase it before the dolls rebel! Before they smell the meat you hide beneath your skin!
Suppose you’re not a carefully packaged raw beef person. Respect. In that case, you can also purchase a miniature cow and a Dollhouse Deli Slicer. That way, your doll can disassemble its own dinner. So convenient!
Don’t worry; not all dollhouse food is meat-based. There are also the clown cakes. At first, I found it unsettling that the clown birthday cakes would be displayed in a lot of six. Why does someone need so many clown birthday cakes at once? I wondered. Then I learned that you can order miniature clown birthday cakes in a lot of up to sixteen. They wouldn’t allow you to order that quantity of miniature clown birthday cake if they didn’t think someone would want to. What is happening to all of these birthday boys? Upon what cursed day were sixteen clowns born!?
After eating all of that delicious raw meat and clown cake, your dolls might get a tummy ache, but don’t worry, because we’ve invented miniature Pepto Bismol. The ghostly hand that extends the Pepto Bismol to you is not included in the deal (bummer!).
Honestly, I think the Pepto Bismol is one of the most upsetting things on this list. I understand creating miniature dioramas is a form of escapism, but why would you make a tiny perfect world for yourself and include diarrhea in it? Dolls don’t have buttholes. Imagine the world you want to exist. If you’re going to order a fun colored liquid, at least do the miniature booze instead, even though they come in a quantity that says your dolls might have a teeny tiny problem.
If you’re not careful, your doll might wake up in a pile of doll cash with no memory of the night before. What terrible things did they do to be surrounded by loose piles of cash? They’ll never ask, and you’ll never have to tell them.
What kind of doll is this doll furniture made for exactly? Well, you don’t even need a doll most of the time. I’ve seen plenty of people on TikTok that cultivate empty dollhouses. However, I think most of the doll house furniture I’ll be showing you today was created for one particular doll. I know I said that dolls don’t have buttholes, but actually, I think this one does.
This rare $350 porcelain doll is clearly going through some shit. You can pair him with a $450 doll of a terrified woman holding an empty basket and imagine the good times they would have together. You could fill her basket with the doll meat! These dolls both come from the same Etsy seller, which somehow makes it worse for me. I will not give you their name because I’m pretty sure if someone ever makes these two dolls kiss, the ancient god of sickos will emerge from the crust of the earth.
Anyway, back to doll buttholes. I usually try not to go too far in my Hotdog research, but I’ve recently typed both vintage doll toilet and awesome doll toilet into Etsy. I think it says a lot more about Etsy than me that awesome doll toilet yielded me this result.
“This toilet is for the brave only,” so go forth, you brave doll collectors, into the great darkness beyond this mini porta-potty door. Many brave doll owners have gone before you and failed to return from its depths. The nightmare toilet costs eighty-five dollars.
The notes and reviews of some of these items are the best part. I know at this point in the article, I’m probably not going to be able to surprise you with a dollhouse electroshock therapy machine. However, you might be surprised to learn that it comes with an all-caps warning about the date you need to order to receive it in time for Christmas. If you want Old Saint Nick to zap your dolls, you had better order before November 8th, 2023, otherwise NO ONE IS GETTING ELECTRIFIED THIS CHRISTMAS!
Alright, it’s time to stop taking it easy on you guys. Let’s talk about the sex stuff. Of course, there’s sex stuff. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen. There are things I’m pretty sure Patreon won’t even let me put on here, so I’m going to give you a description of the Lego compatible diddlers. That’s right, someone took the time to painstakingly craft dildos that snap into the clippy hands of Lego mini figurines. Those are supposed to be for holding whimsical stuff, like magic wands and…wait.
The numerous warnings that the makers of this product felt were necessary to warn people not to attempt to put the Lego Diddlers into their holes. It’s for fake Lego holes only. You should always practice safe doll sex, which involves knowledge of when something is tiny enough to easily get lost inside of you, and also doll condoms.
“Dollhouse miniature condom sexy,” for when maybe you have a doll that should NEVER get another doll pregnant like the examples I’ve cited above. These can be purchased in quantities of up to thirty-five. If someone were to buy the maximum amount they would be spending, get fucking ready for this, 420 dollars on doll condoms. It’s possible that I never truly understood the meaning of art until this moment.
So, of course, the dolls are fucking. We all know the dolls are fucking, but are they having pleasurable sex, or is this more a layback and think of England situation? I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask the creator of the miniature lube tube? It’s rated five stars by someone fancy enough to refer to doll sexual lubricant as decor. I would like to see what additional decor they have spread around their house and how much of it is related to doll orgasms.
Of course, we all know where all of this doll sex is going to end. Luckily, they do sell doll pregnancy tests! You can follow your doll through the entire life cycle, from conception to being electrocuted in a deeply haunted porta potty or choking on the most menacing cake you’ve ever seen in your entire life. If it’s not yet time for your doll to conceive, they also sell doll tampons.
You can choose any of your favorite vintage feminine products! I’m so glad to be alive in 2024. This really is the era where girls and serial killers can have tiny versions of it all.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ted H, the only doll with crippling anxiety and WOW! Yes REAL lactose intolerance ONLY 186 DAYS LEFT UNTIL CHRISTMAS.
Sylvester Stallone made a branded luxury snake/sword/skull “Chaos” pen. Somehow that fact is less embarrassing than the pen’s trailer.
You should really watch the pen’s trailer.
After you clicked “play”, your life changed. You now throb with desire for a Chaos pen. You must possess it. You wield money before you, like a lantern splitting the darkness, seeking a path to a life of Chaotic scribbling. But I am sorry, My Dear Hotdogger. It is no longer possible to buy this pen. They sold out all four versions of Sylvester Stallone CHAOS WRITING INSTRUMENTS.
I love knowledge. I also resent the imposition of knowledge of luxury products. Luxury product information hijacks a functional brain. My head’s whirring Noggin Gears process any input. This often serves me well. My thoughts stop me from falling through open manholes, or watching films lacking Pierce Brosnan.
However, my brain also processes the most obscene fruits of capitalism’s tree. If you show me the pricing for Chaos Writing Instruments, I will optimize it. I’ll leap from never conceiving that these items existed, to thinking “silver is mid.” After all, one golden Chaos Pen is worth a dozen silver Chaos Pens. That is true, because of math. But I should not feel like Sylvester Stallone sells the silver pens in friggin’ egg cartons, or soda twelve-pack cardboard, or some other shame packaging for the hoi polloi. The beautiful precious metal silver is valuable. Luxury Brain sneers at it like it’s a grade school crafts project by Not Your Kid. I was happier, yesterday, without that mindset. Yesterday I felt like a new baseball hat is a splurge. For real: I was wracked with angst about the expensiveness of a minor league baseball hat, even though my approach to making TikToks makes it a business expense. But that was the Old Me. The plebeian Pre-Chaos Pen Me. Now I question anyone using a silver (yuck) Chaos Pen. You bought the silver pen, [spoken in a kleptocrat voice where this phrase has the opposite meaning] in this economy?
Anyway that’s the products in the trailer. Er, most of them. There’s also (spoiler) a wristwatch. Here is how the trailer for Mostly Pens begins:
IDEAS. Ideas are what these pens are all about. Your current pens are trash because whoever made them forgot to think about big ideas during pen-ufacturing. Have you noticed when you pick up your current pen, and write something, the thing you wrote is not a BIG IDEA? That’s because the pen came from a factory assembly line with zero nozzles to squirt-insert concepts in its shaft part. A shaft of squirty ideas, narrated by the voice of Sylvester Stallone. Because the pen is “designed by Sylvester Stallone.” The trailer says so, in the most normie font possible, beside an illegible haunted hayride special effect title of the word “Chaos”, probably.
I wanted to make GIFs of the funniest transitions, smoke-fades, and whirligigs of this trailer. That was impossible. I’d have to make hundreds of overlapping GIFs of every second. Just watch it, please. It’s a journey. You will often think the video peaked. Then you’ll look at the YouTube progress bar. Then you’ll steel yourself for the next four-fifths. This trailer is wall-to-wall MOMENTS. It flies us through gloomy sagebrush under a full moon to behold a desert skeleton, and THEN it starts getting wild.
I never thought I’d miss the calm, measured stability of a crystal skulls book by two Floridians who broke off their situationship between UFO sightings. Those former lovebirds took their time. They titrated out their skulls tantra-style. Sylvester Stallone’s pen partners reject this philosophy. They barrel forward into their chief design motifs of snakes, skulls, skull-swords, snake-swords, whatever combinations are left over, and lizards.
I math’d the timecodes. That image comes 40.7% of the way through this trailer. The giant burning snake/sword/skele-pen is, in a dramatic sense, an early step of Act Two. On with the show:
Thank you, close-ups of the previous close-up. I wasn’t sure how many reptile motifs and bone molds we’re dealing with here. Also is that skull being blessed by the exact reptilian paw of The Geico Gecko? Still: this is powerful filmmaking. They allow the WRITING INSTRUMENT to SPEAK FOR ITSELF. It’s that old maxim of “show don’t tell.”
Sure. Let’s also tell. Show AND tell! Maybe bring this to grade school “show and tell”, if your plutocrat divorced dad has you that week. At the very least, show it to me. Despite how many times I’ve watched this trailer, I’ve barely seen the actual pen. Instead of filming or photographing the pen, they poured a vast yet insufficient budget into CGI-ing it. It’s as if McDonald’s stopped advertising pictures of their food, and started making cutscenes of it. Why not show me the pen in real life? The next minute-plus of trailer is closer and closer shots of a computer animated replica pen. The polygons are inescapable.
Sincere question: is purple fire a thing? Can you burn specific chemical elements to generate it? I refuse to look it up. MONTEGRAPPA faked some purple fire with Italian Adobe software, and I refuse to let that prompt me to research my question’s answer. I’m busy. I’m busy trying to figure out whether the actual ballpoint pen is this basic-looking on its writing end.
Banks have more interesting pen tips. I’m flabbergasted. This pen costs thousands of British quid, and THAT’S what’s under the cap? Awful. And fantastic. I love that, for everyone but the pen’s owner. Every one of these pens causes an exquisite unboxing letdown, because this pen has a cap. Imagine a customer receiving their CHAOS PEN. Marveling at its CHAOS DESIGN. But then, they open the CHAOS CAP, to discover a COMMONPLACE, CUSTOMARY, CAPITAL ONE CAFÉ-ASSED BALLPOINT. Many congratulations, Chaos Pen Owner. Each time you uncap this pen, its surface area turns forty percent more ORDERLY.
In the trailer’s next shot, they reveal this little skull on the cap clip. The skull has wings. I think. That’s what they’re going for. But it looks like the skull of Bozo The Clown, in a universe where skull protuberances dictated his hairstyle. Which bozo designed this pen anywa–
Oh right. That informative shot leads to rapid shots of Pen Parts, plus purple fire, and soundtrack escalation. It’s a lot. It’s too much. And I found the next shot informative, because my mind spilled all its information several “insert → text → ugly” software commands ago.
This hints at one challenge for the trailer. The challenge: the product is a pen. People have pens. Selling someone a luxury pen is like selling someone an extra clothing pocket. I walked out of the house with enough pockets on my person. Or I have a bag. Either way that’s bad news for your sales pitch. Once you’ve got that hill to climb, you might as well draw a weapon and rob me. Robbery is a crime. But it’s more likely to get my money than selling me a luxury pocket, with a pitch about The Power Of The Car Keys Not Falling On The Ground.
After that we “transition → fireball → low res” to the pen version of a Microsoft Solitaire victory screen. They unfurl as many Writing Instruments as possible. It looks like the gun-knife peacock thing on the poster for the first Expendables movie. That parallel suggests creative involvement from Sylvester Stallone. That’s the biggest surprise of this trailer. Don’t get me wrong: Sly’s recycling an idea. He copy-pasted it for the Italian pen guys long after that movie came out. When this trailer dropped, Stallone was two films into an Expendables franchise. He was and is a star. He made a big movie every year of the 2010s. So I doubt he delayed pre-production on Creed 1 or Exp3ndabl3s or A 5th Friggin Rambo Movie to hop on a transatlantic Skype brainstorm about pens. He let the pen guys fly solo from here. They solo’d a next beat of “the pen visits Ancient Rome.”
There is more than an entire minute of trailer to go. They fill twenty seconds of it by repeating all the “pen visits Ancient Rome” shots, in reverse order. This is a terrible choice, because sometime around the Ancient Rome part, the animator found the “3D → rotate → too fast” command in their dropdowns. This sequence is nauseating, and THEN it pulls a directional switcheroo mid-carnival ride.
That’s the next beat after the Roman Vomit Comet. The pens get disintegrated by Lasers But Boring. Then, the trailer recycles those lasers as they recycle some text.
Those text splashes are two separate messages. The trailer follows a text splash of “And Now…” with a text splash of “And Now…”. You cannot be this discombobulated in front of an audience. Those are the exact words and pacing of a magician who swears the trick didn’t get stuck like that when he practiced it one of the times.
Abracadabra.
Abraca-more skulls. Feel the CHAOS of the INTERIOR BONUS SKULL, impressing a skull on your sleeve! Or that wrist brace you wear sometimes!
Did you know they don’t make good watches in Italy? I sure didn’t! But these guys drove north a few hours to a better country to get their watch gears, because…CHAOS. IDEAS! RECYCLING THE RECYCLED EXPENDABLES IDEA FROM BEFORE!!
Honestly? Good for Sylvester Stallone. He got this opportunity by being a movie star. He became a movie star by outworking full-time writers, and making at least one movie my dad loved. Sly is himself a dad. A dad to countless faildaughters, according to the Paramount Plus ads they make me watch because I didn’t buy Deep Space Nine on physical media. Sly isn’t just working for his own enrichment. He’s supporting Sylvestra and Sylveena and Stallette. Cashing in on Skullwatches and Snakepens is better than the other ways he could fund his family. So I sincerely want what’s best for Sly. I’ve also never checked if he’s cancellable and I’ll ride that blessed ignorance for a while. And here’s another thing I mean sincerely: Sylvester Stallone is too talented to associate with this pen company. He’s a legitimate filmmaker with basic competence. But I dug a tiny bit deeper into his partners, and watched the next listed video on their YouTube account. Turns out they’re the least competent luxury brand on all of social media.
If you’re a luxury brand, media is your entire job. Media in all its forms, from going viral online to generating “Devil Wears Prada”-type fashion spreads. My Dear Hotdogger, MONTEGRAPPA is so far below the level of every fashion thing you’ve ever seen. MONTEGRAPPA’s trailer for MONTEGRAPPA is lower quality than the last hundred YouTube videos you’ve watched. I linked the video before and I’ll link it again but don’t watch it. Or maybe watch it with the sound off? About 80% of the shots do not have sound that lines up with the picture. It’s that busted. The guy’s mouth doesn’t move in time with his own voice. I also learned something watching this, because I’ve never seen a video where 80% of the sound isn’t synced. I’ve only watched videos where 0% or 100% is offline. It turns out an 80% misalignment feels far worse than 100%. If this video was always messed up, I could pretend this is a spaghetti Western with that funky dubbing that’s kind of its own aesthetic. But in this case, you can’t play that game. Just when my brain recalibrated for the problem, and implemented my headcanon, I got jolted out of it by a rare shot they fixed.
According to this video, Montegrappa makes their pens in a beautiful villa. The CEO tells us this as they cut to… a suburban medical building plus loading dock.
Then the CEO says they’ve made pens in this location for more than a century. I am a bit of a historian myself. So I tried to remember if anything significant happened between this video’s upload date (2013) and the previous hundred-plus years. I believe the years that start with “19” feature a few significant Italian political choices. Before I could google to check, the CEO shared an interesting take. He says they assembled their pens through Italy’s difficult times. Even the times when, direct quote, “Italians heroically defended their country during two world wars.” The next shot is footage of guys fighting – “heroically” – in World War Two. This pen sales video is capital-F Fascist.
Next, the CEI (Chief Executive Il Duce) says Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos swung through Montegrappa’s region during World War One. Therefore, “legend says” those novelists were the first users of Montegrappa pens. Then the CEI’s words, and eventually his mouth, welcome you to a shot of a worse showroom than your tri-county Nissan dealer.
Behold the showroom’s “Icons” pens. These pens celebrate Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee, and other men whose estates signed on the dotted line.
Guess what style of music soundtracks that Bruce Lee pen, and no other part of the video. You guessed right! And one Montegrappa celebrity partner stands above the rest. Mostly because they stood up a UPS Store banner of his face in the lobby.
The video gets more disappointing from here. It disappoints with its celebrity tie-ins AND its geopolitical preferences. Did you know Montegrappa sells a branded pen for the Paulo Coelho novel The Alchemist? I’ll bet that fits that novel’s message! Next up: a Montegrappa pen played an exciting role in world history.
That’s right: they PROMOTE their role in Boris Yeltsin signing legal documents that put Vladimir Putin in charge. Are you going to ponder that for even a split second? No! You will not! This video whisks you to a next shot of the CEI. They also leave in a first part of the shot where he’s waiting for his cue before he starts walking toward the camera. Also, his mouth is multiple entire seconds ahead of his voice. So as the CEI tries to look cool in the pen workshop, his voice and the captions laud this century’s worst authoritarian.
Then there’s one more shot, featuring Signore CEI’s office…
…which might not be nicer than your bosses’ office, at your job. If your boss has one desk toy AND a Formula 1 poster in a generic frame, he’s as glamorous as this Italian executive who ran out of Sylvester Stallone pens.
Does the CEI thrill you with passion style and sophistication that make up the soul of Italy? Are you transported to a higher realm of Italian luxury? Yes? You are? Excellent. Now give this man forty thousand American dollars, in exchange for getting that money back minus transaction fees, because Rocky Pens With Bozo Clips are out of stock forever. Nothing says “luxury” more than that…and I’d like to see PoxCo TRY to prove me wrong.
Special thanks to Cyberzone for the hot dog tip.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sean Chase, designer of Nitrate, the only pen that’s just a hot dog. It writes with genuine hot dog water for as long as the dog stays wet. $12,000 USD.
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Upsetting Day: Foreskin Man 🌭
One of my favorite kinds of fiction is the world where everyone only cares about one specific thing. In Road House, bouncers are celebrities known across the land. In the universe of Duets, all that matters is how good you are at karaoke. And in Foreskin Man, the entire population is locked in an endless war over the practice of circumcision.
Created by madman Matthew Hess to promote a proposed 2010 California bill that would have banned medically unnecessary circumcisions of minors, Foreskin Man is so deranged that upon release it was immediately condemned by anti-circumcision groups themselves. Even the leader of the group that Hess was a part of disowned it, calling Foreskin Man “inflammatory and 180 degrees different from the direction we want to go in,” adding “I can understand why people would be offended.”
But what’s to be offended about? I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. Miles Hastwick, ex-research scientist, has somehow accumulated enough wealth to open a “Museum of Genital Integrity” which he uses to expose the evils of circumcision through commissioning lifelike sculptures of baby dicks. But as so many Twitter activists have shown us, awareness of social issues is not enough. Sometimes Miles has to take things a step further as Foreskin Man, the defender of the innocent (baby genitals).
What are Foreskin Man’s powers? They are plasma flight boots and no second thing, unless you want to count powers that aren’t explicitly called out in the narrative, like how Superman would have to project some kind of force field to lift a plane without it collapsing around him. For instance, Miles has a superhuman ability to be on the scene wherever circumcisions are taking place. Maybe it’s a Night Man-type situation and he can hear foreskin crime?
But seriously, aside from all the weird stuff we’re going to get to, that’s one of the strangest aspects of Foreskin Man. His only power is that he built some boots that let him fly.
Hess was clearly going for a Batman-type technology-powered hero, but what makes Batman fun is he has a million different bat-themed toys. Foreskin Man just has the boots, and they don’t even flop around festively as he flies through the air. The only foreskin-themed thing about him is the emblem on his chest, which I didn’t realize was supposed to be the head and foreskin of a penis until I’d read every Foreskin Man comic multiple times.
Is he strong? Listen, bub: he routinely gets the shit kicked out of him by a handful of random goons.
The whole thing seems like the author wanted to create an anti-circumcision superhero, but then didn’t want to make him seem too powerful, so he overcorrected and made him suck ass instead.
Foreskin Man doesn’t even have any lore, one of the things that people love about superheroes. He isn’t an alien whose foreskin gives him superhuman powers under Earth’s yellow sun. He didn’t see his parents get circumcised in an alley behind a movie theater when he was young. He’s just Miles Hastwick, a guy who hates circumcision. We don’t even know if he’s circumcised! But the answer is almost certainly not, based on what this comic thinks that does to you — more on that later.
In issue one, Miles Hastwick throws a party for the opening of the Museum of Genital Integrity. It’s not enough, he bemoans. The pro-circumcision lobby is simply too strong.
This is a line that would probably hit harder if the character thinking it weren’t walking into his futuristic Foreskincave complete with giant electrical orb and speedboat. I mean, the museum seems to be getting a lot of funding, and Miles isn’t independently wealthy. He’s absolutely spending donor money on foreskin-themed speedboats, right?
But there’s no time to contemplate that — somewhere, a circumcision is about to occur!
I know that getting into comic art criticism in a series called Foreskin Man is like critiquing the lighting in a snuff film, but I want you to take a look at Amber Young and her son, Orlando. Literally every woman in Foreskin Man has a huge rack and a terrible case of porno face, and literally every child looks like an adult man who was cursed to be a baby by a spiteful witch. Did I mention that there are Foreskin Man trading cards? In a just world, that would be nothing more than the random utterance of a lunatic to a competent and caring medical team.
No stats? I need to know baby Orlando’s Energy Projection rating! How strong is he compared to Nameless Goon With Knife? These are the questions that trading cards are supposed to answer!
Anyway, Doctor Edric Griswold wants to cut that baby’s foreskin. And here Hess betrays his own view of the people who perform the procedure he despises so much.
Yes, this doctor — a mouthpiece for the practice of circumcision — doesn’t actually believe in anything he’s telling this young, sexy, fully made-up new mother. He just loves cutting foreskins, ok? He loves it so much, in fact, that seeing an intact foreskin is his trigger to morph into a monstrous, animalistic form. That’s right: he’s a Foreskin Hulk.
It’s like we’re watching someone create the concept of superhero comics from the ground up. Our villain has no motivation and doesn’t even believe in his own stated goal. We don’t even know what made him a Foreskin Hulk! Did a nuclear bomb go off while he was being circumcised, or was he the product of a Weapon X-type program to create the ultimate circumciser? Who cares? Let’s get to the really important stuff: Foreskin Man having sexual tension with every woman he meets.
You might have noticed something by now, which is that mild-mannered Miles Hastwick and Foreskin Man are identical save for one feature. Did you spot it?
Yes, instead of Clark Kent-esque glasses to conceal his identity, Foreskin Man wears a fake goatee at all times that he isn’t flying around to prevent the culling of foreskins. It looks idiotic, but wouldn’t it be easier to wear it only when he transforms? That spirit gum has gotta itch, right? I guess it’s probably pretty hard to apply fake facial hair in a dramatic fashion.
So far I’m not seeing what’s offensive about Foreskin Man. Sure, it’s offensive on a technical level, but— oh. Oh no.
That’s “Monster Mohel.” Yeah. Full-on Nazis probably read this comic and were like, cool it with the antisemitism, pal.
But Monster Mohel isn’t just some roaming, foreskin-obsessed lunatic like Doctor Mutilator. He was called here by Jethro, a rich, Jewish— oh, come on.
Evidently, Foreskin Man is hamstrung by a Batman-like unwillingness to kill. He has his foe at his mercy, when the father of the child points out that it’s not really any of his business what happens to this baby’s foreskin. At least, it wouldn’t be, if the villains hadn’t knocked out and possibly killed the baby’s mother, who nobly and boobily attempted to prevent the ritual from taking place.
I’m sure we can all see that there’s only one reasonable solution here.
Right, illegally kidnap the man-faced baby, that’s the easy part. But did you guess what happens next?
If you had “give the baby to the Intactivist Underground to be raised as one of their own,” then it’s legally a hate crime for you to come within 200 feet of a bris.
The IU celebrates their new addition by burning an enormous sculpture made from hundreds of stolen circumstraints. Two notes here: one, circumstraints are used for a lot of infant procedures, not just circumcisions. These assholes just made it that much harder for hospitals in the area to X-ray babies. Second, those things are made of plastic, so these hot, sexy babes just exposed that infant to a cloud of toxic fumes. Does that count as irony, if baby Glick gets health problems from burning stolen circumcision apparatuses? Does fucking anything count as anything anymore?
The first two issues of Foreskin Man take place in the Bay Area, but circumcision is a global problem. Issue three sees him going to Kenya to confront Githinji, a circumciser so prolific that Foreskin Man has already heard of him when a woman tells her that he has kidnapped her son and taken him on a trans-Atlantic flight solely for the purpose of circumcising him.
This is a world in which there are famous circumcisers. And there are also famous anti-circumcision heroes, and tales of their exploits resonate across the globe. When Foreskin Man is rescued from three men with one knife between them by Vulva Girl, she is not meeting a strange, goatee-less white man in a vaguely-themed costume. She is meeting a legend.
Vulva Girl, sorry yeah her name is Vulva Girl, can fly like Foreskin Man, but she can also project beams of energy. Her power source is the Siri Amulet, about which we learn less than nothing. She is a much better superhero than Foreskin Man in literally every way, from her powers to her emblem.
Foreskin Man and Vulva Girl work together to save some girls and boys from a globally-renowned husband and wife team of genital mutilators. And just to remind us that this is Africa, it all goes down not in a hospital but in tribal huts protected by blow dart-wielding warriors.
To get real for a moment here, anti-circumcision advocates often try to connect their cause to that of female genital mutilation. The bill that Foreskin Man’s author helped write was even called the “Male Genital Mutilation” bill. And look: should we be cutting any baby’s genitals? Probably not. But to make foreskin removal and clitoral excision equivalent requires some pretty advanced mental gymnastics. You’d have to depict circumcised men as broken, unlovable freaks who—
Holy shit! In issue seven of Foreskin Man, we get an opening narration by a victim of Doctor Mutilator. This is what I meant when I said that Foreskin Man himself probably wasn’t circumcised. In the world of this comic, circumcision is extremely common and the pro-circumcision lobby is an immensely powerful force. At the same time, being circumcised makes you a bitter sexual mutant who, uh, can’t cum? Can’t make a woman cum? It’s kind of unclear.
But there is hope for the circ’d: the love of a good woman who talks loudly in bars about the arrests of famous circumcisers.
It’s a truism that men care far, far more about their penises than the vast majority of women do. But Foreskin Man stretches this reality to comical extremes. Seriously, if you showed the last panel of this comic to most normal people without any context, they would assume it was about virgins or men who’d had their dicks exploded in the wars.
In case you were wondering, yes, the circumcised dick whisperer does have a trading card. It says that she “has a gift for soothing the pain that is trapped within so many circumcised men. She is naturally drawn to those who need her affection the most.” You thought I was kidding about the dick whisperer thing!
Alas, Doctor Mutilator is released from prison thanks to liberal soft on dick crime policies. The system has failed our gritty protagonist, Donovan Tracer. Foreskin Man has failed him. There’s only one thing left to do.
He becomes a Foreskin Punisher! He wears a Mardi Gras mask as a disguise, because New Orleans! I take back everything bad I’ve said about this comic, this kicks ass. My only note here is that “Blowback” is too generic a name for a dark genital revenge antihero. How about “The Prepucinator?” Or “The Sheath?” Or, I don’t know, “The Frenulum Avenger?” We’ll workshop it.
Foreskin Man arrives on the scene just in time to stop Foreskin Punisher from gunning down the Foreskin Hulk. What a world. It turns out that Donovan’s dick whisperer girlfriend is pregnant. “Don’t throw your life away for revenge,” Foreskin Man pleads. “I’m torn up inside by my roiling emotions!” Foreskin Punisher replies. “Excuse me, but I need to tear a baby from a woman’s body so that I can circumcise it,” Foreskin Hulk interjects.
Our hero saves the day and Blowback decides to become an intactivist dad instead of a dark counterpart to the clean-cut (crucially, not like that) Foreskin Man.
God, I’m already up to 2000 words and I haven’t even covered the sadistic, pedophilic Filipino nurse, the attempted circumcision on a thrill ride atop The Strat in Las Vegas, or the anti-circumcision newscaster whose job is continually threatened by her pro-circumcision boss.
I haven’t even covered Foreskin Music, which exists in-universe as one character’s ringtone.
Taken as an intact whole, Foreskin Man fails not just as a superhero comic, but as propaganda. Rather than actually trying to convince anyone that circumcision is a problem, it just assumes that the reader is already on board with its worldview, in which a blond, blue-eyed superhero is one of the few brave warriors to stand up to a motley crew of mostly ethnic minorities who crave the separation of infant boys from their precious foreskins for reasons of profit, religion, or possession by an ancient, malefic foreskin-hating blade.
Foreskin Man is the Road House of genitals. It’s the Cocktail of… cocks. If it has any enduring value, it is in posing one question to its readers, a question that we’ve all asked at one time or another in our lives, a question that cuts into the fleshy, protective sheath of our society:
Special thanks to Thrillho for the hotdog tip.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpottyReception, who expressly does not have any strong opinions about baby foreskins.
Categories
Upsetting Day: Baby Follies 🌭
At some point, society decided that babies hold the secrets of the cosmos within their tiny, still-developing brains. Countless pieces of media have explored this truth, from Baby Geniuses to Rugrats to Boss Baby. But only one such effort suggests babies live in a heavenly city controlled by a baby mafia. Also there’s a baby Sigmund Freud diagnosing baby psychosexual issues. Actually maybe Boss Baby did that too? I never saw Boss Baby.
Welcome to 1993’s Baby Follies. Before you ask, yes, it’s French. This might be the most French cartoon ever created.
The babies live in the sky in a cloud kingdom. They have jobs like shop manager, game show host, and bartender. Yes, there’s a bar in Baby City, or Baby Land, as it’s sometimes rendered. Babies go there to drink bottles of milk. Where does the milk come from in a land populated exclusively by babies? “Existence precedes and rules essence,” existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said. Maybe this is what he was talking about.
As premises go it’s a little bleak, projecting as it does mid 20th-century capitalist living onto an all-baby fantasy land, but it’s not outlandish in itself, right? Evidently the creators of Baby Follies thought so too, because most of the show isn’t about babies going about their daily lives. No, Baby Follies is primarily about a baby Humphrey Bogart attempting to foil the plots of the Galopin gang, led by the evil Scrogneugneu, who hovers menacing above Baby City in his blimp.
Is Scrogneugneu a baby? No, that would be absurd. There are no evil babies. Sure, there are babies who can be lured into working for an evil entity through coercion or bribery, but Baby Follies is careful not to make an argument about the existence of essential, inborn evil by depicting a baby criminal mastermind.
Anyway, how could a baby fly a blimp? Scrogneugneu is an elf who used to work for Santa Claus until he was kicked out for hoarding toys. I thought that would be obvious.
See, he put so much love and care into his craft, but then Santa always took them away to give to the children. So now he wants to usurp Santa and I guess shut down Christmas? We don’t really get too deep into that.
Throughout the series, Scrogneugneu and the Galopins try out various schemes, like getting the babies addicted to a game show or robbing the baby bar. Bogey, our noir baby protagonist, stops them from getting away with it. Occasionally he’s helped by a Superbaby.
It’s possible that you’re thinking that noir and babies, as concepts, don’t mix together so well. A world-weary detective baby is kind of funny on its face, but there’s not much you can do with it considering how violent and gritty noir tends to be by definition. You, my friend, lack vision.
The only limitations that exist in this world are those we place on ourselves. Again, in the words of Sartre, “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”
In other words, there is no god to stop us from depicting a baby Humphrey Bogart sucking pacifiers to approximate the chain-smoking, alcohol abusing noir detectives of yore.
Haha, great bit, good work everybody. But regardless of what the luminaries of mid-20th century continental philosophy might tell you, we live in a society. By accepting the benefits of communal living, e.g. grocery stores and not being stabbed for taking the last ripe avocado in the grocery store, we have agreed to certain rules and regulations, even if only tacitly. Those rules include: don’t stab people, don’t take other people’s stuff, and don’t put a Lauren Bacall baby in a cartoon, even if it does complete the famous Bogie/Bacall duo.
Wait a goddamn minute, the character is named Lauren, but that’s a parody of a scene from The Seven Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe, arguably one of the most famous images of the 20th century! You’re mixing your goddamn golden age of Hollywood references!
And what’s maybe the worst thing about this scene is that there isn’t even a vent on the sidewalk. Where is that updraft coming from?
Sorry, no, the baby upskirt with bedroom eyes is the worst thing about it. And now the animators, me, and everyone who reads this is going to jail. Fantastic.
But we needn’t stop there. Should we? Yes, absolutely. But “man is continually transcending himself,” Gabriel Marcel once said. And we wouldn’t want to make him look like a jackass, would we? Surely not. Can we get uhhhhhhhhhh Lauren the baby dancing in pasties and singing, “they’re blind to all else except Lauren’s charm / and they dream of holding this gorgeous girl in their arms.”
Sure we can! Nothing means anything.
That’s the one named black baby on Baby Follies, by the way. His name is Baby Crooner. He’s the star of an episode where he’s trying to figure out how to make money off of being the Baby Crooner after he gets fired from the bar. Some people hate this. I don’t know what it is, but they fuckin’ hate it. There’s people that wanna kill him.
Anyway, Simone de Beauvoir, in her landmark work of feminist philosophy The Second Sex, said “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Clearly she didn’t know of the existence of a pre-birth dimension populated by sultry dancing she-babies.
But back to our noir detective, who after all is the nominal lead of Baby Follies. He’s your typical hard-bitten protagonist. He has an on again off again thing with a dangerous dame and he spends too much time drinking. These things, in my experience, lead to dark places.
“There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” Camus said. He was talking about how in a world of absurdity, all that truly matters is whether or not you get up every day and decide to keep going or just kill yourself. So why not? Let’s do a storyline where a baby noir detective becomes so disillusioned with his life as a baby in a city in the clouds that after a night of binge drinking he decides to be born and the whole thing is played as suicidal depression.
Let’s even show him writing a suicide note where he says “I can’t stand this darkness anymore!”
Ultimately, though, the writers of Baby Follies were cowards. They faltered at the finish line of actually showing a hard-drinking baby detective jumping onto a cabbage and letting a stork take him away from Baby City forever. Instead, Lauren and his friends show up and convince him not to kill himself be born.
Of course, this raises a lot of questions about the nature of Baby City. If being born is like suicide in that you can choose to do it whenever you want, is it like death more broadly in that it eventually comes for us all? Storks seem to run the baby delivery system in this world — are old babies taken away by them to be born against their will? Are seemingly young and healthy babies occasionally snatched up off the street by the birds, leaving their remaining friends to wonder at the random senselessness of it all? Let’s go with yes.
We’ve done baby burlesque, we’ve done baby existential crises. Where do you go from there? Uh, a Star Wars parody? A baby trial of Scrogneugneu? I can only guess based on the episode titles, because Baby Follies is a very difficult show to find. It aired in the US and UK during the ’90s, but I couldn’t find any English-language episodes online, and only found a few of the original 52-episode run in French and Spanish on YouTube. However, Baby Follies aired in a lot of countries. In Poland, it was called “Bobaskowo”, or “Baby Doll.” In Sri Lanka, viewers knew it as තොත්ත බබාලා, which Google Translate tells me means “Totta Babies.” And in China, it was titled 婴儿城 (pronounced yīng’ér chéng), which means, simply, “Baby City.”
And that brings us to our diabolical twist. See, I’ve been working on you throughout this whole article, building on your deeply-held biases to convince you that Baby Follies was a uniquely French show. But it was, in fact, the result of an international collaboration between French studios and the Shanghai Animation Film Studio.
I want to be absolutely clear here: people grew up watching Baby Follies in China. Go into the comments sections on the Chinese language episodes on YouTube and there are the typical comments you see on any children’s series from thirty to forty years ago. “I watched this when I was in primary school,” “the best memory of my childhood,” “my father left home when an episode of this was playing and now I can’t achieve climax unless my lover calls me ‘Bogey’,” that sort of thing.
The Chinese government controls the vast majority of mass media in the country, and children’s cartoons are and were no exception. Other ’80s and ’90s series like Black Cat Detective featured morally upstanding characters banishing crime, while Journey to the West: Legends of the Monkey King drew on historical Chinese fiction, retelling beloved stories in the medium of animation.
Meanwhile, there was Baby Follies, which promoted… well, I guess not killing yourself, so that’s something. But you have to imagine that the guy whose job it was to read through the scripts for this show and approve or reject them just wasn’t paying much attention that day.
I mean, we’re talking about a market where foreign media companies have self-censored everything from skeletons to homosexuality to reduce the likelihood that their cultural products will be tied up in red tape. But somehow sexy baby pasties are ok? Suicidal babies are fine? This is fine?
I guess!
“There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics,” Mao Zedong told us. Well, perhaps Baby Follies indeed represents the proletarian struggle in some manner that I, with my limited knowledge of the Chinese language, can’t fully grasp. Maybe Bogey is meant to represent the worker, kept in toil by the gangster capitalism whose schemes hold Baby City in their evil grasp? Maybe Lauren is actually a satirical figure, calling attention to the ways in which the capitalist mode of production demeans women and distracts them from revolutionary fervor with the meaningless pursuit of beauty through consumption. Maybe we’re meant to see Baby Crooner’s struggles as emblematic of the ways in which the owner class divides and conquers the workers using the tool of race, much like Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar?
Nope, it’s an international crime. Please call Interpol and have them arrest those responsible for Baby Follies, me, and everyone who made this article possible.
This article was thanks to a hot Hot Dog tip from Yeyo.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Max Baroi, a loose cannon baby cop and the only one who can save Baby City from rampant corruption.
Hi. Clown ministry. As someone who collects and writes about mistakes by maniacs, it’s hard to maintain a perspective on “strange.” And so I’ve ignored this 1990 clown ministry book in the clown ministry section of my library for years. It’s called Clown Ministry Skits for All Seasons.
In my world, this is boilerplate… background noise behind a thousand piercing screams. Call me when the clowns are children. Or when the author has contemplated Christian clowns so much he has forgotten the meaning of both words. This is not madness. This is more like an instruction manual you’d get with a wig.
Even the back of the book promises nothing outside the generic idea of clown ministry. The author, Floyd Shaffer, describes himself as a clown minister who made Clown Ministry and wrote Clown Ministry. And he writes clown instructions with that same dynamic and vibrant style. Let’s take a look at his introduction:
The book opens by explaining what holidays are and how the book is organized, and then describing the organization of books and how some events are called “holidays.” It takes Floyd four tries to explain “brainstorming” which he calls “Word Ticklers” but also “brainstorming.” So this is crazy, but I’m not sure it’s fucking crazy yet. Intros are hard to write, and I think I proved that when I said, “Hi. Clown ministry.” Let’s keep reading.
I see. This is a trap. All this dullness is some kind of clown gambit. ‘We are normal, this is no big deal. Some Christians are clowns, turn to page 73 for handwashing instructions for your Godlaffs “Real Human Hair”®️ wig.’ Well, I don’t buy it. This normal clown minister is about to reveal himself as a third kind of deranged.
Fine. Keep your secrets, clown. For now. We’ll begin with the religious holiday of Advent, which the author explains is a type of holiday and a kind of holiday.
Oh, I see what’s going on now. This is a land mine. Clown Ministry Skits for All Seasons is absolutely a plot to destroy the career of clown ministers before they become Floyd’s potential rivals. This sucks shit, would completely bomb, and it’s the opener! Floyd is telling the reader to have two clowns (or more) learn about air circulation from The (small) Bible and the only lines are coughing. You don’t do that if you want young clowns to have promising careers in Christ. This is designed to strangle baby clowns in the manger. The only other possibility is that this 20 year Christian clown veteran is a confused, joyless idiot, which yeah, okay. It could be that also.
People in church are used to allegories and metaphors stretched beyond recognition, but it would take such a generous audience to watch two (or, again, more) clowns cough at each other until they remember windows and think, “Oh, I get it! Christ our Lord is the ventilation! Wonderful! Three honks for all these remarkable clowns!” Nonsense. Clown-deflating nonsense.
Let’s check out another Advent one.
Th– what the fuck? I’m meant to dress like a hobo and silently assemble furniture? Over the course of a month? What kind of show is that? And the goddamn finale is “leave”? This is how an alcoholic father builds a bookshelf, not how you spread the message of Jesus Christ. And did Floyd describe the manger as “opened in readiness to receive the Christ-child”? What? Is the audience meant to say, “This mime intruder has built a babyless trough in our church, slowly, across several weeks, and I agree that’s strange, but… it seems about the right size to receive God’s son! Wow, can you imagine!? If God’s son was in there!? Majestic!!” I can’t stress this enough: nonsense.
I’m going to move on to Christmas skits.
So I need a homeless clown in a box with a canned fish cold cut sculpture. Fucking why? Are we phonetically acting out a Beck song?
This is nuts. Clown Two sneaks up on Clown One while he or she is sleeping and starts going through Clown One’s things. “Not a violent reaction, in fact no words at all,” says Clown One in this situation. And then the two clowns walk into the cold to die together. Or fuck? It’s weird none of these skits have endings. Less weird than the fish made from cold cuts, but still. Anyway, Christmas made Floyd think of gifts, so he did a skit about gifts.
Okay, new theory: a group of creatures crawled from an opening in our reality and Floyd Shaffer was the anthropologist who went missing while studying them. “Day Two: The giftless clown appeared to give itself to the others, who accepted by ritually removing two feet of their height and disguising themselves as gifts. They seem suddenly aware I’m watching them. Could my presence be violating some sacred taboo? They are approaching qui–”
Oh, good. There are Lent skits.
So a clown, or a group of clowns, hugs their way through your church amid incomprehensible manifestations of fear and then they vanish. Am I crazy, or are these starting to make sense? No, but seriously, what the goddamn fuck is happening? This is a dream I would describe if a clown ate thirty people and I was trying to get out of jury duty. Then disappear. Speaking of, “Then disappear.” is a chilling way to end your instructions on a clown fear skit, right?
It’s the only ending clowns know.
These are all real endings taken from other skits in the book. Floyd Shaffer has dedicated most of his life to clown theater and has somehow decided “unexplained vanishing” is the best closer. Maybe because he’s tried these skits and knows how crowds respond when prompted to “let the clown ministers know what you thought about that.”
I don’t know why they keep vanishing, maybe I never will; I only know I hate it. It’s bad writing and leaves the whereabouts of legitimately troubling people unaccounted for. I have finished typing this paragraph, I give you a clown hug and disappear.
I want to do another Lent one, the Christian holiday dedicated to resisting temptation:
Three or more clowns enter with something that dirties their hands? Say no more. I’m in.
Jesus fuck, this is what you’d write if you were the only survivor of a circus slaying. Clowns can’t kneel until they have washed their hands with pizza coupon-sized towels, and the clowns then disappea– wait, why did I use a pizza coupon as a unit of measurement? Oh no, did I conjure this? This was lurking on the next page of the book:
Clowns in Bellevue, Washington designed and photocopied their own Pizza Hut coupons and hid one in this book. And there is no expiration date. If Washington clown law is to be honored, Pizza Hut has to give me an $8.99 Medium Supreme Pizza, and then a second pizza at half price. Now and forever. Maybe? There are surprisingly few details on these bootleg Pizza Hut savings, and I don’t think it will be much help to tell the cashier, “I’m here for God on behalf of clowns. Now, before His watchful eyes, are you refusing to honor the homemade pizza coupon of clowns?” Ha ha what is any of this; all of reason is boiling into wigged lunacy.
Sorry, I’m having too much fun. Let’s do a sad one.
This routine uses something Floyd calls the “running gag” technique, a clown insider term meaning to get sadder and sadder every time you reappear. End by leaving, very sadly. As sadly as possible. I included a scan of the entire page because I didn’t think you’d believe me if I said the skit was a clown getting more depressed as his balloon deflates, the end. He doesn’t even disappear. This is not religious comedy. This is how a French filmmaker would tell 1921 he never loved his wife. What is going on? I hate to pull this card after only 1300 words, but look at this, what God would allow this?
Let’s move on to Maundy Thursday/Good Friday, though as Floyd’s sudden self-awareness explains, “the very nature of the observance may seem paradoxical for the presence of a clown.”
Okay, Floyd had me worried a pod of clowns might set the wrong tone for remembering the torture and execution of Jesus Christ, but finding out it’s only a single clown and he’s only crucifying a loaf of bread, it seems appropriate. I love that I’m not exaggerating in any way when I say this nutbag told his readers to make a hat for bread out of barbed wire, shake it in half with a crucifix, offer empty cups of nothing to a church, and run away. It’s such haunting senselessness. It’s something a fortune teller would say to a Subway marketing executive about to meet with a young man named Jared Fogle.
From the writer of “Sad Balloon Clown Grows Sadder” and “I Have Killed Your Bread Christ” comes the quote, “I truly believe that laughter is the only authentic response to God’s grace.” So Floyd does think these skits are funny? The month-long manger building project? The tiny towels thing? I’m not really asking. I’m almost positive laughing at those would be seen by any god as a betrayal of the natural order. I guess my actual question is this: is the message of Easter really “Death is conquered!” Because that rules.
“At first clowns are sad about the death,” types Farts Fartinson, the 38th century’s most popular time prankster before dropping this fake book in 1990. Untold eons later, an advanced and unknown prankster would add the pizza coupon.
By this point, it would have been fair for any reader to say, “Oh. Easter skit. Let me guess. A bunch of clowns get very sad and afraid and then disappear?” And yet that’s exactly what happened.
One thing I’ve learned from Clown Ministry Skits for All Seasons is there are no actual traditions in Christian traditions. You can walk into a church dressed like a clown, fuck a baguette inside out with their faith’s most holy symbol, brag about it in a book, and they’ll be fine with it. You can see Floyd almost realizing this himself when he says nobody knows how to celebrate a birthday for church, so go ahead and do whatever. No one will object if you bring in a group of mimes wearing flaming mouth headbands. Or whatever; that’s of course not a real sugges–
Freed from all constraints of tradition, Floyd has chosen to symbolize Christianity with a group of mimes wearing flaming mouth headbands. “Erect” ones, but that feels like bait left here in the past by another time prankster. It’s going to be tough to express this without accidentally giving a nu metal band its name, but we are reading the unmedicated rants of a clown disorder. The onl–
God damn it, I knew it. We’d better skip to the end of this skit.
“So the tongue of fire… headbands let the clowns play k-kazoo, or any such impossible task,” asks a man truly trying to understand.
“Don’t talk to the fucking prisoners,” says the other guard as their armored van is suddenly attacked. The clown has disappeared.
To celebrate Pentecost, why not have five or more clowns enter holding signs meaning nothing, intentionally nothing, before the hugs, before everyone’s hugs? Don’t give up, we can survive this! They seem to be weak to sonic attacks! Hold them back with these firecrackers while I read their skit idea for Transfiguration Day!
Something about this still feels a bit off. For instance, the subject of the book is clown ministry. But also, this passage reveals people who are not yet clowns are called “clowns” by other clowns, as if cursed by clown destiny. I don’t like how clowns spot future clowns magically, like Jedi recruiting children with high midi-chlorians. I honestly don’t like any of this, or where it’s going. These clowns are going to multiply and vanish and we are running low on firecrackers.
This is how clowns are born? Not eggs? Who would watch this, and why would they associate it with Jesus? Why am I still demanding answers when Floyd has just answered my most desperate question? Do you see what he did here? This skit about making more clowns has an ending! Floyd Shaffer wrote a big finish! I guess there’s no need for clowns to mysteriously disappear when all are clowns, honk, when everyone is clown.
We haven’t done a WORD TICKLERS yet. Let’s check the word ticklers for this skit.
This idea, clowns putting clown makeup on a clown and nothing else, was inspired by the words “eyes clouded” and “honor.” I can’t believe I ever, for a single second, looked at this book and thought, “That’s not so crazy.” Hey, I wonder if clowns celebrate…
I’m sure this will be fine. We can trust the judgment of an increasing number of sad and missing clowns.
This is how the words “you have a railroad spike in your skull” sound when you have a railroad spike in your skull.
Cutting people shapes out of red and yellow paper to represent ethnic diversity is a real celebration of Whiteness. “Does anyone have a non-white they can call about this,” Floyd asked his 1990 Lutheran church, accidentally writing his first good joke.
What.
Alright, fuck you. You’re telling me a clown minister wrote a skit about Martin Luther King Jr. Day with racial paper dolls, a “seed envelope” which he himself puts in quotes, and now someone has hidden a “deflated love balloon,” which has to be what Lutherans call a “used condom,” which has to be what the Amish call a “”seed envelope,”” in a Bible. This is an obvious prank by malevolent reality meddlers, and I will not fall for it.
So on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we do various insanities and genetic experiments to no effect and then celebrate the segregation of the paper races? There are only so many ways I can demand to know, “What the goddamn fucking shit.” This skit feels like the author was specifically inspired by the word “racism,” but there’s no way for me to che– wait a minute.
Hey, there’s our word tickler: “racism.” It’s second to last before “respect,” which is exactly where a cunning clown would put it to seem least suspicious. “What do I think of when I think of Martin Luther King Jr.? Well, certainly busing… justice. What else… opportunity. Personal worth… r-racism? And finally semen. In balloons, in envelopes, all over everything. I mean respect! Envelopes of respect.” Hey, while I’m losing my mind, let’s do Valentine’s Day.
Rookie clowns, you don’t need to make things complicated. The perfect Valentine’s Day skit might have been staring at you with glassy eyes from a dark bog this entire time. Hold completely still until your prey is close enough to grab!
Special thanks to trapdoor spiders for sending in this skit idea. If you have a clown skit idea, send it to Floyd Shaffer by whispering it to any Pizza Hut cashier while negotiating a homemade coupon covered in clowns.
I have a new concern. Did I, me personally, somehow do this? Because “Have one other clown enter and carefully examine this “Valentine” clown,” sounds like something I would Photoshop onto a fake clown pamphlet. And not in a first draft. That would be carefully calculated and polished absurdity. I’d look at the words “carefully examine this ‘Valentine’ clown,” and be certain I’d written the perfect joke. So I ask again, is this me? Am I Farts Fartinson from the year 3970?
This is getting too silly. Maybe there are some clown skits about honoring dead soldie–
Fuck yeah.
“I’m not here to be funny, I’m here to restrain you by your fingers as a reminder of the day’s significance.” – All Clowns
“The sad clowns tie the church’s fingers together. Clowns disappear,” says a voice from behind many layers of restraints. “Move closer, closer to my teeth so I can tell you the rest.”
We should do a nice, normal one. Like a birthday.
Maybe not this normal, Floyd. I was finally getting used to this dark world of unfiltered clown madness and his birthday tip is “get them a big card”? Come on, Floyd. I was fully prepared for something like an old sheet filled with clown holes.
Oh no, the book can hear me.
“Surprise! We are clown heads! Alright, goodbye! Unless you guys are partying?”
Okay, you’re not going to believe this next one:
Floyd Shaffer has written a highly critical 4th of July mime skit. The clown who has chosen to spread the one true religion through confusion, human seed, and vanishing has notes on how we’re running the country.
If you’re going to perform this skit, you should know it’s both very anti-American and highly clown intensive. You’re going to need at least five clowns, and an 8-foot cardboard Statue of Liberty. But don’t worry, all of those things should have spawned from the PEOPLE SEEDS envelope we made back on Martin Luther King Day.
Oh my god. This is something the Viet Cong would make John McCain perform for a prison camp’s Hùng Kings’ Festival. The clowns are going to call out the Statue of Liberty for every last one of her false claims. Oh, did you think we called your name, “Your Tired?” Well, it says here your name is “Your Getting the Fuck Back on the Boat, III.” Better luck next statue, assholes! I’m sure you already see where this skit is going, but let’s read it anyway:
Through the power of pantomime and shackled clowns, Floyd Shaffer puts the last of America’s hypocrisies on trial. Begone, “your poor.” Communicate your fear elsewhere, “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” This is indistinguishable from Soviet Cold War propaganda. Floyd has to be pulling from his Maybe pile with this one, because there is no way he’s ever tried performing this in front of a bunch of Ohio Pentecostals. And when the authorities are breaking up a fight between a white church and a group of invading clowns calling the Statue of Liberty a liar, I think I know what side the cops are taking.
Back to the skit, the USA has kicked out “your poor” and “your huddled masses,” so I guess that’s the whole poem debunked. Time for the clowns to vanish.
What!? The IRS sent a clown to take down even the “Give me” part of the poem! I don’t know what to say. Floyd finally wrote a surprise based on disrupting our expectations rather than the random brain misfires of a man dying of clown’s disease. I wonder what word ticklers he used to inspire it.
Okay, I’m definitely using this book to send myself messages from the future. And speaking of me and my forbidden clown knowledge, I think Floyd eventually tried one of these clown army skits and it didn’t go well. Because I own his video, Clown Ministry Video, and it comes with a warning to the viewer to never clown in groups of five or more. If a clown cluster is too large it can have an off-putting effect on an audience, and I have never seen any concept communicated more clearly and in so many ways. I did not edit this in any way, it was made like this by a leading clown advocate:
Author Floyd Shaffer sat at his typewriter. “I’m not really going to suggest Christian clowns at a wedding,” he word tickled. “Hkkkk,” his mouth said as a skeletal hand reached out and tapped, “NO LONGER TWO, BUT ONE”.
A stickler for credits, Floyd Shaffer makes it clear he adapted this skit from a skit by Floyd Shaffer, with permission.
So the clown meddling with the drinks at your wedding has the groom mix a pitcher of blue chemicals with his new bride’s pitcher of yellow chemicals to symbolize the miracle when Jesus turned Mountain Dew into Mountain Dew Baja Blast. You might be so distracted by how fucking insane all this is, that you didn’t notice what was missing.
The clown has not disappeared. If you invite Floyd Shaffer to your wedding, he will put suspicious chemicals in your food and remain there until the union is consummated.
There’s another wedding skit idea:
It’s sort of a loose one. You basically get dressed up like a clown, show up to a wedding, and keep yourself busy. Whatever you, with your Christian clown judgment, think the married couple didn’t plan for. I’m sure you want more details, so Floyd offers all three:
First, try standing outside the wedding and greeting people. Silently. Call you and the other clowns “silent greeters,” but silently and to yourselves.
Second, wait for the wedding to start and begin decorating. Tie “love” balloons to things, wherever, an industry term for “normal” balloons with a tablespoon of clown semen added.
Third, go to the reception and tie the married couple up by their fingers, along with others as appropriate. That’s the whole thing, the whole skit idea, then clowns disappear. Amen.
I vanish silently.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Cerril, the clown who enters with a bloody cross, points to three children, and then silently disappears. Those three children each die within three years. Seeds are planted. Plants are harvested. Clowns. Clowns.