Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

Mascot Week: Bernard the Bee Boy 🌭

Where are mascots born? A panicked boardroom at 2 AM, with none of the drugs AMC promised. Just a whiteboard with the dumbest shit ten former artists have said in their lives. In the back, a disappointed mentor pockets another call from home. Something about a birthday. He fires a pleading, imminently divorced look.

“Anything.”

You have nothing.

“Guys. Cereal is fun. People like cereal. Anything.”

You write down the nothing.

Or not, who knows. That scene almost explains Bernard the Bee Boy. He’s a legacy mascot, from a proud line of brand priests. Post has faith in advertising.

Faith rarely works out.

You saw the title. Meet Bernard.

Sorry, that’s Crazy Craving, the second oddest Honeycomb mascot. And a long-runner, despite heaven’s will. I can rant about dignity and sanity all day, but they don’t test well. Awards heap praise on thoughtful ads for things we don’t buy, while Crazy Craving turned trauma into cereal sales.

Crazy Craving tested my loyalty to Toonami. I could face the beast for Big O, a.k.a. Batman Found A Mech. But I fled during Silverhawks, a.k.a. Thundercats in Space. Today, I rate punching in seconds of Crazy Craving tolerance. I gave Jujutsu Kaisen a chance, but that’s six seconds of Crazy Craving, tops. Chainsaw Man is a solid minute.

With that breakfast shoggoth out the way, here’s Bernard:

Or the Honeycomb Kid, Honeycomb’s first mascot. He’s great. Imagine a cowboy pastiche, but from another timeline. The Honeycomb Kid’s lion-powered chariot doesn’t evoke any western ever made. Good. Authenticity’s for food that doesn’t glow. Post went weird ages ago, only the horror and tedium are new.

The Kid moved me to try Honeycomb. It’s fine for a sweet tooth in denial, or corn withdrawal. Like most cereal promising health and flavor, Honeycomb fails twice. It’s better than blowing rent on Magic Spoon’s protein chalk, but so is a weekend in Atlantic City.

The Honeycomb Kid defied fate to deliver prediabetes. Mostly with old cowboy tricks like hucking boulders back at avalanches. Which is how Tombstone ended in my heart.

Product worship can be fun! A mock folk hero feels fresh, or at least manically inspired. Now that you’ve seen a mascot work, meet Bernard.

Bernard’s a feral child.

A feral child raised by bees.

In fairness, I bury bleakness like this in sugar. And based on headlines and every dad in fiction, human parenting’s flawed. Sadly, bees are third rate animal godparents. While wolves teach you to found empires, bees teach you to starve.

Some questions emerge. Hitting an early spot might clear things up. As they said in my old hive: “that’s a little too urban for Princeton.” Later on, they said specifics matter.

This one’s fun. Still demented, but fun. Most cereal ads are, until Groundhog Day vibes set in.

Like many sugar mascots, The Bee Boy (not to be confused with a dancer/killer/mediocre student) lives on loop. Figuratively—exaggerations blend in here. For example, a Jane Goodall impersonator finds a preteen with super-speed living off nothing in the jungle. That’s a straight-laced summary.

Gane Joodall is decades ahead of the curve: she records Bernard for clout instead of helping. The web’s ravaged traditional publishing. And web publishing. And global democracy. But I suspect it’s hit freakshows harder. The better Bee Boy spots are all mockumentaries. If you don’t hear a strained English accent, you’re in for a bad time.

I should explain “super-speed.” As a rogue drone, Bernard emits a persistent and infuriating hum. He also twitches every two seconds, bending space and making the sound effect worse. Think Nightcrawler with a vuvuzela.

Gane should probably look into that. But she prefers the old bird vs. screen door gag. Fair play, even when the bird’s an orphan. That joke’s less of a lemon, and more shared culture. Object vs. face belongs to everyone.

Squint, and you’ll notice a box tucked just out of sight. It’s Honeycomb, the corn of the elite. This ad remembered the sponsor with ten seconds on the clock. For all the bees in Tarzan Jr., there’s not much room left for cereal. Unless…

Cereal tames the savage beast. Or rather, gives him tweaker convulsions. Again, that’s less of a joke and more of a transcript. The audio description track would say “Bee Boy scratches himself between violent shakes, desperate for his drug of choice.” Leaving blind viewers to assume a sick joke. Which this is, but not that kind.

Gane and Bernard bond over substance abuse.

Whoever meth-coded this brand? We’d get along. No one that chooses this can bore you. They might accidentally ruin both your lives, but they won’t bore you.

I think this first spot’s alright. I also expect nothing from this medium or mankind, but I respect a fresh swing. Especially after Crazy Craving. Sadly, the sequels suck out loud. They overdo it. Reuse material. Beat a horse’s skeleton. If you think Lucky’s stuck in a time loop, watch Bernard’s journey go nowhere.

Granted, low effort’s the goal. The dream’s a machine so simple another agency can’t break it. The Trix Rabbit mined one joke until empathy became hip. The King’s death mask invoked fates worse than Burger King for a decade. Post wanted a self-driving brand. They found one in the ’60s, but new execs need new trophies.

Bernard seemed like a repeatable joke. Saturday morning’s only competing fiends were Ed Edd & Eddy. The gimmick survives Bernard’s trip to the zoo, where he challenges a bear to single combat.

Over honey, naturally. Bernard’s handler lures him back with cereal. I’m wary of a “Would You Kindly” trigger as a product benefit. But that appeals to some parents and keeps the premise alive. The academic frame, honey gags, and ear-stabbing buzzes limp along.

The joke stretches thinner when Bernard meets the neighbors. His jungle’s next to Whoville. The Jim Carrey edition, with a sneering bourgeoisie:

Client notes said “more cereal.” It’s a yellow-tinted town, the neighbor has a yellow dress, blonde beehive, and Post serial code tattoo. It’s a honey world, the Bee Boy just can’t afford it. That’s not where I’m stuck.

Bernard has neighbors? He’s the most unhoused mascot I’ve seen. Oscar the Grouch is ahead by a trashcan. Bernard has negative assets, a Schedule I habit, and a stage parent. Sure, this gated community might be in the heart of the Amazon, sparking more questions. But Bernard’s credit score isn’t high enough to face this rejection.

The Who’s heart grows, and she offers to show Bernard central air. If he leaves his bees outside. The only creatures to show him loyalty or love.

Bernard’s betrayed something. His family? Class? Friends? He can vibrate all he wants, his inner bee’s dead. I hope this home’s copper wiring is worth it.

But we’re aiming for absurd. Overthinking means you’re bored, and Bernard’s schtick is getting old. He speaks entirely in twitches and buzzes, in dialogue-driven sketches. The charm’s less Kenny McCormick, and more a child thrashing to mosquito love songs. We’re already behind the Silverhawks line of commercial tolerance. Desperation’s scent is smothering the honey.

It doesn’t improve with Halloween Bernard.

Or yearbook Bernard.

Or flash Bernard.

The website’s dead, like this idea. We’re eight seasons into a sitcom, and the showrunner’s on trial. I’d say they stopped trying, but that implies they’re missing something. They aren’t. Bernard’s a dry well. We’re restarting another comic at #1.

The solution? The same as any failing relationship. Another baby.

Meet the second Bee Boy. Bernard’s saving throw against joining the Kids’ Club in the grave. I could say this angle defied Scrappy and Jeb, and saved the campaign. I could also say plastic fades, VC firms saved the internet, and Honeycomb tastes chalk-free. It’s better to face reality.

To spell it out: younger, spunkier replacements might work in sports and love. Less so in stories, which ads oddly still insist on telling. Sure, Bernard finally found a kindred spirit in a lonely hive. But that is impossible to give a shit about. Post should’ve rented Terry Crews a decade earlier.

Still, give Post some rope. Cereal’s a tough niche:

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ken Paisley, who once killed a man for Sugar Smacks. Smacks are whack, kids. Stay in school.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: No Hang-Ups

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Word Chewing 🌭

When an uninitiated is asked to define “Word Chewing,” one most commonly encounters a scatterplot of similar guesses: Is it a sex maneuver? Is it how they’re trying to teach Gen Alpha to read? Is it the original Swedish version of Number Munchers? Dear god, Father Author! Tell us! Tell us! they scream, dumb terror in their piggy little eyes and slackened jaws as they read their precious satire website.

Wrong on all counts, genius. In fact, Word Chewing is worse than all those things. For those who wish to brace themselves appropriately, I’d say it’s a hair less awful than those erotic tickling clips from the Tickled documentary, but handily worse than getting punched in the special ninja way where your splintered nose-bone shoots up into your brain.

Hey, here’s some now!

No, that is neither a flipbook of a man who photographed himself having a stroke every day for a year, nor is it a zoetrope of high-speed photos taken to resolve a bet between two 1870’s railroad magnates. Rather, it’s a sadly misguided young person doing – something – set to the song “Satisfaction” by Eminem. I guess you could say he’s “chewing” the words, but to me it looks a lot more like an AI-generated Jim Carrey impersonator.

The small cadre of weirdos who sustain the Word Chewing movement are taking making funny faces to its logical conclusion: getting everyone to hate you. It’s kind of like air band, except instead of miming all the instruments, you just mime the vocals REALLY HARD. The equivalent would be a Pink Floyd cover band playing “Money” by doing a drum solo with a Gallagher mallet.

Fortunately, articles hosted on Patreon lack embedded video support. I say “fortunately” both because the audio on these is just the copyrighted song or quotable clip in question, making an aural component unnecessary, and because it shields you, my precious readers, from contracting a curse where everyone in your life slowly starts talking like this. These things are like the video from The Ring, but scary.

Word Chewing is also a lot like tobacco chewing, in that it’s a scourge that gives you mouth cancer (or if it doesn’t, we should do science until it does). And despite all efforts to the contrary, its tumor-like growth has engulfed much more than just music. Here’s someone chewing up a line from their favorite movie, Honey, Let’s All Kill Ourselves.

As with any weird trend, there are those who hop on the bandwagon to have a bit of harmless fun, and then those who center their life around Word Chewing and rehearse alone in their room for hours on end. A truly outstanding Chewer is like a good prom date – there’s lots of hand stuff involved, a little tongue action, and about twelve seconds of rhythmic bouncing.

And remember, a Word Chewer’s face and part of their upper torso is their instrument. Just like a skilled actor protects and nurtures their body, many Chewers take special care to maximize face-appeal. For example, here’s someone doing their makeup while also masticating the scene from Family Guy where Stewie gets his period.

Other perennial favorites of hers include the American Pie “band camp story,” the scene in Audition where the girl makes the guy eat a bowl of his own vomit, and the Ed Bradley “Revisiting Emmitt Till’s Murder” segment of Sixty Minutes. Once finished applying, she’s ready to make TikTok magic!

Fun fact: this clip fell backwards in time and is actually the origin of humans fearing clowns. But makeup isn’t the only augmentation a Chewer might rely upon. Eventually, as it does, CG came onto the scene, which many of the Chewing oldheads say cheapens what was once a noble art performed for the kingly courts of the Hapsburgs. There the Crown Prince of Austria would sit in his glory, watching stuff like this:

For the Word Chewing sea is deep and dark my friends, with currents and counter-currents. While some futz with their phones, others embrace time-honored practical effects, like a tear stick to simulate crying, or gloss on the lower lip to give a little pop to the nightmares I’ll be having from now on.

Toss in some legit moves, a hundred dollars’ worth of lights and costume pieces, and ten hours of practice, and you can perfect the illusion to such a fine degree that it will make your followers feel like they’ve been sucked into a video game. Specifically, Dance Dance Revolution mixed with that VR headset that blows up your forebrain.

In-camera effects don’t need to be flashy and expensive, though. Giving your Word Chewing vid flair can be as simple as taking advantage of foreshortening and forced perspective, like the great Peter Jackson used to make Elijah Wood small. Hey, speaking of making wood small, this repels me.

Still, what keeps me coming back to Word Chewing – aside from deep-seated psychological trauma that forces me to clutch masochistically at anything that brings me the pain I so deserve – are the unadorned classics. These essentially fall into two categories. There’s the folks who are basically just lip syncing really emphatically:

And then there are the those that compile a bunch of tiny clips and still images into a video flipbook:

As you dive in, the craft opens up to reveal its myriad layers. For example, like some kind of twisted mouth-jazz, a lot of the subtlety of good Word Chewing lies in the words you don’t chew. Observe how this Chewer makes use of the space between words to explore the nuances of the music.

Mmm, subtlety. Incidentally, I would rather see my daughter start an OnlyFans page than a Word Chewing channel. But there’s no time to focus on that, because here’s an OnlyFans model showing off her Word Chewing skills! Personally I’d prefer to have a sex worker chew on my penis than watch them chew words, but I’d gladly pay them a monthly subscription fee to stop doing both.

It’s striking to note that this was filmed as “the talent” sat in a car parked in front of her son’s school. In the annals of parents embarrassing their kids while picking them up, this is the Mona Lisa. When the other kids saw her doing this, they all blacked out and instinctively descended on her son, ripping him limb from limb with their bare hands in a Dionysian frenzy.

In fact, Word Chewing in your car in public is an entire subgenre. Here’s a human being born of another human being who once walked through life with dignity instead of shame.

Whereas I’m constantly afraid another driver will see me scratch the far side of my nose and misinterpret it as a pick, these brave warriors are out in the streets working mouth muscles usually reserved for taking dental X-rays.

Ultimately, Word Chewing continues to thrive, and no comedy article full of jibes can stand in its way. It goes on evolving, as younger practitioners incorporate things like separate camera setups and real cinematographic and editing choices.

I want to stress that again. These were choices. This was a series of decisions made by someone with free will and in full control of their faculties. It’s not like someone chained these people up and made them Word Chew.

Great. Way to make me look like an asshole, GIF I laboriously made and placed in the article. Just for that, I’m ending on the duet between that girl with the eyes and that guy with the teeth! You brought this on yourself, fucker.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go do something more worthwhile, like practicing with my Tech Deck mini finger skateboard. I’ve almost got my pop shuvit nailed.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: CommonCentz, who has committed no face crimes the internet can prove.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: The Mascot Handbook 🌭

It’s been a while since we’ve discussed the deeply disturbing history of sports mascots. We’ve covered the cursed lore of the Chicago White Sox mascot before, but little did we know all mascot lore is that magical mix of tragic, hilarious, and oops, uh oh, it’s tragic again. For instance, the man considered baseball’s first mascot was probably driven insane by mascotism, committed to an asylum for loving baseball too much, got tuberculosis in the asylum, and died. Where did I learn that thrilling informational tidbit? The Mascot Handbook, a rundown of all the professional working mascots up to 1982 and their tragic backstories. If you enjoy the bloody tragedy of Game Of Thrones, but with people in better costumes, this is your week!

Let’s start with nature’s first mascot, Charlie “Victory” Faust. He was an overly confident man who told the manager of the Giants that a fortune teller predicted he would pitch for the Giants and they would win the pennant. It turned out that he was so terrible at baseball that it was funny, and The Giants decided to let him on the team, basically gaslighting him into thinking he was really good at baseball. They would even get the other teams in on it and have them pretend not to be able to hit his slow, sad, pitches.

The Giants did win the pennant all three years Charlie was on the team, but he basically annoyed the manager about letting him play too much and was let go. Since he thought he was a great player, he never understood why his baseball career lost traction after the Giants dropped him. Basically, a man with delusions of grandeur was taught that he was absolutely right about how great he was for three years and then suddenly woke up in a world where he was crazy the whole time, and everyone was Truman Showing him into oblivion until he was committed. That’s the warm and fuzzy mascot story The Mascot Handbook starts out with, and it only gets worse from there.

Is anyone shocked that a mentally ill man and hunchbacked batboy were the first mascots American baseball teams could come up with? I’m honestly surprised people didn’t flock to the stadium for the antics of hunchbacked batboy. Why would anyone pursue mascots after the marketing failure of hunchback batboy? Well, for the same reasons they were drawn to hunchback batboy in the first place– the cruel darkness inside Man. Mascot suits gave fans a target to mock, and if you’re from Milwaukee, sometimes bite.

This book will constantly look you in the eye and tell you the worst moment of a mascot’s life as if it’s a cool little tidbit you might like to hear. They file every horrific assault away in the middle of a paragraph about boring mascot bureaucracy, stuff that you might otherwise skim. They’ll say, “Professor Dancy Crab is booked for public appearances by the PR team of The Seattle Starlight. Once, a fan hit him with his car and kept on driving. Didn’t even look back. It wasn’t serious; he has a master’s in theater studies.” The entry for Socceroo is actually darker than this, and I was just trying to emotionally prepare you for it.

Nothing could possibly make that story worse, right? Socceroo was stabbed. A man was stabbed! Well, a teenage boy who thought, “Hey, I bet it would be fun to be a professional masco– oh god, why, why are you stabbing me?” Fortunately, his injuries weren’t serious. It was a light stabbing.

The way this book tried to put a professional spin on Socceroo’s stabbing was frankly unsettling to me. It feels like the people writing it were very pro-mascot but the mascots themselves wanted to warn people to stay away. “No one should dream of mascotting!” The mascots are screaming to us but we can’t hear them from the prison of their fur and feathers. In fact, sometimes people will fight to become mascots even when the team has not asked them to.

There are several stories in this book of people who became team mascots by sheer force of will. Heroes from the bygone age of hunchbacked batboys like Krazy George, Wild Bill Hagy (winner of the University Of Maryland’s Snappin Terp award), Uncle Willy, Dolfan Denny, Crazy Ray, The Big Wheel, and, of course, renowned rainbow wigged Jesus fan, Rock N Rollen.

There are no bits in those names; even the Snappin Terp award is real, even though it’s the most Seanbaby thing I’ve ever heard.

Some regular guys who want to be mascots don’t just put on a silly wig and Jesus shirt and head out into the crowd, though. Multiple fans in this book saw that their team didn’t have a mascot, designed their own suits, and made themselves a stabbing target for the bit! These can’t be cheap suits. Someone put a lot of time and money into creating The Terrible Fan, and in response, The Steelers still chose not to have a mascot for years, probably because they understood the risks.

How much of a burn is it that The Steelers now have a mascot, and it is not The Terrible Fan? It’s some fucking chad named Steely McBeam. Apparently, the big yellow square wasn’t hot enough for The Steelers. They needed a mascot that would test well with the women 20-65 crowd, and by God, they got him. Look at this specimen of a big yellow man.

Steely McBeam is far too hot to be featured in this mascot book, though! The Mascot Handbook is specifically for the freaks and weirdos of pre-1982 American sports. Mascots like Soccerhead, a man with severely impaired vision on roller skates! Now the mascot-related injuries don’t have to come from the crowd at all. They’re baked into the mascot costume itself. Look at this thing. Fucking look at it:

Soccerhead looks like an accidental death on its way to another accidental death. There’s also the prototype for Steely Mcbeam, Yankee Frankie, from the era between man and monster, where they experimented with man-mascots wielding paper mache “man” heads. They hot glued some old shag carpeting from a wet mini-van to Yankee Frankie’s head and unleashed it like a penguin-shaped camera in a penguin colony. Yankee Frankie looks like he has a scarecrow with a trunk full of human organs for sale. He walked so Steely McBeam could take your mom out to dinner.

There is also a mini horse named Touchdown in this book. There’s nothing wrong with Touchdown. He is perfect. I just thought you might like a break from the head horrors, and there’s no way in hell I’m ever going to read a book for this website that includes a teeny tiny horse named Touchdown and not show him to all of you. This is a 1900hotdog guarantee.

Ok, now back to the terrifying freak mascots. Is it just me, or are Ribbie and RooBarb totally Fucking? Why is Roobarb holding Ribbie’s trunk like that? Who told them to do that? This gives me so many uncomfortable questions about what these creatures are and how they bang. The energy of this photograph is sexually menacing at its absolute peak. It doesn’t get worse than this.

You believed me, you fool! Did you think I was going to go all the way through this article without showing you Wild Bill receiving his Snappin Terp award from a University of Maryland cheerleader? Of course, it could get worse—it could always get worse! That is the moral of this website. Have you learned nothing in our years together? I’m disappointed in you.

As haunting as it is being so near an open and unwashed Terp, a single chapter title from this book has stuck in my mind for weeks. It’s like they hired Steven King to do this one chapter title.

It’s a very regular chapter about The Bears’ first mascot, a bear. They didn’t have to call it that, but they decided to freak me out. I’m getting word that three mascots died while I was writing this article in fan-related maulings. Their injuries were not serious, good bye!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Cheddar Wolf, the tragically devoured former mascot of the Kenosha Milkwolves.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: A Very Special Today’s Special

In the annals of Canadian children’s television, Today’s Special is up there with Polka Dot Door and You Can’t Do That On Television. While it hasn’t yet received an analog horror take on its premise like The Elephant Show (look up the theme song), it remains a beloved touchstone amongst Canadian millennials. When star Nerene Virgin died earlier this year, thousands of Canadians in their mid-30s poured out remembrances on social media, while anyone south of the border or outside of that age group likely had no idea what they were talking about.

Well, I’ll tell you: Today’s Special was a Canadian children’s series about a mannequin who comes to life with the help of an enchanted hat. Running from 1981 to 1987 on the educational channel TVOntario, it actually predates the film Mannequin and takes place more or less entirely within a downtown Toronto department store after hours. For adults mired in a perpetual adolescence by multiple financial crashes and unprecedented global crises in their lifetimes, that adds an additional layer of fantasy to the viewing experience: on top of the magical mannequins, remember department stores? Remember how beige they all were? Remember tagging along with your mom and begging to be allowed to go to the toy department to see Sky Dancers and Snailiens? No you don’t, you fucking liar. Nobody knew Snailiens existed until they started showing up on eBay.

Where was I? Oh, right. Jeff is a mannequin brought to life by a magic hat. It’s sort of a Frosty the Snowman situation, if Frosty had the body of an adult man but the mind of a child.

This born-sexy-yesterday abomination is coached on the realities of being a self-aware, living creature by Jodie, a store display creator; Sam, an ancient security guard who is also a puppet; and Muffy, a mouse who can only speak in rhyme.

Jeff’s mannequin rules are extremely specific and restrictive. His hat must be activated with the magic words “hocus pocus alamagocus.” If his hat comes off at any point, he reverts to his inanimate form, as he does when the store opens for business. And should he ever leave the store, his life is forfeit. He is, essentially, a prisoner in the store for eternity.

What happens if the store is knocked down? Does Jeff age, perhaps at half the rate of a normal person? Does he die when he becomes a mannequin? Well, he’s not sleeping — in episode seven, we learn that he’s tired because he didn’t know he was supposed to sleep in the first place. Becoming a mannequin each morning, then, is not a restful time for him. Rather, he simply ceases to be until the following night. How do we know he’s the same Jeff when he comes back? More importantly, how does he know?

These are the sorts of questions a millennial who grew up watching Today’s Special might pose in a “7 Shows From Your Childhood That Were Secretly Dark” listicle. But we don’t need to lower ourselves to that level. Indeed, we needn’t fuss with subtext at all when the text itself is so rich.

Most of the early episodes of Today’s Special revolve around basic subjects, with Jeff being a sort of stand-in for the child viewer. In season one episodes, Jeff learns about snow, pets, noses, fruit, hands, and camping. But by the time Today’s Special hit its sixth season, they were running out of body parts and natural phenomena to explain to the world’s first and possibly only male sexy baby. What was left? Well, how about problem drinking?

Most episodes of Today’s Special jump right in after the opening sequence in which Sam closes down the store and Muffy rouses Jeff from his deathless(?) slumber. Not “Phil’s Visit.” Kids in 1987 must have known something was up as soon as the opening credits gave way to Jodie sitting alone on a stool amidst the wreckage of a medieval castle display.

She looks directly into the camera and explains the cause of the disaster: a man drank too much alcohol. Then she explains what alcohol is: a special juice adults drink when they don’t find each other attractive enough to bone sober. But who was the drunkard responsible for this? Sam the elderly puppet? Muffy the lightweight mouse? Surely not Jeff?

No, it was Phil Phenelli, a photographer sent by Storemakers Magazine to document Jodie’s incredible work at creating department store displays. I’m not sure there’s ever been a scenario that speaks more to the heady excess of the 1980s, and all that without a mountain of cocaine. Probably?

Phil, by the way, is portrayed by Gerard Parkes, who is best remembered for his roles as Doc on Fraggle Rock and the bartender in The Boondock Saints. I would say that his performance here is a mixture of the two, blended with a fifth of Canadian Mist.

Phil is an old friend of Sam, the puppet security guard. The two of them served together in the merchant marine. I guess some people are just puppets in the world of Today’s Special and it’s sort of fine? It’s kind of a Muppets situation, except with schnapps. Phil produces a silver flask he’s kept from all the way back when they were sailors and Sam tells him there’s no drinking allowed in the store on account of policy. Phil seems a little disappointed, as if getting hammered in Sears was a thing people did all the time back then and this is a draconian exception.

Sam takes Phil up to meet the gang and he doesn’t seem at all perturbed to make the acquaintance of a talking mouse or a plastic facsimile of a man brought to life by a wizard’s accidental magic discharge. Muffy the mouse wants to be a photographer, so he asks her to be his assistant for the night and they all sing a little song about how great they are and how much fun they’re going to have. Oh, the hubris of man! Oh, the heights from which a toy department can fall!

While Jeff and Jodie change into different outfits for the photoshoot of the store displays (???) Phil repeatedly sneaks off to the bathroom to rendezvous with his dark mistress, liquor.

He thinks he’s being crafty, using breath spray to cover up the cheap whiskey on his breath, but Muffy catches him taking a shot and can smell it through the Binaca haze. Despite being a child-like creature, Muffy knows what booze is and reminds Phil he isn’t allowed to drink in the store.

Now things take a turn. Twisted by the devil alcohol, Phil confronts Muffy — a tiny mouse puppet — and begins threatening her.

“Now just a minute, Muffy,” he whispers, “You’re not going to tell on me, are you? You’re not going to be a snitch and tattle tale about your old friend Phil? Because I think that would be a big mistake, Muffy Mouse!”

When he realizes he’s menacing a helpless rodent, Phil backs off and takes a different tack. He explains how if Muffy tells Sam he’s been drinking, he’ll be thrown out of the store and then he won’t be able to take photos of Jodie and her display, ruining her big night. And that would all be Muffy’s fault, wouldn’t it? Phil, if you haven’t guessed by now, is kind of an asshole.

Muffy debates telling Sam about Phil’s drinking and lands on keeping it a secret for the time being, seduced by the possibility of being an assistant to a professional photographer and maybe getting her big break in the biz. But her troubles are not over. Returning to the children’s department, now ruled over by a muddled ogre, she helps Phil open a camera bag he was unable to in his crapulent fury.

Her reward? A cussing out for making him look foolish in front of Jeff and Jodie, who are surely beginning to notice something is wrong. Nevertheless, they leave their tiny friend alone again with this raging, decrepit hulk while they change into another set of outfits. The overt message here is about the dangers of alcoholism, but the secret message is that people will turn a blind eye to terrible, terrible things in the pursuit of their own selfish desires, such as being photographed for a magazine about department store displays.

Phil slurs his way through “Muffy and Phinelli (Drunken Reprise)” then tries to take a picture of Jodie’s castle display while Muffy moves a toy dragon back and forth in the shot. He screams and curses at her while she whimpers that she’s only trying to help. “If I were you, Muffy, I’d mind my own bizzis and just do like I’ve asked you!” Phil howls, his gin-fuelled frenzy rendering him more beast than man. Finally, he can take the incompetence of his assistant no longer and resolves to put the dragon in the right place himself.

What happens next is both unexpected and obvious, the fulfillment of the promise of the show’s opening. As a child, it probably would have devastated me. As a jaded adult who has seen entirely too much, it cracked me up.

Phil stumbles out from behind the camera, lurching towards Muffy in a threatening posture, then trips over his own feet and crashes like a Brobdingnagian lush into the castle, his wrinkly, alcohol-soaked bulk completely obliterating the carefully-constructed display in an instant. And what is Phil’s reaction to this devastation?

The fucker says…

He tells Muffy to get away from him and he sits alone amidst the rubble, turning once again to his secret lover alcohol for comfort. It’s a truly wretched sight, this senior citizen guzzling Old Crow out of a steel flask on the floor of the children’s section of a department store.

When Jeff and Jodie arrive in their new outfits, Phil blames the destruction on Muffy. Here his anti-mouse bias comes out, when he tries to claim that he couldn’t work with her because of her species — it was just too much of a problem, he says. No, Sam tells him, Muffy isn’t your problem. Alcohol is your problem.

Now the entire Today’s Special crew bands together for an impromptu intervention. Being told you’ve got a drinking problem by a puppet you served with in the merchant marine has got to hurt. And getting this look from a naĂŻve living mannequin man?

Phil has brought ruination and sin into the Garden of Eden that is the children’s department of this magical Toronto department store. He must be wondering how his life brought him to this moment.

Alcoholism was recognized as a disease in the mid-1950s. But if you thought there was going to be any discussion of Phil getting help or suffering from addiction, you’d be wrong. No, the blame is laid squarely on this old man’s shoulders. None of these people know what he saw on the sea, and they dare to judge him.

Muffy desperately wishes she could make him stop drinking, but Jodie tells her she is powerless in this respect. Only Phil can choose to stop drinking, making alcoholism seem like something people just decide to get into one day, like SCUBA diving or Jeffmancy.

Still, Muffy’s hopes are briefly raised when Phil tells everyone that he’s going to try and stop, believing that this means he’s going to get better soon. But Jodie once again brings them crashing back down to earth. It won’t be soon, she tells the mouse, and it may be never. Some people can get better from a drinking problem and some people can’t. It’s all up to Phil.

Hurray for personal responsibility! In the words of Ivan Drago, if he dies, he dies.

Phil hobbles to the exit and takes one last look back at his erstwhile friends and the remnants of what could have been, all washed away in a flood of bottom-shelf bourbon.

He leaves in disgrace and we dissolve back to the opening scene of the episode, where Jodie sits on her stool reflecting on the evening’s events and how important it is to speak up when something is wrong. Her dreams of appearing in a magazine have been crushed by a doddering old souse, which perhaps explains why she seemed to care so little whether he got help or not.

The writer of “Phil’s Visit” was Jed McKay. He wrote on a number of episodes of Today’s Special throughout its six seasons, including “Butterflies,” in which the cast learns about the concept of mortality. To paraphrase Principal Skinner, the kids have to learn about death and drinking sooner or later.

In retrospect, one of the weird things about this episode is that nobody ever really explains to Jeff what alcohol is. Sam, Jodie, and somehow even Muffy already know. Did someone explain it to Jeff offscreen at some point in the past? Has Jeff ever illicitly gotten drunk within the confines of the store? Does he go on from this episode still not really understanding what was the matter with Phil? It’s impossible to say.

Roll credits over wreckage. Cue slow, sad version of Today’s Special theme. What have we learned? The lighting director was Alf Hunter, or possibly the show’s assigned Alf Hunter was named Lighting Director.

Phil never got clean. House mice only live for about five years. Dreams crumble to dust.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Eric Rion, who is not an Alf. Who only loves cats to pet. Who has all the proper paperwork to prove Negative Alf status.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: How Sick Can You Get? 🌭

As frequent hotdoggers know, Phil Hirsch was a prolific joke curator with the comedic sensibilities of a fartless cadaver. His books were weird collections of terrible jokes he didn’t write about tits, prostitutes, and, of course, hamburgers. But in 1974, he had his best idea yet: what if he took a stack of MAD Magazine knockoffs and photocopied the worst parts of them into a tiny paperback book?

Sick Magazine started as a flagrant MAD Magazine ripoff in 1960 and became at least twice that three years later when they changed their mascot to MAD Magazine’s mascot.

The point is, we’ve never needed AI to help us steal shit and make it worse. And this is a story about a man who did that twice to the same shit.

If we’re being generous, Sick Magazine was the “naughty” version of MAD Magazine. It was still rated very PG, but everything was more desperate and from the perspective of assholes. It’s tough to explain. It was going for edgy in an era where you could still find segregated drinking fountains. Maybe imagine a Daily Wire movie with no fracking investors and less coherent politics? Let me find an example. Oh, look, here’s one: the first article reprinted in the book.

The article is about Superman and his mission to “stop crime,” and the gag is that many of the things Superman does would be considered crimes like changing clothes in a phone booth, violating air space, vigilante violence… it’s sort of a reasonable premise. But look where the writer went with it. Four men see Superman looking all gay and beat the shit out of him for it. What the fuck? Why write that, and how would it work? The man famously known for being super loses a fist fight to park Nazis with no kryptonite? What the shit is going on?

So, here’s what I think happened. I think Superman was trapped by the logic of “stopping crime” which doesn’t include this since the author doesn’t see hate crimes as “crime.” They’re the outrageous jokes MAD Magazine is afraid to publish. And I’m worried now we all understand Sick Magazine. As for why Phil Hirsch published a paperback collection of aggressively random articles from it, we may never know. For instance, what the goddamn fuck is this?

This is from an article called “EULOGIES FOR MOVIE MONSTERS,” and maybe in magazine form that cop had hilarious things to say at Frankenstein’s funeral, but after Phil adapted it for book, it became an unreadably microscopic block of sideways text. If the Invisible Man’s eulogy didn’t look identical, I’d think that was the joke– that Frankenstein is made out of so many people his eulogy went on and on and on. That’d be fine! If you wrote a zany goodbye to the ones we lost in Frankenstein’s head, torso, penis, and legs, I wouldn’t call you a hero, but we wouldn’t be here calling Phil Hirsch the maternity center fire of comedy again. How do you look at that shit and think it’s okay? You can’t just copy unpleasant trash and paste it into a format that makes it worse. That’d be like publishing a book of unedited Denis Leary tweets…

Oh, Jesus. I thought I made that up.

Let’s see what Phil selected next. Oh, fun: sports! This one is about sports and suici– oh my fucking god, Phil.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but in “How to Be a POOR SPORT,” the entire premise was what if athletes killed themselves? And it seems like even the 1974 edgelord realized this wasn’t quite a joke, so they tried to rescue the bit by adding, “ha ha because we have too many people, right?” This is something you’d pitch if you were a nervous serial killer wearing a comedy writer’s face. Let’s see how it turned out!

Oh. Wordless suicides, sort of themed around sports. M-maybe it builds to something?

Oh. Maybe not. In fact, I think these are somehow getting further from comedy. At least with the 12-foot basketball player, we were looking at an ironic dilemma: his goal was to score, but if he dunked it would kill him. That’s… something. This is random, senseless death. We have a baseball catcher not catching a cannon, possibly volley, ball with a pane of glass, and a boxing match where a full electric chair has been set up in the corner. I’m not sure any punchline could save these, but at the very least we need some context. Even if it just said, “Sick Magazine pays me $8 per page and my nights are so lonely” that would help. As it is, we have some hockey player trying to shave with his skate? What? Is this from an unrelated non-suicide sports cartoon, or is this guy about to kill himself on accident? Because neither of those are the premise. This needs to be something like a runner shooting himself in the head with a starter pistol or a football player charging into a giant bear trap.

Right, like that. Thank you.

In a lot of ways, I understand what happened here. I spent several years at Cracked.com which was born from a MAD Magazine knockoff, and before that I was impishly naughty in a way few people would call “timeless.” And what can happen when you’re stretching a concept too thin is it becomes less about comedy and more about solving the problem you’ve given yourself. You need seven entries in your dumb list of sport suicides, and you haven’t done football, so the task before you is no longer the best joke, but figuring out how a running back would kill himself. So yeah, after your brain bounces off that impossible problem, it eventually says, “Fuck it, giant bear trap.” There’s no better answer because the only answer was abandoning this at the concept stage. This is fucked. This book is a prop thrown out by the Se7en production designer for being “not funny enough.”

Let’s look at the original, though:

Before Phil took scissors to it and mashed it into a book, this is how the article appeared in issue 97 of Sick Magazine. It’s still the dark act of a psychopath, but if we’re being generous, it almost works. When you see all the suicides together, there’s a tone approaching silly. You’d have to be so bad at comedy to think, “Let’s take that picture of a track runner with a gun to his own head and make it a full page. Let the reader really sit with it.” This is like taking an All in the Family bit and cutting out everything except the racist Archie Bunker lines…

Oh, Jesus. I thought I made that up.

Over several pages of gray text on gray background, this book reprints the time Carroll O’Connor’s character on All in the Family won Sick Magazine’s “COMEDIAN OF THE MONTH.” I honestly didn’t know Archie Bunker talked like this. I figured he hated affirmative action and mouthy wives, but this is… I mean, he claims Eleanor Roosevelt disobeyed her husband to discover black people like they were a lost tribe guarding a treasure map. We don’t need to get into it, but that might be everything except a joke. Maybe it’s meta comedy? Because if someone asked what the worst possible 1974 book could be, a funny answer might be “humorless Archie Bunker quotes next to cigarette ads,” and that is precisely what this is.

These quotes are so out of context, you can barely tell what he was talking about. “Shut up about Wyoming, wife. You’re like these fucking goddamn insurance companies and non-whites. And to answer your questions, pizza and maybe.”

By the way, that image isn’t a bit– like the cheapest paperbacks of the time, this book contains full color ads for cigarettes. Which means Phil Hirsch had the idea of selling 25% of someone else’s magazine as a book and then got less ethical.

This can’t be right. This one seems to be an ad for women who want to get sexually ambushed as housekeepers? It says they’ll train young and pretty women… okay, troubling, but certainly there’s some kind of turn coming. Certainly there will be a punchli– oh. Oh no. This gag is all premise and the premise is “you will be groped.” I don’t… maybe we should switch to that book of Denis Leary tweets? Let’s check the back of it.

Oh my god. Absolutely fuck that. Fuck Denis Leary’s publicist and the world that would allow them. We’re sticking with How Sick Can You Get?

I’m not sure this is anything other than a puzzle for historians. This is a haircut review of a fictional haircut, and the comedic reveal is “this was a drawing of a man the whole time.” I get this was an era where gender roles were more strictly defined, but I worry they’re giving the reader’s homophobia too much credit. This is like saying, “picture a drag queen for me,” and then ending your life with a hockey skate, buy cigarettes.

This kind of joke, a sudden and unpleasant reveal, seems to be a staple of Sick Magazine. Here’s the tiny-texted and sideways story of a girl whose mother told her to stay away from Herbie Klotz. For a number of vague reasons! Where are they going with t– oh, he’s her brother. Well, that certainly makes all the things she said strange.

We can argue all day about whether incest, suddenly and with no other context, is funny, but I want to talk about the other reason this sucks. This is a kind of comedy you don’t see anymore because it requires an intellectual dishonesty we strangled to death decades ago. You have to willfully pretend you don’t know the things you know for this type of bit to work. To explain what I mean, if ’90s Jerry Seinfeld appeared before us today and asked what the deal was with women putting perfume on their wrists or breakfast cereals having too many ingredients, we would know what the deal was. Or his phone would have told him before he asked. As a species we are simply too smart for bits like this. And like Jerry Seinfeld reading lines for Bee Movie, this Herbie Klotz story requires you to not ask the obvious question, “Why didn’t you tell me about the incest stuff at the beginning?”

This one is even worse. Look at the trauma 1974 comedy fans had to wade through to find out the man sexually beating you to death was actually playing checkers. I mean, what’s the deal with language? In one context you’re playing checkers, and the other you’re killing a hitchhiker? How are we supposed to know what kind of jumper you are? I’ll tell you one thing I won’t be jumping: to any more conclusions about the type of story I’m reading in this book!

This one is amazing because for it to work the reader has to start with maximum misogyny. Like, they can’t be a “women’s sports aren’t as good” type of misogynist. They have to be shrieking at their untouched boners and living under the fear of a The Great She-placement Theory before it became known as Ghostbusters (2016). And then -on top of that- they have to not know what an astronaut does. I don’t think it would be pedantic to tell this dumb fuck that astronauts are pilots and engineers who travel to the stars in between parades. And did the illustrator invent a pressure suit dick hole just to confuse the untrained lady astronaut? Even if you’re on board with the premise of women being useless boob transports, that seems unfair.

These are unsettling and confusing and I refuse to speak of them. You had thousands of pages to pick from, Phil Hirsch, and you chose these. Great work.

Finally, a bit that works! Sick magazine presents “SICK BEATS THE HIGH COST OF MEAT” and it’s just a picture of a butcher selling meat for very high prices. Fucking hilarious– completely makes up for the dick hole in the space suit and the haunting incredible living band-aid. I’m back on board.

Sick Magazine seemed to be operating under the editorial mandate of “be the biggest piece of shit possible,” which was probably very silly and apolitical in 1974. Today, though; it sounds like an ordinary Fox News segment today. Like this article about pollution where they argue on the side of pollution. I don’t really have a point, I’m just troubled by how modern right wing talking points were a bitter asshole’s best guess at comedy fifty years ago.

“I like pollution because it kills fish and I have to clean fewer of my husband’s fish who still goes fishing twice a week, and this is a coherent punchline and argument,” says this woman. “Noise pollution sure beats the sound of rock and roll music,” says another. “I am writing comedy jokes good enough to get published a second time,” says their author. “If only I were also racist,” he adds. “Oh, god damn it,” I foreshadow.

It’s a bit of a walk, but this is a fake article awkwardly clipped from a magazine and squeezed into a book about a farmer who likes D.D.T. because he picked up a bottle of it right as a man tried to shoot him. The assassin was an indigenous man mostly blind from nuclear radiation, but believe it or not, none of that has anything to do with anything. If I made this up as a bedtime story, my daughter would tell me, “Sir, I am here on behalf of the state to represent you in a very serious string of racially motivated killings and I am not your daughter.”

I’m now going to say five of the worst words you can hear on Upsetting Day: Speaking of Native American racism…

“A Sick LOOK AT THE AMERICAN INDIAN” is not what you’d expect. You’re probably picturing it as a racist take on something, but it’s so much less than that. This is a formless mass of racist jokes without the jokes, obviously, but sometimes without the racism. For instance, what the hell is this?

It’s hard to imagine the lack of imagination it took to get here. The author went through all the things he knew about Native Americans. One of them used to be on a nickel, and oh fuck, end of list. So now he had to come up with a bit around just the nickel thing, and I’d argue he didn’t. This is dick-biting madness written by a bathroom intruder who thinks peeing women disappear when he covers his eyes. The joke is that he’s waiting for a 6 cent coin because he once posed for a nickel? Fucking fuck you. That’s like watching a hockey player kill himself and saying, “Hockey players love to have one less head in the bathroom, it’s why their sport is played in the bathroom, headlessly, now and forever.”

Wait, nevermind, there’s more than just nickel stuff. The author looked them up and learned about their nomadic lifestyle and skin tone. Here he is doing a fun little riff on those things. “Is this a joke?” asks the dumb racist as he has Christopher Columbus comment on the color of a woman he hasn’t seen. “I’m worried it’s not,” he says to a spoonful of lead paint. “Add a CIA periscope,” suggests all the nearby asbestos.

“Indians are strange because they wear beads and makeup constantly” is such a toothless double hate crime. It’s practically apologizing for its intolerance as it’s doing it. And you’ll never find a more perfect example of the intellectual dishonesty I was talking about earlier. This little bitch references war paint and he’s all, “Hur hurr like fancy ladies wear.” What? How generous is an audience supposed to be with their stupidity to make your joke work? If ’90s Seinfeld was here, even he’d say “What’s the deal with gay warpaint jokes? You paint your face before you scalp your enemies with a tomahawk, and the novelization of a MAD Magazine knockoff calls you gay? If that’s gay what does that make the rest of us? We’ve all got zero enemy foreheads! I’d ask my girlfriend but she won’t get to American history until fourth grade!”

I think we can all agree we’ve had enough of Phil Hirsch’s favorite selections of directionless racial intolerance, but I wanted to include this one to help us calibrate Sick’s politics. Because I don’t think this was a right wing hate magazine. Maybe. At least sometimes. But look at the self-awareness coming through here. Richard Nixon asks “Chief” if his people will treat the White Man as well as we treated them, and he replies with a rare coherent joke: “What you think Indians are– savages?” It’s still a bit ignorant and the different font implies there was some kind of last minute change, but you don’t print this joke if you’re an actual white supremacist publication. A Gutfeld! writer doesn’t pitch this joke. No, if you were an actual racist you’d write the joke closer to how they did a single page later:

Buy cigarettes, everyone!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dot Supreme: Jared MountainMan, who posed for the new buffalo nickel. That’s not an Indian thing, he’s just buff.