Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: The Games Children Play 🌭

In 1990, a Canadian man named Peter Lalonde released a VHS tape about the dangers of sorcery in fiction. It was embarrassing. Not in hindsight, but very much at the time. It was a stunningly credulous, frightened man with no research skills shouting his hilarious fears into a camera for an hour and he called it THE GAMES CHILDREN PLAY.

Peter was only 29 when he filmed this, but he had the media literacy and misplaced resentment of a man four times his age. He was furious, horrified at the world for changing, and he would never figure out why or how to explain it. Watch him try here, on the back of the box:

I know that’s a wall of madman text, so I’ll try to walk you through his reasoning. Peter noticed the world was producing new cartoons, and they were different. He hated and feared this. He also hated wizards, but that’s not related. Or was it? Maybe the reason he didn’t like modern cartoons is because they were causing all these wizards? Peter decided that must be it, because God can’t be wrong. It sounds like I’m making fun of him, and I am, but I watched him try to explain this forty times during the course of this video and that’s as coherent as I can make it. This man was not aware things could be something other than Christian, and he points them out like a grandmother guessing the killer in an episode of Cupcake Wars. Something at this level of Satanic Panic is not safe to look at with naked secular eyes, so cut out and use your PoxcOzzy Occult Decoder now:

The video opens with a group of children being led through guided meditation, a demonic New Age ritual where someone says soothing things to help you relax…

It’s terrifying stuff. And this is not footage found in a mysterious sinkhole where a kindergarten once stood. Peter Lalonde heard about meditation, genuinely thought it summoned demons, imagined what that would look like, and then filmed it himself with eleven innocent children. To you and me this is nothing, but by his own words, Peter literally thought they were calling The Devil. This is like making a video about the dangers of pornography by hiring a full crew to film your wife fart on cake. As a viewer you are given no explanation. Peter is just hoping the viewer shares his irrational fear of meditation. And after a few minutes of watching kids almost nap, it finally cuts to him at a playground, with perfect comic timing, shouting this:

Peter has the rage of a thousand white victims, but the personality of a twice-farted cake. He lists outrage after outrage. There is “incredible mind manipulation that is taking place in the public schools,” he whines. There is “no more kick the can,” he includes for some reason. He complains about all the channel options, Hinduism, The Simpsons, and unharmful trends of no significance. He is furious at how children only want to stay home and watch TV, a point slightly undercut by the childhood joy behind him. This man has to yell about how kids no longer play outside because he’s next to so many kids playing outside. It’s like filming yourself in front of twenty sailors spitting on each other for a video called Sex Today: Too Dry, Too Polite. Peter has the brain of a man who has spent at least 4 hours of his life being found dead at the bottom of lakes. But one thing his misfiring neurons have decided on is that what they hate most of all is The National Education Association.

I’m not kidding when I say Peter lists suicide prevention, sex education, and AIDS awareness among the NEA’s unthinkable crimes. And as with most things, he doesn’t explain why. As far as I can tell, his God wants more people dead, no further questions. I wasn’t expecting this video to be convincing, but I did expect it to try. This is a man with no charisma standing outside a grade school with a microphone to demand more evil for no coherent reason. I’m starting to think this might not even be a Christian video. This might be a bodyswap comedy where a Fox News anchor and his daughter trade places and she had to take his body to work. “I hate school, education, and these stinky hairy armpits. And remember older stuff? It was better and kids today are the wrong religion. Um, this is my dad, signing off. W-white power.”

Peter isn’t only angry at good things. He’s also mad at fake things. For instance, this Buffalo school teacher who used mind powers to meet Abraham Lincoln’s ghost, and I fucking love that I’m not kidding:

 

This motherfucker is citing Abraham Lincoln ghosts as a reason to destroy the educational system. I barely understand 15% of what he’s mad about and I’m a man with a Crazy Christian section of his library containing eleven subsections. At one point he scoffs that schools are “even teaching tolerance and understanding” like the basic idea of caring about others is witchcraft. His hate is almost cute, like we caught a little boy on his first day of fascism. But this next example is anything but cute:

This really happened. It’s the origin story of how Round Rock, Texas became the site for the Palace of the Earth King. Back to Peter, though. A lot of his fussing is about “globalists,” and if you’re familiar at all with nutbag media, you recognize this as a code word for THE JEW. But Peter, sweet Peter, is so adorably pure in his ignorance that he thinks globalists are people who literally worship “the globe.” It’s like forming an anti-kidnapping group because you heard about a child who died from sleep. It’s like calling the police on “catsup” because it’s made out of cats. This magnificent idiot is willing to tear down every public school in order to prevent a third hand story about 9-year-old wizards from ever happening again. He made an anti-semetic propaganda movie through sheer confusion. And as if I couldn’t be more amazed at his stupidity, the next thing he does is this:

I sped that up 15x because Peter fucking started an episode of Thundercats and let it play, without saying a word, for a minute and a half. Awesome middle-aged people might recognize this as “watching Thundercats,” but Peter thinks he has proven the death of God. He doesn’t even begin to explain it. You learn the Thundercats’ backstory and he’s like, “Wow. That says it all, doesn’t it?” He then babbles about the occult while the TV behind him kicks ass.

Don’t worry, I speak Christian Wordsoup well enough to decode what he’s getting at. He thinks this proves an occult conspiracy because Lion-O’s sword has an eyeball on it, like the third eye representing enlightenment in Hinduism. I promise there’s nothing more to it than that. It is a cartoon adaptation of a false interpretation of an abstraction of something extremely harmless, and he is fucking livid. I can’t imagine what he’s going to do when he realizes there are actual, non-secret human Hindus. Or that the space cat with the eyeball sword is only twelve years old.

“Children should not be beautiful hunks with three foot knives!” would have been an actual point, but instead Peter is upset that the famous intolerance of Jesus Christ never found its way to Thundera. Mostly because his research into the occult took place during a single trip to the mall. He bought an official Sword of Omens with the Light Up Eye of Thundera:

I can’t conceive of a better prop. When you pull out the goddamn Sword of Omens during a speech, you have my attention. But all he does is hold it up, eyeball side-in, to prove it really does have an eye. Hindu wizards or not, that’s not fucking anything. He calls this a war against Christianity, but it seems to be taking place entirely in his imagination where he is losing. Peter might as well hold up a fully clothed Ken doll and accuse Mattel of wanting to remove all penises. He’d be right, of course, but only by coincidence and not the way he thinks.

Peter is also campaigning against Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for shaky reasons. In a moment that made me literally say “no way,” he starts describing an entire episode of the show. As he recounts, there’s one where an alien tells the turtles about a crystal broken into three pieces that will become the “Eye of Zarnod” when reassembled. This infuriates him because it’s an eye, one of the most important symbols of the occult, and it grants wishes. “We know they’re talking about the power of positive thinking we hear so much about today,” he scolds. It’s breathtaking. He’s mad at optimism. He’s mad at the most generic macguffin quest. Like, nothing can be less than this. If you can get angry at the occult for this, you can hate anyone for anything. This is like strangling your cat because it was near a TV where the Superfriends took a meteor distress call from a sikh.

What this also reveals is that Peter only watched the one episode of Ninja Turtles. Christians don’t complain about season 2 episode 2 if they’ve done their turtle research. There’s an episode where Donatello and Raphael disprove God with a sex act. Peter is not a witch scientist who did peer reviewed studies on the amount of He-Man it takes to summon Tri-Klops. He’s a bumbling second grader giving a book report on a bird he didn’t see.

And Peter Lalonde is losing more of his goddamn mind by the second. He calls the generic idea of cartoons “emotional and spiritual child molestation” which isn’t the kind of judgment you want from a man going to elementary schools alone to scream. He seems to think magic in cartoons is harmful because when kids run into problems, such as playground maniacs, they will try to solve them by calling on mystic powers, not God. Which isn’t as outlandish as it sounds, Peter’s wife explains:

Patti Lalonde rocks uncomfortably from their dining room’s tax receipt nook as she tries to help you understand the dangers of sorcery. See, it’s like a volleyball serve. You practice it thousands of times until you master it. Just like after enough Dungeons & Dragons practice, you master casting spells. I’m not leaving anything out. She’s hiding out from hypothetical people who are too good at RPGs. I feel like enough indoor kids saw Empire Strikes Back that we have the data on whether or not “trying it a lot” lets someone really use The Force. If this hoof-headed dingbat was right, one out of four of us would be a Jedi. Anyway, all these words are making it sound like Patti had a bigger part in the video than she did. She’s done. Comparing RPG spells to volleyball serves was everything she had to say. She is the Malcolm Gladwell of Cure Light Wounds and nothing else. Good riddance, Patti.

Back to Peter, he starts doing some classic Satanic Panic around Dungeons and Dragons. He quotes Dr. Thomas Radecki, M.D., who cited his gut on how he’s definitely sure the game causes young men to kill. Peter calls him “Dr.,” but Dr. Thomas Radecki got caught trading painkillers to patients for sex and lost his license 8 years before Peter made this tape. I’m not calling Peter a hypocrite. His ideology isn’t coherent enough for words like that. I actually think he’s a good partner for taking on Dungeons & Dragons. Because when you’re at war against make-believe virgin heroes, who better to team up with than an actual sex villain? In your face, everyone involved.

Next Peter uses a quote from an academic who “must assume” Dungeons & Dragons is harmful. I found no evidence of him saying this or anything ever about Dungeons & Dragons. I’m not calling Peter a liar. His thoughts aren’t coherent enough for words like that. I’m just saying the guy who watched most of a Ninja Turtles episode to uncover an occult conspiracy might have poor research skills. It’s hard to argue with his next source, though; some anonymous kid who died in Dungeons & Dragons:

If this person, “Ex – D & D Player,” is real, can you imagine their thrill when they found Peter Lalonde? People were probably ignoring him for months going on and on about how hard D & D is for low level magic users, and then one day a strange man at the playground with a microphone overheard him and screamed, “Did you say you died in Dumbos and Draculas!? My God, my dear sweet Lord, tell me everything.”

I’m obviously having a great time watching the dumbest fuck and his wife get more and more confused about cartoons and toys, but what happens next is almost too wonderful to believe. Peter shares a story of his recent research trip into the secular world where he asked a toy store clerk what was popular. He said, “Nintendo,” so Peter bought one and the three least Christian games they had. He pulls out a game manual and says, quote, “They are sitting in front of their video boards and they are entranced in a world that we know nothing about.” Peter couldn’t figure out how to set up his new Nintendo Entertainment System and did what anyone would do: blame Satan and vow to defeat him.

The best part of being a Christian has got to be the neverending thrills. Peter starts thumbing through the manual for Wizardry and every page is a new enemy in the saga of Peter Saves Jesus. He calls each of them out as he sees them– pictures of dragons, acclimating kids to dragons like those in the Bible! Cleric spells! Spells. Let me just quote his exact words. He says, “And you go to the pages it’s listed on, in this case page 41… and they have complete descriptions on how to cast spells. And how to contact powerful spirits. And how to use this powers and spirits to overcome, obviously, um… evil. Or GOOD. Because there’s both white and black magic in these books.”

He thinks NES manuals work on reality? Like, out loud, where people can hear him? Okay, Peter. Page Page 41 of Wizardry for the NES… let me dig a box out of my basement and see what you’re so worried about:

Peter, come on. Peter, one of these forbidden rituals is for solving mazes. This is boilerplate RPG manual. This is like getting mad at a lawn mower warranty for not honoring the sacrament of Christ. Oh, you’re going to do another one? Yes, please.

Opening the manual for Dungeon Magic, Peter announces, “We picked up another one to see if that was just a coincidence.” Fucking what? A coincidence of what, Peter? I am stunned by his comedic delivery. He is checking to see if a second RPG has magic in it like he’s tracking a serial killer. Something inside chills him. He says, “And it’s Dungeon Magic here. And we look through again and we see in here, ‘casting magic spells, page 22.’ The complete description, and it says here ‘each wizard has mastered a certain type of magic. If you meet a wizard he will give you four basic elements of his mystic studies.’ So we have a wizard now teaching the children of his magical studies.” I also looked this one up, and he stopped right before it became truly terrifying.

Spend Health Points to symbol mix in order to pass the scrutiny of wizards? What the hell is Dungeon Magic for the Nintendo talking about? I agree with Peter– the devil wrote this. Okay, you’re never going to believe me, but next Peter says, “I look at another one here just to show you this is not an isolated example,” and reads page 72 and 76 of the Final Fantasy instruction book. He discovers there are 8 levels of magic!? Both white and black? This goes deeper than Peter thought. And then, this man who just skimmed three video game manuals to count the ways they violate his church’s HOA rules… this confused ape weeping about misremembered Thundercat lore… this man looks right to camera and says:

He thinks they’ve made the point! I’m being serious here: In all my years of watching deranged idiots say deranged things, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone make less of a point. This playground stranger set out to destroy the public school system and he accidentally learned how to cast DUMAPIC in Wizardry. By his own admission, he has no idea what is going on, doesn’t want to, and hasn’t looked into it much. Maybe his brother Paul can help?

Paul was a counselor for “drug addicts, prostitutes, and gang members,” and he’s here as an expert because all of those people love the occult. Paul explains, “They listen to heavy metal artists like Ozzy Osbourne, or groups like AC/DC and Black Sabbath.” He sounds well-informed on the subject to me, but I only listen to Bon Jovi, or the bands Jon Bon Jovi.

I’ve spent most of the video worried this was a parody, but Paul has me very suspicious. While interviewing a Canadian kid who tried to kill his stepfather, Paul asked him why he liked Ozzy Osbourne so much. The kid said, “Everybody likes Ozzy Osbourne! Man, he tried to kill a chicken on stage once!” This is a confused mashup of two very different Ozzy Osbourne stories– a weird mistake for such a notable Ozzy fan to make. I mean, when people ask me about my attempted murders and they bring up my love of Bon Jovi, I don’t say, “Jake Bovi is the best! He gave HPV to Courtney Thorne-Smith!” Anyway, Paul declares that D&D eases you into Satanic rituals and his proof is how one time he heard black cat owners in this one town were told to keep them inside because D&D groups love to sacrifice them. I THINK WE’VE MADE THE POINT: Peter Lalonde’s family attends a church with no carbon monoxide detectors.

Peter cuts to footage of children in the clutches of secular relaxation. He can’t contain his disgust. He calls it textbook hinduism. “This is YOGA,” he hisses. “It’s religion! In public schools!!” Peter claims meditating children are taught to imagine a wise person and demands to know who this man is. Is it an inner voice? Because these wise men could be spirit guides, or “someone the child has contacted from the demonic realm!” Some of this might seem familiar because it’s the same kids from earlier and he’s flubbing the same talking points. I THINK WE’VE MADE THE POINT: Peter is going to keep making these child actors call to the darkness until something tears into our realm through them.

“Well, how do we summarize it all,” asks the man who has said zero things over the course of an hour. He reminds us about the Hindu stuff, how computer games have made our children “proficient at magic,” and goes over each of these hard facts several more times. Then it seems like Peter can suddenly hear himself and he gets defensive. He blurts out, “We’re not talking about backmasking here! We’re not talking about being paranoid!” He challenges any educators who think this is ridiculous to “go back and look at the textbooks of shamans and witch doctors from hundreds of thousands of years ago” and see these preschool relaxation sessions use the same techniques. He’s not crazy, he insists! The environmentalists tried to control our minds with “We Are The World” he also insists!

Peter Lalonde hasn’t consulted witch doctor textbooks from thousands of years ago, and I know this because I watched him read three Nintendo manuals. If he was sitting on an ancient tome of actual spells, he had time to bring it up. The video comes to an end with a plug for his next video about how credit cards are a little bit like the Mark of the Beast, and at this point I’m certain this is a prank.

So I Googled Peter Lalonde and learned that his next project ended up being a film adaptation of a Christian novel, and he did such a bad job he was literally sued for doing a bad job. It was meant to be a $40,000,000 blockbuster, and he said fuck it– get me Kirk Cameron and the cheapest Missouri film crew you can find. That’s right, this article has a dark twist. Peter Lalonde, the dumbest son of a bitch I have ever seen, went on to make Left Behind, failed so badly it was illegal, and it still spawned four sequels and a reboot. With all his heart he was sure Nintendo mazes were proof of wizards, but instead of dying in a sock swallowing accident he became one of the wealthiest filmmakers in Canada. Sometimes a story gives you no lesson! I THINK WE’VE MADE THE POINT: Sometimes things are just broken! Bye!

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rain Vargas, who rolled a Bard one time and long story short, is now the actual devil. Hail Rain Vargas.

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Upsetting Day: V the Musical

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Upsetting Day: The Goop Mother’s Day Gift Guide

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: God’s Clowns 🌭

Hello, where are the clowns? More clownly, why am they? Clowns are hidden, forever, and hidden. They are both clown and clown. How is clown, clown teeth. Clowns definitely aren’t maybe, or is it? Hello again, I’m Seanbaby and here is reason: I’ve recently finished reading GOD’S CLOWNS: MESSENGERS OF THE GOOD NEWS.

Written in 1990, GOD’S CLOWNS is a 135 page exploration of a metaphor about clowns actually being other things. I can’t stress this enough: it is not a book about how to spread Christ’s message with pies and honks. Nor is it the memoirs of a missionary clown. Those types of books are pretty common. I have an entire section of my library dedicated to them where I weirdly always find my missing scissors, but none of them are like this one. As far as I can tell, aside from one afternoon as a child, the author has never been a clown, Christian or default. He is simply a big fan. No, more than that. This clown nerd, C. Welton Gaddy, has decided nothing is more majestic or important than the clown. They are the center of all life. In many insane, poorly explained ways, they are all life. Let’s get started.

Note: There were no images in GOD’S CLOWNS: MESSENGERS OF THE GOOD NEWS, but when I ordered it from an online bookseller, a nice lady (who must have thought I was a Christian clown) included a free copy of The Clown Ministry Handbook (3rd edition). This was lucky since I, and this is real, only owned the 4th edition. Anyway, this other bonus clown book had more than enough pictures of Christian clowns to illustrate this article. These images are irrelevant to the text, and are merely a haunting presence.

No one will ever love clowns more than C. Welton Gaddy, and even he could only write about clowns for four sentences before they made somebody cry. This opening is the perfect encapsulation of the book. This is a madman blindly sprinting away with a premise. What if we need clowns!? What if they are necessary for all things!? WHAT IF THE ANSWER IS ALREADY YES AND IT’S TIME TO EXPLAIN WHY.

Gaddy also writes like a D student making fun of a C student trying to sound smart in a freshman philosophy class. He is in the first half of the first page of a clown explanation, and they are already reflecting the pathos of desperation to challenge us to entertain redemptive fantasies. Nonsense. Raw, clown-bonered nonsense. And it never changes. If Christian clown hands closed around your throat right now, you would die with a full understanding of God’s Clowns and this book named after them. For everyone else, let’s continue.

This is the story of the time Gaddy got to be a child clown in a parade. Well, most of a parade. His legs weren’t long enough for the whole thing, though his soul was. This is page 2, and clowning is already a transcendent gift of freedom to the human spirit. Gaddy spent some of an afternoon waving at people in a costume, and he writes about it like a dying X-Men recounting their origin story. “As a youth I was hunted for my large shoes, my ‘unnatural’ pie abilities, but t-today I die… a free clown.” What I’m saying is there are no fucking brakes on the part of Gaddy’s brain that imagines clowns.

Clowns aren’t exactly a normal thing to like, but go ahead and like them. This, however, is an absolutely deranged way to put it into words. Clown faces continue to evoke your appreciation? Fucking what. I dare you to put that a crazier way. Oh, they feed on the imaginary in each of us? Fine, I guess that was my fault. Speaking of nuts, Gaddy has some criticism for people on top of parade floats: be far more emotionally vulnerable, you plastic sons of bitches. Fuck you.

Genuinely curious, I searched through the whole book to figure out what the hell is wrong with C. Welton Gaddy. It’s dense, unthinkably thick with clown metaphor and clown description and nothing else. However, I did find this passage of him describing how he thinks children play. It might help us.

So this might explain why Gaddy can’t deal with the thrill of clowning. While trying to picture the kinds of things children play, his only four examples were: pretend to be at church, pretend to be at work, commercial airline pilot, and pretend to be at church. This is more of an observation than a joke, but I guess it’s easy to enjoy clowns when your soul is already dead.

You probably know this, but motivated reasoning is when you decide something then figure out how it’s possible later. Christians do this naturally sinc– you know what? We don’t need to get into this. The important thing is C. Welton Gaddy somehow decided: clowns. They are good, and everything good is them. In a way, what isn’t a clown? The rest of the book is that idea stretched far past its breaking point, and is indistinguishable from a clown representing himself in a murder trial.

Gaddy looked up the word “clown” in the Bible, and didn’t find it. He did find “fool” several times, which is a type of clown, in a way, sort of, so God probably meant all of His prophets were clowns. I went to enough church as a child to know that looking up words in the dictionary and rethinking them with the 3rd or 4th definitions is a normal starting point for a sermon. So when Gaddy started claiming everyone who ever got called a fool in the Bible was technically, when you really think about it, on Team Clown, no big deal. I didn’t understand why he was doing it, or to what end, but it seemed like the ordinary thoughts of an incurious mind killing time before death. I could have put that in a nicer way. C. Welton Gaddy is the religious version of someone explaining how Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Wait, that’s meaner.

After he was done pointing out all the characters in the Bible who were legally clowns because people laughed at them, he moved on to the ultimate clown: Jesus Christ. Again, I have no idea what he is getting out of this. I don’t agree with any of what he’s saying and would call you a fucking idiot if you did, but even if he’s confinced you, fine. Jesus is a clown. Now what? Why lead us here? What is so funny about Jesus?

Ha ha holy shit. We give definitions some wiggle room, and there are a lot of games you can play with words to make a bad point. But fucking Jesus fuck, if you are saying a man getting crucified died an honorary clown because his murderers were sort of ironic… maybe saying things isn’t for you? This is like beheading your neighbor and arguing it was okay by holding up a fish. You’re wrong and crazy in ways that won’t make sense to you, so I’m not going to try. I wouldn’t even know which fish to hold up, you lunatic.

Clowns are rambunctious, yet stoic! Minimalist, yet Santa Fe! And these aren’t just Gaddy’s provably unhinged speculations! He cited an actual “careful student of clowns.” This seems unnecessary, though; since the only other type of clown student is, of course, dead. I am not being cute when I say I have no idea what is going on in this book. It has the structure and content of a nine hour scream. I promise I had no intention of coming in here and making a bunch of murder clown jokes, but read some of this and tell me you feel safe:

I don’t understand why someone would define clowns in increasingly strange ways for 70,000 words. This is something a clown would weep during a dismemberment. The main text is pointless madness and the subtext is a cobra-like penis bite. Despite his love of them, it is not possible to know less about anything than C. Welton Gaddy knows about clowns, who are now every character in the Bible, beacons of joy, icons of revolution, and tortured lovers. And you know what? Why not? They’re unfettered by reality itself:

Now that clowns are defined by any trait, word, or concept and every Biblical character is one, Gaddy starts to consider which secular historical figures might have also been clowns. Now what I want you to do is stop here and think about it. Who do you think is first on his list? What person from history was, when you think about it, a clown? Seriously, think about it. You might really guess it.

. . .

Okay, let’s see if you’re right.

You either guessed Martin Luther King, Jr. or you’re a goddamn coward.

Admit it: even after Martin Luther King Jr., you weren’t expecting to read “prisoners of World War II and Vietnam. Talk about clowns!” If clown ever meant anything before this book, it doesn’t now. Clown is a scurry of legs fleeing from the light. It’s a smell on the wind that lets you know you’re prey. It’s the pure laughter of a child playing church accountant.

Now that you know what a clown is, let’s discuss laughter. It’s what you think of when you think of clowns, along with Vietnam POWs… Martin Luther King, Jr…. the hilarious death of Jesus. Gaddy lists the three main types of clown laughter: fear, trauma, and fake. Wait, holy fuck, I wasn’t kidding. I listed three things no one could possibly use as the pillars of laughter and somehow Gaddy went back and… h-how did he do that?

Chapter four! Time to lose our mind a little bit more! We need clowns, we simply must have them. Please, I beg of you: clowns. We need them, I’m not sure I’m making myself clear, give clowns unto us, Amen.

I guess Gaddy wasn’t done listing civil rights leaders who were plainly clowns. Which, again, is his highest compliment. What’s interesting about Rosa Parks is that when Gaddy calls her a clown he is suddenly sarcastic. And I’m speaking with the benefit of a brain unpoisoned by clown enthusiasm, but I would say the sentence where you describe Rosa Parks’ dignity is the wrong moment to try sarcasm for the first time. And it’s, I don’t know, interesting that Gaddy considers the cops who arrested her to also be clowns. What cards! Rosa Parks and the 1955 Alabama PD– just one big team of silly billies working together to make us do all three types of laughter!

Our need for clowns is quite urgent and can’t be overstated, even this late in the book. We need clowns, we need at least some clowns. Everyone is clowns, yes, but still: we will literally die if we are away from clowns for too long. This needs no explanation, and this book has no meaningful structure, so it’s time to move on to more historical clowns.

To the starving people of Calcutta, Mother Teresa was an angel. To everyone else, a little clown.

Clowns tell the truth. Are you fat? Clowns know. Are you irrational? Clowns are Martin Luther King, Jr.. They express grief. They refuse to comply with conventional goodness, fears are screamed aloud. What were we talking about? Irrational? Ha ha ha ha ha irrational!?

Maybe C. Welton Gaddy wasn’t clear enough with you, reader. Tell him where the clowns are. He needs them. Or maybe they need him. In fact, maybe they are terribly sad. Maybe we’re asking too much of them to be all things and people in our life. This is the book adaptation of leaping from a bush to steal a second grader. I have never seen an idea so tiny get stretched so far. If you took the skin of a clown and wrapped it around a van, it would be exactly the same as GOD’S CLOWNS in every relevant way.

You don’t have to be a Jim Crow-era police officer or a sad, beleaguered soul to be a clown. You could be a teenager who doesn’t fuck or the kind of person who doesn’t tell a sick man to “just give up and die” like his unperceptive friends. These are all normal things to think and type. Seriously, we all joke about clowns being scary, but how else would you describe this book? I caught it trying to crawl down my throat while I slept. When I threw it in a fire, the voices of fourteen lost children said thank you. And when it reappeared unburnt the next day, the same voices told me I’d made a mistake.

Aside from everything else, I hate the way Gaddy talks. “Ah, my inventing cap has been donned and mayfor by happenstance, methinks a clown convention there should be!” This dumb fucking shit thinks he’s a clown expert, but he came up with the idea of a clown convention seven years after the World Clown Association’s first clown convention. Which means the clowns, all of them, made a clown agreement to not invite the author of GOD’S CLOWNS to the clown party. This is like writing a book on marriage and saying, “we should come up with a way for women to have sex,” but only after spending 130 pages explaining how women are, at their essence, Martin Luther King, Jr..

Oh good, he ended his book non-insanely. With the forbidden words clowns use to echolocate in the dark. The author brings up an important point, though. For Christ’s sake, where are the clowns, where are the clowns? Where are they then, fuck, the clowns must be near. But where, Amen.

…

This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rhiannon, who knows exactly where the clowns are. Who contains the clowns. Who is all clowns.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Revelation Road 🌭

PureFlix, the Christian alternative to Netflix, has several categories of “family friendly” films for Christians to enjoy. Categories include Talking Dog, Romance in a World Where Horny Doesn’t Exist, Rip-Offs, and Rip-Offs with Kevin Sorbo (the fancy rip-offs). One of their high budget secular media rip-offs is the Revelation Road series, the lord’s answer to Mad Max. 

Revelation Road is about traveling bulletproof vest salesman, Josh McManus, roaming a post-apocalyptic America and helping people in search of Christ’s redemption. That is not a joke, bulletproof vest salesman is his actual job title. In the first film, he says he’s a traveling salesman, and the only thing we ever see him try to sell is a bulletproof vest. He’s also a former government assassin of some kind because, in this day and age, everyone has to have a side hustle. 

The movie seems to exist in an alternate reality where one of the ten commandments was that machine guns are bitchin’. Josh McManus struggles with whether it’s ok to keep doing so much murdering. He says he always “tries to find another way,” but often, that other way will be something like tricking a man into shooting his own brother instead of Josh. So, I guess God isn’t big on technicalities regarding murder. 

Revelation Road was a huge hit for PureFlix, spawning two sequels with progressively bigger budgets and a TV Show. Part of PureFlix’s continued support of Revelation Road miiiiight have something to do with how the owner of PureFlix happened to be none other than David A.R. White, the star of Revelation Road. 

He’s the guy on the back left in the above poster, behind the more famous guy with way less screen time. You know, the guy who was in Desperate Housewives and a Canadian show about witches? David A.R. White produces and stars in most of PureFlix’s original movies, which means this man is churning out D-list movies at the rate of an ’80s porn star. 

It’s truly impossible to scroll through any genre on PureFlix without running into David A.R. White. Looking for a Comedy? How about David A.R. White’s HolyMan Undercover? More interested in Romance? Try Nothing Is Impossible, starring David A.R. White. Do you only watch Bollywood movies? Luckily I can’t help with that. However, if you like watching a man use Jesus as an excuse to kill people with his feet, the Revelation Road series starring David A.R. White was made for you. Because like you, they suck.

The first Revelation Road movie, The Beginning Of The End, takes place mostly before the rapture, but it’s still rapture flavored. There’s a biker gang called The Barbarians whose leader, Hawg, kills people with a big silver hammer. He rides by people on his motorcycle and polo smacks them in the head, or sometimes he stands over them and gives them a good bop. 

Then, in the film’s last twenty minutes, there’s suddenly an apocalypse. It feels like someone had a sixty-minute script about a former government assassin rediscovering his faith in God and needed an extra twenty minutes to make it a movie. The description says, “Where were you when the world ended? The right man at the wrong time, Josh foiled a robbery perpetrated by The Barbarians, an outlaw biker gang. Then it happened. An unnatural flash in the sky, followed by a crippling series of earthquakes, throws the entire world into chaos. His only goal is to go home to his family, but he’ll have to fight his way through The Barbarians to do so.” All those things technically happen in the movie, but most of it is Ray Wise talking about Jesus. 

All of the Revelation Road movies suffer from one annoying flaw: they have to make a lot of objectively cool stuff seem not cool. It shows teens a big greasy biker guy with a six pack, and a ton of tattoos doing hand to hand combat in front of a fire that’s accentuating the backlit silhouette of a sexy lady, and it says, “see this, kids. This is not cool!” Whacking people with a big silver hammer is not dope as shit. Don’t be like this attractive, awesome-looking guy, ok? You want to be like the guy in khakis and a tan button down collared shirt. Slowly kicking people to death on foot! That’s what’s cool! 

They combat this issue by having every character, even the bad guys, tell Josh how cool and impressive he seems. Every movie is a big old compliment party for David A.R. White, who is coincidentally the guy signing the writer’s and actor’s paychecks. Every thug Josh runs into is like, “Uh oh, this guy looks so tough. He probably has a huge dick with no weird curves or veins, fully circumcised, the whole enchilada. It’s just smooth and shiny. Good at business as well, I bet. We should be careful with this one.”

Revelation Road 3 opens with a car chase scene where the henchmen say, “Wow, this guy can really drive!” as Josh steers straight down an open country road. He’s out to save a sixteen-year-old girl who’s been kidnapped, and he does, but not before she’s stabbed in the stomach. Here is where I should mention some Christians did have a small problem with this movie. It was dinged on Christian movie rating site, Dove.org, for being too sexual!

There is implied sex slavery and prostitution in this movie. We see a young girl in a cage at a black market, and while it’s not explicitly stated why the young girl Josh is rescuing was kidnapped, her getting stroked on the hair sensually was probably not the thing you should warn potential viewers about. Josh is forced to take her into the territory of a man named Drake for medical treatment. Drake is played by James Denton, who I was sad to see here. I knew his career wasn’t going great, but I didn’t realize it was going PureFlix not great.

Drake captures Josh at the town medic, where he’s trying to get treatment for the teen girl he rescued, and chains him up in a Christ pose. He tells Josh that there was a surgeon in town named Grace, but she left to follow a prophet called The Shepherd. Drake has been trying to track down Grace and The Shepherd to bring her back, but The Shepherd is extremely good at avoiding his men, with some people saying he can only be located by a man of faith or a man able to maintain immaculate bleach blond highlights during an apocalypse. Josh is both of these men. 

Grace’s daughter, Sophia, stows away in Josh’s car, and they go on a fun little goose chase to find The Shepherd. Along the way, they run into a lot of obstacles, including a zany family of cannibals, and Kevin Sorbo, the head of the black market, who tries to steal their car.

Kevin Sorbo walked into the prop closet on this movie and said, “I’ll take it.” His look combines a fluffy pirate shirt, 1.5 IKEA rugs, AND a fedora. It’s revealed that his character was a drama teacher before the apocalypse, and honestly, I think they nailed this look. This is how a total theater nerd would dress during the rapture. It’s how you would stay warm if you were waiting out a blizzard in a Party City. He’s dressed like he’s been chasing cartoon cats through clotheslines.

Kevin Sorbo gives Josh the nickname “The Black Rider” when he forces him to fight to get his car back. It means nothing. I think the writers came up with the cool title and were desperate to find a way to fit it into their extremely uncool movie. While they’re at the black market, we learn that Drake is tracking Josh as a way to hunt down The Shepherd because a larger government-like entity (clearly run by the Antichrist) wants him captured. Sorry, this plot is dumber than Kevin Sorbo’s lil hat. 

Josh and Sophia escape the black market with Kevin Sorbo and Co. hot on their tails. Josh is now sick of this shit, so he asks himself WWJD and feels like the answer is “mow all of these guys down with a very big machine gun I’ve been saving for this exact occasion.” However, Sophia has now converted to Christianity, and she convinces him that might not be what J would D, so Josh chooses the path of nonviolence. The moral of this movie is violence is bad, maybe, except when it’s not, in which case it’s awesome. Amen.

Josh choosing nonviolence, combined with Sophia’s newfound commitment to Christ, summons The Shepherd. I think this is supposed to be because only Christians can find him, and now Sophia is a Christian. Either way, he just sort of pops up behind them wearing a bed sheet because Kevin Sorbo took all of the good props. 

It turns out Grace is not with The Shepherd. I feel like that makes the metaphor they were going for pretty muddled, but no one cares. The Shepherd is actually a powerful prophet who’s supposed to witness the End Times, and he has magic powers like healing and making plants grow. He wants Josh to escort him to the coast so he can go to Jerusalem. This is all, once again, the plot of a whole other movie beginning in the third act of this movie because, as we all know, a good story doesn’t really get going until the last twenty minutes or so.

Drake’s henchmen show up for The Shepherd and shoot Josh dead. You might expect Josh’s previous bulletproof vest salesman job to come in handy here, but it does not. He straight up dies and talks to God, who’s like, “you can just be dead now if you want,” but Josh decides he wants to stay on Earth and help more people, so God resurrects him, and he goes on to rescue The Shepherd from Drake and the evil devil government and I know this sounds like rambling stupidity which means they didn’t check with a single person if this plot made sense before they started filming. 

That’s the conclusion of this hyper-violent, hyper-sexual episode of Drake And Josh. The Shepherd goes off to Jerusalem without Josh, who will continue to roam the world murdering, pillaging, and spreading the gospel as an undead zombie man in the TV series, which is currently shooting in South Africa. According to the Instagram account for the show, Josh has gotten even blonder since we last saw him. You have to admire the man’s dedication to haircare in a world without running water.

There are over 500 Christians following that Instagram, waiting for any scrap of information about the next leg of humble bulletproof vest salesman Josh MacManus’s journey. Will he get to kill more people in ways nearby people will call cool but sometimes abstain from killing in the name of religion? Will Kevin Sorbo’s character, let’s call him Random Debris Carl, show up again? You’ll probably have to sign up for PureFlix to find out, so, I guess we’ll never know!

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Michael Lehr, who is also called “The Black Passenger.”

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Yiddish for Dogs 🌭

In 1985, a graphic designer named Janet Perr won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package. Twenty two years later she thought, “I have an idea.” She was wrong.

Yiddish for Dogs is not what it sounds like. It’s not what anything should be really. It’s a 75-word Yiddish dictionary, only you’re a dog and everyone is dogs? I’m not explaining it well because it’s a broken mistake. It’s pictures of dogs made more Jewish by Photoshop in a way your 2023 eyes will see as a problem, and they’re sort of acting out the words, but are mostly just there. It is a drunk newborn’s wild guess at a thought. There is no reason it shouldn’t be Azerbaijani for Potatoes or The Signing of the Declaration of Independence Only Get This: They’re Taxidermied Rabbits, but it’s not. It’s Yiddish for Dogs. I’ll let the book jacket try to explain:

Anti-semetic isn’t the right word for this, but there is no use for it other than as a gift to someone when the only thing you know about them is their semitism. It was sold in the HUMOR section, which sounds ironic, but anyone who ever walked through the HUMOR section of a bookstore in 2007 knows most of the titles were a bunch of dog corpses glued to a thin premise that wouldn’t age well. 2007 humor books were for turning Internet memes into paper debris, documenting the last of mankind’s gendered insults, and I hope I’m guessing wrong here: helping Jewish dog owners work through some sort of terrible loss?

Every word of this is just barely not a hate crime. This is the worst Spanish student ordering burrrritos for the table. It is a ’90s Judd Hirsch comedy about an unfrozen caveman hiding from the mob in a synagogue. It is a Christian juggler at a corporate retreat one minute after being told, “There is a bomb under the stage set to go off whenever you say something not Jewish.”

You don’t need to know what “kibbitz” means to know this is a clawing spout of demon limbs posing as a book. Kibitz means to hang around and talk shit, by the way. Which is not interchangeable with klutz nor something dogs do, making it both not funny and dumb as shit. And that’s the closer of the book jacket– that’s Janet’s sales pitch joke. She’s trying to say “This book has actual value” and she accidentally said, “Sled accident many minutes of silence, Jew.”

This is how Janet starts her book. It’s plainly insane in a way most people would forgive as failure. She’s not a talented comedy writer, nor even sure what one of those would look like, and her premise is already so fucked there’s nothing to stand on. Best of luck to you on this journey, Janet, but you can’t be silly or shocking when you open with, “YOU EVER MET A PUTZ DOG, AM I RIGHT, WELL WELCOME TO MY LIFE, WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH ALL THESE JEWISH WORDS NEAR UNRELATED DOGS, LET’S SEE WHAT ELSE.”

I did my best to prepare you, but this is the book. It’s 75 of these. It’s the dictionary if the dictionary was also a horny Jewish dog diary and you shouldn’t really trust the dictionary part of it. The manuscript for this should have been tagged as evidence after being found next to a human head, yet here it is fucking existing in our world next to 101 More Chuck Norris Jokes for Her.

“Okay, maybe jokes aren’t my thing,” said Janet after she clinically explained ten words with meandering dog sex stories and no punchlines. “No problem, I’ll fall back on my main area of expertise: graphic design,” said Janet while roughly attaching clipart of a parachute to a sitting dog pasted over a child’s drawing of the sky near the word “Chutzpah” in the default font. Of all the terrible things I’m likely to say about Janet Perr, I hope that one is the most devastating.

I’m sure no one went into this book to learn, but why is “klutz” here? This is a very commonly used word, and is the default word for what it describes. Is there even a Gentile version of it? By the way, do you know what’s funnier than a dog falling down the stairs next to a mirthless description of a dog falling down the stairs? A lot of things! Most of them, in fact! Everyone knows this fucking word and you almost killed a dog to teach it to us, Janet!

I’m trusting you not to tell anyone this, but the second I saw the cover to this book my brain formed the thought, “Oh no, I hope they didn’t just, like, Photoshop a dog onto a bagel.”

“There are no consequences to our actions,” thought Janet Perr as she wrote fifty five words and zero jokes about large Jewish noses for her humor book. “Now, to add some poorly cropped novelty glasses to a random dog at the wrong angle,” said the Grammy-winning graphic designer. And yes, I agree, it would be weirder if this was good, but fuck. I mean, what the fuck.

Vilda Chayas have 5 hit dice and corrode any metal they touch (with magically endowed items gaining a 10% chance of not being affected for each plus). I’m not sure what Janet was going for here, or whether she nailed it. To describe a rambunctious Jewish child, she has assembled something an undercover cop would show to an animal murderer to earn their trust. This is what you hold up to warn God that AI is close to replacing Him. Congratulations, Janet, it’s troubling in simply every direction.

I’m fascinated at Janet’s joke construction. She starts dumb, then gets sad, then finds the strength to keep going, and nowhere along the way does she try to be funny. And look at what she’s made. This is a weirdly sexualized dog asshole next to three sentences of a dog justifying an eating disorder, and to do what? To tell the reader how to say butt in Yiddish? I mean this in the cruelest possible way: Janet has accidentally made an Andrew Dice Clay act adapted for a children’s book. In a way it’s amazing. There are no conceivable paths to get to what this is. If you asked 100,000 geniuses from all walks of life to create two pages of joyless nothing using a dog and butts, no one could create anything sadder or less. You did it, Janet.

Yiddish for Dogs is uniquely ignorant. It’s a confused woman blindly stomping through pictures of asshole dogs and dog assholes fully confident there’s no way to fail at comedy or discussing Judaism. As long as man exists, there will never be anything else like i–

Janet published Hip-Hop For Dogs one year later.

You knew this was going to be a problem, but I bet you didn’t expect it to fall apart this quickly. I mean, dawgs, look at this mad schmutz. This is a fucking disaster. This is the n-word run a hundred times through German submarine code. This is the script for a Eugene Levy / Lou Gossett Jr body switching comedy called Gray Area (aka Blackface Soccer in France).

It’s so perfectly wonderful how this is the face of the woman who had this idea and then pursued this idea. “IS YOUR DOG A PLAYA, DOES HE REPRESENT?” asks the 52-year-old blonde woman as if that’s anything. “Yo, phat bitch, am I doing this shizzle properly?” she says to a black child at the airport TCBY, holding up what she was told to be the finger sign identifying someone as a Blood. “It’s for a book, I’m a writer!” she explains to him.

I own a book for World War II soldiers to identify the race of potential enemy Asians by eye and forehead shape, and it is less offensive and more practical than this. This is nonsense translated into a different language by someone who speaks less than one of them. This fucking maniac is just calling the reader’s dog names. More than once, Janet Perr has gone up to a black person and said, “Hello, phat playa, I know some words in your language! Bitch! Ho! Ni– oh, darn they left.”

Never has a point been made faster: I, Janet Perr, have no goddamn idea what is going on, and yet here I am continuing with this bullshit. She keeps saying nothing other than kind-hearted racism while rearranging the fifteen words she learned from popular rap songs. Speaking of rap, Janet explains rapping got its start when “parties were thrown where people chanted rhymes over the beats of songs.” So if you were concerned this HUMOR book was a sincere attempt at explaining what blacks are to readers unfamiliar with them, it is. It’s exactly that yet worse in so many ways. For instance:

This is 90 words, from a dog’s perspective, on how to use the word bitch around black people written by a middle-aged white woman who decided to write a book on African American culture after looking up rap in her encyclopedias. If a white supremacist found the crates of Hip-Hop For Dogs in Janet Perr’s garage, he would say, “Oh thank god, you’re a monster. I was worried I’d have to spend this whole barbecue pretending not to be racist.”

What’s crazy, truly insane, about Hip-Hop For Dogs is that it’s not a G-rated book for kids and grandmas. It’s written that way because the author infantilizes non-white races, but these dogs are smoking marijuana and fucking. I already thought the indelicacy of racism meeting puppies made it a bad kid’s book, but this is objectively adult material. It’s something to keep in mind when you try to figure out who -the fuck- Janet was imagining when she wrote this.

Working backwards from words she remembers from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air dialog she thinks is called Ebonics, Janet explains again to her readers what a butt is. And like she did in Yiddish, she does this by having a dog emotionally grapple with a weight problem. “I spent the day Photoshopping dreadlocks onto a dog to explain how brothas like badonkadonks, which is a type of round booty, which is what their people call butts,” Janet said to her publisher when they asked how the new book was going.

In another hilarious HUMOR entry, Janet defines a commonly used word by having a dog struggle with body issues. And don’t get me wrong, this is great. Great job, Janet. This isn’t strange and stupid and you almost matched the number of dog legs in the text to the number of dog legs in the picture. But man, as a comedy writer, if I kept forgetting to write jokes and instead just had my characters fight to overcome their physical insecurities, I’d worry my readers would figure out I look like absolute shit naked. I’d be concerned that’s what I was telling them, Janet. Anyway, time to write the punchline for this paragraph, something that should be easy since I have normal balls and not terrible, strange balls. I have good people in my life who are not suspicious of the hypothetical monster balls I keep mentioning.

I don’t know enough about black hair to know if you’re allowed to Photoshop these particular hairstyles onto dogs, but I do know 2008 marked the 20-year anniversary of the last teenager who had to tell their parents no one says “da bomb” anymore. It might be a useful phrase book for time travelers trying to figure out if Biz Markie is afraid of or enjoying their sweater, but they’d also have to know bombs are alphabetized under D for “da.” Ridiculous.

“This African American dog, like many of them, went to prison.” Janet tells her comedy fan readers. “He also has kennel cough, which isn’t really part of it and their community doesn’t have a fun word for it,” she elaborates. “I tell ya, I’d much rather be in the hood chillin’ wit’ da crew,” Janet adds in flawless Hip-Hop. Speaking as a frequent book-owner, this is one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever seen an author put together. It’s a horror of bad decisions, most of them very racial. I’m not saying Janet Perr is unfit to walk among us, I’m only saying a person capable of this is capable of anything.

Most of this book is just the stupid racism of a dumb talentless racist who would be shocked to find out she was any of those things, but sometimes there are these wild surges of world building. Like this one where Janet explains how dawgs be droppin’ bootleg food in their mouth, yo. So they live in a society where no one has hands, but it’s illegal to keep non-food objects in your mouth. And this is the only law mentioned in the entire section on dog cops. That’s nuts in an entirely new direction, which is such an impossible achievement when you’re already a book and a half deep into an idea any human brain would have rejected as nonsense before it formed. Creatively speaking, she is rearranging the entrails on a train derailment.

Wait, okay, sometimes I forget, but these dogs do not live in a universe where everyone is a dog. You’d think that since they have their own police enforcing their own savage code of laws, but this book takes place in our world. These fly, illin’, phat dogs still have owners, and Flavor Flav, the human, exists and has dog fans. And if I’m understanding correctly, this one has tasted him. I’m not sure it’s humor, Janet, but it is fascinating.

Comedy writer Janet Perr sat at her computer. She had already finished defining the obscure African American term “foxy.” Though the muse can sometimes play coy with her, the description of the word came to her almost immediately. She quoted herself, “Mmmm, mmm . .  . all the dawgs on the block be sniffin’ me and following me around.” Perfection. “Nearly indistinguishable from a real Black,” she said into her voice recorder. Her right index finger clicked the familiar icon for Photoshop. It was time to begin work on the day’s new task: FUCKABLE DOG. The fingers on her left hand were already curling around a hardening nipple.

Let me see if I can explain “GET BUSY” to you, readers. You know when a dog fucks “the baby’s fluffy toy?” A human baby, not a dog baby. These are regular dogs, remember, not talking dogs from a universe where they’re the people. And this one has sex with human baby toys, drenching them in dog semen while it masturbates to the idea of stalking a bichon. “This joke looks finished,” decided a humor author in 2008 and then an actual one fifteen years later.

Oh no. Janet, as a fellow White, I’m worried this one is our word.

“I’m not a ho, but I’ll have sex with you, please anyone,” says the dog written by a woman with a clear creative vision.

Come on, Janet. This dog has never seen malt liquor, but it can describe its effects in its second language? Or not really, because I don’t think you’re using this word correctly . . . the point I’m making remains the same: this is stupid even for a racist. Speaking of, we’re closing in on the letter n. It’s probably a good idea to jump way ahead in the alphabet.

If you were never a big rap fan, that’s sure to change when you learn it’s a style of music where rhyming is combined with rhythm. And I know I’ve been pretty hard on Janet for all this unthinkable ignorance and her inability to write a joke, but let’s stop here and get serious. This biyatch wrote a D+ third grade book report on “rap” followed by a completely sincere attempt at it. There is no comedy here by any stretch of the imagination. There aren’t even dog references! This rap isn’t about burying bones or impregnating baby toys– it’s about how good they are at rapping. Why? Any of it!? As long as you live, you’ll never see anything fail to be anything as much as Hip-Hop For Dogs fails at doing whatever it’s trying to do. There’s no elegant way to put it– it’s a better dentist eulogy than it is a comedy book, and better at water skiing than it is at education. Fuck the universe that allowed it.

As always, when a terrible author spends this much time being defeated by the same idea, their weak spots get exposed. Like how Janet tried to define black womanhood and only came up with five things: hairstyles, fucking, sometimes being ugly, sometimes having a big butt, and watching each other’s fatherless children. Then this 52-year-old white lady added an afro to a picture of her own jet black dog to represent “sistas.” And if she considered for a second not to include that hair pick, I will find Janet’s dog’s remains and eat them. Again, this isn’t really my area of expertise and you would not believe the ways I disappoint my black friends, but I feel confident in saying Janet Perr understands black culture worse than she understands comedy. This is like setting out to write a book on nuclear physics and proudly publishing seven wrong diagrams of inclined planes.

This lady writing about WACK is like a bank self-regulating, fucking boom: roasted financial crisis style, which is my way of telling myself I should skip to the Special Thanks and wrap this book up. . .

Being someone’s only black friend is a hard job, but no one has fucked it up worse than Pam. Janet called up to ask, “What does your kind call shoes and marijuana cigarettes?” and Pam told her. Pam, you knew this was the dingbat who wrote Yiddish for Dogs. She has given you at least four copies. Did you think she was suddenly taking up weed at 52 and wanted to get the terminology right? Your response should have been “A blunt is when y– hey wait, if this is for a book, no. Fucking absolutely not, Janet. Whatever you’re typing, stop. Hang up now and burn any computer that has touched that file.” I know this isn’t all on you, Pam, but you kind of gave this white vilda chaya permission to publish a 103 page racist joke.

 

So this woman has now published two books, and since no one has stopped her, Pam, Janet set aside an afternoon to write a third. From the author of 2007’s Yiddish for Dogs and 2008’s Hip-Hop for Dogs comes 2009’s . . . oh Jesus fucking Christ.

 

Please don’t tell anyone, but my brain did that thing again where it saw the cover and went, “I hope she didn’t Photoshop a baby onto a bage–

Fuck!

This is the same book as Yiddish For Dogs with fewer jokes, and there already literally weren’t jokes! God damn it, how absolutely dare you.

Most writers take more than three books to find such a clear literary voice. This is Janet at her best– as a moron looking at butts while explaining the basic idea of butts, only dumber and weirder than that sounds. This is, word-for-word, how Janet’s worst enemy would make a sarcastic book to mock her.

What am I supposed to do with this? That hat is baby-sized, which means it’s for a baby. The baby is wearing it because someone put a baby hat on the baby. Everything here is working as fucking intended, Janet! Your friend Pam explained rap to you, but never got around to hats!? Fuck you both. I’m sorry, Pam. You don’t deserve that. You’re probably still dealing with Janet insisting that there’s no problem in saying it because all lives actually do matter.

Oh, it’s a naked baby escaping with a full, cooked lobster. “What are you doing with a non-kosher food item?” is my only question.

“This Mardi Gras necklace won’t look like anal beads if I enlarge it,” thought the award-winning graphic designer.

 

“T-that baby is wearing anal beads,” thought everyone else.

I don’t have a joke for this one. I just wanted you to see how Janet Perr talks about a baby pooping in the potty the same way she talks about every sensitive issue facing people of color.

Ha ha ha the Yiddish word for fart is fart with a Swedish accent!? I can’t believe I learned something I can use from a Janet Perr book.

Imagine you were a published author and an award-winning graphic designer and the way you explain trash is to throw a baby in it and say “There’s a baby in the trash. Or sorry, oy vey, there’s a baby in the trash. The Jewish word for trash. Whatever, you get it. NEXT WORD!” I’m only saying that on top of everything, Janet Perr is a mad schlepper, dawg. I can barely look at what I just typed. I’m skipping to the end before I do any more self harm.

A decade and a half ago, these were the last words Janet Perr ever published. In only three years she managed to have no ideas and still ran out of them. Across three racial comedy dictionaries she wrote zero jokes and betrayed two races while educating no one and plagiarizing herself. With as much delight as you’d expect from it, she threw a dog down the stairs and a baby in the trash. No author will fail at such a championship level in this many categories, and Baby waves bye-bye. Zai gezunt!

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Bim Talzer, who has never been convicted of racially profiling dogs.