Alex tells us about Boris Skossyreffa, a Russian man who talked his way into a kingdom. Brockway shares the story of Elvira Gamboa: a Filipino woman who faked her own country. And in our bonus episode for Hot Dog Appreciators only, Seanbaby shares the cautionary tale of Matthew Kline Kader, a Vegas dirtbag who tried and failed to convince people he was a celebrity, a fighter, and a corpse.
Once, long ago, there was a comedy website that only wanted three simple things: to make people laugh, to teach them a few things, and to make enough money to build a robot that would be our friend, instead of yet another enemy. It succeeded in two of those goals, before getting piledriven into the dirt by corporate scavengers. Some of its archives have been deleted, some of them have been corrupted, and some just suck. You decide which one this is. It’s…
My earlier forays into the field of professional drug abuse were full of mistakes, I understand that now. My chief error was buying all of my prescriptions in baggie form from a man named “The Hungary Hungary Hippo” whose office was “the stank spot beneath the pier.” I’ve tested drugs for boosts to intelligence, creativity, and the enjoyment of colors. But I already understand crosswalks and once caught a squirrel with my bare hands; I’m as smart and alert as any human being needs to be, practically speaking. Plus colors rip ass. They don’t need a boost. No, what I really need is more focus. And, as with all things, I assume that stealing prescriptions is the best way to get it.
Test
To measure for a potential increase in concentration, I will be repeatedly watching a 10-minute loop of a sheep chewing grass to techno music. I will measure the efficacy of each drug by seeing how long I can go before clicking away and Googling He-Man mashups. Our baseline is 0 seconds, because I didn’t even manage to hit play the first time. Instead, I watched this three times and then chased my dogs for a while.
Natural Solutions
Mother Earth was the first and maddest scientist. So if we’re trying to trick our brains into productivity, why not abuse nature first? This article insists that concentration is really a simple matter of adjusting the amount of lubricated fish in your life, and that makes a strange kind of sense to me. Do I have problems focusing? Yes. Am I eating lots of greasy sea life? No.
The problem is clear.
Don’t Take If:
Really, the only risks from natural medication are allergies. And as everybody knows, it’s impossible to be allergic to something you’ve never had before. So I’ve gone ahead and stocked up on the most exotic, oily sea life I can find (for less than 10 dollars): Whatever is in these abandoned Russian fish tins.
There’s some kind of half-fish, half-man skull on the back with a giant cross through it, so it’s either NOT made from mermaids, or it’s made from ONLY mermaids, and either way seems like a good start.
Side Effects:
The complete absence of human companionship. They make your breath and skin smell like an old fisherman’s wet longjohns.
Also some minor blindness.
Video Test Results:
I made it 35 seconds into the sheep clip this time before I wandered away to watch a He-Man/DMX mashup. I am but a man, with all of that creature’s weaknesses.
Ritalin
Sometimes it’s best to start with the obvious. If you’re looking to buy a car, you go to a car dealership; if you want a Big Mac, you go to McDonald’s; if you want a mattress, you go to Mad Matt’s Mattress Mattorium. So if you find your priorities constantly shifting from work to shiny objects, you go with the big name first: Ritalin.
Don’t Take If:
According to their website, one should not ingest Ritalin if you have “a fructose intolerance, glucose-galactose malabsorption or sucrase-isomaltase deficiency.” I don’t understand what any of those words mean, so I have to assume that they don’t apply to me.
Side Effects:
This is weird: Ritalin lists its side effects as “fast, pounding or uneven heartbeats, feeling like you might pass out and aggression.” But what if you’re always on the verge of passing out (it’s called having a good time, officer), you’re aggressive because people are stupid and constantly in your way, and your heart only beats that way because you’re so fucking fast?
Video Test Results:
I managed to get a full two minutes into sheep trance before wondering if the Internet might have Skeletor doing some Queen covers and it fucking totally did.
Concerta
I actually started taking this one because I thought it was called Concentra, named for the Greek god of paying attention. But upon closer inspection, it seems to be called Concerta. So it’s like a music drug? That seems a bit redundant. We already have a music drug; it’s called “all of them.”
Don’t Take If:
You have a family history of Tourette’s syndrome. Oh man. Will this increase my ability to tell people to fuck off?! That’s not a side effect, it’s a stat boost! This is how you get yourself a customer, Big Pharma.
Side Effects:
Nothing too bad. I’ve stopped sleeping and started swearing (more), and I now have to snap my fingers every time I use a comma, like there, or here, or hey, did anybody else notice that this paragraph is punctuated to the tune of John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane”? No, just me? (,,)
Video Test Results:
Holy shit! I watched the whole sheep thing twice. This is amazing! I’m not sure if it’s due to increased concentration, or if it’s just that I have more uninterrupted time to focus on my tasks since I started calling everybody Captain Cocksipper and stinking of the fruits of the Baltic Sea, but I am really getting some shit done now. I mean, so far that “shit” has just been staring at this sheep, but I am doing it. I’m really doing the ASS out of it!
Focalin
It’s called Focalin because it helps you focus. Get it? God, drug names are so cool. I wish I had a drug name. I wish I was named Robertine or Brocolux. My side effects would be “belligerence and sleep racing,” and my label art would be a field of flowers with one furious naked man standing in the middle yelling at the sun. Fuck you, the sun, I did not give you permission to touch my skin!
Don’t Take If:
It says I shouldn’t take this stuff if I’ve also taken MAOI-inhibitors in the past two weeks. Google tells me that’s some kind of antidepressant. But it’s impossible to say for certain what drugs I have and haven’t taken because nobody leaves me unattended in their bathrooms long enough to read the labels of their prescriptions.
Side Effects:
Eyesight changes.
Wait … ha ha, what? What kind of “eyesight changes”? Will I go blind? Will I get Predator vision? Will I be able to see lies? That’s some worryingly vague shit to drop on a fella, Captain Cocksipper. Captain Cocksipper and his first mate, Mr. Dongdrinker. Captain Cocksipper and his first mate, Mr. Dongdrinker, and their loyal companion Bosun Ballchug.
What were we doing?
Video Test Results:
Okay. Do you still see the sheep in this video? Is it… is it just me who sees this fresh lunacy? Is this what they meant by “eyesight changes”? Fuck you, Focalin, this isn’t an “eyesight change,” this is a madness infusion. And the real tragedy is I’m so goddamn focused that I watched every second of it. I couldn’t help myself. And now, as a direct consequence, I can understand the language that shadows speak.
They have nothing interesting to say.
Vyvanse
Vyvanse.
Vyvanse. VYVANSE. Look at all of those crazy dips and valleys. Vyvyvyv. That word just looks fun, doesn’t it? So I took a handful of them.
Turns out it was a focus drug, too!
Small world.
Don’t Take If:
I can’t take this if I have “agitated states” and a “history of drug use”? Ha ha, shit. You might as well have just put “no comedians” on the bottle. Whatever, Vyvanse. Thanks to Focalin and the screaming war babies, I can already see death’s reflection in the pupils of every man I pass on the street. Really, what are you going to do to me that I haven’t already done to every man foolish enough to look upon me with their cursed death-eyes?
Side Effects:
Vyvanse lists possible side effects as “new or worse behavior and thought problems, aggressive behavior or hostility, hearing voices, believing things that are not true and extreme suspicion.”
Worse behavior than what? My previous behavior? My neighbor’s behavior? Society’s stifling rules of normality? There’s no measure! And “believing things that are not true”? What do you mean, exactly? Are we talking outright fiction here, like the existence of elves, or just erroneous misconceptions, like thinking that concept albums are a good idea? You’re fucking with me, Vyvanse.
Shadowfriends, this medication is fucking with me, and I do not appreciate it.
Attack.
No, attack.
I don’t know, the bottle.
What do you mean, that won’t do anything?
Class action lawsuit? Fuck! You’re so fucking basic, shadowpeople.
Video Test Results:
I was mistaken earlier. This isn’t the wrong video at all. It was the wrong clip before, but it’s right now. It’s all right now. I’ve watched all 10 minutes of it, 15 times, back to back. I do that, instead of dreaming. And I understand now, I do. I understand everything: I know what has to be done, and why, and who has to do it, and that this paragraph is punctuated to Hall and Oates’ “Private Eyes.” (,,)
Yay, that’s fun. That’s a fun thing.
Pardon me. I have a mission.
Arresting Officer’s Notes:
Mr. Brockway tried to burn down a CVS and had to be submerged in an ice bath due to his body temperature of 119 degrees Fahrenheit.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have been “stacking” his tests. He did not stop taking one drug before starting another. Also all of his “test material” used the same active ingredient — some form of methylphenidate — except for the expired can of fish. But apparently the latter, when combined with certain psychostimulants, causes a blood toxicity condition called Spratsblud.
The medical examiner says Mr. Brockway’s plasma is still too explosive to legally allow for an interrogation, but I have drawn some conclusions from my investigation so far:
This was stupid, and somebody is going to be extremely in jail the very second that “upsetting their blood” stops being considered an act of public endangerment.
In 1992, 179 pages of brave words conspired to escape the shackles of reality. Their plan did not work. As they were pulled back from the beyond, they were fused with a dog trainer’s diary of the same size to occupy a single book in a maddening, impossible arrangement of phrases and ideas. I can think of no other reason Problem Gun Dogs could exist.
The book jacket claims Bill Tarrant “has won practically every award given by the Dog Writer’s Association of America.” This sounded impressive, so I Googled their organization and found it does exist and they charge a $20 submission fee to award-seeking dog writers. Even assuming Bill won every time he submitted something, this accreditation cost him over four hundred dollars. As the saying goes, there is definitely glory in acclaimed dog writing, but all the actual money is in unacclaimed dog writing.
It’s tough to know where to start when talking about Problem Gun Dogs since there are definitely chapters and sections, but Bill Tarrant speaks in a mad combination of country dialect and gun dog jargon. He’s prone to long digressions about dogs he once knew and loved, how they fucked, the bitches they whipped, and I’m just now realizing I should have established Bill has never said a single thing without making it weird. When Bill asks a waitress for more milk, he definitely says, “Could you froth another pump of breast juice into this old dog hollerin’ hole of mine, toots? And extra creamy on the drip, thank you.” For instance, here is how he discusses the social hierarchy of a pack of hunting hounds:
We all know you’re not going to get through a book about female dogs without calling a few of them ordinary bitches. “Bitches” isn’t hurtful when a dog trainer uses it as a clinical term, kind of like when a doctor calls you an Eskimo. But why did Bill bring up how his sexual urges mirror that of dogs? Until I know more about you, that doesn’t help me understand dogs at all, Bill. Do they watch their wives with strangers, Bill? Is the humiliation a part of it, or is that something they’re afraid to let themselves think about too much? Bill, in the hypothetical, I’m an amateur pheasant hunter who bought your book because I keep accidentally shooting my dogs. So why did you bring up how the bitches make love like me, Bill? Should I… Bill, s-should this boner be here or not?
If I seem addled, it’s because I’ve just read Problem Gun Dogs. Here, let me help you get in the same state of mind.
The jargon is impenetrable and the instructions are unclear, and when Bill tries to explain something conversationally references his own life experiences which maybe aren’t as universal as he thinks. For instance, you know when your dog lays down and you need to pump it? Think of it like in grade school when you received your ritual beatings. Just put your expanded hand on its flank, then pump and pump until he balloons. Simple, right? And while you’re here answering questions for me, is it illegal to publish instructions on how to jerk off an English Setter? Because I… that has to be what I just typed, right?
There are a lot of awkward phrasing choices in Problem Gun Dogs Bill didn’t have to make. When science invents a way for horny dogs to write erotic fiction, you and I will be disgusted and confused. Bill Tarrant will be filing a plagiarism lawsuit. For instance, in his section on Endurance, a common word no one needs an explanation for, there are no dog fitness tips, but hundreds of words about how dog and hunter want, no desperately need, the thrusting and pumping– they’ve got to take it all, take every last inch on those wet, moonlit nights.
Let’s move on to something less strange like how to select the perfect duck dog:
The main problem you’re going to run into with the genitals and tits of your hunting companion is that they take a lot of abuse if they bash into things. It’s the kind of tip that’s so obvious one has to wonder why the author even added a Teats and Testicles section, much less why he kept it after the entirety of it ended up being, “them long balls are gonna take a real bruisin’ and beatin’ from the hardships of my kind of pumping.”
The book does have some illustrations, but like the elongated titties on a Pointer, they are rarely related to what Bill is or should be talking about. This one, for example, is a random picture of a dog watching its owner get ready to just fucking obliterate a pheasant. I mean, at this range, he’s bringing home a sandwich bag of cordite feather soup. If they want to get a full meal out of this bird they’re going to have to spoon it out of the dog’s bath water. I’m not an expert, though; this is only the 17th book on horny dog hunting I’ve read. And if I’m being honest, I barely know what Bill is talking about most of the time.
Can you understand that? Or this?
It is only 48 pages into the book and Bill already assumes we speak fluent Moonshined Gun Dog. This looks like a speech written to try to get a sign language interpreter fired. Which dog writing award did this win? Least Sense Anyone Has Fucking Ever Made (Non Stroke Division)? What’s Bill going to write about next? Maybe how he hates when uncredentialed strangers knock on his door and ask his wife if they can train dogs on his farm? Maybe a weird poem about that? Oh no, Bill! Bill, no! I was kidding!
D-did my cursed joke somehow cause this? This shit is crazy! This man stopped his book to showcase a two page poem about ungrateful strangers, again with no credentials, who are going to want to tromp your forest and stalk your pond with their dogs. What are you going to say? No? Yes, but I’m going to write poetry about this later?
This can’t possibly happen to Bill often enough he had to turn to poetry. This is a cowardly way of telling one specific duck hunter to fuck off. When local bait shop owner, Butch Goodwin, bought this book to support his friend Bill’s dog writing career he saw this poem and said, “What the fuck? This passive aggressive little bitch. If he didn’t want me pond stalkin’ on his land, he could have just sa– oh, here’s another section on dog tits!”
It’s hard to tell if Bill is full of shit or if he simply leads a uniquely insane and sad life, but here he is casually dropping the fact that his dogs are always running away and at least one of them left him and didn’t come back for years. And he thinks this is a trend! He thinks the future is one where more and more dogs will mysteriously vanish for long periods of time! I wish I could tell you more, but this is all the information he gives. Bill, what do I do with this bolting knowledge? Should I stop shooting birds to protect the future of dog and owner companionship? If I see your dog backpacking through Europe should I call to tell you she’s okay? Do you need the number of a fence guy?
Let’s get serious for a second. We should talk about Bite.
When you’re buying a hunting dog, try to find one whose upper jaw lines up with her lower jaw. If they don’t, she will… hold on, this can’t be right. Tear her babies apart during childbirth? He can’t possibly mea– no, he mentions it a second time. He definitely thinks the main trait to look for in a dog’s mouth is “least likely to rupture puppy bellies.” W-why do so many strange things keep happening to your dogs, Bill?
I wanted to show this somber picture of professional trainer Tom Lovett’s dogs taking some time to honor him and his dead grouse because this next story is very sad. It’s about Bill’s dead dog, but neither of the ones from the book’s dedication (Pooder and Renegade Pepe) or the countless who are missing and presumed bolted (unknown). And it’s not a story about shared love or bird conquest. It’s a story about how you don’t know what you’ve got until it incredibly, impossibly drops dead eating its evening meal like it’s been shot in the brain.
“There are a lot of dead dog stories,” says Bill after irreverently describing the impact of his dead terrier on the carpet. He died alone after a lifetime of rejection, which brings me to a point I’ve been struggling to bring up– this book contains a lot of creative ways to make a dog feel pain.
Bill admires professional trainer Delmar Smith’s ability to bash a dog in the face with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker prying the fingernails off a missing tourist. But even when you do it with the style and finesse of professional trainer Delmar Smith, whipping a dog with a rope knot is sort of barbaric. Come on, Bill. There’s got to be a more sophisticated way to torture a bi– wait, no! Bill, I wasn’t being serious! Oh no, I’ve made another terrible mistake!
Oh good, here’s something unpleasant you can do without rodeo training. You simply tie a nerve cord to your dog’s clove hitch above the carpal joint and it should cause the searing pain you need it to feel so you can properly murder a duck. What’s next, Bill? Are you going to chain a bunch of these dogs together by their nerve endings and abandon them? Oh fuck, why do I keep doing this? Bill, I didn’t know I had this terrible power! Past Bill, please stop putting my dark ideas into your book!
So I don’t know how this happened, but my careless jokes have somehow manifested themselves in the history of this dog author and his long line of missing and deceased pets. These bitches are furious, in screaming nerve pain, abandoned by the master they honored, and I’m worried I did it. Because what’s more likely– someone willingly admitting they did this in a book, or a comedy sorcerer putting an evil time curse on me?
Let me see if I can somehow reverse this. Electric shocks are bad. Electric shocks are a thing you don’t do to problem gun dogs.
Okay, I think it’s working! The pet weapons seem to have been downgraded to a single flyswatter, and Bill is strongly against the electric torture of problem gun dogs. Like very against it. In fact, Bill thinks electricity is ruining outdoor sporting. I think I might have overcorrected. Did Bill just call men who use fish detectors brain-dead Mother Nature rapists? Oh my God, I need to figure out how to calibrate these awful powers. Let’s try to get back to an acceptable level of madness. How about, I don’t know, we put a pigeon in a paper bag until it goes to sleep? And then we clip its toenails until the bird is bloodless? Yes, bloodless! Then we freeze it and place the wretched thing on a magic table! We shall call this sacred rite the Introduction to the Bird!
I mean, that’s nonsense. Impossible nonsense that could never be anything for any reason. Surely this will prove I never had these absurd powers to begin with. I mean, can you imagine thinking I could send ironic darkness back in time and have it manifest itself as a sincere dog torture manual? Ha ha ha ha…
Oh no, it’s real. It’s all real! What else have I done? What unspeakable horrors am I responsible for!? Will I, in this very moment, cause How to Good-bye Depression If you constrict anus 100 times every day. Malarkey? or Effective way? to have existed by saying Problem Gun Dogs is crazier than an ass kegel manual written in broken English? How do I stop it!?
The Japanese version of anything is a beartrap baited with pocky and used panties: It might hurt you, sure, but pocky is sweet and those panties look salty. It’s worth a shot! I would like you to carefully nurture that mindset as I take you through… Japanese Soul Train.
It’s called Soul Tunnels, I guess because that’s what Soul Trains use to get through mountains? That’s actually a perfect title, since this is quite a bit like Soul Train, but not as expansive, way darker, and there will absolutely be phallic things going into dank orifices.
We are in trouble so quickly: The very first thing you see after that shameless ripoff of the Soul Train title sequence is our announcer, DJ Problematik.
I know you’re squinting at all four of those terrible pixels and trying to figure out what you’re looking at. The fake afro could be pretty harmless, but is he…? No, this took place in the ‘90s, surely he’s not in blackface. And you know what? I just can’t tell. The DJ pixels never resolved enough for me to tell whether or not this whole show is an extremely racist reboot of a black institution.
So please allow the host of Soul Tunnels to remove any doubt.
This isn’t just blackface, it’s the worst blackface I’ve ever seen. Klan members tell that guy he doesn’t need the shoe polish AND nose prosthetics. He looks like somebody exaggerating blackface to try and make a point about how bad blackface really is, only he just realized the second he stepped on stage that it still means he’s doing blackface. Is it the laziness that’s most disturbing? The uncolored ears poking out of the sides, the ill-fitting bald cap, the makeup that crudely ends in jagged smears on the neck? This is a man who has done blackface so many times that it doesn’t even give him a thrill anymore. He hastily slaps on racism like I slap on pants so the mailman can’t sue again.
I know the old excuse: That Japan’s relationship to blackface isn’t meant to be offensive, so it’s not offensive. Kind of like how Australians say “cunt” and they really just mean “any human being, anywhere, of any gender or disposition, dead or alive.” But that’s like saying that flashing the mailman isn’t offensive because you didn’t mean to have your dick out — he just happened to be at the bottom of the stairs on Kilt Day. It won’t hold up in court, is what I’m getting at here.
But while the blackface is – oh god, definitely the biggest thing here — there are a lot of other bizarre issues with Soul Tunnels. For example: everyone is wearing costumes that feel like stereotypes I don’t know about Americans, but that the rest of the world thinks are hilarious.
What is with all the cutesy overalls that look more like Adult Osh Kosh B’Gosh than actual farm gear?
Is Disco a hillbilly thing in Japan? Because I would watch a program about Okinawan Disco Hicks and the minor tragedies of their day to day lives as long as the blackface was tastefully done.
It’s either huge toddlers playing farmtime dress-up, or it’s men in suits and dark sunglasses wearing fake afros, like somebody installed a funk mod in a John Woo game.
Here’s the Japanese King of Soul:
Looking like an unsuccessful speedboat salesman. He always shows up with three henchmen dressed just like him, which is to say they’re all dressed like background Robocop villains. It’s the least Soul Train thing I can imagine, outside of an Intro to Business class at a Vermont Community College taught by a divorced, former unsuccessful speedboat salesman.
Every episode of Soul Tunnels opens with the Human Hatecrime in a new crazy costume, and so obviously in blackface that it feels weird even mentioning it. I might as well specify he’s not on fire. He then performs a wacky little skit that always feels like he’s mocking a cultural pun that gets lost in translation. Here he is angrily storming out, freezing in place:
Then dropping to the ground to mime the careful insertion of a microphone into his rectum. It’s so specifically, slowly, grossly done that they actually had to pixelate it:
I don’t know what this is. Is the Japanese phrase for “dance competition” phonetically close to their phrase for “surprise anal”? Even if that’s true, I can think of three skits to better capitalize on that observation, and only one of them needs to be digitally altered for decency. After a solid minute of silent, uncomfortable butt stuff, this Japanese man wearing blackface and Berry Gordy’s pajamas just gets up and goes about explaining the rules of this, again, dancing show.
It’s too bad I was wildly distracted by the second worst mime routine in this article, because I really needed to know those rules. Sometimes it seems like Soul Train, where people just dance for the love of it. Sometimes it’s like Britain’s Got Talent, where bullshit and skill are put on equal footing. And other times it’s like MadTV, if they were allowed to air their first drafts.
It is definitely a competition, but I have no idea who or what to root for. There are very good dancers going so hard they injure themselves…
Have to be carried off-stage…
And then later return to finish their routine, clearly in pain and using a crutch to Hustle.
This is the end of a tragic sports drama. This is the Disco version of collapsing and shitting yourself at the end of a marathon and then not giving up — crawling, screaming, shit-smearing yourself over that finish line as a testament to the human spirit. People are really trying in this competition, when bad dancers do exactly as well by doing nothing except sucking gently to music. Hold on, that’s not fair: Sucking gently and committing race crimes.
These ladies get the same two-minutes of screentime, and they use it to lip sync badly, dance like an unwelcome aunt at a wedding, and run out of shoepolish at the neck.
And yet they made it through, same as the dude that exploded his kneecap so hard he had to scotch tape the pieces back together and crutch-boogie the rest of his routine just so he could have the honor of finishing.
This high drama was wisely saved for the end of the season, but early episodes were more heavily into bad comedy sketches, like the Disco Mime:
Who combined two of everybody’s least favorite things into something worse, much like racism and dry anal.
While the boneless dental assistants absolutely blew up the house:
They clearly cannot dance and aren’t trying, but the audience goes ballistic for them. This has to be a hilarious reference to something I don’t understand, because when the head labtech does the electrocuted octopus:
The crowd loses their shit! There is no explanation! Wearing your work uniform while having a seizure is the least Soul Train thing I can think of, except for maybe receiving a cancer diagnosis by text while standing in line at the bank.
But things really take a turn a few episodes in, when the biggest god damn twist in the world happens. You will never see this coming. You won’t even believe me when I type it.
Soul Tunnels…
Got…
An actual black guy!
He’s not the worst dancer on Soul Tunnels. He does two minutes of moving invisible boxes while trying to dislodge a wedgie. It looks like he’s about to start a dance forty-two times. It’s kind of a freestyle Beavis and Butthead.
And he makes it through!
Listen: He got up there and danced, possibly for the first time ever, while a Japanese man dressed like an old racist ad for cough medicine laughed at him ten feet away. That’s what courage looks like. He deserved this win. Though maybe not the next seven — even though he was so shocked by his victory that he never prepared another dance, they kept putting him through, all the way to the final. Where his brother and his brother’s wife, dressed like they’re making fun of white people, were watching from the crowd.
That’s the only thing he says, and he delivers it like an actor trying to read a line with a typo in it. Like he knows there’s something wrong with what he’s saying but it’s not his job to think about it. It’s such a strange and uneven moment that I am now questioning all of Soul Tunnels. Was I wrong about this whole thing? Was it ever a reality show, or was it a scripted Kaufman-esque spoof of a spoof?
You know what? That’s what we’re going with. This was all a cutting meta-parody that ended with the only black contestant standing next to a hateful caricature of himself, smiling triumphantly because of his ability to do the Funky Forklift for up to two minutes, seven times. Because the other option is that this actually happened.
This post was brought to you by a hot tip from Br_At! Th…thanks?
As fans of the site know, in 1991, a talentless hack named Gregory Godek published 1001 Ways To Be Romantic. It was a poorly edited list of song titles and saccharine cliches useless to anyone except prison guards trying to de-escalate active sex crimes. But it was also a huge hit, so two years later, a less talented hack named Joe Magadatz published his “comedic” take on it: 1001 Ways NOT To Be Romantic. In several minutes, you will fucking hate Joe Magadatz. He is a bottle of novelty Fart Pills who wished to be real on a magic bottle of novelty Fart Pills.
The book claims to be “For Real Men” and “Frustrated Women” and “Couch Potatoes.” Wait, ha ha, did he say Couch Potatoes!? He went there immediately! If the inside of the book is anything like the cover, nobody is safe from the zings of Joe Magadatz who an unattributed quote calls “the Al Bundy of romance– the Homer Simpson of love.” And for a total fabrication, it’s pretty honest. The author absolutely has the sense of humor of a popular sitcom viewer with ordinary interests who strongly identifies with everyman characters. He might be closer to the “Andrew Dice Clay Album Owner of romance– the Bottle of Novelty Fart Pills Joke From Earlier of love,” but the point is he’s what any wacky dad joke enthusiast would call banal and contemptuous.
The back cover has five more unattributed quotes taken from rave book reviews Joe never went on to receive, and there was still some space left so Joe listed some chapter titles. They’re descriptive of nothing other than Joe Magadatz’s pedestrian zaniness. They’re from a production designer’s list of “MICHAEL SCOTT MUG IDEAS — MAYBES.”
This motherfucker named titles in his book “Excuuuuuuuuuuse Me!” and “Go Ahead, Make My Day!” and “Beam Me Up, Scotty” and was proud enough he put them on the back cover without context. He also has chapters called “Burp!” and “Going Bonkers” and “Hooters!” and “Aaaaauuuugh!” because once a writer realizes they’re satisfied with unaltered catchphrases from Saturday Night Live being complete jokes, they are free to simply type random words and sounds, schwing(!) queef ambulance.
Anyway, ugggggggggghhhhh, let’s get started with this bullshit.
Joe opens the book with a very indulgent About the Author section chronicling his adventures in leading an uninteresting life and never learning how to construct a joke. Which is a nightmare since he set out to write a 178 page “NOT!” joke and thinks “parody” means “sincere attempt at recreating the exact same thing but for less pleasant people.”
Joe is governed by one rule: if it has ever been on TV, saying the name of it is humor. In some ways this is a great parody of 1001 Ways To Be Romantic because it’s a panicked author, probably with a weird dick, but definitely out of ideas with 973 entries to go. And like Godek, once Joe has found a structure with modular parts, he will keep adding songs and TV shows until he has strangled all the joy out of it. He will set a joke in a world where “celebrating 7 Days of Superbowl Week” is a thing just to get one more precious step closer to finishing the thing he obviously hates. That’s what comedy is supposed to be, right? A cranky person grinding their teeth through a huge project any idiot could have known would be a nightmare? Anyway, I have several hundred more entries from 1001 Ways NOT To Be Romantic to get to.
Every now and then the book achieves its stated goal through open cruelty or passive aggression. If you think calling your wife fat and decorating your kitchen with pornography are, all by themselves, a complete punchline and set up to a joke, the word for that isn’t “Unromantic.” This is more like the answer to the question, “Ma’am, were there any warning signs leading up to your husband stabbing you?”
This was meant to be a hilarious skewering of a romance guide, but here we are reading a transcription of Jeff Foxworthy’s audio notes. “Note to self: something about The Three Stooges? Come on, Jeff– think.”
This dipshit gave himself the task of listing four cute differences between men and women and this is what he came up with. This is nothing. It’s not possible to say less about men and women than this. Of all the things women don’t do, the funniest ones he could think of were “read on the toilet” and “Air Guitar?” What about celebrating Superbowl Monday? What about celebrating Superbowl Thursday? What about stabbing your wife!?
I’m not actually sure where Joe was going with this. I only wanted to point out he’s wrong about comedy, but also everything. This would be a lazy entry in a book called Dumb, Pointless Things To Say About Drinks. In a book meant to hilariously skewer romantic advice it’s possibly the worst thing he could have written. There’s no whimsy or edge or truth. It’s less than not a joke– if a child found this on a candy wrapper, they’d assume they won some kind of Laffy Taffy Find-The-Jokeless-Wrapper Sweepstakes. Joe isn’t 10% done with his book and he’s already landed on the perfect closing argument for why he is incapable of writing it. He has utterly failed at a task with the lowest of expectations. This line is like an oil technician looking at your car and saying, “I’m going to fuck that big red bird with my ponis.”
From his chapter BURP!, Joe writes “Onion bagels.” as a complete thought. “So true,” thinks a hypothetical reader. “I can’t wait to see what he does for number 126. Oh my God, can you imagine?”
The other thing about Joe is that he’s a pedant. A lot of the book is spent attacking romantic cliches with the smug logic of a FOX News guest explaining how it’s actually the races who are the actual racists. Look at Joe fucking dismember champagne with the weapons of Aristotle. You ladies don’t like burping but you like champagne? Well, ha, let Joe tell you girls something you never knew about bubbles. Oh, and you say want men to help with the cleaning? Then explain why you get so mad at us when we sneak into your home and lick your bathtub spotless, so spotless. Check, um, mate.
Joe Magadatz looked at what he had done and thought, “One hundred forty nine jokes about relationships! That’s got to be a record for an oil technician’s lunch break!”
He began his ritual of dry masturbation on the break room toilet before returning to work when a 150th idea for a relationship joke occurred to him. Desperate to capture fleeting inspiration, he rushed back to his notebook and scribbled down his idea before it was lost to the workday bustle of fucking all those big red birds with his ponis. “Could it be this simple?” Joe said aloud. “Have I cracked the start of my next chapter!?”
The words seemed to glow on the page like a lost treasure. There it was. The perfect joke. The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
If you were wondering how long it would take for Joe to bring up the holocaust and start telling racist jokes: 153 entries. Although it’s hard to call these racist “jokes.” They’re more like racist references. And even that’s not quite right since these aren’t traditional stereotypes. For instance, the intolerant don’t list their grievances with Latinos as “33% of them are bankers.” What Joe is doing here isn’t being racist– it’s suggesting the notion of racism itself is enough to be funny. Like how Eskimos.
“I mean, where’s the challenge in being romantic to a life-sized blow-up Barbie doll?”
– Joe Magadatz, 1993
I wanted to show you this one so you could see Joe’s remarkable decision, in a satire book, to include plugs for real sex devices. Any other writer would have made up a silly, outrageous romantic product, but Joe has chosen to say “Get a load of this wacky thing! Can you believe anyone would pork an inflatable woman? I wouldn’t! I wouldn’t ever! Anyway, here’s how you order one; the ‘Tina’ model has a waterproof milk reservoir in the butt! Don’t trust Tina’s idea of ‘waterproof’!”
Um, and guys, here’s a tip from ol’ Pedantic Joe: if your woman says she wants to be treated like an Equal, ask her if she really wants you to tear off her head and pour her into your coffee. You see, “equal” shares a name with a zero calorie sweetener, and I kill women.
I get we’re only having big laughs here, Joe, but let’s go over the premise. I need a woman who has dated me long enough to have a least favorite tie, but not long enough to introduce me to her parents, for whom she is planning a romantic evening which involves me. And I ruin it by smuggling in an unlikeable necktie. These are the unlikely circumstances that have to come together for this to be anything other than a stupid fuck stringing together random letters, Joe.
I have no notes for these three. Great stuff, Joe. I bet when Joe Magadatz sees a sheet of “I HATE MONDAYS” stickers he genuinely says out loud, “Oh no they gave this to the wrong guy! Ha ha ha, oh man. OH NO.”
Another wacky foible of this kidnapper-vibe scamp is that he seems to think Gregory Godek, author of 1001 Ways to Be Romantic, is some kind of high class sophisticate. Gregory J.P. Godek is the man who gives his wife a “Good for one free pizza, any toppings!” coupon every anniversary. He’s the man who gives his wife a “Good for one small pizza of YOUR choice (because you’va gotta pizza ov’a my heart)” coupon every birthday. He’s fucking trash. But to Joe, Godek is the fanciest of pants. I say all this because it will help you to understand Joe better if you realize he thinks parody means sneering at rich boy shit like “adult” dates who “tolerate sex” and eat at restaurants with silverware instead of “chili gloves.”
Here’s the thing: I’m both a leading genius and the only person who will ever read this book in its entirety, and I have no idea if Joe means “personal computer” or “political correctness,” or why he thinks “Partly Cloudy” is some kind of punchline. This entry, more than any others, is a genuine mystery. Was entry number 403 (buy a pool table) such a struggle his mind gave out? If this was published to give encoded commands to “Unromantics” embedded in our book stores, that would actually explain a lot. I admit I’m making a lot of wild speculations about who Joe is and why he wrote 1001 Ways NOT To Be Romantic, but it’s only because the simplest explanation -a man tried to be funny and missed by this goddamn much- seems too impossible to consider.
You might remember this one from earlier. Joe often returns to the rich comedy well of “You aren’t as pretty as the women I masturbate to, you bitch. You fat bitch.”
You have to consider how when Joe was writing this book, People Magazine gave the title of SEXIEST MAN ALIVE to Nick Nolte (left below). This had to have given average-looking men more unearned confidence than normal, which might explain why Joe feels comfortable implying how fat his wife is so soon after telling his fat wife she’s fat.
Okay, sure, this entry is basically the same as the last two, which are all the same as several others from earlier in the book, but Joe has added a bit of Fat Wife Science to explain how calling your wife fat in mid-February is more hurtful than, say, late-June. It’s still not funny, but all great comedians have to go through a phase where they humorlessly abuse women for a couple decades. I believe it was Mark Twain who once said, “The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue” while giving a thumbs up and then, “Your sad tits, my dear,” while giving a thumbs down.
“I’m barely halfway through this piece of shit book and I’m already so out of ideas I’m listing novelty gifts from novelty gift catalogs,” thinks Joe in a rare moment of self awareness. “Oh, did I do fart pills yet? Let’s see… what else is funny. Beavis and Butt-Head? Okay, but, like, how do I make it work for this book? Let’s see… oh. Oh my god, Joe. Joe you’ve done it again!”
Joe called his publisher and got the answering machine. He screamed, “Fuck you, Geraldine! Fuck. You. You told me you were going to need the advance back if I didn’t get you the 521st and 522nd entry by today? Well, fuck you, I crushed them. A mistletoe belt from a catalog I found, and listen to this, you cow: 522. Not romantic: Beavis and Butt-Head. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. Heh-heh. You’re welcome. I’m keeping the money, Geraldine.”
He hung up, missing wildly and smashing his gross, weird dick. “Bitches!” he blamed.
This is not a gag, but a true story. Earlier in this very article I had a line where I said, “Call Joe whatever you want, but don’t call him… late for dinner!” It’s my standard placeholder for “character makes a dad joke to be determined later,” and then I saw he actually, sincerely wrote it. I know he’s probably still going through his Funny Side Up catalog from 75 entries ago and stealing more ideas, but however he came to be this thing he is, no God or science will ever create a more perfectly terrible sense of humor. Joe Magadatz is a world-class decathlete of funereal zaniness. He is a worst-case-scenario of a person reading bumper stickers out loud in a souvenir shop.
Once he got into the 600s, Joe went all-in on the premise of romance being for uppity snobs and unromance being for the workin’ man. And even that gets shaky. He is a weird, lonely man declaring cultural divides and assigning two groups of people who don’t exist to one side or the other without comedic observation. This book is the gasps of a drowning mind who saw a bottle of fart pills and thought, “This is exactly me! Why didn’t I think of this?” and then fucking found out. Imagine the existential terror Joe must be feeling at this point. Going into this, he was certain he was a “funny guy,” and now reality had proven how wrong he was, 604 times in a row and counting.
“Why won’t the ideas come? Where is my fart pills?” he whispered to his bathroom mirror. “Unromantics prefer steak to swordfish,” his reflection hissed back. “Go type it, you piece of shit. Go tell your readers Unromantics prefer steak to swordfish.”
Joe is so bad at joking, fucking, and writing, this book should have been a tear-soaked polaroid of his penis that says, “Go ahead and let it ruin your day, you fat, frigid bitch. It’s all it ever does. It’s all it will ever do!!! You want swordfish, but I don’t even have steeeaaaak!”
What the shit? This man spent two hundred entries explainin’ how real Unromantics like a little tractor grease on their ‘taters, and now he makes a sudden reference to Cubism and Giacometti? This is not a tone change. This is like stopping a wedding toast to pull off your face and shriek, “Your Trevor has been harvested, Emily and David beasts! Behold our true form!” Unromantics prefer Giacometti? How the, what? I don’t even know what is happening; I guess this one’s for the museum curators who love MADLibs but hate love? But the joke doesn’t work on them either. Does Joe think Alberto Giacometti took so much effort to vitalize the negative space surrounding his figure sculptures to not make passionate love within it!? Ridiculous.
I’m not sure if I’ve made it clear yet, what with all my comedy romping, but of all the troubling things in this book, the most troubling is how Joe Magadatz seems to think it’s the sex part of a relationship that’s particularly unromantic. I’m not saying I have enough to convict Joe of any sex crimes, but it’s suspicious how he finds the idea of any woman enjoying sex to be unthinkably absurd.
If you’re anything like me, you might have thought, “huh?” But assuming this isn’t another coded message for when the Unromantics are supposed to strike, April 15th is the day Lincoln died and the Titanic sank. It’s also the birthday of some other major tragedies– the Boston Marathon, America’s bombing of Libya, and the publishing of The Fountainhead. So, sure, Joe. If you have any of these dates memorized for some reason, you’re right. And as any comedy-head knows, being right about the date many people died is a sure laugh every time. December 8th! Wait, no, the 7th. Sorry I fucked up the joke.
With only 24 entries to go, Joe picked back up his Funny Side Up catalog, selected a random item and literally only contributed the words “Need I say more?” This is like the slowest NASCAR driver stopping after 196 laps to have sex with his sister. You could never have predicted such a total and insane failure, but you guess it sort of makes sense after it happens?
Let Joe make it very clear: he did not buy Sexual Positions: A Sensual Guide to Lovemaking at the, hey look at that, affordable price of $24.95 to share with a lover. Joe is too impish to type the word “tits,” but he absolutely wants you to know he jerked off to this video by himself. Remember 980 entries ago when you thought this would be a lifeless parody of the self-help/romance genre? Well it turned out to be one man’s war on women, and like all men who wage that war, it ended with him giving up, angrily pulling on his own dick to pictures of them, and vowing revenge. How hard would it have been to just do some silly or outrageous versions of those free pizza and backrub coupons?
Oh, he did. And they fucking suck too.
Edit: 11:30am 11/20/2020 Hot Dog reader Joe Dacey discovered something from the transcript of a podcast about “selling disruption” that will make total sense after you hear it: Joe Magadatz, the author of this parody of Gregory Godek’s book, was Gregory Godek himself. That’s how completely and perfectly awful Gregory Godek is.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Adrienne Hisbrook: who prefers IBMs and swordfish and actually likes Brancusi. Haha YOU know what we’re saying!
Very few things about Elvis in 1961’s Blue Hawaii aren’t upsetting, from the way he holds his dog:
To the way he greets his girlfriend after two years in the army: by tonguing down a stewardess, laughing, and saying, “good, she’s jealous!”
The moral of Blue Hawaii seems to be, yeah, Elvis is a dick, but you know you’re horny for him anyway. It’s a thesis that’s outright stated in the last few minutes of the movie when Elvis proposes to his girlfriend by telling her he won’t put her last name on the business they plan to start together.
“In case you didn’t recognize it, that’s a proposal,” he says.
“You’re sure?” his girlfriend asks.
“Well, I suppose I could get romantic about it, but you’d say yes anyway,” Elvis replies. A line so dickish if he were saying it today, he would legally have to exhale a quarter-mile long puff of vape smoke afterward.
It’s like the movie was written by a man whose wife left him for Elvis. I mean, the dudes that wrote Elvis movies obviously weren’t trying too hard in general, as evidenced by the title of the 1965 film Girl Happy.
It’s a movie whose plot involves a mobster hiring Elvis to keep his daughter out of trouble during spring break.
MOBSTER: “Hey, you, the hottest man on Earth, get over here and make sure no one fucks my teenage daughter!”
You’ll never guess what happens, you guys– Elvis falls in love with the mobster’s daughter! It’s cool, though; because Elvis is portrayed as a protector of virginity in his movies. In fact, that’s what leads to the most upsetting part of Blue Hawaii.
The main plot of Blue Hawaii is about Elvis trying to figure out what to do with his life after his return from the army. His parents want him to work for his father’s company, but Elvis wants to do literally anything but that, because he doesn’t want to use nepotism on his Dad’s part to build a career. So, he decides to use nepotism on his girlfriend’s part to get a job at the tourism company she works for.
He ends up leading a tour group that consists of a pretty schoolteacher and her four teenage pupils. His interview for this job consists of the teacher asking, “Do you think you can satisfy a teacher and four teenage girls?” While pretty much winking at the camera.
There’s one teen girl in the tour group who is a horny nightmare. She’s mean and stuck up and tells Elvis to call her Ms. Corbett instead of Ellie, but then three minutes later, she’s hitting on him. She’s got two modes: hate mode and horny mode, which is honestly not that inaccurate of a portrayal of what it feels like to be a teenage girl.
Elvis tries to get Ellie to enjoy herself. He even gives her a little nickname, “Duchess.” There’s a scene where Ellie’s finally like, why won’t you have sex with me? And Elvis says, “I don’t rob cradles.”
“Did you ever see anything like this in a cradle?” She replies, ripping off her dress to reveal…a very modest one-piece bathing suit. Elvis is pretty much like, “Yeah, that looks like a babies onesie, now GTFO.”
However, thirty seconds later, he sings a love song directly into this lovesick teenage girl’s ear.
I think it’s important to point out that Elvis would never have responded to actress Jenny Maxwell’s affections in real life because she was 19, which made her way too old for him. When he met his future wife Priscilla, she was 14 and he was 24. According to her memoir, they divorced because he couldn’t have sex with a woman who had a child. At 19, Jenny Maxwell was divorced with a three-year-old son because the sixties were GRIM.
So at this time — when the movie Elvis was telling the 17-year-old Ellie he doesn’t rob cradles — he was maintaining a real-life relationship with 16-year-old Priscilla through letters and phone calls. He wasn’t a robber of cradles. He was the goddamn pirate king of cradle robbing. Again, whoever wrote this movie fucking hated Elvis (rightfully).
Ellie continues to be mean to her friends and cranky towards Elvis as the trip goes on, until she meets a middle-aged man at a luau whom she hits on right in front of his wife. Even more upsettingly, his wife is just like, ‘get it, girl,’ as the older man tries to drag her onto the dance floor. Movie Elvis, who again hates when older men try to have sex with teenage girls, steps in to defend Ellie’s virtue and ends up punching the married guy right in the face.
This punch leads to the kind of fight that only happens in the movies, where everyone goes nuts and starts hitting each other for no reason and with no affiliation or opposing sides. I don’t know what insane person thinks that if you’re in a bar and you see someone else get punched in the face, your response should be to turn to the person next to you and punch them in the face for no reason. Punching isn’t like sex where you see another person doing it, and you’re like, ‘that looks fun. I should go do that too!’ Except in Blue Hawaii world, where it totally is.
That one punch devolves into a full-blown riot that makes absolutely no sense and ends with Elvis in prison. It was very clearly shoehorned into the movie, so Elvis could sing a sad song about being in jail.
Elvis gets bailed out and returns to tour guiding (a bunch of other things happen because this is wildly only a B-plot in this movie, with the A-plot being a lot of songs about Hawaii and also, I think classism?)
Ellie assumes Elvis punching the married adult man who tried to have sex with her is a declaration of his true and undying love. So she steals her roommate’s outfit and perfume and heads to Elvis’s room at night to throw herself at him again. Her roommates show up and are not at all concerned about finding teenage Ellie in the room of their adult tour guide; they just want their stolen shit back. Now Elvis has three underage girls in his room at night, and he’s like…
Of course, their teacher shows up because guess what, it looks like she’s also horny for this terrible man. She kisses Elvis right on the mouth, and all of her students who are hiding on Elvis’s porch see it. Ellie, in the world’s biggest overreaction to witnessing a man be mildly kissed, steals a jeep, wrecks it, and runs into the ocean in an attempt to drown herself. This movie is rated PG.
Elvis, of course, dives into the ocean and pulls her out, the whole time treating her with tenderness and care because she’s suicidal. I’m kidding. He tells her she needs “a good old-fashioned spanking.” That is a direct quote. Then, even more upsettingly, she agrees with him.
“Maybe I do. Nobody ever cared enough about me, even for that.” She says. And then Elvis proves to the teenage girl he cares about her, via the ass.
That shot fades out, and we close-up on Ellie in a New York City therapist’s office where she’s getting the help she needs for — obviously I’m joking, it fades into a close-up of Ellie’s recently spanked ass. Elvis has fixed the woman by hitting her!
We pan up to reveal Ellie is happily eating breakfast with her friends! And she’s nice to everyone! And they’re nice to her! Who needs Prozac when you could get spanked by Elvis!
And the moral of the story is: if you know a woman with mental health issues, you can slap that shit right out of her. Also, teenage girls really want to have sex with Elvis, but he would never ever have sex with them, only sing them love songs, give them cute nicknames, and spank the crazy right out of them.
If you follow Lydia on Twitter @youknowlydia she will promise never to mention this again.
