Robots fulfill a legitimate need in our society: We have too many jobs and not enough hunter/killers, and those two birds can be killed with one flamethrower. Yes, I am absolutely saying all robots are evil and all humans who build them are traitors to their species — but most of these cyber-Judases at least pretend at respectability. Thereâs something very refreshing about an engineer who openly admits to prototyping a nightmare because they felt the world had wronged them, and it simply made better economic sense to automate their revenge.
Take, for example, the lunatic who built the iCub:
This was not the result of a terrible series of increasingly high-stakes errors — somebody built this monstrosity on purpose. Nobody started off with the best of intentions here. They didnât design the smooth plastic skull faceplate and say âyes, this will comfort my children as they die.â iCub is not the result of a focus panel that accidentally recruited only maniacs who suggested the addition of ever-shifting pink blobs for the eyebrows and mouth. Look how disproportionately long those fingers are. Is there⌠is there an extra joint on those? Fuck you. Zero meetings were had where actual human beings got together and decided that robots would be more approachable if only they had grasping raccoon hands.
iCub is a calculated attack on the abstract concept of safety: It is a pale erasure of a child, its features carefully distorted to best resemble a consortium of ghosts temporarily coalescing together into one body to explain the nature of a curse.
The Demon That Lives Beneath the Apple Store was first developed in 2004, but the iCub team has been working on perfecting the thingâs precise unease ever since. It was conceived of by the RobotCub Consortium of the European Commission’s Cognitive Systems and Robotics program, in case you wanted to jot down the acronym that ends mankind. And it was built at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, which I mention so that the remnants of humanity can pinpoint where to send their time-travelling soldiers.
The IIT says that âCUBâ stands for Cognitive Universal Body, but you might recognize that as horseshit which means less than nothing. Theyâre just hastily backfilling an acronym with the first three vaguely robot related words that came to mind. Because if they explained it actually stands for âCruel and Unyielding Bloodshed,â that would give away the game. They might as well just rip off the human mask and reveal the Snakeoidâs ultimate plan to everyone. And if you think Queen Hissteria enjoys having her timetables fucked with, Dr. SlitheRick, why donât you ask your predecessor, Dr. VenoMichael, why his last thought was âis this what a disintegrator ray tastes like?!â
Here, shake hands with a robot possessed by a babyâs ghost, you idiot:
Woops, you just lost a hand:
Theyâre only just now teaching iCub to monitor its horrible, crushing strength. You know that every warning on a product is only there because some poor jackass actually did it once. We have to print âDO NOT EATâ on silica packets because a dipshit in Oklahoma thought every bag of beef jerky came with a mint. So if these scientists are just now figuring out they have to teach their toddler robot not to strangle, itâs because their toddler robot started strangling.
They knew. They knew this would happen. Look how coy they were about the tiny text hidden in the bottom left of this image:
You can and should try to hide from iCub — not because it will help you survive, but because itâs pretty tough to give a robot an erection and iCub likes foreplay. This machine has a very thorough array of sensors with which to find you:
Oh sweet, it has whatever capacitive tactile sensors are in its âupper body skin.â Guess Iâll take that information to my fucking grave.
Hey, hereâs what it looks like when you first walk into a suspiciously empty lab and ask, âiCub, is that⌠is that you?â
Iâd like to point out that I didnât manipulate that GIF in any way. I pulled that straight from the creatorâs own hype video. If iCub was a valid scientific experiment and not a twisted revenge scheme on the god who took your child, why did you make its bootup sequence look like somebody pissed off Vegeta? Why does the extremely ominous word âAWAKENINGâ crawl across the bottom, if not to warn you of the terrible mistake youâve already made? This is not a âmission to explore the impact of roboticsâ unless youâre being very sarcastic about some of those words.
Oh hey, I just realized you guys havenât seen it move around yet. Did you guess that the IIT gave it an unholy, stuttering crawl?
That looks like something youâd slowly look up to find on the ceiling in a movie whose tagline is âIT CRIES, YOU DIE.â
But if you found the âunstuck from timeâ crawl to be a disconcerting method of locomotion, boy are you fucking fucked:
Yes, theyâre giving this dead-eyed skullfaced stranglebot baby some Iron Man-style jet blasters for reasons that could only be medically diagnosed as âAggressively Suicidal Hyper-Mania.â
Keep your eyes on the skies, Hot Doggers!
Because thatâs where death lives now.
…
This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Neil Schafer: Who was voted âMost Likely to Fuck a Whole Mountain Rangeâ Senior Year, and while he hasn’t succeeded yet, you have to admire the way he tries.
Instant Clowning– it has been a dream for generations ever since man learned you could mask pain and homicidal intent behind colorful make-up. But it wasn’t until 1989 when BE A CLOWN! – The Complete Guide to Instant Clowning was published that it became possible to clown at home without an expensive degree. Ha. I’m kidding with humor, of course, which is one of the tools I acquired from this book. So let us get ready to clown and I hope you are ready for more laughter and also that your body will have enough skin to make my clown wings. Ha, more clown humor kidding.
BE A CLOWN! was written by someone named Turk Pipkin which means his only real choices in life were Clown Author or Hobbit. He chose this, which is an unmitigated disaster. My copy was DISCARDED twice from a Canadian elementary school where it was, according to its library card holder, never checked out. When published, the cover had an actual clown nose you could stick to it, which was probably thrown away by a frustrated librarian immediately. This left a rotting patch of adhesive which has been trapping dust for 31 years and makes it look like a clown was left to die in the frost and only most of him came back. “Honk if you love clowns!” he cackles as the remains of his nose mash to chunky gore between his black and missing fingers. You try to scream, but the sound comes out of the creature’s mouth instead. “No! How? Turk Pipkin is dead!” he shrieks in your voice. You look down at your hands and see they are juggling. “No. B-better… to… die,” your voice tells you from the lipless mouth of Turk Pipkin. This is how all clowns are born. This is how you are born, Turk Pipkin.
Again, I’m using humor jokes to create a reaction of laughter, a technique frequently explained in BE A CLOWN!. Let me show you how it works with a Q – U – I – K T – R – I – K called Balance a Ping-Pong Ball on Your Nose. Someone with your clown training is probably ready to go from the title alone, but what if you’ve never heard of joy or showmanship? What if you are a sadness golem wearing the nose of a dead man underneath the nose of a clown? Turk Pipkin didn’t want to bet on you being anything other than the last one, so he wrote his “wacky” book as if it was coffin assembly software for an industrial robot.
Comedy is a tough thing to teach. There is a kind of science to it, but the more clinical you get about it, the less fun it is. It’s like training a gorilla in taekwondo. After years of hard work you can sort of get it to mimic a spin kick, but that gorilla would have been so much tougher if you just explained how it’s possible to kill things with feet and let it go with its instincts.
Speaking of killing, this book never addresses clowns and their need for blood even in a defensive way. Turk Pipkin should have but didn’t write a chapter called “THERE IS NO NEED TO FEAR US.” He never reassures the reader, “Believe me, putting your tongue through a napkin is quite humorous because of the good surprise, and also believe me: most clowns are not murderers.” I mean, he obviously mentions the first part, but not the second.
It’s possible we weren’t all participating in the running joke about scary clowns in 1989. It wasn’t considered a common enough phobia to have its own name until a year or two later when psychologists coined the term “coulrophobia” which means “fear of stilted men” because ancient Greeks had no word for what today’s missing children know as “clowns.” In 1989, these napkin-tonguing entertainers were apparently perceived as harmless. So harmless, in fact, it wasn’t weird at all for a clown to just be holding a knife on page 11 of your Instant Clowning book with no explanation.
There is no story of how early English clown Joseph Grimaldi would carve meats into joyful shapes for children or how he was always ready to open your mail. It’s simply a picture of a vaguely man-shaped thing in a romper holding a knife next to a basket of human ears. That’s the end of the early English clown history lesson. I actually checked the book’s index to see if there was more information about Joseph Grimaldi. There wasn’t. His only appearances in this book are this picture on page 11 and page 11. I don’t know why it’s listed twice, or why one of them is in italics, but I don’t like it. It’s way too goddamn close to this book winking at me.
And while I’m on the subject of creepy clown book indexes, Turk Pipkin thought fingering someone’s palm during a handshake was something you might be looking up.
For a clown, a “Tickling Palm with Finger” handshake is a quick way to let your new friend know you’re going to do some weird sex stuff with their body before you dismember it. Even Turk Pipkin knows this is pretty fucked up. So after he explains how to do it, which isn’t complicated and takes way longer than you might imagine, he tags it with a one-word sentence: “Creepy!” This is a rare moment of self-awareness for Turk Pipkin, who doesn’t often notice the creepiness of invading people’s personal space in monster make-up to perform mechanical comedy routines. And even when he does consider the creepiness of what he does, it seems to be in jest? Here’s a great example: in the section helping you pick “a good clown hat” by making sure it is “any hat that feels good on your head” he warns the reader not to get into The Cabbie’s car, presumably because he’s dangerous. That’s it; that’s the entire bit. It’s a fucking weird book and sometimes it knows it is the point I’m trying to make.
One thing I learned about clowns, aside from how they tongue napkins in a surprising and side-splitting way, is how they like a struggle. In the chapter on AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION, Turk Pipkin shows how to stage a wacky tug-of-war or human centipede (pictured), and the most important advice he gives is to find people who don’t want to participate. There’s no fun, no sport in that. You want them reluctant. “And don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” This fact wasn’t included in the index, but it’s absolutely true that no clown can get an erection unless someone is begging their colorful penis to go flacid.
Again, I am doing comedic joke gags on the idea of clowns being sex criminals and murderers. Like an overly licked napkin or comfortable hat, it is very funny and wins sure laughs, but is there truth to it? Let’s find out by building a test we can take at home. First of all, I think we can all agree anyone explaining satire and parody is a psychopath. And I think you should always be worried if someone’s first instinct when asked to explain something is to pull out a gun. So with these rules established, if I was to show you a page from a clown book explaining satire and parody and immediately doing so with a handgun, you would have to admit something was wrong. Well, checkmate, clown apologists:
What the fucking fuck are the circumstances where someone sees a clown pull out a gun and thinks, “Oh, fun. A comedy marksmanship show at my child’s birthday.” You think there’s a punchline at the end of that worth sticking around for? The punchline is your children are shot. This is the stupidest way to die. When the police find out you didn’t run away when the clown pulled the gun, they write up your death as a suicide. I went into this thinking, “I am a unique voice in the Internet hilarity landscape. I certainly won’t do anything as basic and predictable as make 1300 words worth of murderer jokes about this clowning book,” but are you kidding me with this shit? If you’re telling me Turk Pipkin, the author of BE A CLOWN!, has less than 15 dead people in his freezer, I will tell you to count the parts again and you will say, “Oh shit, he’s right– this is way more than 150 fingers.”
In cinema, there is a thin line between âinspirational taleâ and âgrotesque mockery of everything we hold sacredâ and if you donât know what I mean, go back and watch American Beauty. In 1999, millions of upper-class white dudes gazed tearfully at Kevin Spacey and whispered, âWhen I look at that man, I see myself.â Though I guess they werenât wrong.
What Iâm trying to say is that maybe we shouldnât be relying on Hollywood to teach us inspirational lessons at all. Your favorite powerful movie monologue was probably written by someone who had to stop half way through to google, âtroubleshooting adult pet tiger after cocaine injected into penis.â But, uplifting stories sell tickets, so every filmmaker is required to have in their mind some vague shape of what a meaningful story looks like. After that, theyâre kind of relying on the actorsâ charisma and a stirring score to hide the fact that their movie has no idea what itâs saying.
In a blockbuster, the result is usually merely vapid (âYour heart is free,â says Braveheartâs dad, âhave the courage to follow itâ) but sometimes you end up with a straight-to-video underdog sports movie about NBA great and legendary weirdo Dennis Rodman training a team of basketball dwarfs. This is not a photoshop:
I mean, it is, but itâs for a real movie. The Minis, which was at some point re-released as Little Hoop Dreams, is a 2007 film in which Rodman, who in real life became extremely wealthy due to a combination of remarkable rebounding ability and marketable personality disorders, plays himself. He is recruited to help the aforementioned men with dwarfism win a basketball tournament and by all rights this should have been the last underdog sports movie ever made before the genre was banned via some kind of international treaty. The film has been out for thirteen years and has no Wikipedia page.
Just to be clear, whatâs hilarious about this movie isnât that it features dwarfs doing things. The way these actors have traditionally been treated by Hollywood is some bullshit. Theyâre forced to pick their projects based entirely on which whimsical fantasy creature they want to play next and if you think Iâm joking, take a gander at the IMDB of one of the most prolific actors with dwarfism, Warwick Davis: In his career he has played characters named Sniff, Wicket, Lickspittle, Weazel, Flitwick, Weeteef, Nikabrik, Bopkin, Grildrig, Glimfeather, as well as the occasional unnamed âElfâ and âLeprechaun.â Heâs not in this movie, but you get my point â every member of The Minis cast was probably thrilled to have a part that didnât require six hours in a makeup chair before filming a scene in which they cackle while stealing a baby.
The opening credits of The Minis plays over a hip-hop(?) song that you quickly realize actually seems to be about dwarfs playing basketball? Sample lyrics:
I really wanna be a big player
Mini get it on the court, come closer
You wanna be a giant like me?
Take the ball and prove you can be
âŚ
Little man when youâre dribblinâ low
Then bustinâ it back to front
Come on do what you came to do
Weâre gonna play b-ball together
Yeah, it turns out that every song on this filmâs soundtrack was composed specifically for the film and every fucking one is absolutely about basketball-loving dwarfs. Each was written by Valerio Zanoli, who also wrote, produced and directed this film. There is an excellent chance that The Minis started as a concept album about dwarf basketball and the movie was merely supplementary material.
We then cut to Roger and Chevy, a pair of middle-aged men with dwarfism playing basketball on a city court in L.A. A group of evil, also-middle-aged anti-dwarf bullies come along and taunt the protagonists. Why bother playing basketball, they sneer, when you are so short? Youâve seen underdog sports movies before and so had Mr. Zanoli â this is the part where we reveal the ignorant prejudice that our heroes must overcome. It is also cruelly true to life: in twenty-first Century America, success does in fact require winning the support of guys who look exactly like this:
Chevy replies to the bullies that Roger is a great shooter, regardless of height, and that heâll prove it. Then Roger shoots and ⌠misses so badly that the ball is wedged behind the hoop.
So this story, ostensibly about how prejudice unfairly holds back certain groups, goes out of its way to point out that prejudice is in no way the obstacle in this particular case. The protagonists are simply not very good at basketball, despite unfettered access to all of the necessary equipment and facilities. The existing system, this film says in its opening minutes, is a meritocracy that is functioning perfectly. Or, at least, it was.
Roger then goes to a different court to watch his normal-height teenage son play a basketball game of his own. His son also sucks and, after an embarrassing turnover, a (different) bully taunts him with, âLike father, like son.â So in the universe of this film, Roger the dwarf is so bad at basketball that 1) he is infamous around the Venice Beach basketball scene and 2) has shamed his entire family.
His son runs home crying, disowning his father (calling him âRogerâ instead of âDadâ) and telling him that he was just rejected for a basketball scholarship, presumably because his father has done such a shitty job of imparting to him any kind of basketball-friendly genes or skills. Roger then sullenly sits on the sofa and gazes at a framed photo of his son being sad about basketball:
Roger soon stumbles across a flier for the First Annual Venice Beach Basketball Tournament, seemingly taking place on the same famous courts featured in White Men Canât Jump (side note: if you stumbled across The Minis on cable, youâd assume you were watching a White Men Canât Jump porn parody in which all of the fucking is merely implied yet also unspeakably graphic). The first prize is $50,000 and Roger notes that this would be enough to pay his sonâs college tuition. End of Act 1.
Roger needs a team of five for the tournament and recruits two other middle-aged friends who also have dwarfism, reminding them that all they need to do is believe in themselves. The pair note that they have not played basketball since they were children but agree to join because, as one of them says, they have nothing else to do. This will remain those charactersâ only motivation for the rest of the film.
We then cut to a montage of all of the men practicing and failing so hilariously that it appears theyâve never even heard of the sport of basketball, let alone played it. They chuck one-handed shots that sail over the backboard. A simple pass hits Roger right in the cock.
I should note here that easily 60% of this 75-minute movie is montages and each montage is set to a different track about dwarfs playing basketball. Itâs basically a rock opera. Sample lyrics from this sequence:
Here we go (garbled) this Roger guy
He used to play b-ball in Junior High
But now they donât have style, they donât have grace
Trippinâ and bumpinâ all over the place
People say, they canât play just because they look that way
So heâs small, theyâre not tall
Theyâll bounce, dunk and dribble to show them all
You lying motherfucker. No one is saying they canât play ball because, âThey look that way.â People are saying they canât play because theyâd be lying if they said anything else. These men havenât developed even the limited physical gifts they possess.
Itâs after this disastrous practice that the four decide that their chances in the tournament would be improved if their fifth player was both very tall and also an all-time basketball great. As luck would have it, Dennis Rodman just happens to be in the neighborhood. They ask for his assistance and eventually Rodman and these four horrendous basketball players wind up in the office of Rodmanâs agent.
Thatâs what they had in the script, anyway. For reasons that may or may not involve Rodman forgetting he was in the movie, this scene about the three involved parties talking around a conference table is actually cobbled together out of shots of the agent, Rodman and the dwarf team that were clearly filmed in three different locations on three different days. All of the shots of Rodman are generic facial reactions that I think were filmed without his knowledge:
The agent dubs the team âThe Minisâ and itâs time for another montage, this one involving Dennis watching the men do calisthenics on the beach. To this day I am 100% sure that Rodman believes all of this was just one of his less disturbing hallucinations.
The original track that plays here is either about dwarf basketball or a school shooting (They made fun of us in high school / they stepped on us, we were the fools / but now weâre gonna make âem pay / the Minis are gonna have their way). It is revealed here that the Minis, in addition to being bad at basketball, are also in very poor physical condition and struggle with basic exercise. The tournament is two months away.
At this point, I suspect that something like twenty minutes of film was lost in a suspicious fire. Just five minutes after the above scene, we get another montage about how the Minis, over the course of a couple of weeks, have become wealthy international superstar athletes. As far as we the audience know, the five have not played a single game of basketball against anyone, or even practiced as a team. Yet, we get a song about how great it is to be a famous basketball-playing dwarf (âYou got the fame, you got it all / You got the life, now play b-ball / You made it big though youâre tiny / I wanna be like a Miniâ) over a montage of The Minis appearing on magazine covers all around the world:
The film quickly rushes through a series of subplots. Chevy wants to date a tall woman, shunning the attention of a woman with dwarfism. Rogerâs son says he hates basketball and wants to go to clown school in Paris. Roger responds that they can send him to any college he wants, because now they have more than enough money even without a scholarship, thanks to their Minis-related windfall-
Wait. Back the fuck up.
This characterâs entire motivation was winning the basketball tournament to earn the $50,000 to send his kid to college. And here, a mere forty minutes in, heâs done it. They just mention this in passing, like everyone involved kind of just forgot the filmâs inciting incident. No time to dwell on it â there is another training montage (minus Rodman, who again apparently failed to show up to the set) showing that the Minis are now good at passing and making shots, as long as there are no defenders on the court.
The screenwriter knew that around here is where the heroes are supposed to hit some kind of speed bump in their progress, so he awkwardly inserts a dispute triggered by the agent suggesting the Minis do a series of endorsements to cash in on their fame. Most of the men refuse, because they donât want to sell out. But ⌠wait ⌠they werenât doing endorsements before now? Then how did they make all of their money? From the merchandise? I mean, itâs Dennis Rodman and four dwarfs, what else could they ⌠oh god. Oh god, no.
No time to dwell on this, either, as the Minis reconcile literally four minutes after their breakup. Itâs tournament day!
Courtside, the announcer notes that despite the tournament being open to anyone, only eight teams have qualified and the Minis are among them. Let me remind you that in fifty-two minutes of movie, these five players have still never taken the court together, not even for a scrimmage. Maybe the idea is that Rodmanâs fame was enough to get them in? Eh, Iâm sure whatever group of inner city street ball players they displaced couldnât have used the $50K.
We learn via montage that the Minis win their first game because Dennis Rodman utterly dominates the amateur competition. Itâs around here that you realize the true underdogs of the story are the other players whoâve spent their entire lives honing their craft, only to find themselves humiliated by a millionaire and a team of novices who showed up because one of them walked past a flier. Meanwhile, hereâs what the soundtrack says as we watch Rodman dunking over those sad fuckers:
You canât keep the little man down
âbout to do this like Iâm a terminator now
Small but fly, you canât pace us
Stakes are high, you canât erase us
Gonna dribble you out, then play stainless
Side note: The single best experience you can have with a movie is watching The Minis and imagining the soundtrack is sarcastic. Advancing to the tournamentâs final four, the Minis immediately play the next game and, again, win easily, this time the dwarfs hitting open shots because the other teamâs defense collapses on Rodman. A new song plays:
You know we really donât care what people say
We know weâre gonna b-ball anyway
Donât think weâre scared, Iâm gonna tell you why
Weâre gonna make the big boys cry
What? No one tried to stop you from entering this tournament, even though they absolutely should have! The only people in this whole movie who told you not to play basketball were the bullies at the beginning and theyâre not even here. If anyone is being treated unfairly, itâs the opponents who paid their dues on the courts but never got magazine covers out of it, then had to watch as Dennis Rodman, no shit, scores the winning shot by picking up Chevy and throwing him at the hoop:
With that, the Minis have advanced to the final game, which weâre told will be played the following day. Everyone goes home and the editor, realizing they didnât film anything close to enough movie, slaps together yet another training montage from unused footage. Itâs seriously just a bunch of clips of the actors fucking around in their driveway. Then we get a shot of Chevy driving around in his massive new Hummer SUV, which is another scene intended to emphasize that their lucrative-but-unspeakable side hustle has rendered the tournament and its prize money utterly irrelevant to everyone involved.
The final game arrives, against the âVenice Vipers.â The poor bastards playing the Vipers do their damnedest to sell the idea that they could plausibly lose one-on-one matchups to players with zero athleticism or skills who are literally three feet shorter than they are. The editor rapidly cuts around shots of the action as not to linger on moments like the one below, in which three flat-footed defenders kind of stand back and let Roger shoot, condescendingly going through the motions like a parent playing with a toddler. âYay! You made it!â
Mr. Zanoli knows that in the sports movie template, the underdogs need to suffer some kind of crushing blow right at the finish line that they must overcome with heart and teamwork. Thus, the scoreboard says the Minis are down by four when Dennis Rodman suffers a knee injury. The minis will have to learn how to play without him! The movie almost makes sense!
Wait, no. Rogerâs son â the one who sucks at basketball and hates it, who wants to go to clown school, inexplicably shows up dressed in a clown outfit with a Minis uniform over it. Heâs going to step in and help the team win. Oh, he hasnât suddenly become good at basketball or anything â the actor actually does that thing where he has to look down while he dribbles so he doesnât bounce it off his foot âŚ
⌠but he makes the tying shot because the other team kind of just lets him? Thereâs no sports movie Chekhovâs gun that was foreshadowed earlier, no equivalent of the Karate Kidâs crane kick or Pedro Cerrano learning to hit the curve. The worse basketball players come back against the better basketball players for no reason whatsoever. The game is now tied and they call timeout to draw up the potential game-winning play. Whatever you think is about to happen next, Iâm telling you that youâre fucking wrong.
Without any discussion or any previous indication that the following is possible, the Minis start glowing with golden dwarf magic and climb on each otherâs shoulders to dunk the ball.
It takes them a full minute of screentime to assemble themselves this way and if youâre wondering how they had time to do that, itâs because one of the Minis drilled an opposing player in the scrotum with his elbow and the other four members of the Venice Vipers were busy quadruple-teaming Rogerâs son, perhaps mistaking him for Dennis Rodman.
The referees then take the court and wave off the basket, since that play did in fact violate several rules of basketball and at least two city ordinances. Rather than award the ball to the other team, the ref just declares the Vipers the winner(?). Then Dennis Rodman shows up again and says that it doesnât matter that they lost, because they have gained something far more important: Popularity with the crowd, which is now chanting their name. A child in the audience turns to his father and says, âWhen I grow up, I want to be a dwarf!â Credits roll as that line ricochets around your skull.
So, there are two possibilities here and they are equally tragic:
A) The entire message of this movie is a sarcastic âfuck youâ to the entire concept of âbelieving in yourselfâ mattering at all;
B) Our screenwriter made it to the climax of the story and himself realized that there was no plausible way to have these guys achieve their goal, even within the incredibly forgiving rules of a genre in which you can tell the audience âangels helped themâ and nobody will blink.
Now, as some of you know, I write novels for a living and have a novel coming out this year called Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick, about a team of con artists with PSYOPS training navigating a future full of superpowered lunatics. But my goal with these books is to make enough money that I can retire and do an oral history of The Minis. I expect the project to take decades and it will require me to learn Italian in order to do the research.
Hereâs a taste: The trivia section on Amazon says, âIn Italy, the film teamed up with the number one sports newspaper, radio station and theme park. It had promotions with companies such as Yahoo! and McDonaldâs.â It also notes that the Italian dubbing was done by various famous soccer stars. On YouTube, you can watch the trailer for the video game tie-in that apparently actually existed in some form:
What Iâm saying is that there is an alternate universe in which this movie became the next Space Jam and I wonât quit until I can build a machine that will let me go live in it.
A lot of hyperbole gets thrown around on the Internet. You may have heard, even from me, how a movie is the worst ever or a video game is an actual AIDS golem built by Hitler’s colon polyps. So I understand if you don’t believe me when I tell you this is the most problematic book I own. You aren’t ready for it. It’s “Upsetting Day” on a comedy website built by two men who grew up in an era where a stand-up special was just Denis Leary coughing into a crippled person’s mouth for 40 minutes and calling it Learn to Walk, Wheelie: The World Fuck You Tour, and there’s still no way you’re ready for it. Okay, unprepared readers, let’s look at How to Get Along with Black People.
You may already be worried this book was written by two whites who have spent enough time around African Americans that they think they have permission to say it. About that, I can set your mind at ease. It was written by two intelligent, sometimes silly black women who graduated from Ivy League law schools. But it was published 49 years ago, and we don’t even have adjectives left in circulation to describe how different racism was in 1971. In 1971, you could still get a near-mint Whites Only trampoline. In 1971, the government could still ship black neighborhoods to Vietnam. And in 1971, people still asked Bill Cosby to do the foreword for their book. This is going to sound like I’m making a weird joke, but he starts by helping you feel more comfortable with racial slurs, then encourages you to try them out when firing black subordinates. I personally wouldn’t listen to him, but I’ll let you decide for yourself:
When you’re writing a book about race relations in 1971, you need to approach it with tact and understanding. This one opens with a rapist using the n-word, so if fixing racism has any kind of a fail condition, these women are charging pretty hard toward it. There is no way to safely test this theory, but I don’t think you would get along better with any black people by telling them, “You might think I don’t understand your struggle, but as Bill Cosby once said, gulp, THE N-WORD WITH AN R, you’re fired!”
The least a white can do is try to be self-aware of all the racism built into us and work to undo it. You should be constantly annoyed at the racism you find in dusty corners of your neural map. For instance, when I go to Habesha restaurants, I always order kitfo, a traditional Ethiopian dish that makes all American dishes look like stupid pussies. It’s a pile of raw meat served on a pancake with a side of cheese. I would eat it every meal. But still, after all these years of overeating kitfo, when I hear “Ethiopian food” the first thing my brain conjures is not the hundreds of delicious raw meat pancake tacos I’ve stuffed into myself– it’s Michael Jackson and Kenny Rogers singing together so crates of grain make it to desert baby hobo camps.
I’m pretty sure when I first heard the words “Ethiopian” and “restaurant” together I pictured a kitchen filled with starving toddlers heating up UN rice in disarmed landmines. My point is, this racism was branded onto the inside of our skulls as children and we have to always be watching for it. And it is with this vigilance I stopped reading How to Get Along with Black People every few paragraphs to think, “I am fundamentally more racist after reading these things.” My daughter said her first words to me during this book and they were, “Honkie, this advice is going to backfire.”
For the first 25 or so pages, How to Get Along with Black People is a light-hearted comedy routine about stereotypes which I recognized as a trap. Giving white people permission to laugh at racial stereotypes is how we got Zach Braff. Plus, this book’s authors are lawyers, not pioneering voices in comedy. They can’t navigate the complexities of these issues like someone who has, say, seen Dolemite 2: The Human Tornado 68 times. And as that someone, I have a note. Don’t call one of the chapters in your book on racial harmony ‘EENY-MEENY-MINY-MO (WHAT TO CALL “THEM”).’ I typed those words one sentence ago and I’m already getting targeted ads for Jordan Peterson videos and something called “Lawn Cross brand lighter fluid.”
The most unbelievable part of the book, and I haven’t forgotten about the Cosby hard R n-word incident, is “The Integration Index.” It’s a list of all the types of blacks, how “white” they are, and how you can spot them. They’re each categorized by a silly name like a READY RICHARD, who is a middle-aged man “found with whites when he can manage.” The READY RICHARD, and please understand the rest of this sentence is a direct quote, “prefers ‘Negro’ but will answer to ‘colored.’ He tends to be lighter-skinned.” This reads like a handbook for a Kentucky militia to help distinguish between enemy hostiles and the good ones, but it was published by educated women of color in an effort to undo intolerance. Which is very much like writing a book called Safe Woodworking Projects and only including knock knock jokes about sawing your dick off.
The other “portraits” in the Integration Index are HUSTLIN’ SAM, a dark-skinned huckster who can trick the whites into thinking he’s one of them. There’s also KWAME JONES who adopts African traits but can be found in all-white corporations. GHETTO JIM is a servant or a day laborer– “the black whom whites know best– and least.” I could feel every syllable of it making me a worse person; plus, I have no idea where I’d apply this knowledge. Are these conversation starters? If I meet a black stranger am I supposed to say, “I’m an Aquarius, so I get along best with a GRANDMA CHURCH-HAT or a THUNDERCOCK JENKINS. Which are you on the Integration Index? Or, oh! Oh!! Can I guess!?” It’s becoming more and more clear I don’t understand any of this, but I remain confident you shouldn’t open a book intended to make white people more inclusive with a funny 4 Blacks You Meet At Every Cookout list.
As the book goes on, there is a pretty serious tone change. It starts to complain about the cliche things caucasians do and say to them and absolutely stops even trying to be cute. Discussing and researching the subject matter seems to have exhausted the authors’ patience for our white bullshit. And fair enough. There is a tiny Zach Braff inside each of us, desperate to get included in a complicated handshake or given permission to wear blackface for a Scrubs cutaway. So I get we suck, but look at what that contempt for us did to this book. It turned an artifact of pure insanity into an academic study of the harsh truths of our hypocrisies:
In the end, this book promising you an exciting life of diverse friends turns into lecture on all the ways you’ve hurt people with your ignorance. It makes a strong case for how the well-meaning white is nature’s most obnoxious animal. Even assuming every white person was trying to not be racist, and history has shown this to be closer to the opposite, there were about 178 white Americans for every 22 black Americans when this was published. Which means in 1971, every African American had to be someone’s first black friend eight different times. They had to field the same stupid questions and hear about the same stupid Scrubs gag eight different times– at least. Meeting nice caucasians seems like running into a different crazy ex at every party you go to, and not being able to talk to anyone else until you’ve fixed them. Maybe? The one thing I definitely learned from How to Get Along with Black People is no one likes it when white people offer observations like this. Anyway, happy Upsetting Day to people of all colors from the obnoxious well-meaning whites of 1-900-HOTDOG!
I was born a heathen and Iâll die a heathen, probably in some kind of heathening accident. I donât know anything about the Bible. If I wanted a story about unlikeable characters doing shitty magic and learning self-evident lessons Iâd watch The Magicians. And I did watch The Magicians until they softened up Penny and he became unfuckable, so what do I want with the Bible? But one thing I do understand is cartoons, and there are more cartoons about the Bible than there are about talking animals and friendship put together. Now, they might be old news to you, but being raised entirely outside of its influence, Iâm learning about famous Bible tales for the first time and they are very upsetting. Especially the way theyâre portrayed in The Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible — an animated, kid-centric series about the gnarliest parts of The Old Testament. Itâs brought to you by Charlton Heston and lax Chinese labor laws, though I think one of those things is a lie. Letâs see if you can guess which one by the end!
Why not start with the episode on Sodom and Gomorrah? I love Sodomy, and Gomorrah is my second favorite Guardian of the Galaxy. But apparently to get to that story, we have to start with Abraham:
Abraham looks like Steve Perry with a wicked Synthwave aesthetic, and you know I love that, but thereâs only so long I can watch him wander the Farmerâs Market and attend lackluster raves:
I know that was probably a fuckinâ rager back in Ye Olden Times, but party technology has advanced so far — a fully clothed woman waving wheat in the air barely gets me hard anymore.
If this show is accurate to the Bible, then the good book really needs some pacing feedback. We spend fully half of the run-time of this episode just following Abraham around while he knocks things off his chore list. He starts looking into real estate, and God just hovers over his shoulder for twenty straight minutes telling him which neighborhoods have good parking. These days we lament the questionable absence of God in our lives, but He was a hell of a micromanager back in the day. I suppose itâs a bit like playing an RTS game: In the early stages God has like eight guys and heâs invested in every one. Clicking them out into the Fog of War one tile at a time all worried thereâs an orc in those woods. Cut to a few thousand years later and heâs got the whole map churning out support units and thereâs just no way he has the mental space to give a shit about each and every one.
Hey look at that: five hundred words in and weâre already having a crisis of faith and thatâs before Iâve even told you this is a musical. One with rock riffs so tired they were written by a Phil Collins Ambien-daymare, crudely rapped over by a child who had to look up ârhymingâ in a soiled dictionary only to find half the definition was illegible, all while we cut to stock landscape footage of out of an Uzbek karaoke video.
When Abraham built an altar I figured it was about to get interesting, since thatâs the turn in every horror movie. But no, they just laid an extremely cute lamb on it:
And skipped the âprepâ section of the recipe:
If I were writing it, this would be the point in the story where it turns out they got the altar address wrong and didnât appease their own god, but did accidentally anger the Ram God. Yep, this was all a surprise prequel to The Silence of the Lambs called The Roaring of the Goats. The rest of my soundtrack would just be more bleating and screaming and meatslapping than the last half of Baskin, but in Abrahamâs world, burning a cute animal doesnât do much more than explain why you should never leave Steve Perry impersonators around unattended pets.
Letâs just jump to several decades later, because nothing much of import happens: God promises Abraham a son because his wife is barren, but thereâs no mystical birth – he just meant Abe should start banging the maid. Turns out Abrahamâs wife hates this for some reason, and takes it out on the girl. The maid flees, only to be told to return to her dangerous situation by Ricky-Joe the Domestic Abuse Angel. Everybody lives in a tent for seventy years and it is only through Godâs grace that they arenât riddled with scabies by the time âthe Lord and his angels appear in the guise of three ordinary men.â
Which is to say that three dudes wandered into camp and, when asked if they were gods and âwould like their feet anointed,â answered âsure thing, buddy.â Thatâs just Drifter Code right there: Never turn down a footjob, no matter who offers. While Abe initiates some toeplay with what is clearly an opportunistic hobo, the two angels wander off to massacre a town for ill-explained reasons, as is, again, the Drifter Code.
Well that seems like a perfect segue into a jaunty song break!
Despite this episode being titled Sodom and Gomorrah, thatâs all we see of either. They get forty seconds of airtime, then explode and are completely forgotten, just like Tricky in The Fifth Element.
Letâs check in with Abraham and his 90 year old wife, who is now giving birth:
That sounds like a scene theyâd cut from a Cronenberg script, but this religious cartoon for children is totally cool with exploring geriatric genital genocide. Because this is a miracle birth ordained by God, the child, Isaac, lives to be just old enough to understand dark irony before God appears again, all drunk and needy.
âI must know if you love me, Abraham,â he slurs, âif I am first in your heart.â
Iâve played the game long enough to recognize that kind of addled desperation. This here is a booty projection, isnât it, God?
To prove his devotion, God asks Abraham to kill Isaac, and hey — did you guess that the grim walk to burn your son on the whim of an insecure madman was a rad spot for another song break?
It is pretty impressive that the show manages to set a chill guitar riff to immolating a child — thatâs a rare skill set only featured here and on Danzigâs solo acoustic album: Danzig With Myself.
Abe builds the altar and places Isaac upon it, and something in the Chinese sweatshop children animating this must have really resonated with the idea of a father sacrificing his kid due to forces beyond his control, because they drew the hell out of Abeâs grief. Nothing says âthe unexplainable sadness of burning my boyâ like this face, which I call âhalibut getting a colon exam.â
Of course an angel descends to stay Abrahamâs hand, but only once theyâre absolutely sure he was really going to do it. Like this was all a mean-spirited prank whose punchline is âwatching parental love die in your childâs eyes.â God just jumps out from behind a cloud, busting a gut like âhahaha, holy shit! You were really gonna do it! I canât believe you were actually going to do it. You shoulda — pffthahah — you shoulda seen your face! Y-you were hgghkkhahaha — you were all:â
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This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Dean Costello:Â The Meanie of Weanie, the First Chair Cello of Hot Dog Jello.
If you don’t understand or accept your gay son, you’re probably not used to good news, but I have some: there’s a book called HOW TO UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT YOUR GAY SON (Even if you’re not sure you can). It’s the perfect guide for someone absolutely repulsed by basic human decency, but also willing to read a book on it.
HTUAAYGS(Eiynsyc) spends most of its 155 pages answering tough questions a proudly ignorant person might ask a gay expert. It’s a best-case scenario debate between the world’s most patient person and the bronze medal winner in the Gay Son Hating Olympics. These hypothetical interactions were mashed together into a vaguely book-like structure by a gay couple in… holy shit, 2015!? This wasn’t written from an Arkansas AIDS pandemic in the ’80s? It seems impossible that while we were watching the Night’s Watch and the Wildlings form an uneasy alliance, there were people driving to the suburbs and telling the Barnes and Noble clerk, “Maybe y’all can help me out. I found a penis in the boy’s mouth and, well, before I put him down I was lookin’ for the latest instruction manual on gay.”
Here are, word for word, some of the obvious questions answered by HTUAAYGS(Eiynsyc):
You probably guessed the answer to most of these questions is something close to “no,” but much closer to “no, you goddamn psychopath.” The book tries to take irrational hate and fear and respond to it rationally, which is kind of satisfying and seems like it should work, but you can obviously look around and see how it doesn’t. For instance, if you believe a 680-year-old man named Noah built history’s largest zoo on a cruise ship using year đŚ´7đ⼠technology, you don’t change your mind when you enter second grade and find out everything about it is fucking stupid. And if “the God” told you your gay son was an unnatural pedophile, you don’t tell that God to fuck off because a book goes, “Actually, in several functional ways that’s not technically accurate.”
My point is, I’m not sure how effective this book will be at fixing bigot dads. Not only because of the nature of the problem, but because these authors might not be experts on gay culture. For one thing, they say in their book there is “strictly speaking” no such thing, but also look at the gay son on the cover. Are you telling me a gay teen showed up to picture day with no product in his hair? And look at how it’s been cut. That’s worse than cheap– this kid stuck his bangs in a carnival ride and told them to let it rip. The gayest thing this kid has ever done was ask his mom if he could buy the WWE 2K Randy Orton DLC. Which means the publisher did not set up a cover shoot with an out-and-proud teen model– these assholes scrolled through stock photos until they found a kid who looked kind of gay. It’s probably as tone-deaf as asking your son if he’s a bottom, and gave me more than enough bread crumbs to find their source.
The cover comes from an Adobe stock photo called “Mother and Son Smiling in an Outdoor Setting” which was also used, and this is true, by a military school for troubled teens and a software company specializing in apps that prevent truck drivers from looking at their phone. And like with all stock photo shoots, the models moved around doing weird shit for a few more pictures. Which means the rest of the article is just this:
