Category: UPSETTING DAY
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Sucker Punch punches. Fuck. Starting over.
I keep my top five weaknesses to myself—I handwrite too many duel invitations. But here’s six and seven: my memory is vapor, and I’ve got a teensy humility problem. What do pride and amnesia have to do with Sucker Punch? Simple. To write these articles, I rewatch Sucker Punch each time.
It doesn’t change.
Though my environment does. I’m wasting nature’s fleeting gifts for Sucker Punch.
Spring is in golden bloom. It’s Earth’s last embrace before killing us. The local skatepark’s layout almost makes sense, my neighbors are aspiring actresses, and my ass is inside watching Sucker Punch like it hides the grail. Because I can’t remember Blonde Marionette no. 2’s name or Google it like an adult.
Right. I see why I forgot: Sweet Corn gets the lines of a Sucker Punch deuteragonist, and reads them like it. There’s nothing for an adult brain to retain. Watching Sweet Bean fight for her career is a fool’s choice.
Perfect. I’m finally self-actualizing. Spring should be earned by director’s cut. Once I’ve retained a single line of Sweet Tea dialogue, I’ll be strong enough to survive anything.
To recap, here’s a diagram of reality.
An onion of misery. Not just quality: the tone’s between C-Span and LMG: Enter the Matchstickverse. I suspect the editor needed an all-Exxua diet.
New suckologists might assume the flashy layer‘s a break. Not quite: emptiness hides more pain. Dehydration. Starvation. Ramping. I call this stretch of Sucker Punch The Desert. Forty minutes into the director’s cut, the story stops. It lies flat like Bartleby in Shanghai, leaving us to find our own meaning. What do you think Sucker Punch should be about? A new Wall Street satire could be fun.
In The Desert, they fight zombie Germans. You feel nothing.
In The Desert, they fight a dragon. You feel nothing.
In The Desert, sex slaves dread death. Guess.
Three full premises, reduced to air. I’ve seen Emily Browning and Oscar Isaac elsewhere. They can act. They can say words and make you believe them. They could each, if desired, claim the highest honor in modern storytelling: pushing a shitcoin and fleeing to the Caymans. But some invisible, offscreen, Batman vs. Superman-making force holds them back.
In time, active pain returns. Until then, The Desert regurgitates Babydoll’s plan, repeats Babydoll’s daydream, and plays action scenes for pacifists. What keeps you awake? That’s personal. For some, hope. For me, Dan Campbell’s perfect coffee order. Per The Athletic, it’s about 1420 milligrams of ascension. I can finally see God. We have issues to resolve.
In defense of the pace, it’s a pretty complex plan:
I’m not the type to care if that makes strategic sense. Just the type to drift every time you repeat it. Repeat it. Turn each step of starting a fire and screaming “ATTICA” into a two-year cutscene that canonically doesn’t happen, matter, or not look like shit.
This time, I’ll talk about faces. There’s excess action onscreen, but none of it entertains or matters. So we’ll start with acting. As Pirate Six in a sixth grade run of Peter Pan and Backflip Guy in multiple dance cults, I’m well-qualified.
Humans can’t save this script. It is, however, an amazing study in crisis responses. You learn how each lead acts in a bunker. I’ve prepared a simple chart to keep track. I’m pretty sure they use this in theater school.
To start: our main blonde, Babydoll.
She’s Jesus, if your pastor wanted to fuck Jesus. Though they call Jesus a charisma fountain, and paint him with an eight-pack. Do Christians want to fuck Jesus? Is it heretical not to want to fuck Jesus? What does Aquinas say about the fuckability of Christ? Is this what the Conclave argues about?
Whether or not Jesus jackhammers the pious, Babydoll inspires actress Emily Browning. To take morphine. She floats through cryptic lines about freedom on 50 CCs of whatever keeps elephants from flipping their shit at the state fair. Her mind’s escaped something dark, like elephants not having load-bearing backs. Your dog’s better suited to carry people than an elephant. They are in torment.
She leads her school well.
The Desert zooms in on Sweet Tea, who’s as trapped as I am. She’s the voice of reason, the most benighted role in spec-fic. Channeling Richard Dawkins on a dragon’s back is a disorder. Sweet N’ Low doubts Babydoll’s plan, since bullets hurt a bunch and Babydoll has the skills of a teenage Gogo dancer. Out of all the apostles, Sweet Baby Ray’s the one with too many pages and not enough insight.
Sour Pea’s also the backup point of sympathy/lust, in case you’re into adults. Her actress (Abbie Cornish) tries. She tries so much. If this geek pandering barrage works out, she’ll have a paid convention seat for the rest of her life.
Nope.
Also, in action scenes she kind of flops around.
Sweet Caroline tags along to protect her sister Rocket, the fifth dumbest nickname today. And doomed. Rocket’s the sacrificial lamb in a film where everyone’s already born to suffer. I’ve never seen a more doomed character, and I have Victory Gundam on Blu-ray. A show Gundam fans found too depressing, compared to a shiny version of Johnny Got His Gun. Out of all the apostles, Rocket’s the one that got the others killed following Jesus’s plan to burn down Rome. I haven’t read the Bible in a while.
Selling that arc falls to Jena Malone, who can’t. She sends it and hits a rail face-first.
Then there’s the Wise Man, courtesy of Scott Glenn. In an inspired intro to trench warfare, he says “They’re using steam power and clockworks to keep them moving. So you don’t have to feel bad about killin’ em.” I don’t think Scott understands those words. Neither do I, because the troops are less steampunk and more nothingpunk.
He’s there, but he isn’t there. Scott reads less from a cue card, and more from memories of better days. He’s completely zenned out—an admirable response to failure. I’ll try that if people don’t like Civil War jokes.
Out of all the apostles, he’s the one rolling on ancient hallucinogens. Paul said some out of pocket shit, so that one.
Back in reality, escort wrangler Carla Gugino spends the whole movie doing the Molotov Cocktease voice.
Grim. Meanwhile, team jobber Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) is the only brunette, and Snyder doesn’t underline that joke. It’s a fucking miracle. To celebrate, Vanessa shouts, bounces, and dies as requested. And sounds lost every time. Again, not her fault. The script’s neurotoxic. Blondie’s first line in The Desert laments the prostitutes that died before her.
Amber (Jamie Chung) is the only brunette, and Snyder…ah. Shit. So much for small victories. Well, in Extraction Mode she’s the team pilot. She delivers subaltern ditz lines with eyes that can see the reviews. Hi Amber! It happens. At least voicing Harley Quinn’s fun.
Then there’s our virtuoso. The soul of the film. A performance that leaves it all on the table.
Bunnymech.
Not a single line of wooden dialogue. Actions with weight. A funny rabbit decal on a mech suit. In a sea of sludge, Bunnymech is acceptable. Amber flies it, so I promoted her from “Gun in Mouth.” As for Bunnymech:
Don’t say I don’t engage. You’re right, but I have cover and two degrees in semantics. Also: if you’re not a 8th dan weeaboo, you’ll fucking hate Bunnymech. Anime poison reached my heart twenty years ago.
That said, Oscar Isaac goes for it. I don’t think he even knows this movie sucks. Admirable, unless you value thinky brain stuff.
He dumps normal effort into a speech about knowing something is up with all this hypno-stripping. Including how, if Babydoll’s virginity wasn’t already reserved, he’d hand out a punitive rape. The competence makes the words worse.
That monologue is a relief, since it ends The Desert. We can finally feel again. Granted, it’s only suffering, but an upside goes here.
Overall,The Desert has endless problems, and watching makes you a cenobite. The core is Snyder’s sudden inability to focus. That’s not even a recurring problem of his. He can normally isolate one stupid element, and follow that idiocy from dumbass shot to shot. But he can’t lock in on anything here.
Almost anything. Also: our heroes kill Smough’s dragon baby. They slit its throat for powerups. In case you found something to root for.
How far in are we? Are the credits in sight?
No tears remain.
I’ve compared Sucker Punch to slick and uneven stories, and both seem too generous. This round, in honor of Babydoll, I’ll compare it to another lobotomized film. A ninja waif movie with a script written in red crayon. It even has a desert. But it’s still fun, the action crushes, and like most surgeries it’s better than Sucker Punch.
Enter The Shadow Strays.
More punching from the hero behind The Night Comes for Us (a top-flight The Raid knockoff in a world that needs The Raid knockoffs). It’s a love letter to stabbing and breakup note to editing. Here’s a diagram of reality in The Shadow Strays.
What’s a shadow stray? A cool-sounding title. And a ninja orphan. Batman would be a shadow stray, if he had the guts to kill. Though murder is bad in The Shadow Strays, except when it’s awesome, which is almost always. Just make sure you do it for free.
You’re left to intuit that. The intro’s more into murder. You might think the opening 20-minute Yakuza purge sets up a Yakuza plot, or subplot, or reference later in the film. Get it together. This is about slick gore, and establishing our heroine 13 as a meat sculptor.
No it’s not, she wipes out. It’s about establishing 13’s ninja mom as better in every way. She hits the Yakuza with nearly a half-Kiryu in casualties.
In screenwriting, building your lead this way is called a “first draft.”
Still, it’s economical. Tension between junior assassin and mother hen only ends one way. One rant after Furies, and we’re already back at the family kumite. The Shadow Strays is a lean ride, clocking in at…
See? Snyder and I aren’t the only ones that never stop typing. The Shadow Strays struggles more than it needs to, like its parents think Ritalin’s black tar in a bottle. 13’s arc could be microfiction, but each beat of leaving the group treating her like a murder Roomba gets a half hour.
It’s a bloated, meandering journey, featuring the slickest violence I’ve seen this spring. The Shadow Strays is more choreographed than written, the way that Sucker Punch is more jerked than shot. If you fear no lawyer you can fire up Premiere, hack off everything that bores you, and make the fan edit of the century.
For murder nerds, the violence has surprising range. Katana duels in the forest flank boxcutter fights in crack dens. And then they remember guns work. While ninja segments go full Hayabusa, scenes in the streets have a Raid grit to them. That division could easily mean something, but doesn’t. Every kill in both modes is wild, so I rock with it.
The murder hallways have style for days. You can lean on that when the camera drifts from Babydoll’s socks. And while the Teen Girl squad fails to escape Broadway, 13’s two week’s notice ends in a dead governor. There’s a lot of movie after that, because the structure isn’t. But it retains precise stabbing and corpse presentation. Art’s where you find it.
Besides, that Mother’s Day duel we’re crawling towards? It kicks so much ass none of my bitching matters. I’m comfortable telling you to watch The Shadow Strays after shitting on it in every other paragraph, and this one. It fucking rocks. And sucks. But it rocks four times harder than it sucks, and that’s beyond Babydoll’s grasp.
The distinction’s simple. The Shadow Strays kills and I have no idea what they were thinking. Sucker Punch kills me and I wish I didn’t know what they were thinking. The next rewatch might end me.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: TatersTales, world renowned expert in Christological fuckability debates.
The evolution of online culture has achieved a rapidity we never could have imagined in the 2000s. Back then, we had to subsist on what we called “internet fads” for months or even years. We supped upon a thin gruel of Hampsterdances, All Your Bases, and Hello My Future Girlfriends. Mr. T Ate Our Balls! He ate our balls, damn it.
Even on the recently-compromised then more-recently restored 4chan, memes had a relatively long shelf life. In those days, “meme” was a little-known word that actually referred to a repeated and gradually transmuted image or phrase. Later, it became shorthand for “image macro.” Today, it basically just means any kind of joke you see online.
The average internet user in 2025 sees more “memes” in a single hour of browsing their timeline than a child in 2005 would have seen in an entire year. Inevitably, these trends tend to peak then recede from the public consciousness. Like, remember the Twitter craze of posting a grid of characters or real people with dollar amounts attached and asking your followers to build a team from them with a certain budget?
Well, some people never forgot it. And, it should go without saying, they incorporated it into an incredibly baroque system of masturbation.
I don’t remember how I stumbled across r/celebeconomy. I told Sean and Robert that I wanted to write about it on March 2nd, and they approved the pitch, though Robert noted that while it would make a good article, it would also make him sad. When the time came to actually write this piece and I braced myself to delve into the subreddit to gather material, I was confronted with an unexpected setback.
r/CelebEconomy, like r/RedScareForCisHetMen before it, had been struck down by Reddit, leaving its 81,000 members without a place to call home. I was crestfallen and confused. Do we truly live in a world in which men cannot publicly gamify the fictional purchase of famous women for the purpose of sex? It’s political correctness gone mad! And more importantly, it’s getting in the way of me generating content. But fear not — though the subreddit is gone, its legacy lives on. Specifically, it lives on on weird off-brand porn sites focused on still images that presumably exist to serve lonely Arctic researchers who have to make do with fifteen minutes of internet access a day on a Starlink connection.
I had to see an animated pop-up of Dale and Peggy from King of the Hill fucking for this. The things I do for you. It doesn’t even make sense! Dale is a happily married cuckold! Bill’s the one who’s obsessed with Peggy! Sorry, I’m stalling. But I think it’ll become clear pretty quickly why that is. Let’s try and start with something relatively tame.
Simple. It’s a grid of well-known, attractive, mainly-white women, each assigned a dollar value, with serviceable graphic design. By the time you’ve finished reading this article, this will seem quaint to you. Why would anyone participate in this kind of thing on a public forum? I suppose it’s a slightly more evolved form of the old “who would you rather bang” question with some light gamification. A kind of rules-light RPG that provides a scaffolding for storytelling versus a free-for-all jackoff improv.
I’m a little confused by the “negative $1 discount” for wifing, though. Does the double negative signify an increase in price, which would be expected given the value proposition of sharing your life with one of these women rather than a single night of passion? Or are we meant to take it as a true discount, given that whomever made this almost certainly hates women and for whom the prospect of being married to one, even an accomplished and/or famously beautiful one, rather than pumping and dumping her is a kind of hardship for which he theoretically deserves recompense? I’m stalling again, because things are about to get worse.
Ok, kind of a jump in mechanical complexity here. This time we’re running through a list of famous attractive women and assigning them various “materials.” Would it be churlish of me to point out that “bikini” and “shiny dress” aren’t materials, exactly? I suppose “nude” is, technically, if you consider it to mean “flesh.” But hey, we’re not talking about cutting a woman’s face off to create a terrifying death mask.
Oh. Oh no. This isn’t great, and it’s actually worse than it seems at first glance because we’re not just picking one, as the instructions suggest. We have a budget. We’re shopping for lady faces and we’re going to stitch them together into something new and terrible. We are the villain in a Thomas Harris novel. Can we get a silly one?
Baldur’s Gape. No notes. Of course Shadowheart, the stern goth mommy with a secret heart of gold is valued most highly here, since she was built in a lab to appeal to shut-in gamers. Speaking of gamers, maybe you want something a little more intellectual?
Jesus Christ. This looks like the puzzle on the back of a box of Weinstein-O’s. But we can get more complex.
Here we fucking go. We’re practically into complex European board game territory now. Anyone who seriously engaged with this graphic has gone beyond horny and has discovered something else. And you know what? I think we might have fucked up by making hardcore pornography so freely available. A culture without 24/7 access to the most extreme kinds of filth imaginable doesn’t produce images like this. We’re looking at the work of a mind so inured to an endless stream of genitals in various configurations that it had to invent a means of making it more difficult to jack off. But hey, I just noticed there’s a transgender woman and a model with vitiligo on there. Welcome to the #resistance, horny guy who made this image.
Next up is Tour de Fuck. Tour de Fuck, everybody! It’s a cutely-themed French choose-your-own-fuckventure! I regret to inform you that they’ve actually all been relatively cute up until now compared to what’s coming. Aside from the face one, I mean. Let’s get nasty.
Now we’re talking. The player of this game is invited to imagine himself engaging in specific sex acts with each of his choices. This is a game of strategy and also imagined insemination, much like Warhammer if you’re playing the forces of the Chaos God Slaanesh. Sidebar: the phrase “slow and passionate deepthroat” is an instant tipoff that you’re in the presence of a serial killer. Distract him with sexual grid puzzles and effect a hasty retreat from the situation.
I shouldn’t have mentioned Chaos earlier. Now we must walk its Path, which happens to be lined with an unexpected number of Korean pop stars. Do you think this guy maybe has a certain type? And additionally has psychosexually imprinted on Amy Adams? I had to cut this one off since it went on for like a dozen rows, but spoiler: yes, and yes. Speaking of overlong images…
This one is called “The Last Men Alive,” and it bills itself as not just a game, but a story. Let’s dive in.
Incredible. We’ve got amnesia, we’re making choices, and there are stats involved. This is practically a Bioware game already. I’m going to roll with Miranda Cosgrove, since I think the Sociability skill is low-key underrated in a post-apocalyptic scenario, which this is, I think?
Right, right, the Devastation. Promising breeders. Underground bunkers. “DSL.” Cute. It’s a Sex University where the administration disappears you if your evaluations fall off. So basically regular university, if you’re an adjunct.
Things kind of go on like this for a while. I picked Camila Mendes as my Assistant for another +1 to Sociability and someone named Victoria Justice as my Planner for +1 Duty. My enforcer is Chloe Moretz, just because that’s a really funny image to me. She gives me another +1 Sociability. But things get interesting when we get to “Housekeeper” (sexual).
We’ve got unlocks now? Of course I’m going with Fouz Al Fahad. Let’s scroll down to the list of perks and see what that gets us.
Haha wait, what’s that last one? Haha. Wow, ok, I think I’m good on pursuing this any further! Let’s just move on to the scoring.
My Sociability is 5. My Duty is 1. My Libido is 0. That means we have failed! I guess the UN is going to kill us. The guy screaming incoherently on the corner downtown tried to warn me!
Wait, what? Yes, for the crime of not taking this very seriously, we are now forced to imagine ourselves being sexually dominated by Alison Brie, Jessica Chastain, or another woman who appears on all of these that I haven’t heard of before.
What a journey that was! And it’s not the only one like this, either. Before r/celebeconomy went down, you could have spent all of your time just running through these things. It’s like browsing un-playtested solo tabletop RPGs on itch.io, only with more tits. About the same amount of depression, though. Here’s a bit from another one where you’re a king assembling a royal court.
Hey, Susan Sarandon! That’s nice. Having a woman over fifty in one of these fantasy fuck leagues is the social justice equivalent of America electing a gay President. I think it’s kind of fucked up that if you pick Christina Hendricks you steal her nipples from your children, though.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an article about a weird subset of the porno enthusiast community without an incredibly specific premise. Go on, guess what it could be. Staffing a sexual daycare for adult babies? Castle of female Draculas? TikTok house passing around a pizza boy? It’s none of those, and I’m furious that someone who isn’t me is going to make millions off of Reverse Gangbang TikTok House.
Years ago, I did some phone sex work. It wasn’t for long, but it was enough that very little surprises me anymore, carnally speaking. Most people’s fantasies, even the ones they think of as uniquely despicable or strange, are actually very common. I only ever came across one desire that was actually novel: a guy that wanted someone to pretend to be his mother, who was also his martial arts sensei, and karate chop him to completion. The image I’m about to show you is, I think, actually more out there than that.
I have to say, as large as the AT&T girl’s breasts are, I do not think that paying her $4 million dollars to play professional basketball would be a wise investment. And did you catch the stuff about mouths and ball-handling? It’s pretty subtle, so I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. Just in case it went over your head, the creator provided a helpful little key at the bottom of the graphic.
Now, there’s an obvious question here that I’ve been eliding up until this point. If you take celebeconomy posts seriously as a sort of game design — and the over 80,000 members of the subreddit certainly did — then how do you determine a celeb’s relative value in a given game?
Does it just come down to personal preference on the part of the creator? A gut feeling? My, my, how naïve. No, like the mainstream video game industry, it’s all about data. Activision and EA are constantly gathering metrics to determine how often to dole out loot boxes for maximum engagement in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6: 2, and likewise the denizens of r/celebeconomy compiled vast quantities of survey information to help would-be designers craft well-tuned fuckmatrices.
And boy, do they get granular.
I had some trouble accessing these sheets — I had to pull the links from an archived version of the subreddit, and I think the Google account they were associated with might have gone down with the ship. Eventually, Google Sheets just started yelling at me in Swedish while refusing to do what I asked, which I think costs $5 from Alicia Vikander and grants a +1 to your Meatballs stat. Get it? Meatballs? It’s like testicles. Because of sex.
When I dove into the archives to find these charts, I also took a look at the subreddit rules and guidelines. They are extensive, containing documentation helpful to anyone trying to start a career in whatever this is.
There’s bidding on some of these? I joked about European board games earlier but we’re essentially dealing with a Reiner Knizia once we’ve added auctions into the mix.
Twine! Old friend, is that you? I published a book on Twine a decade ago. To see it recommended as a tool for crafting Sophie’s Choice-style dilemmas over which Instagram model you’d rather have join your starship crew as Chief Cockwarming Officer raises some complicated feelings. It’s got me in a contemplative mood, thinking about what all of this has meant.
What have we learned today? We’ve learned that fantasy fuckball no longer has a place on woke Reddit. We’ve learned that men will go to extraordinary lengths to create barriers between themselves and jacking off with the goal of getting more out of the experience rather than just cooling it for a while and going to the gym or something. But most of all, we’ve learned that selecting Fan Bingbing — star of the live-action Mulan remake — as the sexual negotiator for your harem not only grants you a +1 to Sociability, but also unlocks the Tax Evasion ability.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Good Satan and His Hot Witches, red pill stockbrokers of the fleshnet who see past charisma stats into pure harem optimization theory.
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Upsetting Day: Dead Pet
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Upsetting Day: Boobs🌭
Two weeks ago, I showed you something called The Fart Video. It was an unrelatable series of observations about farts that have never existed; a unique artifact written by a man with no butthole or sense of humor. It would have taken more effort and been funnier if it came with a blank tape and a note saying, “Sorry I didn’t finish the fart video. Cancer.” So now I have a question. What would you say if I told you its creator, Herbert I. Kavet, was one of the most prolific “comedy” “authors” of all time?
A. God damn it.
B. I don’t like where this is going.
C. Please, I’m not ready for another of whatever The Fart Video was.
D. Fuck you, sir.
You’re right! Here is a tiny, tiny sample of Herbert’s body of work:
For decades, Herbert I. Kavet has been guessing wrong about how jokes work for books about farts, sex, or farting. And while all of those titles are fascinating in their own way, one of them caught my eye. Computer: isolate and enhance quadrant sector Boobs.
It’s only the word “boobs.” It’s not “the udder-ly ridiculous book of” them or anything. Just Boobs. And the cover is a child lost in an ocean of them. Why? What part of a man’s brain says, “Forty titties isn’t quite a joke. There needs to be some kind of contex– wait, I’ve got it. An abandoned child leering at two of them. You know, like a real horny toddler. And don’t expect some breast-shaped sand castle gag. I’m saying I will not draw anything more than a tiny boy staring at tits. How long are you going to let me talk? What the fuck does an illustrator need to do to get arrested in 1989?”
If the front wasn’t unappealing enough, this is what the back cover looks like. It’s barely the start of a titty idea. It looks like a shameful Hanna Barbera pitch for something called Lady Harlem Globetrotters. Any attempt to understand it is frustrating. You can tell Boobs is probably a list of different kinds of boobs, but not in a way your planet’s people would know as silly. And it does not bode well that of the four boob examples they give, one of them is already a repeat.
The book opens with, “What’s the deal with the attractive force between objects? When ladies lay down, WHERE do their boobs GO!?” It’s a textbook example of desperate Seinfelding, a technique used by inexperienced comedians where the setup requires both you and your listener to be stupid beyond reason. Herbert tries something unique by not adding a punchline at all and simply soaking in that faulty premise for two more sentences. He could have said, “I tell ya, gravity changes a woman. My wife lays down and suddenly she’s a ten-year-old boy choking out two water balloons, oh!” You add an exploding watermelon or a “cowa-bunga” to that, and you’re an ’80s sensation. But this? This is an incurious virgin asking questions with obvious answers. I promise this whole article won’t be me giving comedy writing notes to a man confused about boobs 40 years ago. Maybe it will help if we calibrate the rules of Herbert’s universe. Let’s check out page 2:
So Herbert’s idea of a standard boob is a swooping tube with a nipple at the end. Like a big toe you can milk. So far, I’d say this man has only seen boobs in two places– Penthouse magazine comics and dead bodies. This is a comedy book about boobs and the author is doing everything he can to communicate two things: I don’t write jokes, and what exactly are boobs.
So now we get where he’s coming from. It won’t help! Up next: Hard Boobs!
“What’s the deal with boobs getting harder these days, fellas? Must be the present fitness craze, right? What? I’m probably thinking of breast implants or push-up bras? No, stop interrupting! You’re ruining my joke about how nursing a baby after aerobics makes them s-strong? Never mind, that’s dumb. You know, you’re right, I might be thinking of breast implants. Sorry, I’m new to boobs and this is only my 78th humor book!”
– Herbert I. Kavet, probably
“I’m just going to say a bunch of random shit for this one, so draw whatever. Sure, inside out nipples on a very sad woman could work! Maybe add a teenager trapped in her cleavage? Yeah, nice. In fact, unless I say otherwise, let’s add a guy getting smothered, just surrendering to the oblivion of titty, in all of these.”
– Herbert I. Kavet, definitely
I’m starting to get this book. Pillow Boobs are the kind of boobs where a pervert author wants to return to the safety of mother’s bosom, to be absorbed by her milky flesh, to crawl into a world where only yummy mommy is. But at the risk of changing tones, va va voom, the busty owner of these fun bags doesn’t need to worry about a date on Saturday nights, zowee, when she swallows all of you in her womb, her loving cervix closing around you, the last of your suffering a shrinking point of light.
Sometimes you can’t tell what boobs look like because of sweaters or jackets, and it sucks. The author of this book must know: can a man sleep forever between your heaving breasts or are you just warm!? You can’t ignore your destiny forever, Enigma Boob!!!
You’re right to not know what’s going on. This went from a list of cartoon boob archetypes to trivia about a specific pair of real-life boobs Herbert is making up. And it wouldn’t be a good story if it was true. It is a haunting rant about mad doctors building a nest inside a woman’s torso. It’s a monologue you’d give to a hitchhiker as you inflated their chest with a bike pump for your murderous tableau. This is not how fucking books work, Herbert.
Oh no.
Herbert is already out of boobs.
Anyone with any foresight should have seen this coming. The second you realized what he was doing you should have thought, “Okay, types of boobs: big, small, hard, soft… pointy… let’s see… the biggest pair formed by the hubris of science, of course. Then… oh no, this is not a concept capable of filling a book.” You can feel the struggle here, the frustration of Herbert’s dull mind as it refuses to cough up boob jokes. Look at this subhuman shit. “Technically, Hidden Boob is different than Disappearing Boob!!!” is a thought a cow might have long after it’s been torn apart for food and industry.
As someone who has submitted many pitches across all types of media, I can tell you one of the worst things a writer can hear is, “Sounds good. Write it up!” It’s what someone says after they’ve heard your ideas and selected the emptiest one, the one you never thought they’d pick. But like most wisdom, it can’t be taught. It can only be earned. Before he pitched Boobs, Herbert never considered a titty joke book would be this hard. If you told him coming up with forty-six kinds of funny boobs and a little cute paragraph for each of them was fucking impossible, he wouldn’t have believed you. This book is a task a madman gave himself, and we are watching him fail catastrophically. If this was a magic trick, it would be like David Blaine never making it to the block of ice because he died a week ago between two tits and his final words were “This is the 9th time I’ve had diarrhea this week, oh look! Tits!”
His brain has run out of tit shapes, so in a panic, Herbert invents an entirely new kind of boobs. Then he gets to work describing them, badly and matter-of-factly. If any part of him notices he’s writing humorless observations from a universe that does not exist, he doesn’t care. Saucers: they’re like plates, but boobs, I guess. “Let the readers try to find meaning or joy in this bullshit,” Herbert thinks, for each paragraph puts him one step closer to freedom, to being able to get started on his next book. Which is, oh God no, 2002 Farts For Over 40 Cat Lovers.
Guys, you ever go out with a lady whose boobs are made out of unspeakable lumps? You know the type. The kind who puts on a thick sweater like we won’t notice. Girl, we know you’re hiding swarms and swarms of furious rats in those titties. Psh. We know your chest is is going to chew our face off while we lay down to rest forever in the serenity of your pillowy motherhood.
This won’t help make it any funnier, but Herbert was over fifty when he wrote about this “lovely young thing” and got super frustrated when her high school boobs never popped out of her dress. In a way, I appreciate how he’s keeping his terrible urges in check, but I’m so distracted by the wrongness of the line “In the history of the world… no boob has ever popped out of a prom dress.” It’s exactly the opposite of the logic of a prom dress joke. If someone said, “We need to get out of here like titties in a prom dress,” you’d know you were both sex criminals in a ’90s Jerry Bruckheimer movie, but you’d also know they meant “go fast.” I know I said I would stop giving comedy writing notes, but come on, you can’t fuck up a prom joke this hard unless you were breast fed through high school.
This nightmare might be as close to a joke as Herbert manages in this book, but I’m going to try to find one that isn’t about child boobs.
Okay, here we go:
Herbert can barely bring himself to write about saggy boobs, which is a problem because they are now the only thing he can think about.
“You are in a flopping titty prison of your own design,” hisses a voice behind Herbert I. Kavet’s eyes. He tries to think of something else, anything else. “Flopping titties, flopping titties,” laughs the voice.
Herbert concentrates. Curse these flopping boobs. With everything he has left, he forces his mind to imagine round boobs again. “Sure,” says his mind. “Two round boobs coming up! Flopping on the end of two long ones!” Herbert shrugs and gets to work describing them. He wonders if hanging upside down could fix them, then accidentally types that where he intended to write a joke. It seems so long ago those days when he thought a boob joke book could be fun. Herbert sits there for hours, trying to imagine something other than these insane ball-on-a-string boobs…
… and Herbert fails.
A sudden inspiration hits Herbert. What if they went the other direction, these boobs!? It still wouldn’t be funny, but he had long since given up on that. So he creates a fake girlfriend named Ellen who had high boobs. She got married and never left Hempstead, end of fun story. I’ve also met an Ellen, end of punchline.
These are the kind of boobs Ellen would have had if she was real. Oh, perfect Ellen. Eat that ice cream all day, my pimpleless, high-boobed queen. By this point, it had to have occurred to Herbert that he had used up the last of his meager creativity. He was changing the names on weird tits and writing self-insert fiction about the women attached to them. So he did what everyone incapable of creating does– he destroyed.
He came up with “Nubbies,” which are “small boobs of no particular shape.” Mathematically, it’s as close as a boob idea can get to the absence of a boob idea. “These boobs are probably on children,” Herbert says. “Damn it, you outsmarted us with that probably,” replies his local district attorney.
Herbert I. Kavet knows he’s (probably) on to something with Nubbies, the non-boobs of young girls, so he is now adding to the lore. He suggests “Ninnies” as the name for not having boobs should you continue not having them. This is no thought of a human mind. This is a scent an insect would secrete to convince predators it was dead. “Without boobs, you could go topless at gay beaches!” Herbert’s brain suddenly vomits in a fascinating misjudgment of all things. After many hours of staring at Herbert’s work, I thought of a cute way to put this: if you’re worse at anything than Herbert I. Kavet is at writing joke books, you deserve to rot in Hell.
Herbert has spent so much time building the featureless worlds of Nubbies and Ninnies that he’s having trouble picturing boobs again. “Hrrk!” his imagination grunts as it squeezes tiny tits onto several kinds of racism. “There, there,” Herbert says to comfort the woman he’s picturing with the tiny breasts. A lot of comedy writers wouldn’t think to do that. And in that spirit, nice try, flat-chested ladies. You did your best.
Sure. Muffins are community-minded, soft-nippled boobs for green shirts. I won’t entertain the idea of trying to engage with this like it means anything. Why bother? In a million years Herbert couldn’t explain why he said any of these words. He is writing jokes like a trapped coyote chewing its own leg off. My dentist is funnier than this on the security footage of him groping me.
A burst of inspiration! What if boobs were far apart! Herbert couldn’t come up with a funny angle on the idea, but he bought himself some time to think. All he has to do now is come up with something other than “far apart” that boobs can be. Come on, think, Herbert. You can do it.
God damn it, Herbert.
T-these are the same boobs only bigger. You goddamn son of a bitch, Herbert. We all see what you’re doing!
You stupid piece of shit, Herbert I. Kavet. I’m going to end this article before you inflate these tits out of control and crash an elevator.
No! Herbert! You won’t get away with this, Herbeeeeerrrrrrrrrt!
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