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Wednesday, November 24, 2004

What Do You Expect for Free?

“His writing is the moral equivalent of a really bad, really long drum solo.” …Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“How do you say ‘Not Funny’ in French?” …Seattle Weekly

“Never have I found the words ‘The End’ to be so comforting.” …Vegetarian Times

“My only hope is that through the miracle of recycling, this website will end up as something remotely useful…like a drink coaster.” …National Review

“If Police Academy VI were a blog, Leftbanker would be the sequel.” …Entertainment

These are just some of the reviews for this website that came out this past week. As you can see most of what was said was less than favorable and I didn’t even bother to post the reviews that contained death threats. I think that my lack of popularity puts me in good company. I am encouraged by the fact that Van Gogh didn’t sell a single painting in his lifetime and had to resort to donating body parts to pay for art supplies. I already own a computer so I won’t need to trade an ear to continue my work.

Call me thin-skinned but a barrage of lousy reviews, more than a dozen death threats, and a brick with a note attached telling me to stop writing, tossed through my window are enough to put me in a bad mood. To add to these insults, someone burned me in effigy in my own yard. I don’t have an actual yard but they burned something that bore a passing resemblance to me near the dumpster behind my apartment building. I thought that the effigy made me look unfairly fat. The worst part is they stole my favorite shirt out of the dryer to make it. How can you not take that personally?

I don’t mean to change the subject but I have something that I think needs saying since no one else seems to have the guts to say it. There really is nothing funny about bulimia. Now this is completely off the subject but nothing rhymes with bulimia. I guess leukemia sort of rhymes with bulimia but leukemia is even less funny than bulimia and if it was funny I would never stoop to cash in on the humor content of a disease that kills thousands each year. No one actually dies from bulimia but it is still gross and I wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot mop handle, comedically speaking.

As a comedy writer I spend hours pouring over medical journals in search of diseases or conditions that, under the right circumstances, could be funny. Spend about ten minutes looking at medical books and you will come to the same conclusion I have: The human body is disgusting. If you disagree with this assessment, if you feel that all of God’s creatures and everything about them is beautiful I have two words for you: number two. Or how about one word? Upchuck* Game, set, and match.

I was going to write a long essay about the Palestine Liberation Organization’s struggle to find a successor for Arafat but finding humor in that arena would be harder than finding a shred of human dignity in an episode of “The Price is Right.”

*In my original draft I wrote ‘upchuk’ and my spell-check pointed out the error. I was impressed that ‘upchuck’ was even in the dictionary.

2 comments:

  1. I admire you for using a spell-checker. So many blog posters obviously do not. BTW, "Van Gogh" is how the painter's name spelled...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ironically (if you can call it that) Theo van Gogh, a newspaper columnist and filmmaker, and a distant relative of the famous painter, was shot dead in Amsterdam on November 2nd, sparking a heated public debate about free speech.

    In his newspaper pieces Mr. van Gogh used to refer to the Dutch Muslim community as "this fifth column of goat fuckers". His killer was a young Dutch man of Morrocan descent who had over the last years drifted towards Islamist extremism.

    He appears to have been recruited by persons associated with Al Qaeda.

    ReplyDelete

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