I plan to make this a regular feature, as my advancing age brings on these periods of quiet reflection. Specifically, I ponder the terrible human toll of comedy.

For instance, I was laying in bed last night and wondering if anybody got fired over the Oozinator. I and about 100 million other people have been making fun of their commercial for about six weeks now because it looks like the children are ejaculating on each other.

What really was their crime here? Innocence? I don’t know who was in charge of the Oozinator, but I’m thinking it was some kindly old lady, we’ll call her Eunice. So she invents a squirt gun that shoots slime instead of water. A fine idea. And so it won’t stain clothes, you make the ooze clear. But, wait, the clear ooze doesn’t show up on TV so good, so we’ll make it white for the commercial. So she’s in the conference room with a dozen Hasbro executives, and she shows them the spot:

Did anybody in the room see a problem with that? Are they all kindly toy makers who never heard the word “bukkake” and who don’t feel the need to make such crass connections? Did no one speak up and say, “You know, Eunice, that kind of looks like those young boys are a shootin’ each other with the man-chowder.”

Well if not, I say that’s pretty cool. Those people have protected themselves in a society obsessed with crudeness. And if Eunice got fired because that commercial became the most-watched commercial in Hasbro history and because the Amazon.com customers tagged it The Xenophallus, well, I hope she lands on her feet.

There’s a certain emotion, and I don’t think we have a word for it, that every man feels in his life. It’s the emotion you feel when you want to slap somebody very hard with your penis.

Slapping a person across the face with a penis is proven by science to be the fastest way to make them stop talking. Whatever we call this emotion, I feel it every time I hear a friend bitching about high gasoline prices, which means I feel it about six times an hour. I feel it, because I know that gasoline consumption per driver has gone UP since gas hit $3.00 a gallon. Also, SUV sales are up, while Honda has had to shut down production of some of its hybrids out of lack of interest.

And then we have environmentalist and frequent cartoon character Al Gore. He appeared at the
Cannes Film Festival to promote his movie on the dangers of global warming… and then drove five separate gasoline-burning cars to get he and his entourage from the hotel to the theater showing the movie. The trip is about 500 yards.

“I think that up until fairly recently the United States has been in a bubble of unreality where global warming is concer-”

THWAP.

This, of course, brings me to The DaVinci Code. We have Christians around the world protesting the film and I guess the book, as if Dan Brown’s story will turn people away from Christianity… ignoring the fact that most people turn from Christianity because they see Christians doing the exact same thing Al Gore just did. They overhear a guy shouting at a restaurant about the godless downfall of society, and in the next breath hear his petty bitching about his steak and see him walk away without leaving a tip. Buddy, they don’t disbelieve because they’ve checked the archaeological records and think the gospels contain inconsistencies. They disbelieve because the guy who told them to believe showed no sign of believing it himself.

And the thing is, I don’t think they know they’re doing it. If you didn’t know it was so common, you’d think it was a mental illness. That absolute disconnect between what we do and what we say and the almost universal belief that the solution to all of the world’s problems lie in deep sacrifices that should be made by other people who aren’t us. I have coined this mechanism of human thought The Retardatron. Feel free to use the term around the office.

the U.S. department of defense is researching a weapon that’s so awesome I don’t even need to point out that it looks like a huge cock:

A special thanks to the eagle-eyed readers who spotted these errors for me. All will be corrected in time for the next printing of John Dies at the End. Those who already own a copy can make the corrections yourself with a pen:

• On page 33 John and Dave take a trip to the Capital of the United States, in “Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.” The capital of the United States is actually in Washington, D.C., in the United States.
• On page 67 John refers to Fr4nk as a “cyborg” but Fr4nk doesn’t have any living tissue, so technically he is just a robot and not a cyborg.
• On pages 76 through 244 Dave refers to John as “Jim,” which was the character’s original name up until the second revision. During that same span John refers to Dave as “Baron Von Rapemissile.”
• On page 306 Grimfuzzle the Troll King, to thank David for saving his kingdom, grants David eternal life. Just six pages later, David is killed. In the next edition instead of eternal life Grimfuzzle will give David three hundred dollars.
• On page 393, during the novel’s finale, John is depicted as stealing a submarine, the Seawolf-class nuclear sub SSN 23. He then uses the sub to win a war against the United States and set himself up as President, resulting in a thousand-year period of peace. In reality the SSN 23 did not enter service until February of 2005, more than a year after this story takes place.

We need a new word in the English language, an adjective that describes a piece of work that would work brilliantly as parody, if it were parody. Only it’s not. If you’ve got suggestions for what that word would be, feel free to speak up.

Examples include that squirt gun commercial where it looks like the children are ejaculating on each other, The Village People video for “Sex on the Phone” and this Malaysian Martial Arts Training Video which is apparently from a country where “Martial Arts” consists entirely of jumping off high places and then rolling around on the ground in pain for several minutes.

I ask for this word because I want to use it to describe this trailer for the game Sadness for the Nintendo Wii. The “you want this game!” climax of the ad features the game character standing in the rain. The game player holds up the Wii controller…

…and the character on screen responds by raising her umbrella:

Yeah.

In an effort to prove my readers are less retarded than the population at large, I offer this. It turns out that 60% of young Americans can’t find Iraq on a map, and 75% can’t find Israel. Since I was digested and farted out of the same public school system as they, I thought I would try it myself. How many countries can you name off this map?

I got almost all of them. A helpful tip is to look at the little labels that name which country is which. I missed Kuwait because the print’s really small.

As I type this, I have been alerted by a friend that the map the youngsters were using was unmarked… but in all the years I’ve been buying maps I’ve never, ever come across an unmarked one, even at a garage sale. I say if some smartass comes up to you with a map that he spent several hours marking out the country labels on, and asks you to fill them back in for him, politely take the map and say, “sure!” Then roll it up real tight, bend the guy over and shove the whole thing into his ass.

Imagine the below bar represents all 5,000 years of recorded history, from 3,000 BC (on the left) to today (far right).

See the green? That’s the years when they had such a thing as anesthesia.

If you had lived during the red part, if you fell down the stairs or crashed your wagon when drunk, you’d have several big guys hold you down while they peeled open the skin and muscle and went to work, while you watched.


I realize many of you reading this have never had major surgery so maybe this doesn’t hit home with you. If so, just keep the same thought in mind on your next trip to the dentist. Also, if you click on that picture it will make a fart sound.