4 Unintentionally Hilarious Guides for Depressing Situations

Do-It-Yourself Coffins For Pets and People

Dale Power, 1997

Pets and people are ticking time bombs of storage space issues. One day they are beloved family members, the next they are cluttering up your garage. How am I supposed to get rid of all these grandparents and birds? I can't put them outside and hope the raccoons have forgotten how to push over a trash can! I don't have time to defrost the freezer, and it's not always practical to wait until the next hunter's moon when I again must feast on innocent flesh. Agh, with all this frustration I'm starting to get why people scream when they see dead bodies.

At least that's how I thought until I got Dale Power's illustrated guide to coffin building. It shows, in amazing full-color detail, how to build a resting place for any size of dead thing. "But nothing I love ever dies!" you might be saying. That's okay, because these coffins have hundreds of ordinary household uses. Just look:

Coffin Tip #1: When a coffin book author starts talking about "surprising" uses for a sarcophagus, don't drink anything they give you.

Why shouldn't I store my extra blankets in a coffin? I can think of two good reasons ... it's fucking crazy and ghost pox. I guess it's still the only way to kill bed bugs, but after they cross over, they become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

I get that there are a couple advantages to replacing all my furniture with coffins. Maybe I'm a vampire who likes to fall asleep in front of the TV. Maybe I have a bag of cat parts I want to hide in plain sight. But don't expect me to believe that there's a

Coffin Tip #2: If you are in a friend's home and notice their coffee table and bookcase are coffins, stab them with a sacred dagger and carefully leap to the side. Their blood will be mostly made of angry crows.

From the intro, I was expecting most of the construction plans to sound like "Did you know a child's fingernails still grow when it's dead. Try holding races while you wait for your coffin glue to dry!" But it turns out making a coffin is really complicated. Once he gets started, there is no time for banter. Each of the hundreds, maybe thousands of steps is pictured ... sawing, sanding, gluing, clamping, staining-- if you buried me alive right now, I could not get any more sick of looking at coffins. But something about

Grieving for Dummies

Greg Harvey, PhD, 2007

We all grieve in our own ways, except for dummies. They use this special book. Grieving for Dummies has pages and pages of cold psychological data to sooth any type of loss. Did your boyfriend die? Maybe your roommate? Your mail carrier? Your landlord? That's really suspicious, lady!

No matter what the deceased was to you, there is a chapter for dealing with the loss of him, her, or it. The book gets oddly specific and the fact that there are sometimes terrible cartoons and jokes makes it all really fucking weird. The author must be a little league coach when he's not sucking at grief counseling because he doesn't seem to care if anyone wins; he only want to make sure every possible type of grief gets some playing time.

The Couples Guide to Great Sex Over 40

Dr. Culley Carson and Diana Wiley, M.A., 1993

I know what you're thinking: sex over 40 isn't depressing! That's because you're thinking about milfy 41-year-olds. There aren't any of those in this video. Before I begin, I want to qualify that I like older ladies. I've dated women in their 40s since I was in my 20s, I will continue to do so when I'm in my 70s. Here's what I like about them: you've probably heard that women know whether or not they're going to sleep with a guy within the first five minutes. And while that's usually true, I've seen a lot of women in their 20s and 30s change their minds after six beers and a finger. Women over 40 have already seen themselves do that enough times to take that into account; they operate like they've just had six beers and a finger at all times. They still might not want to sleep with you, but you'll know that quickly and with unwavering certainty.

So what I'm saying is that I was really looking forward to

Most of the couples in the video are "Over 40" in the same way an abortion is "Almost a Baby." And before these 60-year-olds begin their sexing, they are interviewed about sex "after 40." This is their chance to educate the world about the wonders of mummy sexuality, but all they do is go down the list and verify every single stereotype there has ever been about old people boning. I learned so much from the aged: genitals don't work on either person, their pee is as untrustworthy as coloreds, they throw their backs out, ear hair ... by the time they start their actual sex I was half expecting them to ram into each other on their scooters and complain that all this damp weather is making their knee act up.

Wheelchair Workout with beginning Karate

featuring Patrick Horgan with Sensei Gregory Aldred, 1996

Learning wheelchair karate is like learning how to improvise a dental dam out of a rubber glove. It's fun to practice and think about, but if you ever need to use it, it's only after some very bad personal decisions. Although say you do wheel into the kind of neighborhood that attacks people in wheelchairs, this video will still do nothing to help you. It's horrible. Even if it's for inspirational purposes only, it fails at that because its existence implies that there's an exploitable consumer market that is both disabled and stupid.

Before the workout, someone named Paul Southwick interviews handicapped athlete Patrick Horgan in a TV studio. Literally everything about these circumstances terrifies young Paul, and he's so damn nervous that he keeps reading Patrick's answers to the setup questions. Here, I'll show you an example. This is a word-for-word transcription: