The 10 Most Depressingly Unfunny Gag Gifts
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Felix Clay
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- December 13, 2012
It's Christmas again, and that means it's time to stock up on food dehydrators and VHS copies of the Jean-Claude Van Damme opus Double Impact to give away as gifts to those you hold dear. And for your enemies? Oh, there will be special packages under the tree for them. Special packages that bear the slightest hint of peppermint and bile.
For years, one kind of gift has thrived in the dark corners of Christmasland amid the rancid cast-away cartons of eggnog and the semen-encrusted stockings of back alley elves -- gag gifts. The terrible irony of the gag gift is that it's a joke present that is somehow never funny. In fact, next to a genuinely funny gift, neither will elicit a laugh. Gag gifts are suck gifts. They suck the funny from a room as sure as a porn star will suck a suckable something. I can't be more specific, I've never gotten the parental locks off of my TV.
In the sea of gag gifts, some stand head and shoulders above others as the lamest of the lame, the worst of the worst. I put them in a list, because I love you. I have nowhere to go this Christmas. Please take me in.
10 Fake Pregnancy Test
What's funnier than becoming a parent? Being tricked into thinking you've become a parent when in reality you've done nothing! Har! Presumably designed by the Maury Povich Laughy Time Smile Corporation, these fake pregnancy tests look like the real deal and even come in legit boxes designed to look like real tests. The gag is that they all come out positive. Oh man, good one! Remember how you always wanted a family? Well start thinking of baby names, Daddy. Maybe a good name would be Miles O'Bullshit, because your baby isn't real!
The target market for this gift is likely the sassy woman with no soul who likes to crush the hopes and dreams of her significant other, or just any abomination with a uterus. So Ann Coulter, basically.
9 Toilet Turd
If you were to Google "gag gifts" right now, you'd discover fairly quickly that large percentages are made by fecalphiliacs. Gag gift makers love poop and spend hours in their dimly lit subterranean gag chambers producing all manner of shit merchandise, which I like to think they call mershitdise or merchandukes. Or maybe they just call it shit. I'd never speak to one of these people to find out.
The toilet turd is a fake poop that goes on a toilet seat so that when someone enters the bathroom next they'll be shocked and hilarified to discover that someone shat on the seat. In point of fact, I have gone into a bathroom in which someone has shat on the seat, and I didn't find it funny. It's more perplexing than anything else, because if the toilet is literally right there, why not shit in it? Why shit on the seat? Recreating this mind-boggling event is not funny. Plus you just end up with a fake turd you have to wash because you put it on the toilet seat.
8 I Heart Farting Mug
What the fuck? This is one of those jokes that can only dare dream to work if you and everyone who has mastered literacy refuse to hold a thought in your head for more than the ephemeral instant in which recognition of the words being read sets in. Because if you for even a brief second ponder a statement like this, you'll make that face you make when someone actually does fart as you try to figure out who or why anyone would ever say this. Do you really love farting? Do you have chronic gas issues and you need to expel that gas to alleviate stomach pains? I'm very sorry to hear that. Why is it on your mug? It sounds most questionable. It makes me suspect that your home computer's keys are veritably caked with spooge and toaster strudel frosting. Please keep your awfulness to yourself.
7 Yodeling Pickle
I honestly don't need to write this entry beyond the name of it, because look. Just reread it. That such a thing should exist is a great disservice to our species because it means that someone, somewhere, was struck with what they assumed was inspiration, but which the rest of us will recognize as fever dreams or diphtheria symptoms, and made an electronic pickle that yodels. They then presented this idea to others and enough people backed it that it became an item mass-produced and marketed. This is how cults and oppressive, totalitarian regimes get started -- when no one is willing to stop madness before it gets out of control.
To whom does this appeal? Yodelers or pickle aficionados? Even those people who enjoy musical brine-cured vegetation could only mildly enjoy this. Have you ever met anyone with a musical novelty gift in their home who routinely enjoyed the gift? Do you know people who queue up their Big Mouth Billy Bass at parties? Those people are refuse. They're bad in the soul. Eliminate them.
6 Fake Lottery Tickets
The fake lottery ticket is the ultimate gift for someone you only pretend to like but whose disappointment really kind of gives you a bit of a boner (for you ladies, a lady boner). Each scratch-off ticket is a winner, convincing your poor sap of a target that they are now excessively wealthy. Except of course they're not, so you just gifted them with brief joy and then crushing loss as their hopes of financial independence and security are dashed on the black, jagged rocks of your dead, decrepit heart.
5 Fart Candy
Speaking of farts, fart candy gets a special mention for at least tricking me. I thought this would be something that sounds or smells like a fart, and ha ha, everyone has a good laugh. Remember hot pepper gum? Or the gum that turns your mouth black? Like that crap. But no, this is a whole new level of crazy. Fart candy causes you to fart.
I may be naive, but I honestly wasn't aware that we as a species had developed the ability to hide farts in candy yet. I know that beans cause gas, and that some people can't handle their Mexican food, but not that we had refined a particular ingredient to the point where it can be added to candy, imperceptibly, and then it will make people fart.
While causing farts seems like a good prank on the surface, you have to also be aware that if you're there with the person eating the candy, you too become the victim. Moreso than the farter, because we only pretend to be offended by our own farts, when really we're spitefully proud of each and every one.
4 No Gay Sex Sign
This seems like it would have been most at home in the 1980s, when there was a genuine fear of gay sex taking place in a bathroom or your linen closet or wherever you feel gays might be gathering in and around your residence. Basically when homophobia was more of a cottage industry and everyone had a good laugh at Billy Crystal playing a man named Jodie. A man named Jodie, just imagine it. So silly. So gay.
Anyway, as a gift, this one is just lost in the woods. If you give it to a friend who is actually gay, it's like giving a midget one of those signs from the circus that says you must be this tall to ride. It's a passive-aggressive confrontation. Also, did you know midgets don't like being called midgets? I hope none got up on a booster seat to read this.
The big issue with the no-gay-sex sign is that it's kind of like flying the Confederate flag or listening to Glenn Beck in public -- it's a forthright admission of dummitude and ignorance. Most people want to keep their idiocy secret because it's embarrassing; that's why the KKK wear those delightful linens. The costumes make it easier to be a pinhead. But all out in the open, you have to be a real gaping anus to act that way, and it's hard to give a gift without it being out in the open, so you're admitting to your friend that you either are an ass or have closeted gay fantasies about them, or both. Probably both.
3 Liquid Ass
Last butt-themed prank, I promise. From me, not from prank stores. Maybe. They have pages and pages of this shit. For our purposes, this is pretty much the omega of ass prankage -- liquid ass. Here's a quote from the Liquid Ass website: "Once unleashed, this power-packed, super-concentrated liquid begins to evaporate filling the air with a genuine, foul butt-crack smell with hints of dead animal and fresh poo." If you've never had occasion to say "Well I never," then please take a moment now.
Rancidity does not equate to good times; this has never been a historical observation or even speculation. In the Dark Ages when people were carting wagons laden with plague victims through the streets and if you wanted a breath of fresh air you had to put your face in the dog's ass, no one thought they were living in one big, hilarious prank. No one likes stink. And while we've all been enamored of a real-life fart now and then and found ourselves with watery eyes and our shirts pulled up, laughing a mixture of elation and pain from the magnitude of what occurred, it's because it was produced by another human with whom we have some relationship that we can share a laugh. It's not bottled. I can shit in a can and give it to a stranger right now, and it's going to get very few chuckles. Your fake stink is a pox on humor and besmirches the good name of real stink that at least has sincerity to bolster it.
2 Big Momma Undies
This is a pair of underwear that appears to be large enough to house some of those little midgets who I assume are still not reading this article. Little dickenses. It's funny because the implication is that these were made for a morbidly obese woman, and of course you're not giving them to a morbidly obese woman, or even Martin Lawrence, the proverbial Big Momma whom we all love and admire. He was Madea before Madea was terribly uncool and ruining cinema.
These giant, wind sail undergarments really encapsulate the very nature of what's wrong with gag gifts as a whole, and it's due to the price. These things are $20. Most office Secret Santas set a cutoff limit of $20 or less, and of course you probably know countless people you'd never spend $20 on if it could get them out of a Turkish prison. So why waste $20 on a pair of giant panties that are literally going to be garbage within an hour? What are you, Mitt Romney? Just give them the gift of a photo of you wiping your ass on a $20 bill then. It'll save you the effort of going out, and probably be a better story for them to share later.
1 Queef Machine
Were you hoping we'd get off the fart train? Not yet, lil fella. We have one last stop at Queef Station. I lied before to lull you into a false sense of security. Also, I'm really conflicted by this entry, because the idea of this thing is one of the funniest things I can imagine. Some guy was probably playing with one of those fart machines and he thought (I'm assuming it was a man, because logic) "Man, no one is ever going to mistake this sound for a sound that comes from a vagina," and so he set about doctoring a fart machine to make it more vaginal. For those interested, here is the formula for converting a regular fart into a queef:
So he made the queef machine and roamed the countryside sabotaging innocent, quiet vaginas. And now you can give it as a gift, for the lady who has everything but a naturally rowdy vagina.
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