Friday, September 25, 2009
Vous Me Completez
Hoity Totsy and Hotsy Toity had walked into the bar that evening as total strangers, but by the night’s end they had bared their souls, made passionate love, and swapped first names. The next day, as the train pulled out of the Paris station and disappeared forever into the morning mist, they waved goodbye and fought to hold back their tears. Both felt as though they would never again know such joy, and yet they each knew that the other had somehow made them whole.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Deep In This Pear
Several weeks ago I was at a barbeque eating my veggie burger. I was sitting sort of by myself, but I was only a few feet from my friend who, in turn, was sitting on the periphery of a circle of conversing people. I ate and absent-mindedly spied on my friend who was eating and inadvertently eavesdropping on the coterie next to him. The conversation turned to food, and the subject of nuts was raised. I overheard my friend mutter, out loud but softly to himself, “These nuts.” I saw my friend smile to himself, and I smiled to myself too because I thought that what I’d heard him say was the punch line to a joke that I’d heard as a teenager. It soon occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the joke from which I thought the punch line came. But I seemed to remember that as an adolescent I had enjoyed the forgotten joke very much. I considered asking my friend about the joke, but it would have been a little bit awkward to admit to my spying (despite its innocuousness and its lack of deliberateness). Most of all, though, I wanted to recall the joke on my own. But I couldn’t, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in frustration, reaching into my memory every few minutes and coming up empty handed each time.
That evening I gave up on trying to remember the joke without help, and I googled the punch line. I instinctively knew to type “deez nutz.” What I immediately learned was that “deez nutz” was the punch line to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jokes. Indeed, “deez nutz” was not so much a punch line as it was a genre of humor. There was website after website after website devoted solely to deez nutz jokes…cataloging them, rating them, analyzing them. Readers were emailing in to these deez nutz sites to lovingly and extensively discuss their favorite deez nutz jokes.
[Basically, a deez nutz joke is any exchange of words whose final two syllables are “deez nutz.” (And I suppose that a good deez nutz joke is simply any deez nutz joke that makes you laugh.) For example, your friend is a med student, so you ask her if she has any patients with Grabdy’s. She says, “What’s Grabdy’s?” and you say, “Grab deez nutz!” Or, for instance, your friend is a baseball fan, and you ask him if in the 1999 series he was rooting for the Expos or the Yankees. You hope that he says the Expos so that you can say, “Expos deez nutz!” but if he preferred the Yankees then you say, “Yank deez nutz!” Or, perhaps, you know that your friend banks at Bank of America, and so you ask her if she has an account with Wells Fargo or with BofA. When she answers that she has an account with BofA, you say, “BofA deez nutz!” And so on.]
I waded through dozens and dozens of deez nutz jokes. There were a few gems, it’s true, but most were either uninspired or tortuously contrived or just plain incoherent. After half an hour, I’m pretty sure that the stupider the joke was, the harder I laughed. Why were people posting these dumb jokes? Why was I still reading them? I tried to come up with some original deez nutz jokes of my own, and this exercise much increased my appreciation for a good deez nutz joke. In the end, all I had was a firm commitment to myself that I would always say, “Mickey deez nutz!” whenever I heard someone refer to McDonald’s as Mickey D.’s (this was my best stab at it). What I decidedly didn’t have was any answer to the question of what was that joke that had amused me so much as a youngster.
A couple of days later I remembered the joke that had been eluding me:
Somebody is throwing an emotions party (i.e., a party for which guests are supposed to dress up as emotions), and the hostess has included two Jamaican guys on her invitation list. The doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s a guest in a green devil outfit. The guest says, “I’m envy,” and enters. The doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s a guest dressed in a red suit who’s wearing horns on his head and a ring through his nose and who’s stomping his foot as would a raging bull. “I’m anger,” says the guest as he enters. Then the doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s her two Jamaican friends. They are both buck naked, except that the one has his penis in a bowl of pudding that he’s holding and the other has his penis in a hollowed out pear that he is holding. “What the hell are you two doing?!” asks the hostess. “I’m fucking dis custard,” says the one Jamaican, “and my friend here is deep in dis pear.”
Well, I guess the joke hadn’t been quite as funny as I'd remembered it to have been, but still I was relieved to have caged my chimera. However, this “Eureka!” moment was largely spoiled by my disappointment that my mind could be so long preoccupied by two guys with their dicks in food, by my fear that puns based on stereotypical foreign accents were as close as I could come to epiphany.
And today – that is, right now, as I write this very entry – I am still plagued by a sense of aesthetic dissatisfaction with the lore upon which I dwell. The preponderance of my blog entries deals with cannibalism, feces, incest, zombies, or bestiality. Am I but a literate bug, a worm that writhes and wallows in the putrid fruits of a soiled and limited imagination? There has to be something bigger and better to ponder, something nobler. I’m tired of posting silly blurbs, obscene anecdotes, and blunt potty humor. I’m sick of the filth and the smut and the gore. I want to write sophisticated pieces, complex and nuanced material for mature and thoughtful adults, and so I’ve decided to become a serious artist. My next entry will be poignant and powerful, a work of bona fide genius to make its readers both think and feel deeply. I've already made an appointment with my haberdasher for tomorrow to be fitted for an ascot because, seriously, this is gonna be some fuckin' highbrow shit.
That evening I gave up on trying to remember the joke without help, and I googled the punch line. I instinctively knew to type “deez nutz.” What I immediately learned was that “deez nutz” was the punch line to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jokes. Indeed, “deez nutz” was not so much a punch line as it was a genre of humor. There was website after website after website devoted solely to deez nutz jokes…cataloging them, rating them, analyzing them. Readers were emailing in to these deez nutz sites to lovingly and extensively discuss their favorite deez nutz jokes.
[Basically, a deez nutz joke is any exchange of words whose final two syllables are “deez nutz.” (And I suppose that a good deez nutz joke is simply any deez nutz joke that makes you laugh.) For example, your friend is a med student, so you ask her if she has any patients with Grabdy’s. She says, “What’s Grabdy’s?” and you say, “Grab deez nutz!” Or, for instance, your friend is a baseball fan, and you ask him if in the 1999 series he was rooting for the Expos or the Yankees. You hope that he says the Expos so that you can say, “Expos deez nutz!” but if he preferred the Yankees then you say, “Yank deez nutz!” Or, perhaps, you know that your friend banks at Bank of America, and so you ask her if she has an account with Wells Fargo or with BofA. When she answers that she has an account with BofA, you say, “BofA deez nutz!” And so on.]
I waded through dozens and dozens of deez nutz jokes. There were a few gems, it’s true, but most were either uninspired or tortuously contrived or just plain incoherent. After half an hour, I’m pretty sure that the stupider the joke was, the harder I laughed. Why were people posting these dumb jokes? Why was I still reading them? I tried to come up with some original deez nutz jokes of my own, and this exercise much increased my appreciation for a good deez nutz joke. In the end, all I had was a firm commitment to myself that I would always say, “Mickey deez nutz!” whenever I heard someone refer to McDonald’s as Mickey D.’s (this was my best stab at it). What I decidedly didn’t have was any answer to the question of what was that joke that had amused me so much as a youngster.
A couple of days later I remembered the joke that had been eluding me:
Somebody is throwing an emotions party (i.e., a party for which guests are supposed to dress up as emotions), and the hostess has included two Jamaican guys on her invitation list. The doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s a guest in a green devil outfit. The guest says, “I’m envy,” and enters. The doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s a guest dressed in a red suit who’s wearing horns on his head and a ring through his nose and who’s stomping his foot as would a raging bull. “I’m anger,” says the guest as he enters. Then the doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s her two Jamaican friends. They are both buck naked, except that the one has his penis in a bowl of pudding that he’s holding and the other has his penis in a hollowed out pear that he is holding. “What the hell are you two doing?!” asks the hostess. “I’m fucking dis custard,” says the one Jamaican, “and my friend here is deep in dis pear.”
Well, I guess the joke hadn’t been quite as funny as I'd remembered it to have been, but still I was relieved to have caged my chimera. However, this “Eureka!” moment was largely spoiled by my disappointment that my mind could be so long preoccupied by two guys with their dicks in food, by my fear that puns based on stereotypical foreign accents were as close as I could come to epiphany.
And today – that is, right now, as I write this very entry – I am still plagued by a sense of aesthetic dissatisfaction with the lore upon which I dwell. The preponderance of my blog entries deals with cannibalism, feces, incest, zombies, or bestiality. Am I but a literate bug, a worm that writhes and wallows in the putrid fruits of a soiled and limited imagination? There has to be something bigger and better to ponder, something nobler. I’m tired of posting silly blurbs, obscene anecdotes, and blunt potty humor. I’m sick of the filth and the smut and the gore. I want to write sophisticated pieces, complex and nuanced material for mature and thoughtful adults, and so I’ve decided to become a serious artist. My next entry will be poignant and powerful, a work of bona fide genius to make its readers both think and feel deeply. I've already made an appointment with my haberdasher for tomorrow to be fitted for an ascot because, seriously, this is gonna be some fuckin' highbrow shit.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
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