Be Pro-CACAH!

America (Fuck Yeah!) -Team America (mp3)

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are responsible for a lot of twisted shit. In fact, they have proven to me time and again that they go 11, and my tolerance for calloused satire only goes to 10. Some examples:

• When Satan has intercourse with Saddam Hussein;
• When Cartman contracts AIDS and injects Kyle with it;
• When they kill Strawberry Shortcake; and
• When they wrote and filmed 90% of Team America:World Police.

To be sure, nary a celebrity, cause, political stance or religious belief has been spared from their merciless magnifying glass. But until last week, never once had they dared to cross the line of Muslim extremists.

That's right. Last week, the prophet Muhammed appeared on their show.

Granted, he was dressed completely in a bear suit. But he was there, because he announces himself as such in the show.

Except that Comedy Central bleeped the muther-bleeping bleep out of the episode becuase a group of Muslim extremists began making threats on Parker + Stone's lives if they dared go where only slain Danish cartoonists have dared to go.

Although I'm no prude by any stretch, much of what these two guys do offends me. Half the time I keep watching anyway, and half the time I just avoid it because I feel better about myself when I make the effort to avoid pointlessly cruel mockery.

But now we have a moment where I'm forced to take their side and support them.

It's one thing to be offended. It's one thing to protest, or to enact laws, or to call the po-po. But when a group of wacked-out fundamentalists decide that God or Allah has enabled them the right to be judge, jury and executioner on the lives of people guilty only of drawing, on a fucking computer, a bear, and adding a voice-over of someone claiming to be Muhammed from inside that bear costume? Well, that kinda pushes me into the South Park Support Network.

Or, as hilarious columnist Dan Savage decided to call it, the "Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor (CACAH, pronounced ca-ca)".

Savage has declared May 20, 2010, as the first-annual Everybody Draw Muhammed Day:

In light of recent "veiled" (ha!) threats aimed at the creators of the television show South park (for depicting the prophet Mohammed in a bear suit) by bloggers on Revolution Muslim's website, we hearby (sic) deem May 20, 2010 as the first annual Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.

Do your part to both water down the pool of targets and, yeah, defend a little something our country is famous for (but maybe not for long? Comedy Central cooperated with the terrorists and pulled the episode): the First Ammendment

Unless I fear for my employment -- which, ironically, is a bigger concern than the fear for my very life -- I will participate in EDM Day. I will draw something and add myself to the untold number of people who stand up to this kind of crap.

Here in the 21st Century, in a culture where few things seem worth fighting for anymore, there's a little something known as freedom of speech, and we can make a pretty powerful collective statement defending it by doing nothing more than spending a few minutes of time in our own homes and posting pictures like this.

And here's what I guarantee you: even if Dan Savage was kidding about that day (which he wasn't, I don't think), and even if only a few thousand people participate (the numbers will be much higher, I think), it will be an awe-inspiring moment for the rights of offensive and tasteless comedy over the forces of thought-control and extremism.

And if they come kill me? Screw 'em. It's after the series finale of LOST, so I can die a happy man anyway.

Or I'll just lie and say Bob did it.

Please note that I'm still trying to figure out which of the five ways I've seen it is the most acceptable way to spell the name of the prophet in question. I can't tell whether people intentionally misspell it to try and avoid extremist wrath and violence, or if there's multiple options, or if no one really knows how to spell it.

Be Funny

Freedy Johnston--"I Can Hear The Laughs" (mp3)

Billy and I face an interesting challenge today: we have both been requested to be funny by a group of seniors who are responsible for putting on a luncheon for their fellow senior classmates. They picked the two of us because they thought we would be funny.

Now, professional comedians who are readers aside, I don't know if you've ever been expected to be funny, but it is far easier said than done. Billy's humor, as I have come to understand it, is based on his being a wry observer of the human condition. He can take a situation that most of us would overlook and give it a special Billy spin that not only makes us laugh, but also makes us wiser. My sense of humor tends to come from the sidelines. I don't like to be the center of attention; instead, I'd rather hang back and throw out a potentially devastating or funny line from time to time.

Neither approach necessarily lends itself to the kind of stand-up speech we're expected to give today. Billy is often too smart, too culturally-aware, too expansive in his perceptions for an 18-year-old audience, despite the many ways he acts (we both do) like an 18-year-old. My problem is that though I always know I can throw in a funny line here or there, this doesn't translate well into a 7-10 minute funny speech.

Be funny, they said. We shall try to oblige.

In a way, though, being told to be funny is like being told to get an erection right now.

Right now. You heard me. Come on. Let's see it.

You can stare down there all you want. You can attempt levitation. But usually, depending on the context of that latter request, you need a little something more than just a command to make that happen. Funniness is the same way. Just like you might like to see a little naked shumpin'-shumpin', be teased and tantalized, touch somewhere, so too would you like to have some guidelines for what you're supposed to be funny about.

As far as I know (unless Billy is keeping it from me), we didn't get any of that. Are we supposed to make them laugh about being seniors? Are we supposed to make fun of them and try to get them to laugh at each other? Should we drop something or take a fall ourselves (always good for a laugh)? Should we zero in on the easy targets? Should we pursue the abstract, cosmic humor that drives our lives and this universe, pointing out how isn't it funny that we're worried about this flu when an asteroid is scheduled to hit in two years anyway?

The fact that we've had weeks to plan our funniness hasn't really helped either. Anytime you try to be funny, even on the spot, you cycle through possibilities and decide (sometimes instantly) what you're willing to risk saying. The fact that you have 30-50 cycles of possibilities instead of 2-3 doesn't make you any funnier. It may make you more prepared, but there's no guarantee that you're funnier.

Too much of humor depends on what happened last week, yesterday, last class, last minute. In this case, the tenor of the senior class has changed many times since we first agreed to the gig--there have been victories, defeats, expulsions, bad ideas, college acceptances, Spring Break couplings. A boy and his friend went to the mall last Friday, one wearing a gorilla suit, one carrying a video camera. Both are now banned from the mall area for a year; neither are seniors. It doesn't matter. There's odd, potentially humorous material there that wasn't there a month ago. The senior who said last week that he didn't care how smart a Special Olympian was as long as she was hot offers a potential laugh. At him, of course. Yes, it's sick, it's twisted, but there is something there that you can use, that you can twist. Everything that surrounds us is potential material.

So off we go on our quest, each of us the other person's sidekick, on the quest for human teenage laughter. Many have tried; many have failed.

Wish us luck.

Freedy Johnston's This Perfect World is available at Itunes.

Funny Bone Hairline Fracture

It Hurts When I Laugh - Love Spit Love (mp3)
You Don't Need to Laugh (To Be Happy) - Frankie Miller (mp3)
Paid to Smile - The Lemonheads (mp3)

I'm worried about the state of the American Funny Bone. It's not broken, but perhaps it's in need of some more calcium, stat. The American Funny Bone is like some 90-year-old woman's hips, and one good fall down a stair or two could shatter it into a bajillion pieces, leaving the American Sense of Humor stuck in a wheelchair for the short remainder of its miserable life, constantly bumping into the door frames and complaining about the crappy rest home cuisine.

Can someone please explain to me how, at a time when our society is almost as likely to get its news from "The Daily Show" as from some talking head on CNN or FoxNews, America risks losing its robust sense of humor, a sense that has arguably helped us almost survive numerous wars over the centuries, not to mention eight laugh-so-you-don't-cry years of King Dubya?

First, we get these scathing conservative responses to the Pixar movie WALL-E start sprouting up, accusing the movie of pissing on the Amur'kin Way of Life and mocking our culture of laziness and excess. (Disclaimer: I ain't seen the movie yet.)

And then this whole Obama v. New Yorker nonsense comes up, where apparently the racist morons who might not get the humor in the cover will now vote for McCain.

Excuse me, but just how many racist morons -- excuse me, racist morons who think Obama's a Muslim extremist terrorist -- were biting their nails, still unsure which way their vote was going? Hmm... should I vote for the American war hero or the neegra Muslim terr'ist? It's sooooo close! If only a cartoon magazine cover would offer me some guidance... 

I hate to pee in a big bowl of liberal corn flakes, but living in the South, I'm quite certain there's lots of folks who ain't voting for Obama either because they think he's Muslim, or they think he's a terrorist, or they think he's black. And really? When all is said and done? They mostly think he's a Muslim terrorist so they don't have to come out and say it's because he's black. (A black columnist for The Guardian UK makes some nice points.)

Further, how many racist morons even know where one can purchase New Yorker, much less use this cartoon -- it's a *#%&%# CARTOON, people!! -- in their nefarious propoganda. By that logic, if only Kim Jong-Il could plaster a few hundred thousand buildings with his visage, he could convince the American people he was actually a decent fella. Or maybe he would just need to sing "I'm So Ronery."

I have trouble envisioning the Ku Klux Klan using this cover as part of their recruiting materials. ("This one's guaranteed to double our membership!!") I don't see Republicans carrying large protest posters with this on them, like it was an aborted baby fetus, to their national convention.

But the talking heads are certainly right about one thing. This has hurt Obama's campaign. Even though he's personally tried to shake it off and act non-plussed about it, the reactions of everyone around him and media people and bloggers only serve to remind us that, if we vote Barack Obama for President, our sense of humor will take a serious blow.

Saturday Night Live won't even be allowed to spoof him, as every single spoof risks the overly sensitive taint of possible racism.

Back to the WALL-E issue. As numerous observers have rightly observed, observing our society as fat, lazy and wasteful isn't particularly original or groundbreaking. Nor, as they have noted, is it particularly inaccurate. But does that mean it can't be funny? Maybe not HaHa Funny, but maybe HurHuhmm Funny. Or maybe Oof!Ack!Ow! Funny.

Just how desperate are Republicans for some kind of grumpy upper hand that they're looking to a Pixar movie as proof of the vast left-wing conspiracy in Hollywood? Hell, Michael Moore practically looks like the captain, so I'm not sure Pixar could be skewed too far to the left.

More to the point with both of these examples, have we come so close to the fat bastards in WALL-E that we have to have our humor spoon-fed and spelled out for us? Are we so completely numbed and dumbed down that anything requiring more than a half-second of contemplation is tossed aside or feared? Would Jonathan Swift be bogged down as a barista at Starbucks, unable to sell his essays or novels because he can't write a good juicy tell-all memoir that involves Lilliputians?


"It Hurts When I Laugh" is on Trysome Eatone. "You Don't Need To Laugh (To Be Happy) is from Once In A Blue Moon. "Paid to Smile" is from The Lemonheads' Come On Feel... Amazingly, none of these songs are available on either iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site. Go figure.