Tuesday Roundup

Some favorites and very few duds from Tuesday's commenting.

Favorites, in no particular order:

MarkKelsosMigraine started things off with a funny Jane's Addiction joke in the Wake Up Deadspin post. For whatever reason, a clever, preposterous rethinking of a popular song or movie title, or a famous line of text, really does it for me.

In the Gambling on Wrestling post, Gamboa Constrictor used the simplest of comments to draw laughter and applause. I believe this comment has been made before, but at any rate, it was funny and appropriate and I liked it

All Over But The Sharting left a very funny, solidly-constructed Cinderella reference in the UConn Cinderella post. That joke is as cleanly tied as they get. Well done.

Total Fucking Duds:

Because there were very few favorites on Tuesday, I released myself to hammer a handful of especially crappy comments. No, I'm not going back to the bad times; this is a one-off event.

ToddReesingsTurfFacial was justifiably slapped by the comment_ninja for what is obviously a horrible comment in the Jim Nantz Dog Pun post. The ninja referred to it as meta-commenting, and I think that's an acceptable term, although it maybe could do more to reference the awfulness of the comment. For example, Scrap-Meta-Commenting. Yes. That's better. This kind of comment makes me crazy; clearly, there's an air of, "I know this is a bad comment, sorry" to his contribution. If you knew it was bad, why let it fly? Comments about commenting or commenting memes are dicey; commenters like Delonte, Interrupted once preempted bad comments all the time, and without much humor, and I always found that inappropriate. A comment that makes a hilarious joke by exploiting our common awareness of "low-hanging fruit" would be welcome, but this is not one of those. I don't write the commenter profiles, but I'll say this about TRTF: he has really fallen off lately. A while back, he was a grinder; he dropped comments in every thread, and seemed willing to torture the shit out of a post's content in order to try to impress readers. There was a certain frenzied genius to his commenting style, even though he was conspicuously not always funny and wound up losing his star. Nowadays, he's back to his grinding ways, but now he's more or less carpet-bombing posts with lazy, half-formed, almost aggressively unworthy comments, and this was obviously a low-point in that trend. I'd take the old 550ft. Home Run or Strike Out TRTF over this new, lazy, obnoxious version.

Next up is breathing Deadspin meme Phintastic, a commenting enigma if ever there was one, and his mind-bogglingly worthless contribution to the Greece Fire post. That is the commenting equivalent of an audible, smelly fart in a crowded elevator. The joke there, as far as I can tell, is that "on fire" can be translated into another language. That the game was played in Greece and the fire started by Greek fans is, according to Phintastic, irrelevant. Maybe the fact that the opposition was Barcelona makes the use of the Spanish language appropriate. That can't possibly satisfy anyone's criteria for a good, funny comment. To me, the choice of language seems random, and is therefore irrelevant, which means that Phintastic's comment says, "On Fire." That's not a joke or a comment, that's the observation of a 2 year old.

And finally, there's this. This is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to avoid when I swore off more extensive Duds sections. I don't know why this deserves any special mention, other than that I think I developed an aneurysm upon reading it.

Look, the ninja's most important job, as I see it, is to police the featured comments, because they are the outward representation of Deadspin's commentariat and a significant part of the actual content provided by Deadspin. But the very next order of business has to be getting guys like shuttledik out of the picture altogether. Yes, he often attempts humor, but he's not even thorough enough to check for obvious spelling errors in his comments, and I don't think he's had a single comment promoted ever. He's not contributing to Deadspin's comments, he's trolling. His output represents probably 15% or more of the truly terrible comments made on Deadspin. Bust out the sad trombone and get rid of this guy, already.

Alrighty, guys. Look for a Wednesday Roundup in the regular Wednesday evening time-slot, and as always, have a lovely DUAN.