Wednesday Roundup

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

Favorites, in no particular order:

Irregular contributor fat-leaveher had a nice day, first with this cleverly constructed comment in the Wake Up Deadspin post, and later with this shocking confession from Drew's Rant. For whatever reason, I almost always feel like an idiot for laughing at fat-leaveher's comments, but maybe that's just his particular niche. At any rate, I liked these two comments. So there.

Another guy who really had it today was our pal Gamboa Constrictor. Do I have a gay crush on Gamboa? Possibly. His offering in the Wake Up Deadspin post was wonderful, and it was done without any respelling, which I love. Later, I laughed loudly at his Weird Al joke in the Amazing Soccer Goal post. His current hot streak puts him up among the very best on Deadspin. Great job.

Another MBA favorite checked in with a few winners today; All Over But The Sharting first impressed me with an imaginative long-form contribution to the Brian Giles post, and later brought the funny with his at-first-glance-dense-but-then-suddenly-terrifically-silly joke in the Karen Sypher post. He just pushes out one solid, funny, happy comment after another.

Body by Bacardi got into the act today with a hilarious recontextualization in the Marty Turco post, and received some well-deserved applause. He hasn't been real active lately, but this was a bright, funny contribution, and one of the day's better comments (and it was a good day).

MarkKelsosMigraine struck again, this time with an awesome glimpse into Kentucky's legal justice system in the Karen Sypher post. I laughed quite a bit at this, and judging by the response, so did a great many other folks. Well done.

And finally, Steve U got back in the act with perhaps the day's best comment, this deliciously simple pun in the Kobe in China post. The crowd went wild over this one.

Total Fucking Duds

Two Duds today, the first from unstarred commenter ChuckHostetler'sMisspentYouth, also in the Kobe in China post. The comment_ninja jumped up and down on this one, and I'd say that's appropriate, although entire threads of comments have sprung up, to universal delight, around very similar humor, illustrating a point I made . . . whenever, about how important structure and timing and execution are to jokes that are potentially offensive. It's not the presence of a racial slur that makes this comment such a failure, it's the utter lack of care in delivery. There's no surprise in there, no guilty laugh, just an ugly, lifeless, unnecessary, unfunny attempt at a pun, right there in the middle of the sentence. The reader's first reaction is one of mild disgust. And I have not been offended by the long threads in other posts that have made use of one potentially offensive race/ethnicity/nationality pun after another.

The other dud came from starred (but otherwise forgettable) commenter blogsarefun, who violated the "be funny" rule with his sarcastic bitching and moaning in the Rotisserie Baseball post. For his efforts, his comment was grayed out by the ninja, and I'm all for that. The last thing in the world a Deadspin reader should see when they scroll down to the comments section of a very well-written, very funny post is a featured comment about how lame someone thinks it is. Furthermore, it's not for commenters to police the content of Deadspin posts. Not that there isn't room for criticism in the comments section; it should always be delivered as a joke. And blogsarefun has been around long enough to know better; in fact, the irony here is that, while referencing one part of the Commentist Manifesto, he ignored its first and most important rule of commenting; be funny, do not be not funny.

That's it! Go DUANing!