Monday, May 2, 2011

Monday Roundup

(For dont-forget-where-you-came-from-cheese-mac's Guest Lecture on Commenting, click here. Email madbastardsall@gmail.com to discuss how you too can submit content to Mad Bastards All.)

Some favorites and mercifully few duds from Monday's commenting.

Favorites
, in no particular order:

I loved this comment from Vodkanaut in the Robot post from this morning. We're still buying charming and silly at Mad Bastards All. Great job.

Also in the Robot post, this incredible thread, featuring UweBollocks, Eddie Murray Sparkles, IronMikeGallego, All Over But The Sharting, Same Sad Echo, cobra.la.la.la.la.la, bigredgambler, and all oiled up. Fantastic. +1s all around.

One more from the Robot post: this simple goofball joke from Eddie Murray Sparkles. Loved it.

In the Roger McDowell post, I really enjoyed this clever comment from UweBollocks, and so did the crowd. I'm searching for the appropriate term for a joke that references something from the actual visual or grammatical make-up of a Deadspin post. I first started thinking about this a while back when Hatey McLife used the thumbnail from the Monster Jellyfish post as a part of his joke in a separate post - the joke is a reference to what is seen on the screen, and not necessarily tied very tightly to the meaning of the article. Cinematography? Mise en scene? How can it be that I am actually devoting precious moments of my life to considering such things? It's realizations like these that really [gunshot]

I thought dont-forget-where-you-came-from-cheese-mac's Rent joke in the Heat Jersey post was terrific, even if it did blatantly encroach upon MarkKelsosMigraine's turf. In fact, I thought MarkKelsosMigraine's response was hysterical for its tongue-in-cheek tone. And, and, I laughed at Tulos_Mullet's final reply, referencing the other half of MKM's famous shtick. Awesome.

I like to think All Over But The Sharting blacked out while reading the Kronum post and woke up some time later painted in +1s. First, he did this. Moments later, this. Mere seconds later, he took Phintastic's challenge and dropped this. Still not out of Kronum jokes, he finished with this gem. That's just ridiculous. That's a lot of inspiration from a single post. Great, great job. Unbelievably, All Over But The Sharting pulled another Kronum joke out of thin air, this time in the Drunk Giants post, initiating this awesome thread, featuring Tulos_Mullet and Eddie Murray Sparkles. Kronum . . . who knew?

Gamboa Constrictor had by far the best joke in the Lebron/Bin Laden post, earning a round of applause from the crowd.

And finally, in the Terrifying Ledes post, David Hume went back to good old Kronum for a long, uproariously funny comparison. The crowd went nuts over this one.

Total Fucking Duds

I was a little gentler in my culling of Duds for today's Roundup. I've been meaning to get back to cutting down on this list, and today was a genuine opportunity to start, as there weren't so many flat-out terrible comments. There were still the average number of bad comments, but thankfully, most of them were honest-to-God jokes.

Our first Dud comes from unstarred commenter Broxtons_Buffet in the Snapshot of America post. Obviously, there's a lot wrong with this comment, but nothing more so than the self-referential nature of it. I can appreciate that in some crazy-ass head-on-backwards misguided sort of way, the "BOOM! TOPICAL!" thing is part of the joke, in the sense that Broxtons_Buffet surely thought it was funny and a funny way to accent the humor of the cruelly tortured one-liner before it. Sometimes, new commenters have a tendency to step on their own jokes or those of other commenters with either unnecessary explanations or follow-up or brutally clumsy, desperately misguided piggy-back jokes. Our guy Phintastic referenced this in a Mad Bastards All comment recently, in fact. This is an interesting, multifaceted topic with a fair share of subtlety - what is an appropriate riff on someone's comment? When is it appropriate to follow up one's own joke? The discussion, as I see it, is about the art of following a good joke, and it's a good one, and I think it'd be a lot more interesting if handled by a familiar name from the Deadspin commentariat. So, to Phintastic and everyone else, use the email at the top of the Roundup, and we'll put this thing together.

And finally, from the What In God's Name Were You Thinking file, this mind-bogglingly wrong-headed disaster from unstarred commenter The Misanthrope. Are you fucking kidding me? If I were The Misanthrope, I'd be pants-shittingly terrified that the comment_ninja might stumble across that thing. Holy macaroni.

Hey, welcome back, folks. Have a great DUAN.

9 comments:

  1. As someone who has been featured in the Duds section, I beg you not to cut down on the quantity unless it is truly a dud free day! People who fail spectacularly deserve to be exposed for doing so.

    Afterall, that's one of Deadspin's greatest qualities.

    --chadBROchocinco

    ReplyDelete
  2. You, MBA, coined the perfect term for the proper use of a reply/enhancement in a comment thread.

    "...in a classic example of turning a turd into delicious turd juice..."

    Which is what it's all about. If someone lays an egg, but the "right answer" is there for the taking, take it! It's amazing how much inspiration comes from someone else getting it either crashingly wrong or almost, but not quite, right.

    - SimuLord

    ReplyDelete
  3. Simulord, yes, those can happen, but lately there are too many good comments that should just be getting +1s where inevitably someone tries to either enhance, or one up a great joke with something terrible.

    That phrase was coined on one of my horrible jokes, and then today Sharting took my set up and hit one out of the park. Those are the exceptions. I'm talking about the other side of it, where a lame joke takes the air out of a good one.

    - Phin

    ReplyDelete
  4. Respectfully, I believe that not only this blog, but most of the commentariat, may have overlooked what I would currently rank as the comment of the year, and one of the best I've ever seen on the Spins. No, it's not my 3rd Bass joke (though how you could have omitted that is beyond me), it was this incredible gem from cheese mac in the Craggs thread:

    http://deadspin.com/#!5797646/bin-ladens-death-means-something-or-other-for-the-nfl-lockout-according-to-some-shit-mike-florio-threw-at-the-wall?comment=38846364:38846364

    I'll be honest, I probably laughed harder at Hume and Sharting's Kronum comments. But this is as well constructed as a comment could ever be. It is the Paul's Boutique of comments: perfect, concise, elegant, and yet incredibly layered at the same time.

    First, let's appreciate the fraction - faction pun. It's your classic Emmitt Smith line, and by itself it's funny but not memorable. What is amazing though, is that cheese mac then ties it to not only an actual fraction that dates from the time of Fed. 10, impressive enough in and of itself, but to one that would actually explain why Emmitt Smith would hate fractions. It's amazing.

    Then, in what I think was his boldest stroke, he omitted the customary "-- Emmitt Smith." So the reader actually had to think it through for a minute to tie it back to Tommy's post.

    That, ladies and gentlemen, is simply as good as it gets. I've been in awe of cheese mac's work for a long time, but my respect for him went up another notch today.

    +1

    -- IMG

    ReplyDelete
  5. The fact that I have not been featured in the "duds" section of this blog in the past few weeks makes me question the legitimacy of this whole operation.

    For those of you who are still holding onto my deadspin rookie card, I will try to do better.

    I don't get around to giving out a lot of +1s, but Sharting, Cheese Mac, EMS, Uwe, Echo, IronMike, Bevraj, Steve U, and a ton of others have given me more than a few chuckles lately. I love what you're doing here. Keep up the good work.

    -OnTheTwelfthNightOfLloydChristmas

    ReplyDelete
  6. No mention of a starred commenter dropping a really fucking lazy John Kruk joke in the Terrible People thread?

    http://deadspin.com/#!5797723/guy-who-is-not-even-suing-anyone-says-roger-mcdowell-made-his-kid-cry?comment=38844742:38844742

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oof, that Kruk "joke" is brutal.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Mise en Spin. There's your name for that type of joke.

    ReplyDelete