Monday, May 9, 2011

Monday Roundup

(For our recent AzureTexan Profile in Commenting, click here.)

Some favorites and a fucking fuck-load of duds from Monday's commenting.
(Links function in Firefox.)

Favorites, in no particular order:

Unstarred commenter Sir_Loin put the shtick away and contributed this neatly-packaged one-liner in the Manny Pacquiao post. For his efforts, his comment was promoted and received a +1. Well done.

Also in the Manny Pacquiao post, I really enjoyed IronMikeGallego's sharp, well-rounded dig at Shane Mosley. That's a great job, there.

Gamboa Constrictor got in on the act, dropping this elegant Shane Mosley rip, also in the Manny Pacquiao post. The Manny Pacquiao post was good to the commentariat today.

UweBollocks, When_you_get_the_money_you_get_the_Micah_Hoffpauir, IronMikeGallego, Steve_U, and Insert Clever Name contributed to another great thread today, this time in the Soccer Affairs post. +1s all around.

Steve_U did more than add his voice to a silly thread today. Also in the Soccer Affairs post, I laughed at his long, goofy re-imagining of Doctor Who, and later, in the Jim Tressel post, his stupendous one-liner was perhaps the Comment of the Day. That's good hustle. And last but not least, in the Trey Wingo post, a simple name-pun won an ovation from the crowd.

All Over But The Sharting's funny Kronum joke in the Drew Brees post started an excellent thread, featuring Eddie Murray Sparkles, IronMikeGallego, UweBollocks, and ToddReesingsTurfFacial. That may be the last terrific Kronum joke. We'll see. At any rate, hey, +1s all around.

And finally, in the Andrei Kirilenko Back Tattoo post, I giggled quite a bit at Vodkanaut's outrageous Mikhail Gorbachev joke. He does these long dialogue jokes about as well as anyone.

Total Fucking Duds

Lots of duds today. Without further ado:

Unstarred commenter 214w really should have reconsidered submitting this clunky comment to the Wake Up Deadspin post. The effort to be funny is there, but it's unfocused and more than a little awkward. My advice to new commenters is this: always pare your comment down to a single funny idea, and always finesse that single funny idea into its best, most elegant, most impactful iteration.

The Magic Johnson post was more-or-less a disaster. Most comments were terrible. We'll start with this just incredibly unfortunate offering from unstarred commenter Michael Clark. That's the cheapest, laziest, most worthless comment I can remember seeing. Nothing about it is even remotely successful or even appropriate. Make original, creative, funny jokes. This half-assed, brain-dead, slap-dick refraction of humor will not do.

Unstarred commenter Don't Bring That Kool-Aid To This Gin Party brought some weak-ass Kool-Aid to the Deadspin gin party with this POS ESPN.com comment. Try harder. Way, way harder.

I'd like to know who the hell approved unstarred commenter triple, architect of this pile of shit comment. I'm in no position to insist upon such a thing, but I'd like to recommend that any time a pink commenter is approved, the approving commenter link them immediately to the Commentist Manifesto as part of their approval. This is a flat-out atrocious comment.

I'm not going to slaughter the guy, but DUAN exists for exactly the kind of commentary unstarred guy all oiled up left in the Magic Johnson post. Why is that so hard to understand? Any time you feel like having a conversation about a post or want a serious response, save it for DUAN. The entire commentariat will thank you for it.

I was disappointed to see otherwise solid commenter DJNeuro make this limp, flimsy, lifeless one-liner out of the lowest-hanging fruit in the Magic Johnson post. To be clear, there is absolutely a solid joke in that idea, but my guess is DJNeuro knew it was an obvious go-to pun and rushed this thing out to get there first. That is always a bad idea.

One final Dud from the Magic Johnson post: this lame offering from unstarred commenter JobuNeedsARefill. There's just no ambition whatsoever to this thing. Would anyone anywhere actually laugh at that?

Not a whole lot needs to be said about this joke, from unstarred commenter Notyourvidis, in the Soccer Affairs post. That's just a depressingly cheap excuse for another pancake-flat Greg Oden joke. And Notyourvidis knew it, which is why he stepped all over it. Terrible.

Also in the Soccer Affairs post, this endlessly annoying contribution from unstarred commenter Tea_for_Dong. One gets the impression that either the throwaway nonsense of a joke was just an excuse to blather on about "Giggsy", or the "Giggsy" chatter was a clumsy way of deflecting attention from the throwaway joke. Either way, that's a turd.

This piece of crap, from unstarred commenter DarkhorseFinishedLast, in the Soccer Banner post, is . . .ummm, a piece of crap. Your enjoyment of The Family Guy is not funny, nor is it creative or original.

ToddReesingsTurfFacial struggled today. Mightily. This comment in the Milton Bradley post is, as he pointed out, unoriginal and lazy. It's also, as I Like Cheap Beer pointed out, awkward, clumsy, and off-target. It's annoying as all hell that ToddReesingsTurfFacial knew it was a turd and edited it to apologize for it, but didn't just redact it. But it's even more annoying that he didn't take a few minutes and consider it before submitting it. I've said this before; ToddReesingsTurfFacial is what I call a grinder; his goal is to push out a high volume of comments, and that effort forestalls any chance of his average comment being worth a damn. Later, this. I'll be honest; when I read the name "John Amaechi" in a Deadspin comment, I groan immediately. I'm certain the idea has been beaten to death from every possible angle. But ToddReesingsTurfFacial went with it, and his joke did absolutely nothing to disabuse me of this certainty. At this point, you could replace the entire joke with [insert lame-ass John Amaechi/gay joke] and it would have the exact same effect.

Unstarred commenter TheMisanthrope also sucked today. His lazy-ass rent-a-joke in the Rafael Nadal post was snarked by the comment_ninja, with good reason. Later, in the Phil Jackson Peyote post, he used a photo to make a desperate insult type joke. This is fucking lazy commenting. This guy sucks. Start the death clock.

In the MLS Salaries post, unstarred commenter dickutah threw up this thing. What the hell. Do better.

In the Andrei Kirilenko Back Tattoo post, Disco Choo went to the John Amaechi trough and had his weak shit shuffled off to #notsuperhomowatervolleyball by the comment_ninja. Jesus, if you're going to go down in flames, at least spell the guy's name correctly.

And finally, unstarred commenter Brosef Stalin was too lazy to notice his forgettable one-liner had already been made earlier in the Drew Brees post. It's a crappy joke anyway, but it may not have made the list if he'd been the first or only to make it.

And that's all the news that's fit to print. Welcome back, and have a great DUAN.

10 comments:

  1. I look forward to reading your site at the end of the day, but man does it jack up my eyes. It takes a good five minutes to stop seeing the lines when I'm done.

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  2. Another +1. Great post to start off the week.

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  3. Shit! Your analysis was dead on. I've only been around for a month or so and this was a good lesson for me in not rushing things.

    I had to leave my desk for a while and knew that I had to comment right then or not at all, and I went for it when I shouldn't have.

    You are truly doing the Lord's work.

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  4. Starred commenter Delonte left a pretty lazy "aids" comment on the Magic Johnson thread. Surprised you didn't catch it. The originality is right up there with the "Hey, Kruk has one nut" jokes.

    http://deadspin.com/#!5799938/the-lakers-were-classless-yesterday-according-to-the-cue-cards-magic-johnson-is-reading?comment=39037781:39037781

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  5. SerenityNowAndLaterMay 9, 2011 at 11:54 PM

    As someone who mostly comments in DUAN (thanks to being a West Coaster who does not have access to a computer during work), this roundup is amazing. I know you've heard it before, but I just want to echo what everyone's said. Please keep this up.

    On a separate note, I've got two questions about commenting that I'd love for you to cover.
    1) What's the etiquette on non-starred dudes (or dudettes) leaving +1s? Is that something we should leave to the pros?
    2) Every now and then, I'll see a post, take some time to craft what I think is a damn good comment, and then see that someone has beat me to the punch with a weak effort. My joke is similar to weak effort, but I've put some time into crafting it, and I think it's a much better version. In that case, I've just decided not to post. If you have a much, much better version of a joke that's failed, should you start a new discussion, or just leave it alone?

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  6. Re: Anonymous

    I thought about Delonte, Interrupted's comment in the Magic Johnson post. Ultimately, I decided that the AIDS angle is not itself what makes a joke lazy, but the approach. I felt that Delonte, Interrupted at least put a little more effort into his joke, so I left it out.

    To me, there's no way his joke compares to the awful John Kruk joke of Arther_Digby_Sellers. This was not a classic comment, but it was at least finessed some, albeit clumsily.

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  7. Re: SerenityNowAndLater

    1. If you love a comment, +1 it. There will be a whole post coming soon on what I think about the +1, but in short, feedback is what drives most non-Hatey McLife commenters. The +1 is an important part of commenting accountability. Eventually, I'll get around to explaining this. In the meantime, +1 a comment if you really love it.

    2. This is a tricky issue, and you're right, it should be covered. We'll address this in a dedicated post sometime soon. But my short answer is something like this: if you love your joke, think it is genuinely funny, and feel confident it's a winner, run with it. Ultimately, the site benefits from good jokes. There's more to this subject than that, though, so take that with a grain of salt. Sometime soon, we'll get into it.

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  8. ...and what's worse is that I posted the John Amaechi comment with the full expectation that I'd be called out for it. That's some self-destructive Deadspinning right there.

    Onward and upward ('cuz there's really no other direction to move at this juncture).

    -- TRTF

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  9. At least you didn't name me by name in that last paragraph, it wasn't all that bad.

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  10. (above comment from Phin)

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