Thursday Roundup

A few favorites and a dud or two from today's commenting.

Favorites, in no particular order:

Here's a great dig at Bleacher Report from Eddie Murray Sparkles in the, um, Bleacher Report post. Sometimes, a commenter will create a false premise for their joke and wind up with something annoying and forced. Other times, the whole thing comes together, and the set-up is stronger for introducing a circumstance that both leads us to and obscures the punchline at the same time.

Gamboa Constrictor went deadpan for this wordplay joke in the Aroldis Chapman post, and it worked. It's also no surprise the next commenter was the first to praise it, because . . .

This is apparently what newly starred commenter John Owens does, as with this evil reference in the Aroldis Chapman post. In no time flat, John Owens has established his wheelhouse, and it is the goofy plain-language wordplay joke. Congratulations on that star, and keep 'em coming. Do you.

Boy, this is just terrific, from Sponsored by V8 in the Amendola's Plates post. This is something completely different. Right now, today, Sponsored by V8 could sell a million bumper stickers and a million t-shirts with that joke right there. That's the kind of thing that slays the audience on The Tonight Show. Bravo.

Along those same lines, here's a humdinger from Blast it, Biggs, also in the Amendola's Plates post. This was the post that got everyone going today. There were any number of solid, funny jokes in there, plus more than a few stand-outs. This joke lacks the visual element of the one above, but it relies upon the same device, and is every bit as funny.

Raysism killed me with this (also in the Amendola's Plates post), a joke that benefits from the frequently-mentioned cognitive blip, that briefest of delays when our brain reassembles the working parts of the joke. That delay can be a powerful accelerant for a great punchline, like the backdraft before the explosion. Great, great joke. Later, in the Juwan Howard post, he dropped this brutally gruesome misunderstanding gag, causing me to create quite a scene at my computer this afternoon. Not yet finished, he turned a bad wordplay joke into a winner by handing it over to an easy target in the Craig James post. Any number of gray commenters would have made that line their own, and it would have been goofy, but by putting those goofy words in the mouth of a readily available target and repurposing them as an utterance of flagrant stupidity, he put the joke on the speaker and not on the words themselves. That all makes perfect sense in my head.

Here's a simple, silly, and effective satire of Joe Amendola's ineptitude from Orange and Palindromic in the Amendola's Plates post. One of the very best things about Deadspin's commentariat is how many different angles to the same theme can be found within a single post or on a single day. A topic is tapped at the point when we start to see just the same angles over and over again. Obviously, Joe Amendola-is-a-hopeless-doofus still has a ways to go.

And finally, there's just no way I can wrap up the favorites without highlighting this appearance by our guy Sean Newell in the Amendola's Plates post. My friends are getting tired of hearing about how a writer on Deadspin once wrote for Mad Bastards All, but I still remind them every time they come in to tighten my straight-jacket.

Total Fucking Duds

I've been going round and round with this joke from snoop-a-loop in the Aroldis Chapman post. I can't make sense of it as a pun, and I'm pretty sure "fidel" is not a word, just a name. If that's the joke, or if I'm totally missing it, please, someone let me know in the comments. When I read it, and when I take into account the fact that "fidel" is not the root word of "fidelity" (which seems to be what this joke is going for), I gain the impression of a desperately flimsy pun based on a made-up word, and I cringe. I hope I'm wrong.

And here's something totally useless and inane from unstarred guy thedavidmurray in the Craig James post. I don't know what that is. A conversation starter? Internal monologue? It's very clearly neither joking nor commentary. Would that be considered anything close to funny or sharp or poignant or even particularly interesting in any room of people anywhere in the world? God, I hope not.

Alrighty, folks! Sleep well and wake ready to make funny. Nighty-night (something about DUAN).