Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Monday Roundup

Favorites and duds from today's commenting.

Favorites, in no particular order:

Here's ye olde such-and-such-former-famous-person-is-poor joke from Madoffs Mets in the Daily Screencap post. I like these for obvious reasons: they usually involve a quick-moving bit of misdirection and they poke fun at vulnerable targets. Later, he apparently ended the internet with this well-made one-liner in the Pro Bowl Fan Brawl post. That's a terrific joke, the kind of thing that could easily show up in a late night talk show opening monologue.

Bevraj of Choice dropped one of my favorite jokes from Monday in the Charles Barkley post. I'm surprised this one didn't get a bit more attention. It's got all the right pieces: it's quick, it's elegant, it's smart, it's silly . . . great joke.

Here's an excellent riff on a well-known title from Same Sad Echo in the Charles Barkley post. I love the funny-by-accumulation jokes. No punchline required. Good stuff. Later, Same Sad Echo dropped this wordplay dig in the Louie Armstrong  Anderson post, and even later, he cracked me up with this short and sweet Phil Mickelson joke in the Effort Bowl post. This guy!

Here's another funny-by-accumulation joke, this time from Raysism in the Unkillable Trent Williams post. Okay, well, this one does supply something like a punchline at the end, but you're already laughing by then. Later, Raysism brought the house down with the best use of the mistake in the Louie Armstrong Anderson post. Really either of these comments could have been Comment of the Day, but I'm giving it to this second one. Hilarious. This joke will not be very accessible now that the mistake has been corrected, but that's just the way that goes.

Here's a terrific dialogue joke from Steve U in the Unkillable Trent Williams post. Apparently this is a COTY!!1!1 nominee. All that aside, it's hilarious. I love the jokes that find an original and absurd way of filling in the blanks in a particular news story. And later, here's a dynamite joke in the Louie Armstrong Anderson post. Holy smokes, that's great. This could very easily have been Comment of the Day, too.

Here's a fun thread in the Lance Armstrong's "Creep" post, featuring FreemanMcNeil, Same Sad Echo, Bring Back Anthony Mason, Raysism, SavetoFavorites, and others. Definitely worth checking out.

BlairWalshProject is back for more with this excellent extended quote in the Dull Joe Flacco post. This is very encouraging. Keep it up!

Here's a characteristically thoughtful and well-crafted dig from All Over But The Sharting in the Dull Joe Flacco post. I like about this joke that it doesn't give any sort of head-fake or indication in any direction with the opening line. It takes its time getting to the reveal and then packages 100% of its action in the final 17 syllables. The opening line is almost its reason for being, and then comes the joke. Excellent.

Here's a wonderful catch from RMJ=H in the Dull Joe Flacco post. It's funny sometimes what you don't notice in a given post's accompanying art, but the joke fits the photo so explicitly I had a bizarre moment when I wondered if RMJ=H had somehow shopped it. That's a hell of a pull. Great joke.

BronzeHammer cracked me up with this abrupt glance into the future in the Sob Story post. I just love how to-the-point this joke is. I feel like every word that wasn't put between the italicized line and the "we're both hacks" line would have significantly diminished the potency of the joke. And that kind of thing all comes down to the talent of the joke-maker and that sense of how to maximize the impact of your punchline. This is a fantastic joke.

If this kind of comment, from David Hume in the Sob Story post, doesn't make you sort of sit back and shake your head and smile and think about all the wide world of humor and storytelling out there for the taking, well, you're probably not nearly as lost down this miserable rabbit hole as I am. No set-up, no knockout punchline, no schtick, just a calm, thoughtful, breezy, beautifully confident version of the same angle BronzeHammer took in the same post. I love this stuff, if for no other reason than it reminds me that all that blabbering I do about condensing your idea into a tight punchline and positioning it carefully and yadda yadda is mostly just a boring by-the-numbers way of being funny. Be funny! Burn this blog! Be funny.

Bring Back Anthony Mason invoked Goatse with this awesome one-liner in the Chris Kluwe post, to the delight of the crowd. This is a crowd pleaser, a clever and savage dig at a hugely unpopular public figure. Sometimes you just have to know your audience. Also, am I the only person who sort of thinks Chris Kluwe is annoying and less than a tenth as funny/interesting/intelligent/clever as he thinks he is? I'm probably the only one. Nevermind.

DougExeter squeezed some juice out of a well-worn angle with this recontextualization in the Japanese Bat Flipping post. This joke hits the bullseye, which is fortunate, because I have a feeling it wouldn't have taken much for it to land with an echoing thud. DougExeter is a talented enough commenter to pick just the right way to work that reference into a winner. Good stuff.

I laughed at this wordplay joke from TheCarlosRuizSpanishEnglishDictionary in the Ravens Cheerleader Petition post. It takes two separate bits of information from the post and finds a clever way to draw them together into a tight little one-liner. That's a sharp bit of humor, there.

Here's IronMikeGallego hopping on the silly train in the Kwame Harris post. That's great. This joke has so many working parts. It offers a few lukewarm little pun-like jokes-within-a-joke in the opening, and then throws in a huge curveball at the end, turning absurd at just the right moment. And it gives us Kwame Harris as a . . . err . . . straight man along the way. Excellent.

And finally, here's Tulos Mullet (Tom Ley) being a wise guy in the Marshall Henderson post. Impossible to not laugh at this. Boy would this guy ever be welcome back at the commenting table.

Total Fucking Duds

Skipping the duds today. Thanks for understanding.

So, clearly we're still not back on schedule. I went to a basketball game last night and got home late and punished myself by eating leftover pasta and a bowl of granola with approximately half a gallon of honey poured over the top. Also, man, that's a lot of fucking Favorites. At any rate, forgive me.

Keep an eye out for Tuesday's Roundup tonight. So help me God.

2 comments:

  1. Nate Jackson seems to agree with you on Kluwe and so do I.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, man. It's been fun here all month, huh?

    ReplyDelete