Advice for Over-Privileged A-holes

I have read several essays in major publications on how to get your kid into a good kindergarten. I thought they were kidding but they were dead serious. I guess it is up to me to take a dump on this topic.

It’s time to start looking for a school for your child. I don’t mean to point out the obvious but you really should have started looking when the kid was two years old, but you screwed around and waited until he only has two years before kindergarten. Most responsible parents these days start filling out applications to competitive schools once they get a sonogram or as soon as the paper turns blue on the pregnancy test. You may have procrastinated and screwed up your child’s entire future. Let’s face it, if your kid doesn’t get into the right kindergarten you may as well send them to a training academy for janitors or lunch ladies.

If you were only able to get your child into a second-tier kindergarten there is no need to panic. All you have to do is put that child up for adoption, learn from this mistake, and start over with another baby. If you have become “too attached” to this child to relinquish it, you may consider keeping it as an employee in some domestic capacity, say as a maid or gardener. Let’s be honest with one another, even though your second choice of kindergarten costs $35,000 a year plus supplies, the only thing your child will be fit for in life will be manual labor and he or she will surely be a complete disgrace to your family name.

Since 1997 the Hillsboro Academy has been preparing five year olds for some of the most prestigious first grades in the country. The Hillsboro Academy has recently unveiled a pre-coital registration program in which couples can put their child on a waiting list (along with making a sizeable deposit) even before they have had conception-inducing sex. Registration contracts stipulate that only a partial refund is available if there happens to be something too good on television that night to do the dirty.

If this whole process seems too daunting, there is another option available to prospective parents. Instead of the traditional process of having a child of your own, scratching and clawing to get that kid into a succession of ever more expensive schools which may or may not culminate in producing an offspring you would be proud to call your own, if this seems just “too much” then there is a new service for you. At My Son the Doctor Adoption Agency you can chose from an array of accomplished adults. All candidates for adoption are licensed physicians from leading medical schools, a fact which relieves you from suffering all the usual anxieties of over-bearing parents. At a cost of only $500,000, the My Son the Doctor adoption process will save you a fortune over raising your own doctor from scratch. The bond between you and your adopted doctor will be so authentic that your adult child will want to have nothing to do with you, just like in traditional families.

In America today the most unimaginable nightmare in the realm of childrearing involves sending your kid to a public school. If you believe what is printed in major magazines about the urgency of matriculating your child in only the most elite academies, the public school system is one step below selling your offspring into white slavery or enrolling them in a gladiator academy. You may as well change your baby’s name from Wilson to Spartacus if all you have planned for him is a public school education.

If you choose to send your child to a public school you are setting them up for failure in life. If your child attends a public school how will he learn to cross over to the other side of the street when being approached by a minority? What if they actually become friends with someone of a different ethnic background? We all have nothing against African-Americans as long as they are famous or rich or both, but tolerance can only be pushed so far. I mean, it’s cool to be enlightened these days, but it’s kind of going overboard if your kid brings home a non-white (and poor) playmate.

There Is Nothing Funny About Hitler

Where do you draw the line with comedy? At what point would you consider that someone has gone “too far” in the pursuit of a laugh? Of course, everyone has their own ideas about what is out of bounds in humor, everyone has different standards, but can we all agree on a few basic topics that are forbidden? It would be extremely difficult to come up with a universally agreed-upon set of standards in the realm of humor. Would it be possible to insure that not a single American be offended by any of the offerings produced by the vast humor industrial complex operating in this country? I think that we owe it to ourselves to try.

How about Hitler? Does anyone have an argument against banning history’s absolute biggest prick from being employed in the attempt to get a cheap laugh? My initial instinct, my knee-jerk response is to say that in deference to the millions of victims of his terrible reign of terror, Hitler should be a forbidden subject of gags, limericks, knock-knock jokes, sit-coms, funny greeting cards, and humorous anecdotes of any sort. I’m glad we could all agree on that one.

But think about this for a minute. I don’t think that I will get any argument when I say that Jewish people make up an extremely disproportionate share of comedians. Now take a situation in which millions of Jewish people were being persecuted by just about the silliest-looking fucker in history and you just have to believe that there were a lots of Fürer jokes. And come to think of it, I also remember watching a Three Stooges episode when I was a kid in which Moe did a very convincing, and hilarious impersonation of that infamous Nazi shit heel. If I were to denounce that humorous portrayal of Mr. Hitler, wouldn’t I be guilty of rewriting comedy history? I am ashamed to say it but I can also remember a fairly funny joke having to do with Hitler and tequila. Let’s leave Hitler off the banned list for now.

In today’s newspaper there is an article about a consumer group warning parents of certain toys that pose a choking hazard or other dangers for children. Surely only a monster would consider as fair game for laughter a subject that involves over 210,000 emergency room visits for children annually. One of the products the consumer advocacy group mentioned was a toy guitar that could damage a child’s hearing because it puts out 117 decibels. If there were a child anywhere near me playing with a toy that put out 117 decibels, the last thing you would have to worry about would be the kid’s hearing—unless the child’s hearing could somehow be damaged by me smashing the guitar repeatedly over his head. I don’t think there is a court in this country that would convict me of any wrongdoing, and they would probably get a chuckle out of hearing that story. A jury of my peers probably wouldn’t object if I had also gone after the parents for providing their child with such an incredibly obnoxious toy.

Finding subject matter that is totally taboo to everyone is harder than I thought. Something that I find particularly heinous is anyone who finds humor in the day-to-day cute things that kids say and do, but Family Circus is one of the most beloved comic strips in America, so what do I know? Something even more unpardonable for me would be someone who cuts a Family Circus panel out of the paper in order to show it to coworkers around the office. To me, that violates all standards of human decency. Is Family Circus worse than Hitler? We may never know. I am also horribly offended by the canned laughter used in television situation comedies, but I seem to be in the minority on this issue and so will remain silent.

I will close this essay with the issue unresolved. Until we come to some kind of agreement all of you sick minds out there go ahead and make jokes about handicapped kids, 9/11, Princess Di’s premature demise, dying Popes, dead babies, Helen Keller, necrophilia, leprosy, and the glory hole in Michael Jackson’s bathroom stall. It’s open season on everything. Happy hunting.

Favorite Jokes

Completely offensive to me.

Jokes are almost always unfunny and told by people who don't have the slightest sense of humor. Telling a joke that you are just passing on does not make you funny. Another thing about jokes is that people think that the joke will be funnier if they drag it out. Wrong. Embellishment kills a joke. The only thing funny is the punchline (except the movie The Aristocrats), so stop screwing around and just get to the end with as few words as possible. I have tried to whittle these down to the bare essence.

1) A pedophile serial killer is walking in the woods at night holding a little boy's hand.
“It's dark,” says the little boy. “I'm scared.”
“You're scared?” the serial killer screams. “I gotta walk back by myself!”

2) A hunter goes out into the woods with a shotgun and shoots at a bear. He misses. The bear is so angry that he grabs the hunter and forces the hunter to give him a blow job. The hunter comes back, this time with a high-powered rifle. He shoots several times and misses again. The bear is really pissed so he bends the hunter over a stump and sodomizes him. The hunter comes back, this time with a machine gun. He shoots off two clips, missing with every shot. The bear grabs the hunter and says, “This isn't really about hunting, is it?”

3) Two recruits are finishing their FBI training and it’s the final test. The training instructors take the first trainee aside and hand him a pistol. “For your last test you have to go into this room and kill the person inside.” The first trainee thinks this is a bit extreme, but he really wants to be an FBI agent so he goes inside. A couple minutes later he comes back out and tells his teachers that he couldn't do it. “Congratulations, you passed the test. We don't want some sort of psycho to become an FBI agent.” They do the same for second trainee. He enters the room, the door closes behind him and six shots ring out immediately, then a couple dry-fire clicks from the empty pistol, and after there is a terrible ruckus can be heard coming from inside the room. The ruffled second trainee walks out saying, “Some asshole put blanks in the gun so I had to beat him to death with the chair.”

4) A woman walks into his kitchen with a duck under her arm. “This is the pig I've been fucking,” she says.
“That's a duck,” her husband corrects her.
“I'm not talking to you.”

5) A guy asks his friend, “If you could have sex with any celebrity—alive or dead—who would you choose?”
“That's a great question,” his friends says, “I'd have to say Britney Spears...dead”

6) A man is at the hospital waiting to hear news about his wife who’s just had a terrible accident. The doctor approaches him.
“I’m afraid I have really bad news. Your wife will never walk again. She’s lost most of the functions of her brain. She’ll basically be a drooling vegetable for the rest of her life.”
“My God, that’s awful,” the husband replies.
“I’m just kidding,” the doctor says. “She’s dead.”

7) An older guy and his young wife visit a marriage counselor because the old dude isn’t satisfying his wife. The counselor suggests they invite a young man into their bedroom to wave a towel over them while they have sex to stimulate the younger woman. This doesn’t work so the doctor suggests that the young guy have sex with the woman while her husband waves the towel. The woman has a shrieking orgasm with the young guy. When his wife finally recovers, the husband yells at the young guy, “You little punk, now that’s how you wave a towel!”

8) Two Jews are sent to assassinate Hitler. They are waiting in front of his house for Hitler to return from work. When it is hours past his expected return, one of the would-be killers turns to the other and says, “Gee, I hope nothing’s happened to him.”

Over My Dead Body

What if someone walked up to me right now, put a gun to my head, and told me to write something funny or they would shoot me? Would that inspire me to come up with a humorous essay or would the pressure strangle my creativity? What if I wrote something that was sort of funny, but not ha-ha funny? Would they just shoot me a little? Perhaps they would just shoot my ear off. I could live with that. I wouldn’t want to get shot in the eye, though. That wouldn’t be funny at all and definitely not ha-ha funny. If someone else got shot in the eye it might be funny. That’s called slap stick.

If someone I didn’t like got shot in the eye it would hilarious, so if someone wanted me to write something funny they should point a gun to someone else’s head and not mine. That’s kind of like tickling my funny bone, except replace ‘my funny bone’ with someone I don’t like’s eye, and then replace ‘tickle’ with a bullet. Does that make any sense? It makes sense to me so stop waving that gun at me and go point it at somebody else.

I refuse to be blackmailed into writing humor, so don’t even attempt that approach with me. You could try to take a member of my family hostage and threaten to harm them if I don’t get a laugh. That would not work with me and I’ll tell you why: I don’t like most of the members of my family. I may even enjoy it, so don’t waste your time with that ploy unless you are out to do me a favor.

What about bribery, you ask. I don’t know if I can be bribed into coming up with a humorous essay, but I’m certainly willing to give it the old college try. What did you have in mind? If you are having difficulties trying to think of things to bribe me with, allow me to give you a few suggestions: sex, money, gold, food (something with bacon on it sounds good), chocolate bars, nylon stockings, baseball tickets, and sex are just a few things I can think of. Did I mention supermodels? Perhaps some sort of combination of those items?

If you really want me to write something funny perhaps you should just get off my back and stop bloody hounding me. Good lord, you’re going on and on about this like a fucking broken record. Heaping this kind of pressure on a guy is what gives people ulcers, or heart attacks, or rickets, or that’s what makes people become bulimic, or schizophrenic, or it gives them irritable bowel syndrome (IBS, known as the silent killer except when it isn't silent and then it is hugely embarrassing). I am under so much pressure to perform that I can’t think straight. I am losing my humor erection, so to speak. There it goes. I’m as limp as a noodle. Are you happy now? Do you think that's funny? I would if it happened to someone else. How about if I just drop dead for you? I’m sure you’d love that. You always were one for a cheap laugh.