Jazz-Hands

One down, five to go.

Family Guy isn’t funny. Never was, never will be.

Ever wondered where The Simpsons got their family on the couch ‘trademark’?

Like King Of The Hill and The Simpsons before it, it’s another copycat Wait Till Your Father Gets Home – Hanna Barbera’s animated sit-com of the 1970s cancelled after three seasons when one of the victims of its satire sued them and the show’s sponsors (and you thought gagging by writ by the rich and powerful was anything new?).

The difference is that The Simpsons is funny (to the extent Ronald Reagan tried to find a way to ban it because he thought it ‘subversive’ and ‘preaching un-American values’), using satire to comment on both comtemporary issues and timeless.

Testicles Chin simply graft tired old gags loosely onto tired old plots done a gazillion times better by others, throwing the odd piece of ‘controversial’ material more for the sake of headlines than making a point.

Even the puns in Animal Crossing New Leaf are ten times funnier than Testicles Chin ever will be.

Coming back to the last post about cruelty passed up as comedy, YouTube pranksters are often as funny as toothache in that respect, but this week a guy called Jeromy Jarre showed in two videos how to do it completely right and how to get it completely wrong.

The first video was ‘ace in the hole’, the second plain old ‘asshole’.

Here’s video one:

Ahhhhhhh innit nice?

Here’s video two, done in conjunction with Vitalyzd TV

Ewwwwww innit nasty?

The first one was as sweet as it was silly, the participants got a laugh out of it, and even when he had to take the slap forfeit none of them had the heart to do it to him properly  – as he had no doubt guessed, you’d have to be a real meanie to have slapped him full on when your own forfeit was only to be kissed. In one, he managed to even get a free hug out of it. Win-win.

The second one however was plain mean. Not excusing the girl for spitting on him (wow what a skank!), but hostility begets hostility – she may have felt afraid suddenly for her safety from the way he turned nasty in a blink.

The same premise of the prank could easily have been achieved in a far funnier and less humiliating fashion.

How about this?

Once she agrees to the ride with Vitalyzd in the hot car, Jerome (waiting nearby) now reappears, walking over to the car. Vitalyzd gets out and the following dialogue takes place.

Vitalyzed: ‘Man, there you are! I thought I’d have to go round the block again waiting for you to turn up. Car’s all fixed, you can have it back.’

Jerome: ‘Great! I’ve parked the one you loaned me down the street here, here’s the keys.’ [they exchange keys]

Vitalyzed: ‘Thanks, but look I’d agreed to give this lady a ride down the block before you turned up. D’ya wanna honour my promise for me?’

Jerome: ‘Um, yeah, okay… I guess… unless she’d rather take the ride in your car.’

It now puts her in the dilemma of having to decide whether to:

1. Stay in the car (showing herself as shallow in trusting a stranger on the grounds of the car he’s driving).

2. Go to the other car (at the risk of making it appear she thinks Jerome is a psycho or she has the hots for Vitalysed).

3. Get out of the car and decline both offers (either out of not wishing to offend either or from suspicion she’s been set up, but at the cost of a ride).

Whatever the outcome, you’ve got a clever laugh without being a choad in the process.

As Slappy Squirrel used to say, ‘Now that’s comedy!’

If some stranger reduced your own child completely to tears on purpose for a ‘laugh’, especially a young child, any sort of parent with a pulse would want to tear that stranger responsible limb from limb, ending with ripping their still-beating heart out of their ribcages to show to their faces its rancidness before nailgunning them blind with the rustiest nails that could be found, and dumping their worthless carcasses (alive or not, but hopefully alive) into a large vat of boiling acid to dissolve screaming.

But when that stranger is a TV show host, thousands of Americans surrender their basic maternal and paternal instincts to torment their own children in the hope if they get upset enough it will make ‘good’ enough TV to be broadcast – furthering their child’s distress and humiliation by broadcasting it to the world for everyone they know to enjoy a moment’s schadenfreude watching them sobbing their little hearts out because they think their parents have betrayed them.

This isn’t ‘Prank TV’, this is ‘Prick TV’. Made by pricks, produced by pricks, aimed at pricks and enjoyed by pricks.

Before anyone so much as thinks a single ‘Yeah, but…’ of deflection over the whole ‘morality’ of the American version of Halloween anyway (teaching children ‘extortion pays’ by demanding sweeties from neighbours under threat of having their house and garden toilet papered or worse) as some sort of excuse; just remember those kids are only taking part in a tradition adults started, institutionalised and in time commercialised.

It doesn’t matter a damn that the parents later tell the children they were joking. Whether that happens after a minute, an hour, two hours, half a day, a whole day, what matters is at that moment suddenly that child is left feeling completely betrayed by their own parents – the one set of people they should feel able to trust completely: betrayed into believing the hours they’d put in making a costume (yeah yeah people, most of them buy or hire one, whatever…) and going round the door with friends was all in vain because the fruits of their labours were stolen by overgrown schoolyard bullies (isn’t the USA supposed to be the land proud of installing into their sproglets the  Protestant Work Ethic – even if it is the oldest ‘rich man – poor man’ lie of all)

Telling them afterwards it was all a ‘joke’ only compounds the nastiness – ‘we only told you we ate all your Halloween candy because we wanted to video you bursting into tears so it would be shown on TV’ – if someone else did that to their child, they’d be running to the news media and authorities demanding justice and orchestrating the lynch mob camped outside the court buildings like they were awaiting the January Sales before you could say ‘happy slapping’.

The most basic trait of any human being worthy of the name is compassion, even more so where the welfare of children are concerned – why else do charities bombard us with TV adverts at dinner time with plinky-plonk pondering piano to tug at our heartstrings and thus make us tug at our purse strings? If people now think that a child’s misery is a worthwhile price to pay for a few seconds of their own laughter – we in what is meant to be civilised society are in trouble.

Worse, if people think their own child’s misery is worth a few seconds of a complete strangers laughter, no wonder parents now complain about a generation of callous children growing up learning no respect for anyone or anything in the world other than themselves. They’ve had some education.

Jimmy Kimmel is a pathetic excuse for a human being, and if there’s any karma left in this world it will be slipping on some child’s dropped sweetie straight into the path of a runaway steamroller that sends him down to the lowest pit of steaming rabid bat dung in Hades whilst made to hear De La Soul’s ‘Me Myself And I’ in an endless loop for all eternity.

But he counts as nothing compared to the supposed ‘loving’ parents who aided and abetted him the last three years.

Here’s to the one that saw the future in video games and devoted a company to it (against every expert’s advice) that it changed the face of the world.

For all you did with Nintendo – a company that puts a million smiles on a million faces every day from young to old, from yesterday’s Donkey Kong to today’s Mario Kart and Animal Crossing series – without ever losing their sense of responsibility for the kind of games they were selling to children, thanks for playing.