If you think I'm cranky...

Check out this post.

Most of it is right, but it has all the tact of a freight train.

Highlobster

Creepy PSAs

I love the government. From the earliest days of my childhood, I will forever remember it as an often efficient purveyor of grade school food-like products - grade F meat parts with a side of some kind of preternaturally green lettuce-like plant and a brownish milk pouch labeled "skim" that totally didn't look like a reused hospital blood packet.

Well, it turns out that they do something useful on the side - pumping out clever, completely factually accurate, and totally not permanently traumatizing ads to inform us dumb citizens who otherwise wouldn't be able to grasp complex and difficult issues of not standing on train tracks or not eating paint chips. Behold their genius:

Priest ruins Christmas forever

BBC

A Catholic priest has been criticised by parents in a city in northern Italy for telling their children that Father Christmas does not really exist.

Hahaha. Oh the irony!

The priest got a lot of flak from angry parents who accused him of ruining their family's Christmas by daring to suggest that Santa may be a human invention rather than a real being, but he said that he wasn't trying to hurt anyone's feelings.

Oh the price Santa-atheists pay for challenging the prevailing dogma - the legions of Santa-worshiping fanatics who go into hysterics at the slightest criticism of their Great Red Lord. The Yuletide defense mechanism makes any criticism of Santa a social taboo. It's very fortunate for humanity that Saint Nick is the only manifestly implausible belief that people hold to be sacrosanct, otherwise, we might be in real trouble.

Funny Inventions from the 1930s

It's amusing how many human-powered flight attempts didn't take off.

Humor: You're Doing It Wrong

The good news: a well-meaning article with tips on how to appreciate humor.
The bad news: it's full of fail and reads as if it was made for a 1950s homemaker.

Seriously, folks. The author lists reading newspaper comics as a viable source of humor. That's just plain wrong. Some of the stuff is good enough to crack a smile (Calvin and Hobbes, Far Side, etc) but the vast majority is humorless drek (Family Circus).

Then there's another activity recommended as a great way to get you laughing: writing funny captions in the family photo albums. Uggh, shoot me if I ever do something like that.

Dave Letterman's Top Ten List (how many decades has it been since that was ever funny?)

Add "find something funny" on one's to-do list (spontaneity fail)

Then there's this:

When a person offends you or makes you angry, respond with humor rather than hostility. For instance, if someone is always late, say, "Well, I'm glad you're not running an airline."

Yeah, that makes you a jerkass, not a comedian.

Spend 15 minutes a day having a giggling session.

*facepalm*

Recall several of the most embarrassing moments in your life.

WTF.

Okay...it's apparent that this article wasn't meant for me (or possibly anyone born before 1920), especially its insistence on the lubby-dubby normal people's levity, like smiling at "the sight of kids playing, a loved one or friend approaching". Meanwhile, I'm chuckling at Pedobear and mechwarrior mechs photoshopped into old WWII photos. Methinks the common ground is pretty thin.

Normal people's type of humor:

My type of humor:
I typically go for a mix of black comedy, slapstick and absurdist humor and I throughly enjoy Dave Chappelle, Monty Python, Futurama, Three Stooges, Invader Zim, etc. I adore off-color jokes, like Mel Brooks parodying Hitler (especially the Hitler on Ice bit) and satirical jabs like the Cannibal Corpse Lounge music joke (NSFW).

I really wish people could appreciate that kind of stuff more and expand their horizons just a little bit. There's a whole wealth of humor out there that people, especially the author, seem to miss out on.

Religion Cards

New Humanist has a side-splitting list of religion cards - various religions and denominations get their much-earned mockery in the form of being variously portrayed as obscenely wealthy and sheep-amassing giants who promulgate embarrassingly implausible beliefs and sanctimoniously take offense at nearly everything. (they'll probably take offense to that too) The atheists get off comparatively lightly - geeky and broke perhaps, but not self-deluded.
(Hat tip to PZ)

They really should expand on this idea. How about religion-based MTG cards?



Christians get White.
Pagans/Wiccans get Green.
Satanists get Black, of course.
For Muslims, I'm thinking Red for some reason.
Atheists get Blue (duh, logic and reason)
Jews get...d'oh, only five colors. Well, they get to share Red with the Muslims. That'll work out fine, I'm sure.

Crazy 9/11 Calls

This is why I don't like people.



hat tip to Bits & Pieces

Ancient Greek humor pre-empted Monty Python

Ancient Greeks pre-empted Dead Parrot sketch

The 1,600-year-old work entitled "Philogelos: The Laugh Addict," one of the world's oldest joke books, features a joke in which a man complains that a slave he has just bought has died, its publisher said on Friday.

"By the gods," answers the slave's seller, "when he was with me, he never did any such thing!"

Those ancient greeks, such kidders. Seriously though, no refunds.



Lately, I've been enjoying some of Lucian's plays and the one about the sale of creeds is hilarious.

YouTube Challenge

It's funny because it's true!

So far, this is the only good content they have:

• Copywritten content that hasn't been taken down or is distributed freely (National Geographic, etc) or has been imported from other sites (the Onion, Cracked)
  
• Awesome lectures (Beyond Belief, TED, etc)
  
• Movie/video game trailers
• Music videos (except the live versions, which are inevitably horrible)
  
• News clips that are so egregiously stupid that they're hilarious
  
• Adorably cute animals
• Actually good original stuff (Angry Video Game Nerd, Ask a Ninja)

But I would be remiss if I didn't mention the filth that populates 99% of YouTube:

• YouTube Poop (seriously, stop it)
• Rickrolls and other fake videos (and almost any internet meme)
  
• Clips/photos set to music (i.e. Linkin Park and/or Soulja Boy)
• Home videos (aka pointing a camera at a wall for an hour and uploading the result)
• Video blogging (suffers from the dual vices of looking terrible and sounding worse)

Palin Presidency

Sarah Palin's the best thing to happen to political humor since Bush. The jokes practically write themselves. The fark thread on the topic is priceless.