Becoming the Internet: or how to build a sense of humor

My wife recently asked me about my writing sensibilities or, to be more specific, the things that I read that helps me maximize the effects of my shitposting. As with most things I considered the question superficially at first as my brain rushed to come up with some insightful answer, but as the day wore on my brain did that subconscious unpacking thing where I’m unaware that I’m processing something at the subliminal level, only to have a real response long after the question was originally asked and really its mostly reformulating the question: what the fuck kind of media do you have to take in to create this?

I’ve written a little bit about my love of Calvin and Hobbes, so I won’t go into too much detail about it (though you would be doing yourself a disservice if you never pick up one of many compendiums that Bill Watterson has put out). Calvin had a ridiculous level of eloquence betraying his nine-year old frame and, while still funny, for me the humor was in how different my sensibilities were to him. Humor, though, is a finicky thing in that it seems to be genetic; somewhere in your lineage is a person who cracks up at the same things you do for the same reasons. For me, that was my dad – being the age I am, newspaper reading was still commonplace, and it was through comic strips that I first recognized the hereditary link of humor that connected us. The Far Side was the strip that revealed just how alike the two of us are. It’s not the smartest comic by any means: that title would most likely go to Doonesbury, a comic so smart that only Garry Trudeau finds it funny. With its round-ish, bulbous characters, its not even aesthetically pleasing. It’s the absolute absurdity in its humor; my dad had one strip posted on his office wall that showed a kid pushing against a door labeled “pull” and behind him a sign that read “Midvale School for the Gifted”. Just completely dumb and absurd and with every strip, especially the ones that missed, you could tell that Gary Larsen didn’t take himself seriously. Along similar lines, my dad and I used to regularly read Dave Barry’s columns and I specifically remember one of his columns accompanied by a caricature of him sitting in front of a typewriter and behind him was a plaque of a chicken that read “Pullet Surprise”. It’s dumb dad-humor and I fuckin loved (and still love) every bit of it.

As I grew into my teenage years in the 90’s, that led to late nights watching episodes of “Dennis Miller Live” and the two of us howling at some of the rants Miller made (this was way before 9/11 broke his brain and turned him into an unfunny conservative crackpot). Though we had cable, it was still a relatively new phenomenon, which meant that not everybody had Comedy Central as part of their basic cable package. And yet, in that era of dial-up internet and AOL 2.0, I somehow came across a weird little cartoon called “South Park” and using my lawnmowing money, procured a VHS copy that contained three episodes. My friends and I wore the shit out of that tape and quoted lines from “Cartman gets an anal probe” and “Rainforest Schmainforest” constantly. Being on the front lines of the internet resulted in diving head first into filesharing programs and digging up albums from musicians and comedians which is how I was introduced to people like Dave Attel, old George Carlin bits, and one of my all time favorites, the late Mitch Hedberg who is the reason that I’ll say “temporarily stairs: sorry for the convenience” every time I see a broken escalator.

The internet in the early 2000’s combined with easily affordable portable music players made the transition to podcasts a natural development. A friend introduced me to the BS report which, though not comedy in and of itself, introduced me to Chuck Klosterman (who I will admit is both a great writer and a self-important dickhole) and more importantly, critiques of Bill Simmons by way of Deadspin. At the time of discovering Deadspin, I had graduated from college and was working as a full-time reporter at a weekly newspaper. I was obsessed with reading every post and developed a list of favorite writers like Diana Moskovitz, Drew Magary, Albert Burneko, David Roth and Ashley Feinberg. I loved that site (along with its new successor The Defector) and its writers so much that I’m still angry that it died at the hands of a group of hedge fund ghouls. But more than anything else on the internet, it was that cabal of journalists and professional shitposters that burrowed their way into my writing, for good or for ill, and their combination of hard hitting journalism, unapologetic snark, and political caterwauling that I still aspire to.

So perhaps one day, in between my pissing and moaning, you’ll see some more of that writing. Or maybe not.

P.S. That “why your team sucks” features a certain “Enrique” in the reader responses. Guess who that guy was…