Read “The Stench of Honolulu” by Jack Handey

By Dan Brooks in books 1 Comment

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You probably know Jack Handey from the “Deep Thoughts” series of sketches on Saturday Night Live, which, along with PJ O’Rourke and Carolyn Jacobson, were probably the most significant influences on my writing before age 21. If you don’t think Deep Thoughts is funny, you can safely disregard the rest of this post. You and I will meet at Grown-Ups 3 someday, each of us wiping away a type of tear. Everyone else can read this excellent profile of Handey in the New York Times, in which we learn that A) he is in fact a real person who used to live next door to Steve Martin, and B) he has recently published The Stench of Honolulu, a comic adventure novel. I bought that novel and read it last week, and it is very funny. Excerpt after the jump.

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Everything will be permitted once the new Axe comes out

By Dan Brooks in advertising 5 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NN0-AWiv4k

Pete Jones sent me this commercial for the new Axe odor replacement product, which will apparently render meaningless all previously articulated principles of morality and real estate. Those are three jewelry stores next door to one another in the opening shot, and they’re not in the diamond district. They appear to be on Lafayette Street, but that’s not important. What’s important is that everyone understand the premise of this deodorant ad: jewelry store robbery, apparently involving machine gun fire. You can hear it for the first two seconds of the video, followed immediately by our robber emerging from a store that is definitely in the diamond district now. Since the glass windows are unbroken and there’s no blood on him, I can only assume that all six of his shots hit center mass.

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A theory of taste: fantastic naturalism

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 6 Comments

First, I’m warning you right now that there is going to be way less Combat! blog than you want this week, yet way more than I actually have time to write. Here’s a pro tip for all you freelancers out there: tell everyone you’re going on vacation. I have received more projects labeled “emergency” since I went on vacation than I had previously gotten in my entire career. The next time you see me, I will be wearing a panda skin monocle. Second, the Theory of Taste promised in the headline is not the useful kind of aesthetic theory. It is a theory of my taste, which is notoriously bizarre. Ready? Yesterday, while inflicting an interpretive rendition of a cartoon I had seen six years ago on my brother, who has long since reconciled himself to such tortures, I realized that there is a through-line in much of the animated humor that I like: ultra-naturalistic dialogue and voice acting in the context of fantastic situations. I think that cartoons in which monsters, superheroes, space cowboys and other fantasy characters have to live in apartments and work at jobs are hilarious. Those of you once forced by the pursuit of English degrees to read the execrable Gabriel Garcia Marquez are familiar with the literary genre known as magical realism, in which key aspects of human consciousness go unaddressed in favor of love turning women into butterflies. That sucks. But what does not suck is the style of humor that I’m going to call Fantastic Naturalism.

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“Atlas Shrugged” is awful/amazing depending on whether you are a jerk

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W07bFa4TzM

The first exchange of dialogue in the trailer for Atlas Shrugged pretty much captures the problem with Ayn Rand. When the answer to “Who’s asking?” is “someone who knows what it’s like to work for himself and not let others feed off the profits of his energy,” we know that we are in for a particular sort of artistic production. Ayn Rand was an ideological writer with powerful theories about human beings, a species she knew primarily from rumor. The problem of making any of her epic novels of ideas into a movie—Atlas Shrugged is too long, The Fountainhead is too rapey, the other ones are too no one knows what they are—has been an acknowledged fact of Hollywood for decades. Producer John Aglialoro made Atlas Shrugged: The Movie on a tight budget and even tighter schedule, in part because he needed to start shooting before his long-held option expired. The, uh, limited resources available for production show through in the final product, which is currently running at 8% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. And yet the audience rating runs a robust 85%. That discrepancy becomes simultaneously more and less odd when you consider that the film is only playing in a few cities, and that the majority of those audience reviewers have therefore not seen it yet.

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