The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

I Didn’t Order Any Spiders

What I find funny now is not what I would have found funny 10 years ago. Tastes change and people move on. I believe the funniest humor can come from irony and ridiculous situations. Humor comes from when someone goes out of their way to put a character in ridiculous situations that is actually important to a plot, or even have a song that is over the top in production and guitar playing to mock songs with over the top production and guitar playing. The possibilities are endless once we enter this realm of humor, and it only gets better as time passes.

I have always been into music and video games growing up. I never wanted to go ahead and listen to a comedy special or even cared for stand-up. This was so until one year in high school, my friend made me listen to Longmont Potion Castle. Longmont Potion Castle is the pseudonym for a collection of experimental prank call tapes that an anonymous guy in a metal band does in his free time. They aren’t your standard Bart Simpson fake name bar prank call. Instead, he calls up different people to get a reaction out of them. His favorite thing to do is to ask stores for things that don’t exist or to ask for C.O.D for deliveries he makes up on the spot. You would think people hang up when they’re told they are getting something delivered. There was this one tape that LPC released in 1998 called Live From Longmont Potion Castle.

It was a collection of music that he does, strange video clips of his neighborhood, and recordings of cable call-in shows he would call. One of my favorite bits was one where Longmont Potion Castle calls a random number in Colorado and begins to tell the person that picks up the phone that he has a delivery of spiders. The man on the other end starts denying any order of spiders. At the same time, Longmont Potion Castle keeps up fake UPS customer service employee professionalism. The man on the other end gets angry, threatens to call the police on UPS, and then hangs up. This bit is still referenced by my friends today. We also still ask each other if we have things that don’t exist, or if we have our spiders from Lebanon.

There is actually a situation of accidental racism in this one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm that I think was absolutely hilarious and extremely tasteful. In the episode “Meet the Blacks,” Larry has to take in a hurricane refugee family with the last name Black after an argument with his wife.

One of the members of the family writes a private message for Larry, hoping to get to know him better, but she is a doctor and writes the message with the same handwriting that is used to write a prescription. Larry takes this note to his pharmacist, who is African-American, and has him read it to him, as he can’t do it himself. The message reads, “Larry, had a great time last night. Would love to get together, just the two of us. Meet me Friday at the bel-air regency hotel at 11, just the two of us. So tired of these brothers and sisters around and I know you feel the same way. Tell me your life wouldn’t be better without the Blacks.”

The pharmacist angrily gives Larry his prescription and tells him to have a nice day. Larry is stumped and tries to fix the situation stating that there are people in his house with the last name Black, but it doesn’t do anything. Larry David seems to be the king of situational comedy, as I know of no other way to describe it. You can see yourself being put in this situation, and by Larry being a white guy, it would have been hard to explain anyway that the letter wasn’t racist. This situation had come up as a payoff of the family name and the fact that the episode was never about race. The encounter at the cafe and Larry’s encounter at the pharmacy were both ridiculous situational encounters that a person seeing this in third person would find absolutely hilarious. Comedy lies in everyday encounters like this.

Comedy can come from unusual places, even with a dark undertone. In one of my favorite films, American Psycho, there is a scene that is one of the funniest scenes that I have seen. American Psycho follows Patrick Bateman, a yuppie, serial killer, and vice president of a company with 10 other vice presidents who seem to have gotten that role from their father. In this one scene, everyone in the company meeting starts sharing their business cards, comparing it to each other’s.

Patrick asks to see three people’s cards and he feels smugly superior because his business card looks better than those three. Finally, he sees his rival’s card last, compares it, and his expression turns from smug superiority into anger and hate. He drops his rival’s card in shock and the person next to him states that Patrick is sweating. Bateman has chosen his next victim, and will eventually get away with it. The director felt the need to shoot this scene to show how crazy Bateman is and how he is willing to kill because another person had a better looking business card than Bateman. The comedy lies in the ridiculousness of this scene. It was a scene of just people comparing business cards and one of them took it too seriously.

I believe ridiculousness is what makes me laugh. The director shoots a hilarious scene with people comparing business cards, whereas on paper, the scene would be rather boring to read. There’s also another form of ridiculousness that I enjoy, and that is in music. One of my favorite albums is the 1996 album The Mollusk by Ween, which is filled with psychedelic and well composed songs about the sea. Ween is a sum of its influences, but it drags its influences into a comedic spotlight.

It’s not a parody album, but the song subjects can be hilarious when it is paired with the musical genre it is trying to be. For example, we have a song called “Buckingham Green” that contains cliche 1970s progressive rock tropes and complete with 2 grandiose over-the-top guitar solos. It also contains silly british limerick song-writing: “Summon the queen \ Spoke the child of eye \ It’s time to fly \ Turning fire to steam \ On Buckingham Green.” The song sounds like a ten minute 1970s rock song, but is actually only three minutes and twenty seconds long. Ween has never taken itself seriously, but at the same time show how good they are with their instruments. The song is hilarious; it sounds like a 1970s rock song and does not actually contain a deep message like 1970s rock songs. It is actually about nothing, like most Ween songs are. Here lies the comedy: it’s so ridiculously over the top to mock its influences and they pull it off well. You are given a new form of rock music that is extremely self aware and that is absolutely hilarious.

I can certainly be the witness of ridiculous situations at work. I think this perception is all due to the type of humor I grew up with. Longmont Potion Castle opened my mind to the idea that humor can always exist around us. A simple innocent prank call can be a spectacular show to a third party, and the methods used could be used in conversation. You can ask people about ridiculous things that don’t exist, or you can write ridiculous songs mocking things that have existed before. Ridiculousness makes me laugh, and I believe the media I have taken in as I got older definitely shapes the types of things I find funny now.

The image is from the VHS tape. I posted the whole video below. It’s definitely worth a watch as it only got a limited release in Colorado in 1998. (basically 30 people or so owned the original) Fortunately, it was included in a DVD box set released for sale on Longmont Potion Castle’s website.

This Live from Longmont Potion Castle. It’s definitely worth a watch as it only got a limited release in Colorado in 1998. Fortunately, it was included in a DVD box set released for sale on Longmont Potion Castle’s website. For more LPC goodies check out longmontpotioncastle.com and enjoy that old 90s website aesthetic.

References

Old Punks and Agitation

Punk is a big chunk of my life and I am more than happy to write anything about it, as I have always had a lot to say about it. Especially its history and the punks I’ve met.

[The establishment] may also entice members of the agitation to join the establishment by offering them positions within the institution, or they may co-opt the agitator’s ideas or rhetoric. Singer James Taylor illustrated how the establishment can adjust when he described what happened to many of the counterculture’s ideas and values: “All the things we considered to be revolutionary were co-opted by the big corporations — our music, our radio, the record companies, our dress.” — Bowers, Chapter 1.

I have a good friend that I made working at my cafe named Tim. Tim is an aged punk, one that is lost when you mention any music past 1989, but can talk to you for hours about a punk record twenty people bought in 1978. There is yet to be any boring conversation with him. Only recently have I learned of his very conservative family, that in trying to protect their values, pushed their own family members away.

An interesting story is that of Tim’s conservative older brother, who happily changed his hippie ways in the 1980s, in favor of Reagan and his “smaller government” policies. This same man had the police called on him by his own father for smoking pot in the garage when he was 17. There were many baby boomers who voted for the conservative Reagan in their later adult years, contrasting a lot of their liberal policies they helped to make in their 20s in the 1960s.

Tim’s story made it seem as if Reagan’s double-edged smile drew nostalgic pictures in their minds of happier times, when their friends weren’t being sent to Vietnam by the big scary government to die. The conservatives managed to have a generation that had many outspoken liberals and groovy music turn into big-government hating robots, all based on their experiences with the government.

My least favorite punk bassist, Sid Vicious, once tastelessly wore a shirt with a swastika. There could be many reasons why he wore this and one on the street might even label him a nazi. It wasn’t necessarily the next big fashion trend, but its most basic statement is the old punk adage, “I don’t care what you think.” The reason Sid Vicious came up is because of the next topic Tim and I discussed, and that is how punk is seen in the modern eye.

For Tim, punk was a different sound and attitude; a photo-negative of the grandiose leather-pants wearing arena rock of the early 1970s. Old punk fashion has now become mainstream. Punk fashion is now something that looks good to the average person in the industry, and not something that is made out of the need to be resourceful and be defiant against societal fashion norms. Old punk music has also become mainstream.

The Ramones, who released their first album in 1977, did not have a single certified Gold album until a compilation called RamonesMANIA was released in 1988. Nowadays, you will hear the Ramones on the classic rock radio, but in the past, they never got airtime. Modern day classic radio would paint a different picture, inserting the Ramones into the radio in a time that they actually never were aired.

I am very glad that the Ramones are finally getting air time, it’s just that these people are lying to themselves if they ever listened to the Ramones on the radio before the year 2000.

Punk is now mainstream, the same way the hippie culture became mainstream. They are both a comforting and nostalgic memory of what it once was to those that were there when it happened, and a “retro” fashion and music repository to those that came later. These were also counter-culture movements and they are now just pieces of clothing for someone’s retro party, and I think the establishment wouldn’t want it any other way.