Humor is subjective. And, for some people, it evolves over time.
When I reflect on the things I once thought were funny — dare I say hi-LAR-ious — frankly, I cringe.
THEY'RE LIKE SMALLER, HAIRIER, FUNNIER HUMANS!
One of the high points of hilarity for me was, at one time, the orangutan. Apparently, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, many other people did, too.
Can't argue with the orangutan's place in the comedic animal kingdom. You can snap a cute pic of a dog, cat, even a walrus, but only an orangutan can do a number of things that (most) humans do — walk, fart, crack open a beer — but do them all in a funnier way than, say, your hirsute Aunt Hilda, because it's an orangutan!
Once my brother and I outgrew Disney cartoons, my mother transferred the movie-chaperoning duties to my father. (After we'd return home, my father would then describe to my mother the film we'd just seen, and his explanation always ran longer than the actual movie.)
Sometime in 1981, when I was either 9 or 10, as we departed the theater for a film I can't exactly remember — I perused the Wikipedia list of American releases from that year in order to make this anecdote as accurate as possible; maybe it was the original Clash of the Titans (it certainly wasn't My Dinner With Andre!) — we noticed that they'd already changed the marquee for the following week's releases.
One of the new releases was a film called Going Ape! (the exclamation point is part of the title), and my brother and I were disappointed because we would rather have seen that instead of whatever it was that we'd just watched. (Dad took us to a movie maybe once a month, if we were lucky, unlike the way I am with my own kids today, looking for any excuse to get the hell out of the house and kill a couple of hours.)
With the magic of the Internet I've been able to satisfy many of decades-long nostalgic longings, like using an emulator to play any Atari 2600 game or watch cartoons that I'd forgotten even existed, but I never actually had the urge to track down and watch Going Ape!
But on that night in 1981, I couldn't think of anything else...
The reason for this image will become clear soon enough.
One problem with having more than one blog is that you might have trouble deciding under which blog a post should run. (Another problem is having two [or more] reasons for people to not give a shit about what you have to say.)
I'm been working on a music blog centered around the highest-reviewed albums by Robert Christgau, one of the best-known rock critics of all time, and I was going to place this post in that blog, but I feel this particular idea is more personal that what I usually post there, so it's going here.
ANYWAY, here it is.
I was discussing the Marshall Crenshaw album Field Day, which was released in 1983. I'd never heard of the album, which is somewhat understandable because I was in sixth grade at the time and the album was a sales disappointment. However, the album is considered (by some) to be one of the greatest albums of the 1980s.
As I typed up my little blog post about the album, I'd wondered, What was I listening to at the time?
The fact is, I wasn't up on music much (not that much has changed since). For most of my childhood I listened to whatever my brother was listening to, and this is what he was listening to in 1983:
The only other music I remember from sixth grade was "Tom Sawyer" by Rush, but my brother didn't own the Moving Pictures album yet. (He soon would, though, and parts of my brain would be forcibly fed "Limelight" until my ears bled.) But the Pyromania album was huge, and nearly every boy in my grade would be saying "Gunter glieben glauben globen" at least once a day.
It turns out, according to trusty Wikipedia, which quotes from the "official Def Leppard FAQ" (yes, one exists):
These four words that you hear at the start of "Rock of Ages" mean
nothing, though the band sometimes jokingly claims it means "running
through the forest silently." It's actually just German sounding
gibberish, said by producer Mutt Lange
during one of the later takes of the song. Lange was a perfectionist
and would often do dozens & dozens of takes, and after repeatedly
beginning so many with the standard count, "One, two, three, four" he
simply started saying nonsense words instead, the band liking this one
so much that they included it on the album.
A MYSTERY PLAGUING ME FOR NEARLY THIRTY YEARS HAS BEEN SOLVED, AND I CAN DIE A SLIGHTLY HAPPIER PERSON
Def Leppard was probably my first experience with what was considered "heavy metal" at the time, later called "hair metal," and in retrospect lumped into a category, coined in a Simpsons episode, called Crap Rock.
In sixth grade the music was unlike anything I'd heard — note that I didn't listen to much of anything prior to 1983 that wasn't sung by Sha Na Na or a Muppet, and my parents didn't have cable until after I was married — but it sounded edgy and dangerous.
Allmusic, an online music resource I visit frequently, calls Pyromania an "enduring (and massively influential) classic," but Robert Christgau, who inspired my other blogs, sums it up like this:
Fuckin' right there's a difference between new heavy metal and old heavy metal. The new stuff is about five silly beats-per-minute faster. And the new lead singers sound not only "free" and white, but also more or less twenty-one. [Grade C]
Don't try to figure out what that means. Just revisit "Photograph," whose opening riffs make you want to rip donuts in your dad's car in the parking lot of wherever you're working that shitty summer job.
The most memorable memory I have of Pyromania is not directly about the music, per se, but what would be a contribution to the pamphlet Things I Used to Do to Piss Off My Brother on an Almost Daily Basis: A Study in Antagonism, 1975–1993. One of the lesser-known songs from the album is a ditty called "Foolin'":
It starts off as a slow "Monster Ballad" about empty beds and lonely nights and dead fires and extinguished flames but it eventually leads into a faster (I don't have a metronome, but it sounds faster) chorus where Longhaired Lead Singer wants the world to know that he's not foolin' around.
Only he doesn't say, "I'm not foolin'." He says that BABY I'M NOT...FUH-FUH-FUH-FOOL-INNNNN'.
My brother took this song very seriously (he took a lot of things very seriously) and when I would claim that Longhaired Lead Singer was actually singing BABY I'M NOT...KUH-KUH-KUH-KOOL-AID!!, I must have ruined the innocence of the song for him because my mocking would send him into a seething rage. It probably didn't help that I'd yell that revised chorus every single time he played the song.
But at least what I was saying was actual English. I could have been yelling Gunter glieben glauben globen all day long.
Here's my one-and-a-half cents regarding Gary Carter, who died today.
Back in the early 1980s, my brother and I and another pair of brothers who lived a couple of doors down supplemented our baseball card collection with a baseball sticker collection. Baseball sticker books contained two pages for each team, and something like five spots per page where you were to pasted the stickers for the appropriate players. The best player on the team arrived in a thicker, foil sticker.
We spent what little money we had on these stickers — I cringe when I see that Pokemon cards cost like four bucks a pack today — and, unlike the baseball cards of the time, the stickers have absolutely no value as an investment.
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH GARY CARTER?
On each team's set of pages, there was a bit of information about the team, including the name and address of its home stadium.
During that sticker-collecting summer, I shared with my friends an idea: Let's write to our favorite ballplayers, using the addresses for the stadiums, and ask for their autographs.
So that's what we did one afternoon, huddled around our friends' picnic table, writing letters. "You can't just come out and say, 'I want an autograph.' That would be rude," I strategized. So we wrote our letters like this:
You might hate these things by now, wondering why you
ever ate them in the first place, but when offered the opportunity,
you'd still eat them. And then hate yourself later.
What? Okay, just me, then.
Now, where were we? That's right...it's been a while. I'll skip the "I haven't blogged in a while wow what a lazy person I am" prologue and get right to it.
HERE'S WHERE I GET RIGHT TO IT
Due to the nature of the distribution of chores and responsibilities in the The Anthony Show household, I am rarely if ever involved in the weekly acquisition of foodstuffs and sundries.
Mrs. The Anthony Show prefers it that way. Now that the kids are old enough that I can keep an eye on both of them by myself without the missus worrying that one child may shove the other child into an outlet, she usually hits the supermarkets (generally, Trader Joe's and Stop and Shop) on her own.
It's like a private vacation! For her, that is. Anyway, she always returns from her supermarket odyssey with a number of treats that would never be found in my parents' house when I lived there, unless they were smuggled there via the body cavities of sympathetic friends and relatives.
