c7_assassin
3rd Level Black Feather
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- Jun 24, 2007
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As some of you already know, my writing was recently featured on Cracked.com. Sexy and awesome though this achievement makes me, my worldly aspirations lie far beyond the realm of internet dick-joke comedy. I must therefore regard this mostly as a learning experience, the sum of which I am more than happy to share with all of you here:
Internet comedy is a lot of work and is kind of bullshit. The premise of my article was to compare six books I had read to six Hollywood adaptations of those books I had watched, and draw attention to funny or silly elements I thought the filmmakers had been smart to edit out.
Now, the way cracked works is the writer pitches his idea on an open forum, meaning anyone at cracked.com can add their own suggestions, advice and critiques to your pitch before an editor approves it. My topic was a hot one, and I had people chiming in left and right with their own suggestions for deleted content I should include. The editors liked a lot of those suggestions more than my original ones, so they gave me my revised list and approved the article for publication. Problem was, I now had to write about some books I had never actually read. So against a deadline I had to go out and find these novels, read them, hope to god I saw whatever my anonymous friends on the internet were talking about, and then write jokes about them. It was a lot of work to go through for the sake of factually-accurate dick jokes.
My article got something like 900 000 hits in the first 24 hours of its posting, which, again, sexy and awesome. Which is a good thing, because the money in internet comedy is also kind of bullshit. Divided by what I ultimately got paid, I earned approximately 1/180th of a cent per viewing. If book publishers were this bad at math, trees would have taken over the earth by now.
Everyone hates Tom Bombadil just as much as I do. For those of you who aren't going to read my article and haven't read Lord of the Rings, I spend a while making fun of a character you don't remember from the movies because he sucks. His name is Tom Bombadil, and he is the worst thing to happen to literature since Stephanie Meyer discovered her body-glitter fetish. By far the most popular recurring comment on my article was "Yeah, fuck Tom Bombadil!" It's nice to be supported in your hating.
Make no mistake, I love Lord of the Rings. There are chapters I go back and reread every so often just for fun. That's why I hate the fact that so many other chapters are filled with elf-hymns and stilted dialogue and forest-raping dandies. If there was a mission behind what I was trying to do with this article, it was to show that the things we love can sometimes be kind of stupid, and it's okay to make fun of the stupid part while loving the greater whole.
Fanboys don't like it when you mock their gods. Another part of my article poked fun at Robert Heinlein's politics. I thought I was on reasonably safe ground doing this: Starship Troopers (another novel I shamelessly fucking love) is so ball-stompingly militaristic that his publishers refused to touch it in goddamn 1950's America; it came out later that he actually wrote it as a stunt to get fired so he wouldn't have to write any more Spacesuit Adventures for Pimply Boys. But what I didn't count on was the sheer amount of Fuck you, I understand Heinlein at levels you can scarcely fathom! I would encounter from internet commentators. I backed up my observations with references to Heinlein's actual statements on the subject and quotes from the book itself, and I still got accused of being an ignorant fuck. So I guess this experience taught me that there will always be someone out there who thinks he knows more than you, and that this person is smelly and antisocial and that therefore his opinion does not count.
Wil Wheaton is a pretty little princess, and I made him cry. Near the end of the article, I made a throwaway joke about the child actors in The Stand using drugs. I didn't really give it a second thought; I had already slandered at least two dozen other celebrities at that point and it was becoming almost an unconscious action (kind of like how Wil Wheaton rubs his nose every time he sees a bowl of sugar or a powdered donut). What I didn't count of was the fact that Wil Wheaton is more retarded and bitch-like than most celebrities, and so within a few hours he had actually taken to twitter to denounce my article and the slandering of his good, clean-living name.
This was hilarious on at least three levels: for one thing, Wil Wheaton's alleged drug-use was just part of the set-up to a joke I was making about Jerry O'Connell and his preposterous career and his idiotic rapping kangaroo; Wil Wheaton wasn't even the butt of that joke. Second, the tiny substance of the joke that had any bearing on Wil Wheaton was the implication that he had no life and no career, and the best plan Wil Wheaton could come up with to disprove my assertion was to start a flame-war with me on the internet. Third, holy shit, I actually managed to hurt Wil Wheaton using my words! I have to check, but I think that may make me some sort of god. I imagine Wil Wheaton sobbing and shaking his manicured ladyfist in a display of impotent rage over my hurtful comments... I think I need to invent a time-machine, because my thirteen year old self definitely owes me a handjob for that one.
So was it all worth it? Let me put it this way: Coming soon to cracked.com, "13 Washed-Up Celebrities Who Suck Dick For Coke and Are Named Wil Wheaton."
Internet comedy is a lot of work and is kind of bullshit. The premise of my article was to compare six books I had read to six Hollywood adaptations of those books I had watched, and draw attention to funny or silly elements I thought the filmmakers had been smart to edit out.
Now, the way cracked works is the writer pitches his idea on an open forum, meaning anyone at cracked.com can add their own suggestions, advice and critiques to your pitch before an editor approves it. My topic was a hot one, and I had people chiming in left and right with their own suggestions for deleted content I should include. The editors liked a lot of those suggestions more than my original ones, so they gave me my revised list and approved the article for publication. Problem was, I now had to write about some books I had never actually read. So against a deadline I had to go out and find these novels, read them, hope to god I saw whatever my anonymous friends on the internet were talking about, and then write jokes about them. It was a lot of work to go through for the sake of factually-accurate dick jokes.
My article got something like 900 000 hits in the first 24 hours of its posting, which, again, sexy and awesome. Which is a good thing, because the money in internet comedy is also kind of bullshit. Divided by what I ultimately got paid, I earned approximately 1/180th of a cent per viewing. If book publishers were this bad at math, trees would have taken over the earth by now.
Everyone hates Tom Bombadil just as much as I do. For those of you who aren't going to read my article and haven't read Lord of the Rings, I spend a while making fun of a character you don't remember from the movies because he sucks. His name is Tom Bombadil, and he is the worst thing to happen to literature since Stephanie Meyer discovered her body-glitter fetish. By far the most popular recurring comment on my article was "Yeah, fuck Tom Bombadil!" It's nice to be supported in your hating.
Make no mistake, I love Lord of the Rings. There are chapters I go back and reread every so often just for fun. That's why I hate the fact that so many other chapters are filled with elf-hymns and stilted dialogue and forest-raping dandies. If there was a mission behind what I was trying to do with this article, it was to show that the things we love can sometimes be kind of stupid, and it's okay to make fun of the stupid part while loving the greater whole.
Fanboys don't like it when you mock their gods. Another part of my article poked fun at Robert Heinlein's politics. I thought I was on reasonably safe ground doing this: Starship Troopers (another novel I shamelessly fucking love) is so ball-stompingly militaristic that his publishers refused to touch it in goddamn 1950's America; it came out later that he actually wrote it as a stunt to get fired so he wouldn't have to write any more Spacesuit Adventures for Pimply Boys. But what I didn't count on was the sheer amount of Fuck you, I understand Heinlein at levels you can scarcely fathom! I would encounter from internet commentators. I backed up my observations with references to Heinlein's actual statements on the subject and quotes from the book itself, and I still got accused of being an ignorant fuck. So I guess this experience taught me that there will always be someone out there who thinks he knows more than you, and that this person is smelly and antisocial and that therefore his opinion does not count.
Wil Wheaton is a pretty little princess, and I made him cry. Near the end of the article, I made a throwaway joke about the child actors in The Stand using drugs. I didn't really give it a second thought; I had already slandered at least two dozen other celebrities at that point and it was becoming almost an unconscious action (kind of like how Wil Wheaton rubs his nose every time he sees a bowl of sugar or a powdered donut). What I didn't count of was the fact that Wil Wheaton is more retarded and bitch-like than most celebrities, and so within a few hours he had actually taken to twitter to denounce my article and the slandering of his good, clean-living name.
This was hilarious on at least three levels: for one thing, Wil Wheaton's alleged drug-use was just part of the set-up to a joke I was making about Jerry O'Connell and his preposterous career and his idiotic rapping kangaroo; Wil Wheaton wasn't even the butt of that joke. Second, the tiny substance of the joke that had any bearing on Wil Wheaton was the implication that he had no life and no career, and the best plan Wil Wheaton could come up with to disprove my assertion was to start a flame-war with me on the internet. Third, holy shit, I actually managed to hurt Wil Wheaton using my words! I have to check, but I think that may make me some sort of god. I imagine Wil Wheaton sobbing and shaking his manicured ladyfist in a display of impotent rage over my hurtful comments... I think I need to invent a time-machine, because my thirteen year old self definitely owes me a handjob for that one.
So was it all worth it? Let me put it this way: Coming soon to cracked.com, "13 Washed-Up Celebrities Who Suck Dick For Coke and Are Named Wil Wheaton."
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