Beware the adorable, yet homicidal lamp. A brand parody of Pixar:

You can find it here, if the embedded video crushes your browser.

Brought to you by alltop, humor-blogs.com, and the letter “z”.

TORONTO (The Skwib) — They may wear toques instead of berets and scarf down high-octane Tim Horton’s coffee instead of smoking Turkish cigarettes, but a new poll shows 79 percent of Canadians are in as serious an existential crisis as most French novelists about to write a bleak philosophical roman ennui.

“A bit of uncertainty is healthy, but a crippling lack of meaning and purpose can really screw up your political system,” says Martin Angst, Director of the Void Institute for Philosophical Research.

According to the survey, a whopping 72 percent of Canadians who are undecided or who have said they will not vote in the next federal election have said they “don’t see the point”. A further six percent say the “meaningless” of the vote drives them to despair. One percent say they are heavy industrial magnets. The latter group are likely not existentialists, but absurdists.

“It is clear from these poll results that Canadians must accept that existence is prior to essence,” says Angst. “In other words, if they want meaningful choices they will have to make the choices themselves.”

And if Canadians don’t like the candidates available on the ballot?

Angst just shrugs.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are both filled with a sense of despair.

You can always find the Kubrick kookiness here if you need a retake on the embedded video. Via the talented Dan Meth.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com still think Dr. Strangelove is Kubrick’s best film.

As readers of The Skwib, you may be aware that I am also a novelist releasing his second work, Marvellous Hairy – a novel in five fractals. It’s available direct from the publisher now, and in stores in October.

But I’m also podcasting this bad boy, and they are well underway. I’ll be listing them all here, at iTunes, at Podiobooks.com (released soon) or you could check out the episodes on my writer’s blog:

Part One, The Cult of the Claw

Episode One (chapters one and two)
Episode Two (chapters three to five)
Episode Three (chapters six to eight)

Part Two – The Human Ideal

Episode Four (chapters one to thee)
Episode Five (chapters four and five)

Buy Marvellous Hairy directly from the publisher. Released in stores this October!

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are also easy listening humor monkeys.

As readers of The Skwib, you may be aware that I am also a novelist releasing his second work, Marvellous Hairy – a novel in five fractals. It’s available online from the publisher now, and in stores in the Fall.

But I’m also podcasting this bad boy, and they are well underway. I’ll be listing them all here, at iTunes, or you could check out the episodes on my writer’s blog:

Part One, The Cult of the Claw

Episode One (chapters one and two)
Episode Two (chapters three to five)
Episode Three (chapters six to eight)

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are also easy listening humor monkeys.

If you’d like to join me for the podcast of my second novel, you can find the listing of them as they’re released at the Marvellous Hairy website. While you’re there, sign up for my newsletter to catch all the news as it happens.

The first episode (which is about twenty minutes long and covers the first two chapters) can be found at my other blog, on my author’s site. I’ve added the second episode now too. You can also subscribe at iTunes, and soon at Podiobooks.com.

Or you could just go get your own copy to read yourself. Just sayin’.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are also humor monkeys.

Warning: while this post may be about comedy, don’t expect it to be comic.

I would consider the quote “comedy is tragedy plus time” an old saw, but it’s still an interesting idea. Could every tragedy become funny, given enough time? The British comedian David Mitchell seems to think so. (I’ll link to his video rant, which tries to explain why Vikings raping and pillaging in the Dark Ages is funny, but the Soviet takeover of Berlin in 1945 isn’t yet, below.)

The quote should really be, tragedy plus time allows comedy. Depending on how you portray events, you can still achieve either a laugh or tears, and sometimes both. That’s what art is all about, right? But can you imagine taking a scene say, Schindler’s List, and turning that into a rip-roaring farce? Wait, no! Don’t even try to imagine it, because, as they say in another cliché: “it’s too soon. ” You can make jokes about Nazis (not much fun in Stalingrad), but please, no jokes about their atrocities. Personally, genocide strikes me as one of those events that is impossible to turn into comedy, no matter how long ago it happened. (But perhaps I’m not really trying. Maybe there is some good humor to be had in the Church’s elimination of the Cathars, for example.)

Proto-goth and journeyman of the bon mot, Horace Walpole once wrote to a friend, “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”

I think I like that quote even more, because it gets to the heart of the difference between the two. Of course, it may be that I remember the quote: “Comedy is tragedy plus time” as coming out of the pie-hole of Alan Alda’s character (the abrasive Lester) in Crimes and Misdemeanors, and not from Carol Burnett, as the Wikiquote would have us believe. (Crimes & Misdemeanors was a 1989 Woody Allen film, and Burnett’s quote is attributed in 2004 in Wikiquote. I’ll let wiser heads sort the provenance out.)

I definitely don’t agree with Lenny Bruce, who said: “Satire is tragedy plus time. You give it enough time, the public, the reviewers will allow you to satirize it. Which is rather ridiculous, when you think about it.” The beauty of satire is that you can go for it right away. It might not get any laughs if it’s too early though.
Of course, none of these sharp observations are as funny as Mel Brook’s 2000-Year-Old Man (1961): “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

If you’re still looking for help on this one, you may find the tragedy-to-comedy conversion chart useful:

(via Comics vs Audience)

Now, as promised, here’s Mitchell on why the Vikings aren’t funny. I do agree with him on one thing for sure: the Vikings didn’t wear horns on the helmets. [You can find it here if the embedded video doesn't work.]

It would be tragic if you didn’t enjoy the comedy at Alltop and humor-blogs.com. HT to Renal Failure and Unfinished Rambler for helping me waste time on a Saturday morning. Thanks to Xoxé Tétano for the vintage viking.

Onga was always asking him to cut his toenails, and it made Thag crazy.

If he cut them too close, then he had nothing to protect the end of his toes. Good nails were especially important when you jumped on the back of an auroch during a hunt. If you didn’t have long enough nails, you might not be able to hold on.

Then again, he had to admit it was not auroch hunting season.

She could get really insistent, making veiled references to how well-groomed Weasel-Scratch-Face-Brother’s toenails were. (The shaman was always trying to one-up Thag in any way he could.)

In fact, it was the shaman’s adroitness with cave art that got Thag started on it.

He couldn’t help it that all he could draw well were aurochs — which were an important religious symbol, of course, and the representation of which got under Weasel’s skin — and toenails.

Actually, it had taken him a while to perfect the representation of toenails, but eventually he got it down, and filled an entire cave with them (and aurochs).

“What?” he asked Onga. “I cut them off; I can’t paint them either?”

Modern long-nailed auroch-lovers exist too.

More about the discovery of Lascaux cave paintings. Originally published in 2005.

Nick over at Name Your Tale asked me to guest pen one of their stories. In case you haven’t ever been to the site, it’s kind of a neat idea. Anyone can submit a title idea, and then the busy scribblers at NYT pen a 100-word masterpiece to fit it.

Every tale has to be exactly 100 words, including Apocalypse Cow.

Alltop and humor-blogs.com are also catastrophic cattle.

I’d start by disabling the publishing industry in some way — perhaps an elite cadre of pulp-loving squirrels armed with plasma-shredders and capable of firing book worms out of their mouths? Or perhaps you could change the tax laws so that drinks, food and visits to literary conferences can no longer be deducted.

Then I’d start a massive PR campaign that showed (with whatever scientific research we can drum up — we’ll need to set up a think tank to provide some too) how reading books was actually harmful to your health. We should also start some kind of fake grassroots organization that can politicize the issue for us, appealing to our need to “save the children.”

Then, I’d –

No, no, I want more people to read books

Why would you want that? It makes the population much easier to control if they’re illiterate, you know.

I don’t want the population to be easier to control!

What are you, some kind of anarchist?

Okay. So a campaign to get more people to read. Hmmm. What if you tied lotteries to book reading? Instead of picking numbers at random, you would only pick winning numbers from a pool of those who purchased tickets and correctly answered the skill-testing question, based on the book they have claimed to have read?

Either that or have some kind of compulsory reading comprehension test every year: they get three chances to answer the questions right, and if they don’t, you implant some kind of mind-control device (the X-trablian Zombie Beetle is an excellent choice) that prevents them from using the TV, Internet and radio.

Or you could force them to spend their days, reading through the slush piles of romance publishers.

Next time: I seem to be molting, and I’m not a bird — so what’s the best way of recycling skin?

Neither Alltop nor humor-blogs.com can read while watching TV.