I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: FAMILY GUY-“Everything is Better with a Bag of Weed” (2009).

I recently posted about the song “Me Ol’ Bamboo” from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  When I was looking it up, I discovered that Family Guy had created a song called “Everything is Better with a Bag of Weed” that is sung to the tune of “Me Ol’ Bamboo.”  And holy crap I nearly busted a gut laughing when I watched it.

Of all the weird songs to parody, this was a brilliant choice.  The song is catchy and fast paced and absurd and just adding these new lyrics has made it funnier and more absurd.  There’s even the same odd instrumental break which they animate as playing glass bottle with drumsticks and as far as I can tell that’s really what it is.

My o my, this is very funny indeed.

I can’t seem to embed the video here which is a shame, but by all means check it out here.

[READ: April 9, 2013] Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People

I have read most of Douglas Coupland’s work and I like him quite a bit.  But I have discovered from re-reading his books recently that he’s not exactly the author I thought he was.  And one thing is that he’s really not very funny.  Existential? Yes. Comically absurd?  Yes.  Funny?  Not so much.  So I was surprised to see that he made this book with the rather funny title.

I assume this book is supposed to be funny since the inside flap says “Seven pants-peeingly funny stories featuring seven evil characters you can’t help but love.”  And indeed, the premise is funny, the title is funny.  But the stories are really not funny at all.  Here’s the list of the seven stories: Donald the Incredibly Hostile Juice Box; Sandra, the Truly Dreadful Babysitter; Hans, the Weird Exchange Student; Brandon, the Action Figure with Issues; Cindy, the Terrible Role Model; Kevin, the Hobo Minivan with Extremely Low Morals; Mr. Fraser, the Undead Substitute Teacher.  Judging from the titles of the tales you may think there’s humor in them…a juice box as a main character?  But there’s something about them that falls flat.

A summary of the stories: Donald is a juice box and he does mean things to other juice boxes.  Really that’s it—no comments on consumer culture no entertainingly awful jokes about juice boxes.  Most of the other juice boxes just get squished.  In the second, Sandra is a really bad babysitter.  There’s some humor in this because she encourages the kids to steal and start fires, but again, nothing that really stands out as especially funny except that she keeps getting hired.

Hans was probably my favorite character. He saves scraps of food and feeds them to crows (in an elaborate way which intrigues the popular girls).  He has a surprise which I didn’t see coming and which was rather funny.  But Brandon the action figure was really hard to follow—he acts like a person but is a tiny action figure? Cindy is a pop singer and bad role model, but there’s nothing especially new about pop singers being bad role models.

Kevin the minivan is a weird story too.  Kevin lures kids into him so he can shake them down for money.  I understand that it’s kind of funny that he is a minivan but there’s no qualities about him or the other non-human characters that make them stand out as inanimate objects with personalities.  It’s probably the funniest premise of the bunch but the humor seemed drained from it somehow.  It just doesn’t feel well thought out. Indeed, in this interview, they reveal that the entire project was completed in a matter of months.  And I hate to say it, but it feels like it.

The final story is about the zombie substitute teacher.  He asks the students to write an essay about who would be the tastiest to eat. Again, funny premise, but…and maybe I’m just realizing this…in Coupland’s world his characters are almost hyperrealistic—beyond believable, which works for his fiction but seems to ruin any of the punch of humor.  They want to be realistic and farcical at the same time.

Graham Romieu is an illustrator and this book is illustrated throughout with amusing and grotesque characters.  The drawings are quite good and are often funnier than the stories.  It’s especially funny to see dark and disturbing images done in watercolor.