playa hatin' (or, let's get a few things straight)

[rone]

Penny Arcade is not funny.
Dave Barry stopped being funny around the time Reagan left office.
Achewood is not funny.
The Onion was funny until they started repeating themselves sometime around `97.  They'll occasionally have a good zinger, but most of their stuff is telegraphed to hell and back.
Jerk City is not funny.
Sinfest is funny until you realize it's a adolescent ripoff of Bloom County with the main character being two-thirds Milo, one third (Watterson's) Calvin.
Something Positive is not funny.
David Letterman is funny only when compared to Jay Leno.
McSweeney's is not funny.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I liked UF for a while but it got old.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid all your earlier opinions are now UTTERLY IRRELEVANT after this admission.

Also, To clarify: Achewood is not funny if somebody links you a strip and you've never read it before. It doesn't work outside of its own twisted context. Many Achewood strips are also not meant to be funny.

Jerkcity is also not funny when you read one strip of it. It's not funny when you read ten strips of it. When you're working up towards a hundred, though, it suddenly starts being really, really hilarious. I can not explain this.

Penny Arcade is very, very funny about twice a year.

The Bunion (http://www2.warnerbros.com/madmagazine/files/onthestands/ots_424/bunion.html) is funny.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I've heard that before about Achewood (as well as PA), but i don't believe i should have to work that hard to enjoy a fuckin' comic strip. I especially don't see the need to read an adjunct weblog just to make sense of the "joke".

Jerkcity is not funny. The more i read, the more i want to set my monitor on fire. It's just stone stupid. It's like a teenager on Red Bull who discovered surrealism.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Well, you are certainly free to not make the effort to get into the comic, but that doesn't mean it's not funny. It is definitely not easily accessible (although you don't need to actually read the blogs - I don't), but you can't honestly claim that a literary work has to be accessible to be good.

And with Jerkcity, I don't mean read it as in following it day-to-day - I mean being bored out of your skull and sitting down and just clicking through hundreds of strips. This is the way to reach a state of higher stupidity, where the comic is actually funny.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

you can't honestly claim that a literary work has to be accessible to be good.

Well, naturally, but i thought we were talking about Achewood.

Seriously, if a comic strip requires more work to understand than "Doonesbury", it sucks. Period.

I read the first quarter or third of my brother's Jerk City book. I almost burned it.