12/20: Comedy 101 Part 1
While true wit is tough to come by, it is still possible to extract a laugh or two from an audience using common everyday methods available to anyone right in their own home. With that said, this is Part I of Comedy 101 with your instructor Kyle Reid.
The Misfortune of the Male Gonads
Hilarious, huh?
Years of episodes of America’s Funniest Home Videos prove that a well executed punch to the testicles is a timeless technique that will break a smile across the face of even the hardest cynic. Sometimes nothing is funnier than watching a kid nail his dad in the junk with a wiffle-ball bat. And while no one really knows exactly what makes a man receiving pain to his groin so funny, we do know for the most part that it works. The great thing about this joke is that it’s so simple that it can be performed by even a humorless rube such as yourself. Just get those gonads in sight and strike. You will soon be rewarded with the laughs and cheers of all onlookers. They will pat you on the back and call you the funniest thing since Carrot Top made a sombrero out of sliced bread.
“But Kyle how exactly should I hit a man in his sack” you might ask.
Well first of all never refer to a man’s nether region as his “sack” you should rather refer to his nether region as 1) his nether region 2) his groin 3) the gonads 4) his junk or 5) his testicles. Calling it his “sack” is just base and rude, but back to the question. Don’t be worried young fledgling! There are a number of ways to inflict pain to a man’s family jewels, so let your imagination be your guide. Creativity is always rewarded, but there are some limits to remember. It is a fine line you must walk between the perfectly orchestrated shot to the groin and just plain cruelty. You should remember that the pain must always seem temporary. If the audience believes that your victim or “mark” as I call him may be receiving long term damage and possible sterility, the joke ceases to be funny.
Here is a quick example:
It is clear which joke will get the laugh and which one will get cold stares and awkward coughs. To be sure that this doesn’t happen to you, practice, practice, and practice. Punch your roommate in the nads while he’s sleeping, accidentally swing a bag of groceries into the bag-boy’s crotch while he’s not looking, even try opening a door knob right into your own baby maker. The key is to just practice. [By the way add “nads,” “crotch,” and “baby maker” to my list of approved terms for a man’s manhood, also add “manhood.”] Once you’ve mastered the art of hitting a man in the testicles, you are well on your way to being remembered forever in the annals of comedy. Good luck and God bless you!
-Kyle Reid
12/15: Children's Kwanza Letters to Rashid Mashudu and their Reponses
Dear Rashid,
My name is LaQuanda Marshall. I am 7 years old, and I live on 2751 Boston Rd, Bronx, NY. My mommy says I have been very good this year even though I let my pet hamster run off the balcony a week after we got it from our land lord Mr. Cranston. She says that I have been very good and that my brother, Samuel, has been very bad. Because I was good I want to ask you for a new dollhouse and ballerina slippers for Kwanza this year. I hope you have time to visit me!
Sincerely,
LaQuanda Marshall
Dear LaQuanda,
I don’t know what parents or your friends have been telling you, but Kwanza is not Christmas and I am not Santa Claus. I do not bring you presents on Kwanza. The only thing I deliver to young girls and boys on Kwanza is Black Pride, and by the sounds of it you need a good helping of some African heritage.
Earnestly,
Rashid Mashudu
Dear Rashid,
My name is Jackson Thurmond and I have been very good this year. I was wondering how you have time to visit every good girl and boy in the world in one night each year. I would also like a new ten-speed bike.
Love,
Jackson
Dear Jackson,
This is sad. Do you even know the first thing about Kwanza? Kwanza is seven goddamn days long, and that’s more than enough time to visit all the “good” girls and boys in this world, and by “good” I mean those children who are proud of their African ancestors and celebrate them daily to the fullest extent. Ask LaQuanda about your bike.
Solemly,
Rashid Mashudu
Dear Rashid,
My name is Billy. I am white. Can I celebrate Kwanza?
Sincerely,
Billy
Dear Billy,
The short answer is, no.
I sincerely hope you weren’t sincere,
Rashid Mashudu
Dear Rashid,
My name is Joey Goodwin. I am 9 years old. My friend Frankie says that since we have candles on Kwanza that we are Jewish. Are we Jewish?
Confused,
Joey Goodwin
Dear Joey,
First of all stop talking to your dumbass friend Frankie. Second of all, unless you are Lenny Kravitz I seriously doubt that you are Jewish. Just because we have candles, celebrate for close to eight days, and come around Chanukah time doesn’t mean we are anything like Chanukah. End of story.
Black Power,
Rashid Mashudu
-Kyle Reid
12/06: Your Fate and Facebook.com
“Matt Kilgore has a birthday on December 6th.”
That is what I see immediately after I sign on to facebook.com tonight. The immediacy of this information, its prestigious place on my home page, conveys the importance of this occasion, the remembrance of the day when Matt was born. Sending him a happy birthday note would be a nice thing to do for a friend. I feel obligated to wish him the best, and I think about what to say, but then I soon realize something very important… “I don’t even know who Matt Kilgore is.”
This is what happens when you give up your one and only facebook profile forever for a joke that loses its humor only after a few days. This is the empty life of anonymity, fraught with uncaring strangers on your friend’s list that I choose.
Some of you may know me. I am Chuck Norris on facebook.com, one of many.
So I click on Matt’s name with nothing better to do this evening, and I’m taken promptly to his profile. It says he goes to East Tennessee State University — that’s a few states away from here. It also says his interests include Frisbee golf, and that he likes the movie Donnie Darko.
“Great to know you, Matt. Happy birthday, man. If you ever need help fighting ninjas you know who to call. Sincerely Walker Texas Ranger.”
I send him his happy birthday note, let out a lonely sigh, and leave facebook.com, not a bit happier for having visited.
Let me say something to all you freshmen out there who have yet to create your facebook profile: despite how hilarious you think it sounds to make a joke facebook profile, no matter how much you and your friends laugh at the possibility of being Mr. T or the Croc Hunter, Steve Irwin, sooner or later those chuckles will turn to tears, as you are faced with the fact that, according to facebook.com, the real you does not really exist. And if facebook.com says you don’t exist, do you really think it will be long before girls on campus stop paying attention to you, before your teachers don’t know who you are, and your parents stop calling to see how you’re doing every week? It may be happening already. How long before automatic doors stop opening for you, spammers stop sending you e-mail, and you just start fading away like Marty McFly? It is a terrible fate to be stricken with, worse than the cursed Roman Tantalus.
Do you harbor such hubris to think that you are above the gods of facebook.com, that you can scoff at their power and unnaturally turn your profile into a puerile joke? Sure drunk frat guys will want to be your friend, and sure you can add hot girls to your friends list without fear of embarrassment or that they won’t accept, but what’s the use of knowing these people if they will never truly know you? There are plenty of other funny things to laugh at in this world, funny guy; your own misfortune need not be one of them.
Do yourself a favor, drop the joke, find a picture of you drinking out of a red plastic cup, make a real profile, and thank yourself for following my advice. It’s all I can do to put you young ones on the right path, after all I am The Ranger.
Farewell my freshmen friends, and I already know what you are about to say; you loved me in Sidekicks.
-Chuck Norris A.K.A Kyle Reid
12/03: On Campus with Kyle Reid: Boob-Skirts and Tinted Face-Windows, Fashionable Alternatives to the Hooded Sweatshirt
DISCLAIMER: Retronetworks.com does not, never has, and most likely, never will support the views and opinions of content contributer, Kyle Reid. We simply believe in the right to free speech. If the article below offends you, feel free to take it up with him personally, or open a discussion in the forum.
Many of you may recognize that past pop-culture plea, “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” spoken in a Pantene shampoo commercial by the super hot model from that movie Weird Science, Kelly LeBrock. While that aphorism of the attractive may have been appropriate some years ago, I think that on a modern college campus the saying should go something more along the lines of “Don’t hate me because you can’t tell if I’m beautiful or a horse-faced dog-woman.” Yeah, I think that phrase better expresses the confusion that many young college-guys like me are subject to every time we spot a fashionable young woman parading through campus. We try and size them up because it’s all we can think about. “Are they hot?” But the task becomes impossible thanks to today’s obfuscating fashion trends.
What are these fashion trends that serve to hide a woman’s face and form? They are none other than what I have come to call boob-skirts and tinted face-windows. I think my terminology may require some definition.
Boob-skirt:
Once donned bashfully by pregnant women as maternity wear, this shirt/dress combination fits snugly around the breasts, accentuating them nicely, and then just below the bust it explodes into a flowing drapery like a skirt for the breasts, loosely hanging over the woman’s midsection. It is impossible for a man to tell the girth of a woman’s stomach who is wearing a boob-skirt. “Is she fat, or is that just the fabric shifting in the breeze?”
Tinted face-windows:
Close cousins to the ski goggle, these fashionable sunglasses almost completely engulf a woman’s entire face with tinted plastic as if she were hidden behind the heavily darkened windows of a limousine. Their thick rims are most likely made from recycled airplane fuselages or big-rig trailer cabs. Before their recent resurgence in popularity, the last woman to wear these sunglasses was the famous presidential widow Jackie-O. As in the past, these sunglasses are enough to make a man’s head explode. With over half of the face hidden from view a man has no way of telling what lurks beneath. She could be an unmatched beauty like, say, the immaculate Natalie Portman or she could be Pinhead from the Hellraiser series of movies.
It used to be easy to spot an unattractive woman on a college campus. She’d be covered like the HunchBack of Notre Dame in an over-sized hooded sweatshirt with the logo of whatever school you were attending printed across her undulating gut. They were clearly marked and easy to avoid, but now the unattractive intermingle undetectably with the populous of hot women us men seek to ogle impotently from a distance.
This is my plea, beautiful women: Reveal to us yourselves again, and start up a new trend that makes it easier for us to tell how hot you really are!
-Kyle Reid
10/28: Famous Warnings that were (Unfortunately) Misunderstood
Abraham Lincoln
April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth. Jackson Whitfield, a destitute sod farmer who won free tickets to the show at a town fair by correctly discerning the Carpetbagger among a group of Jayhawkers, was in attendance of the play that night. As Jackson struggled to watch the show from his obstructed view in the upper mezzanine, he spotted John Wilkes Booth dashing out from the darkness with his flint-lock pistol aimed to assassinate the beloved President. Jackson, acting on pure adrenaline and patriotism, shouted at the top of his lungs, “Mr. President, there is a man behind you with a gun.” To which Lincoln replied, “No. I don’t think oil lamp fines are very fun.” Seconds later, the President was shot in the head and died.
Marie Curie
While struggling daily in poor, haphazard living conditions to unlock
the mysteries of dangerous radioactive elements, Marie Curie found
herself, one day, inextricably uneasy. Although on her way to
discovering the very important element radium and gaining world-wide
fame and prestige, Marie could not shake the belief that some vaguely
impending doom was upon her and her pioneering work with radiation.
Being highly superstitious, Marie sought the wisdom of a gypsy fortune
teller in a town nearby. After burning ritual incense, reciting the
proper incantations, and examining Marie’s palm, the fortune teller
delivered this cryptic message: “There’s such a thing as too much of
one good thing.” Marie left taking this advice to heart, and raced home
as fast as she possibly could to quickly clear her shelves of her
life-long passion, collecting miniature ceramic unicorns. As she tossed
the fragile figurines into the trash, Marie sighed in relief, knowing
that the danger had passed. Weeks later, Marie Curie died from aplastic
pernicious anemia, almost certainly due to her massive exposure to
radiation in her work.
Joseph Hazelwood (Captain of the Exxon Valdez)
March 24, 1986, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez struck the Bligh Reef off
the Alaskan coast, spilling between 11 and 35 million gallons of crude
oil into the cold pacific waters. Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the
tanker and known drinker, was in his quarters refreshing his sprits
with another swig of fine whiskey after a long day’s work, when his
first mate rushed to him to deliver a grave message: “A crash into the
Bligh Reef is imminent, Captain.” Taking this to be some kind of wager,
the captain grabbed his first mate’s shoulder hard and croaked, “I’ll
show you who’s drunk, you bastard.” The captain and first mate traded
shots of whiskey up until the time when the coast guard found them both
unconscious in the boiler room of the wrecked ship. As a result of the
spill thousands of animals perished immediately and the ecosystem of
these Alaskan waters was forever affected.
-Kyle Reid
10/10: Goodwill: A Field Guide
Compiling years of notes and observations, I have put together this handy field guide concerning the behaviors and artifacts found at my local Goodwill. This guide is designed to allow Goodwill patrons to enjoy their shopping experience more fully by being able to recognize the more subtle goings-on at their nearest Goodwill. Please note that while my conclusions are applicable to most Goodwills around the country, the observations recorded here are a product of my long stay at a single Goodwill on the outskirts of Gainesville, Florida. This publication is one of an ongoing series.
Chapter One: A Time Travel Hotspot?
I have only been here a short while, but already my findings are
amazing. While examining the aisles and trying to determine the
approximate date when each of these articles went out of fashion, I
have started to hypothesize that not only is the Goodwill a dumping
grounds for past fads gone by, but that it also somehow holds fashions
that have yet had a chance to be in style, let alone go out of style.
I’m speaking of course on the uncommon theory of Clothes from the Future,
which was first formulated in the early 80’s. There are some subtle
differences that demarcate these untimely vestments from the usual
stockpile of ratty leisure suits and worn out, bleach-stained neon
sweats one usually finds in consignment. I have recorded data,
observations, and theories on a number of these fashions that may help
young researchers in the field spot these rare articles.
I have noted V-collared, orange ruffled vests made of dense, synthetic fibers that will undoubtedly keep hip astromen warm in the darkest reaches of space.
I have seen T-shirts containing inhuman patterns and colors that stand so vibrantly that I am made wonder which alien landscapes are being depicted on them, perhaps one of Jupiter’s moons or perhaps some yet uncharted celestial body. I can only make a guess that these shirts might translate into the modern equivalents of “I Went to Venus and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt” or maybe “I ‘Heart’ Zarthon 4.”
Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, I have measured garments of incredible proportions. For the first weeks of my stay here, I had misinterperted these articles simply as misplaced linens. However, upon one curious inspection, I found several feet of zipper running down a sewn crease in a vast expanse of fabric. I am horrified to imagine the creature that may require vestments this monolithic, but my greater fear is that these, what I can only loosely describe as pants, might be a result of America’s ever-increasing prevalence of obesity. It is fearful that in some possible time-line these pants may only be considered a “gentleman’s slim-fit medium.”
I have no proven explanation for these clothing’s appearance in the present. My best hypothesis requires a terrible future in which fads are born and die so quickly that every Goodwill becomes stocked beyond its capacity, and the need to send “chrononauts” back in time to dispose of out-dated trends at Goodwills from the past is of top priority. I have kept my eyes peeled for conspicuous donators, possibly arriving in silvery futuristic vehicles; however, I have spotted none thus far.
I harbor one fear in finding proof of Clothes from the Future and that is that the U.S. government will learn of these clothes and harvest them of their future technologies to create dangerous weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps the seizure and research of these clothes by government scientists could set into motion the very events that have caused such a possibly bleak future. My head spins with possibility much like this incredibly priced second-hand Lazy Susan, which is currently the center piece of my make-shift base of operations back here in used house goods, but even with the frightening possibilities looming I must continue to publish my findings.
-Kyle Reid
10/04: On Campus with Kyle Reid: College Campus CosmologyI’m not going to keep it a secret that, at least for a couple semesters, I’m going to a community college. I’ve attended a state university and a community college, and there are a myriad of differences between the two. I won’t list them all, but one of my favorites is that all the buildings on this particular community college are named with a letter.
“I’ve got class in lecture hall E.” You might say.
Every letter is represented on campus from A to Z. It makes perfect sense then that there would be a building X, however; I was not prepared for how funny it would be when I actually encountered it. I laughed to myself as I came around the bend and spotted, in giant letters “Building X.” I don’t think everyone will appreciate the humor of Building X and that’s not important. I did, and I immediately started an internal monologue that might help explain the joke. It went something like:
“Building X, an outcast building shunned by all other buildings for its radical theories and arcane practices. Forced to live among the shadows, Building X’s anger grows everyday. When will Building X exact its revenge and forever change the landscape of this humble community college campus?”
I went to extend the joke further, ignoring the fact that I had already stretched it pretty thin and that this new addition didn’t even make too much sense to begin with, when I started to say,
“Building X is a rogue planet…”
But right in the middle of that thought, a rather rotund sample of the female specimen turned the corner. She was not your typical weekend-warrior type of husky. For her collecting calories was a life time commitment. She was a pro by the looks of it. That’s probably not how being over weight works. Being 6”1’ and all of 150 pounds, I’m not even sure how being regular weight works, so I realize I’m not a fat expert, but with that said, she was quite large and I was quite immediately struck by her “unique” figure.
I imagine that if there had been a DJ anywhere near by, he would have let the needle slip off the record, making that classic sound of bewilderment and surprise that brings any rocking party to a hush. Now I wouldn’t call walking around a community college campus and crafting a tenuously funny internal monologue about the natural sciences building a real “party”, but I was still having as much fun as I otherwise would at any social function. I usually take pleasure in the odder parts of life, but that enjoyment was brought quickly to a halt by this woman.
I stopped dead in my tracks. The internal monologue ceased and my mind raced to find a witty response to this silence. She was fat. I had to make a joke, that’s how America works. I thought back to what I was about to say — something about some “rogue” something — and realized a great opportunity. I redirected the course of my rather mundane internal monologue from Building X, focused my wit on this large but innocent woman, and pronounced heartily,
“No… That’s a rogue planet.”
I’m not proud that, after the thought fully set in, I started laughing uncontrollably right in ear shot of that hurling mass freed from its orbit, but I did. I could have saved some feelings and just kept that little story to myself. In fact, I’m sure I should have, but it’s too late now. My only excuse it that I was thinking of things to write about and this was the best story that came to mind. I can’t really apologize to the world’s obese community either. All I ask is that everyone not hate me too much and realize just how funny that phrase really is: Rogue Planet.
-Kyle Reid
