... Wolverine cut off Baron Strucker's right hand...... and his left hand fell to the floor.

From What If...? v.2 #7: What if Wolverine Was an Agent of SHIELD?

For the first 55 minutes of Red Skelton's More Funny Faces, Red treated his audience to bad jokes--when he could manage to tell them between overpowering guffaws of fake laughter--and pantomime performances by three other people, despite the fact the audience was there to see him. Imagine if Guns and Roses--the real band, not Axl and the guys he playing with today--reunited and were playing to a sellout crowd. But after playing a quick, poorly rehearsed medley of "Yesterdays," "Civil War," and "You Could Be Mine," they brought out a trained dog act. After that, they return to the stage for a half-assed, flat, out-of-tune rendition of "Paradise City." After that, more dog acts, including a few routines featuring Izzy Stradlin and his four Pomeranians.

While the G&R crowd probably would have burned the building to the ground, Red Skelton's audience couldn't have been happier. Because, as we've previously stated, the 1970's were completely devoid of entertainment. Fucking "Three's Company" was a top rated show!

Now, imagine Guns and Roses is coming back to the stage. Axl offers a heartfelt thank you to everyone for supporting the band and shares how great he felt when Appetite for Destruction and how much it meant for him and how often people come up to tell him about how much they love the album... then detours into a political rant that kind of misses the mark because he's trying to relate "Sweet Child O' Mine" to support for a school voucher program. Finally, the familiar opening chords of "Sweet Child O' Mine" blast from the amps...

And after about sixteen bars, the band stops and everyone leaves the stage.

That is essentially how Red Skelton closes More Funny Faces.

In short, "This is my most popular character. Everyone loves this character. Even people who aren't fans love this character, and since you guys are fans I can only imagine how much you love this character. Let me put on the costume I always wear when portraying my most popular, most beloved character. We should do away with welfare, Medicare, and civil rights. Okay, are you ready? Here it is... my most popular character... good night!"

You have to assume that people willing to pay a lot of money to trudge out into a packed amphitheater in the dead of winter in Toronto to see a hack comedian twenty years past his prime are pretty hardcore fans. If they get nothing else, they're going to want to get some Freddy the Freeloader.

Instead, Red Skelton gives them a Freddy cocktease. And he didn't even take the time to make the eye makeup not look like shit. What a fucking asshole.

I also find it interesting that instead of performing as Freddy the Freeloader, he opted to discuss what Freddy the Freeloader means in terms of Skelton's own right wing politics. It should be noted that Skelton was a pretty hardcore conservative who got upset that he couldn't bring on Spiro Agnew and blamed liberals within CBS for the cancellation of his show in 1971.

However, the character is Freddy the Freeloader. He's a panhandler who steals from people. He may have a heart of gold, but at his core he is a layabout beggar who leeches off the more productive within society. One cannot make the case that "he doesn't ask anyone to provide for him." In fact, that's exactly what he does. He's not Freddy the Guy With a Steady Job That Pays the Bills.

The more disturbing belief of Freddy--and by extension of you and me and a little bit of all of us--is that he doesn't want equal rights. Freddy the Freeloader understands that some people don't want to have to look at a filthy hobo while they're eating their lunches, so he's willing to eat out back behind the restaurant, and he can't understand why the darkies can't do the same without raising a fuss. Freddy the Freeloader knows he's not as good as the rich, prominent, heterosexual white men who run the country and wishes the poor, gays, blacks, and women would accept the same!

If this is Red Skelton's most popular, most beloved character who symbolizes all that Red believes and stands for, then fuck you, Red Skelton, fuck you in hell.

Red Skelton's More Funny Faces began as a terribly unfunny observation of what comedy used to be in a time when people were so starved for amusement that "Chico and the Man" was considered groundbreaking entertainment.

After some bland jokes covering hot topics like bad women drivers and drunks, Red manages to throw in an appearance by one of his famous characters, Clem Kadiddlehopper, which the people of 1979 react to as though Santa Claus and Jesus jointly announced that everyone was getting a new Rolls Royce made out of orgasms with all-winning-lottery-ticket interiors.

Before I share the comedic brilliance of Clem Kadiddlehopper, let me share a story. In fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and tenth grade, I remember doing poetry lessons that included "Beans" poems. The idea of the poetry lessons was to teach us about different styles of poems and to have us write our own sonnets, haikus, limericks, etc.

The "Beans" poem was a standard part of this curriculum, I assume because it was the easiest to mimic. The poem was just a list of types of beans (pinto beans, green beans, baked beans, kidney beans, etc.) with the ending "Most of all/Best of all/I like jelly beans." The assignment was to pick a different thing and make a list of types of that thing, then end with some kind of twist thing that shared the name but didn't quite fit, like big dogs, little dogs, fluffy dogs, mean dogs, but last of all, best of all, I like hot dogs! Or:

Tough jobs,
Cushy jobs,
Part-time retail jobs,
Fat cat desk jobs-
Those are just a few.

Mall jobs,
Office jobs,
Low-paying menial jobs,
Afterschool jobs,
Dirty jobs too.

Temp jobs,
Service jobs,
Don't forget freelance jobs.

Last of all,
Best of all,
I like blowjobs!

Why did I take the time to go off on this tangent? Because that poem that I spent three minutes writing represents about the same level of effort that Red put into his bit featuring his second most popular character ever.

As I noted last time, proponents of Red Skelton like to point to the fact that his material is safe enough to share with your children. That's largely because it written at the same intellectual level as children. "I'll read a poem about frogs that doesn't entirely make sense--"Mom says no but then there's Dad." Huh?--then I'll have a bunch of frog puppets pop up from behind the couch and I'll shoot them with a toy gun," could easily be the plot of my daughter's next "play" that she'll perform in the family room.

At least Clem Kadiddlehopper is a notable Red Skelton character. Where More Funny Faces really goes off the rails is when Red takes a break and hands over roughly twenty minutes of his hour long special to mimes.I'll just go ahead and assume you didn't watch that entire video. It says something about the absolute lack of entertainment in the 1970's that anyone knows Marcel Marceau's name. How many other famous mimes can you name? Do you think there's a reason for that?

Every couple of years, America will take an interest in some foreign country and try to co-opt bits of its culture. In the mid-80's everyone was saying, "G'day, mate," every restaurant tried to incorporate some variation of "shrimp on the barbie," Fosters beer sales went from absolutely nothing to slightly more than nothing, and Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious enjoyed careers as film stars. A few years later, sushi restaurants and karate dojos began popping up in every strip mall. In the 60's, the British Invasion hit America and somewhere in the 1970's someone decided what America really needed was wine bars, fondue sets, and mimes.

Fuck but the 1970's sucked! Oh, and what's the deal with those fucking stupid mime outfits with long sleeves but the low-cut scoop front that exposes the 1970's forest of chest hair? It serves no practical purpose other than to announce, "I am a mime. You can tell because I am wearing a lycra mime outfit! You know... in case the fucking white makeup didn't tip you off."

Marcel Marceau does another routine where he acts as a lion tamer and a mime couple does some kind of routine where she's a balloon and he's got her by a string. When Red Skelton comes out between their acts, he engages in pantomime himself. As we all know, the key to good mime is not speaking. One must show and not tell. Only through the actions can the audience relate to the performer. If you have to explain it, you suck at miming.

With that in mind, please listen to Red's intro to his Eiffel Tower pantomime routine.I propose that all entertainment be given the same treatment. At the beginning of a movie, there should be a short clip of the director saying something like, "Hello, ladies and gentlemen, I am so happy you came to see Usual Suspects. This is the story of five career criminals who wind up in a very sticky situation, working for a mysterious man named Keyser Soze. Some people debate whether Keyser Soze even exists, and he does. In fact, what you'll find is that Kevin Spacey's character, Verbal Kint, is actually Keyser. I think you'll really enjoy that twist. Okay, again, thanks for coming and I hope you enjoy The Usual Suspects."

And, just in case making people who paid money to come watch you perform sit through half an hour of mime while you chill in your dressing room isn't insult enough, Red Skelton saved the biggest fuck you for the last five minutes.

Next time: Red Skelton, Cock Tease

If I could go back in time and punch anyone from history in the face, it would be Red Skelton.

Skelton is known as a classic American comedian by those who have never seen him or have no idea what humor is. If you look up his DVDs on Amazon or Netflix, you will find overwhelmingly positive 4-to-5 star reviews, but if you actually read them you'll find they are written only by the people who are so devoid of any taste that they could actually sit through an entire hour of this tripe.

The key thing you will notice in every positive review is a harkening back to "the good old days when comedians didn't have to work blue to be funny." They'll lament that "the youth of today have been poisoned by the lack of censorship" and "good clean humor seems to have left the public venue of entertainment" and "it is so sad that comedians now have to use profanity to make people laugh" Again and again, the endorsement you will see most often is "you can let your kids watch this and not worry that they'll be exposed to anything offensive."

True, Red Skelton won't bust out Carlin's "7 Words" or Patton Oswalt's "A Blowjob Behind the Tilt-a-Whirl." But suggesting that anything Skelton does or says is superior to either of those routines merely because of a lack of words deemed inappropriate by arbitrary standards of an uptight minority is either dishonest or moronic.

Those who claim Skelton's humor is funny--or more importantly funnier than modern comedians--do so with that same condescending moralizing and unconvincing zealotry of vegans insisting grilled eggplant tastes better than steak.

I first was exposed to and became dangerously obsessed with Red Skelton in 1997. I went to Los Angeles for a job interview with Fox Sports Net and stayed with my friend, Dan, at his apartment near USC. After dinner, we were hanging out debating what to do and a Red Skelton special called More Funny Faces came on PBS. We didn't change the channel immediately because we started discussing the fact that we'd both heard of Red Skelton and knew him as a comedy legend, but that neither of us were familiar with any of his material. As because of our hesitation, I have wasted countless years of my life hating Red Skelton.

Within the first two minutes of More Funny Faces, we knew we wouldn't be doing anything else for the rest of the evening.

The performance is like opening a time capsule. Presented without any context it gives a baffling look into the terribly entertainment-starved decade of the 1970's. Skelton's opening is a series of jokes that are typical old school stand up. For the last two decades, comedians have come to focus more on routines, taking a subject and making multiple humorous observations about it, rather than just telling jokes that have a set up and a punchline and are completely unrelated to the previous or following joke. Also, modern comedians' routines tend to focus on personal experiences or experiences to which we can all relate as opposed to "three guys walk into a bar"-type jokes.

Or in Red's case, "two seagulls are flying together"-type jokes.

It's not really fair to criticize Skelton for not being funny here because the humor style has changed. However, it's interesting to observe what an unprofessional demeanor he has by today's standards. Even hacks like Carlos Mencia and Dane Cook wouldn't set up a bit by saying, "Oh, I got a joke for ya. I got a joke for ya." Of course you do. That's why the audience is there. You are on stage with a microphone and they paid money to sit in a room and hear you tell jokes. The statement "I got a joke for you," delivered with that spur-of-the-moment-inspiration tone implies you are up there half-assing it with no planned script and are happy giving us whatever pops into your age-addled mind.

Also, imagine David Cross laughing so hard at his jokes that it looks like he may wet his pants. Red has been doing some of these routines for fifty years, yet he cackles at the audience like he just heard them himself at every punchline.With the exception of the final mug to the audience in that clip, Red never does this during his pantomimes (yeah... more on that next time), so it's clearly a conscious decision on his part.

If this was all More Funny Faces had to offer, it would have quickly faded from our memories, forgiven for its slice of terrible reminder that the 1970's existed, but as you can guess from the fact that Dan and I still discuss it and analyze it the way two war veterans might recall seeing an child run into the crossfire of a gun battle on the streets of Kabul, it got much, much worse.

Next time: Fourth grade poetry and mimes!

ADDED: It has been pointed out to be by a horrified reader that Red's elephant and hippopotamus joke from the above clip is more commonly told with a racist theme, substituting a person of Jewish heritage for the elephant and an African-American for the hippo.

Mind? Blown.

"I've told you all along, the big problem is money. I feel like I have to do everything myself. I can't rely on you financially," she informs me from the couch I paid for in the living room of the house we couldn't have bought without the down payment I provided while turning up the volume on the TV I bought her because the washing machine I got her is spinning, which makes it difficult to hear the movie she rented with my Netflix account that's in the DVD player I bought for myself but didn't take when I moved out since I didn't need two of them and I knew she'd get bored only watching the cable that I continue to pay for even though I haven't lived in this house for over a year.

It takes a moment for this to register since I just walked in the door from running out to buy the kids some new clothes for the start of the school year, dropping the payment for the doctor's bill in the mailbox--thankfully, it's much less than it would be if not for the health insurance I pay for--filling up her gas tank, and picking up dinner, which she eats off my dishes, with my silverware, at my dining room table.

But I don't have time to debate--or to show her once again how to add new music to the iPod I picked up for her last summer at the same time I bought her computer for that matter. I have to go round up the kids, who are being watched by my sister, who moved into this neighborhood in part to help provide free babysitting for us, and take them up to my one-room shack in my parents' backyard so she can have some alone time for a week or two, so she'll have to call me later with the new cellphone I bought her four weeks ago.

I'm such a lazy, selfish, ungiving asshole.

The other night, I was watching "Louie" and saw a commercial for that new Christopher Nolan film about inhabiting dream worlds where nothing makes logical sense and everything is surreal. What's it called?

Oh, right. The 2010 Major League All-Star Game on Fox.

Who is this ad supposed to appeal to? Nothing seems to make sense. I understand the message is "The All-Star Game is in California and most of the people east of the Pacific Time Zone think the entire state is one big beach, so use that to sell the idea," but there are so many conflicting messages.

When your sport that used to be known as "the national past time" now can't draw flies, when the records that were held sacred to fans for decades have been shattered by men we now all know were chemically enhanced superfreaks that the league tries to pretend never existed, when your steadfast devotion to traditionalism and rejection of technology robbed a player of a one of your sports greatest achievements--a perfect game--what do you think would be the worst possible symbolic message you could send fans?




Gaze ye upon my works and despair! I'm going to go with "showing everything associated with baseball crumbling to dust." The only way this symbolism could be more clear would be if Peyton Manning jogged through at the end of the commercial and knocked over the sand stadium.

Just as God created Adam from clay, so, too, are Chase Utley, Hanley Ramirez, and other top players formed from dirt. This game's being played at the Angels' stadium, right? They can't play on the beach...

Hey, guys! You like hot chicks? Good news because one of our greatest pitchers looks kind of like this hot chick! See?


The Kaiser has returned! He's ben hibernating beneath the sands of Southern California beaches and the only ones who can stop him are Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter!

Oh, I take it back. The stadium is on the beach. At least in the sense that all of California is a huge beach where people hang out in swimsuits all day and try to give gays the right to marry--at least, that's what it is if you live in Missouri and have never been there.

Sorry, buddy. Tonight, when she's with you, she'll be thinking about us. That's right. Major League Baseball is gonna fuck your girlfriend if you're not careful.

What the fuck? Where did the mutant kid come from? We just saw this stadium rise up from the dirt and tower over people. Now a kid who is taller than the stadium walks up to adorn it with an Angels logo. Is this a world within a world twist? It's like in Men in Black when the galaxy was in the charm on the cat's collar, but then in the end we saw that the Milky Way was inside a marble that alien kids were playing with.

My take on this is that all the people on the beach in the earlier scenes, including the players, are all figments of the imagination of an autistic child--like the finale of "St. Elsewhere."

And where the fuck are this kid's legs? The distance from the bottom of his rib cage to the ground is about the same as the height of his head. That means everything from penis down has been lopped off. Holy shit! Somebody chopped an autistic child in half, but keeps him alive to build elaborate sand castles that he populates with his imagination. That shit makes the Saw movies downright reasonable.

Economics classes teach the concept of sunk costs early and will continue hammering on them all the way through MBA courses and doctoral theses, businesses regularly suffer from their inability to accept the idea. Yet, it's not that difficult to understand why. Our brains just don't seem wired for it.

For those who don't recall seventh grade social studies and beyond, sunk costs are the money you spend on a failed enterprise that you cannot ever get back if you admit your failure. If you spend a million dollars to open a factory and have to shut it down the next day, you could sell the machinery inside, sell the property where it stands, sell the building, sell the office furniture, and recoup at least some of that million. If you managed to sell everything for $800,000, you sank $200,000 into the factory and there is no way you will ever see it again.

Often, when we see this presented, our instinct is to focus on the sunk costs as unacceptable. If the factory stays open, it could generate revenue. Eventually, it can make enough to cover the $200,000--or so we choose to believe. The more likely case is that keeping the factory open will cost more money than it generates, and six months later, the machinery and furniture is used and worth less, real estate is down, and you've had to pay half a year's wages to all the workers. Instead of being down $200,000, you're down $400,000.

Simply put, the concept is not to throw good money after bad. Even if you've spent more than the gross national product of some nations into research and development, product testing, and advertising, there comes a time when you have to admit the world just might not ever want baby food for adults, celery-flavored Jell-O, or Pepsi that tastes not quite like Pepsi and looks like seltzer, no matter how many millions you paid Van Halen to tell them otherwise.

And yet, what would be millions in sunk costs often becomes tens or hundreds of millions because the people in charge refuse to recognize the failure for what it is.

Human beings appear to be wired for hope. When our favorite baseball player gets three hits in the entire month of June, he's not too old nor has he lost his edge. He's in a slump and will snap out of it any time now! Pessimists are derided for not thinking positively... and too often realists are labeled as pessimists for simply acknowledging the possibility of failure instead of assuming everything will go swimmingly.

Furthermore, everyone loves a story about a guy who succeeds against all odds. Every good entrepreneurial story begins with "No one else believed..." or "Everyone told him he was crazy when..." When everyone else said, "Why would you want to put an outhouse inside your home?", Thomas Crapper never stopped believing! Where would the world be if Ken Hakuta had listened to all the nay-sayers who told him people didn't want anything wacky to walk on their walls?

These stories alway imply that failure is simply a matter of not wanting it enough. When the Yankees win the World Series, it's not because they buy all the best players in baseball and pay them more salary than the combined rosters of the Padres, Pirates, Rangers, Marlins, and A's. It's because Derek Jeter is such a great leader and Alex Rodriguez finally overcame the stress of playoff baseball and Joe Girardi understands his team so well.

You don't have abs so great they'll get you cast in a teenage vampire movie despite a complete inability to act because you're a quitter. You could have a yacht and a couple mansions and girls in bikinis who hang out sipping champagne around your pool all day if only you had the go-get-'em spirit that those guys on the infomercials at 3AM do. Whatever dreams you've had but never achieved are solely the result of your lack of faith.

The point is that we are taught never to accept failure and to expect success. This is why we've become a nation in perpetual debt to our credit cards. If we want a new 50-inch high definition TV, we buy it, because, even though we don't have the money now, it's only a matter of time before we'll be more successful than we currently are and able to afford it. Hell, the Republican Party's entire economic platform is based on the idea that everyone who wants to be successful will be and we shouldn't help anyone who is unsuccessful because they are clearly only unsuccessful because they are lazy.

Star Trek fans will understand where I am going with all this.The Kobayashi Maru was a test given to all Starfleet Academy cadets, but that none could pass. The point was to put them in a no-win scenario to see how they would deal with failure. Of course, as fans, we get all lightheaded when we hear that Captain Kirk managed to beat the test because he "doesn't believe in the no-win scenario." But when you consider the above discussion of banking on unlikely circumstances and the compounding of failure when it isn't acknowledged, Kirk becomes a petulant, immature, delusional brat who is no better than Scottie Pippen refusing to inbound the ball to Toni Kukoc.

For the past nine years, I've been in a failing relationship with the mother of my children. We never got married, solely because we never liked each other enough to do so. When she first learned she was pregnant, her family immediately assumed I would walk out on her, and treated me as such an asshole for seven to eight of the last nine years. I, on the other hand, swore I would never leave my child and that I would do whatever it took to make the relationship work. That refusal to accept that the relationship was a failure led to longstanding misery.

They say, "It doesn't matter how many times you get knocked down. What matters is how many times you get up." Admirable as that sounds, there does come a point where you are best off staying down.A year and a half ago, I moved out after years of planning and threatening to do so. Every previous time, however, we'd agree to try to make things work out for the good of the family. Even when I moved out, it was treated as a temporary arrangement--a cooling off period so the two of us could refind our bearings, recognize what it would take to make the relationship work, and decide if those were things we were willing to do.

In short, we refused to let the relationship and our family fail. We focused on the sunk costs of nearly a decade together, a house purchased together, shared expenses, and more, and held onto the hope that eventually we'd start to love one another enough to erase all the bad memories and misery. I convinced myself that if I was the best boyfriend in the world--the shoulder-and-foot-rubbing-est, always-telling-her-she-looks-beautiful-est, spending-more-quality-time-with-the-kids-than-any-other-dad-est, multiple-orgasm-giving-est boyfriend that Cosmopolitan seems to think all women want--that she would recognize what she stood to lose and meet me somewhere in the middle.

Instead, she never let go of her simple dislike of me. No matter what I did from Day Two onward, she had made up her mind on Day One that she didn't like me and wasn't going to do anything to make us work as a couple.

It is possible to do everything right and still fail. It's even more likely to do several things right but still do enough wrong to fail. I did so much right that even as I type this, I have trouble accepting that my family isn't a family anymore. I feel guilty when I flirt, but have to remind myself I can't cheat if I have no one to cheat on. I failed, and with every failure I tried to learn, to improve, to change tactics, and proceeded to fail again.

I refused to believe in the no-win scenario.

And like Captain Kirk, I failed to learn how to fail. Now, when i can deny it no longer, I can't help but be devastated, unable to cope, worried that success is forever unachievable.

Dug out this old scan from Marvel's The A-Team #2... in case you wondered how he got the name "Faceman":
What's ironic is that in the show, the A-Team guys never hit anyone they're aiming at. I would have expected him to shoot all around her feet and scare her into running away.

At least he's gentleman enough to help clean up after himself.I wonder how many Google hits I'll get for "A-Team bukkake."

I can only hope issue three featured a nice donkey punch.