A List of Words That Can Be Rendered Hilarious With One Errant Keystroke

I’m talking beyond public, whose comedic possibilities have already been thoroughly explored.

And yes, for most of these, I learned the hard way, and yes, the first one just yesterday.

• faces
• genial
• trust
• tuckered
• named
• Scotch tape
• exotic
• wore
• ditties
• wonton
• hose
• curt
• shot
• shirt
• snitty
• shift
• trump, as a verb or a proper noun
• discount, which can be tragically but wonderfully turned into discocunt
• and of course, superheroes, which becomes the obscure but nonetheless evocative word superherpes when you type just one letter incorrectly

On a related note, the adjectival form of the word pus must be avoided in written form at all costs. Also, true story: Once I typed Josie and the Pussycars in a headline. It wasn’t more obscene, strictly speaking, just more surreal in a way that made me wish pussycars were a thing.

Why My House Wasn’t in a Movie About Fresno

Here is a phone conversation, re-created some artistic license, that happened about a year ago.

Location scout: Do you want your house to be in a movie?

Me: Not really.

Location scout: We’ll pay you!

Me: How m—

Location scout: Not very much though.

Me: Well, no, then. That sounds like a hassle.

Location scout: We’d need you out of there for, like, two days.

Me: But I just moved in.

Location scout: So you’re not used to it yet!

Me: I need to go.

Location scout: But Hollywood magic!

Me: What’s this movie?

Location scout: It’s called Fresno!

Me: Bye.

Shortly after I moved last year, I got a note tacked to my door from a location scout asking if I’d be interested in allowing a crew to film a movie in my house. This was one of the most Los Angeles things that had ever happened to me, and I was tempted. But when I called for details, I said no, ultimately for two reasons. First, just having newly moved in, I wasn’t eager to get displaced from my home. Second, the film was called Fresno and something about the thought of my home being one that could exist in Fresno didn’t sit well. I like my home. I strive for a non-Fresno aesthetic. Being told “Your home could be a place in Fresno” is kind of like being approached about being the subject of a makeover show — “You’re a ‘before,’ and we want to make you an ‘after,’ you shapeless, sad glob.” Only they weren’t actually promising to “after” my house — just highlight its “before”-ness.

Last weekend, nearly a year later, I watched the Outfest screening of the new movie by Jamie Babbit, who directed But I’m a Cheerleader. The film featured Natasha Lyonne, who also starred in Cheerleader, alongside Judy Greer, who starred in every other movie this summer. (Seriously, she’s been in Tomorrowland, Jurassic World and Ant-Man. Can’t help feeling proud for little ol’ Fern Mayo.) It’s a solid indie comedy, and the title is Addicted to Fresno.

The working title, I learned, was Fresno.

In retrospect, I missed out.

Having watched the film, I’d guess that the location scout was looking for one of two homes featured in it: the one that Lyonne and Greer’s characters share or a second where Greer’s character meets one played my Molly Shannon. Greer and Shannon meet up again on the street, in a spot in Atwater Village that’s literally a five-minute walk from where I live. I cross by it everyday, and consequently I get to think about how I missed my chance to experience Hollywood magic in the form of having my walls repainted, having my furniture rearranged and my floors scratched up, to say nothing of having to camp out at a friend’s while a film crew looked at the art on my walls and saying, “Nah, this sucks. Move it out of the shot.”

Good movie, though.

Of course, that title Fresno can and should only belong to one thing: the 1986 Carol Burnett miniseries that made fun of night-time soaps like Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest, that focused on Fresno’s glamorous-but-cutthroat raisin industry and that hinged around the idea that setting a story about glamorous people in Fresno is inherently ridiculous.

The entire four hours of Fresno, I have learned, are available on YouTube, and I’d like to suggest a Fresno-themed movie night if anyone else is down.

If Everybody Wants You, Why Isn’t Anybody Calling?

Listening to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” is like being trapped at lunch with a friend who is so focused on criticizing some extraneous person that you begin to wonder about the nature of the obsession. “You’ve been going on and on about this Gloria person. Are you sure you actually don’t like her?” you ask at long last. “I think you’re in love with her.” Your friend puts down her fork. Your insight was not appreciated.

So that, only you can dance to it.

I’ve actually been wondering what Gloria’s deal was for a while now. It’s been eight years since I posted about the strange lyrics on this blog, and it took me until this week to find out why this song exists.

Here’s the story.

The song was initially released in 1979. Sung in Italian by Umberto Tozzi, this version of “Gloria” is a straightforward love song about a man infatuated with a woman who may be imaginary but whom he nonetheless misses “in the air,” “like salt” and “more than the snow melts the sun,” at least according to this translation .

Jonathan King translated the lyrics into English later that same year. Tozzi later re-recorded this version as well.

Eventually Laura Branigan decided she too should record a version, but simply re-using Jonathan King’s translation proved doubly difficult. Had she just kept the subject of the song as is — this alluring woman named Gloria — it would have skewed too sapphic for mainstream pop in the early ’80s. And simply substituting all the references to Gloria with a man named Mario didn’t have the same impact. Thus, Branigan and a collaborator re-wrote “Gloria” as essentially a hate song, with the narrator calling out the subject for living life bigger than she should.

(Note on the Gloria-Mario business: The Wikipedia page on the matter cites People Weekly as the source of this info, but I can’t find the article, and a search of the People.com archives, if that’s the publication it’s trying to refer to, turns up nothing. However, the search did lead me to a 1983 article that refers to Branigan’s gay following as “the AIDS circuit,” and that is certainly something that helps us see where were are as a society now versus thirty years ago.)

The song broke records on the Billboard Top 100, so clearly these creative decisions helped it connect with American audiences, but isn’t that an odd solution to the problem? “We have this catchy song, and we don’t want to our girl to sound like a lesbo, so let’s just have her be obsessively critical about this Gloria bitch?” Lyrics such as “Feel your innocence slipping away / Don’t believe it’s coming back soon” seem intended more to hurt than help, but I suppose constructive criticism hasn’t ever been a big theme in pop music. Of course, today, Branigan would have just covered the song as is, and no one would have blinked an eye about her singing a love song about a woman.

That’s the explanation. In case you’re ever along for the ride, listening to “Gloria” and someone points out how odd the lyrics are, offer them this background, even if it doesn’t completely explain why Gloria is living under an alias. (Spies? Spies!) Personally, I want someone to write Gloria: The Movie and further flesh out the world of sin and scandal that this woman has descended into, a la the movie adaptation of “Ode to Billy Joe.”

And speaking of that, is it strange to anyone else that there’s not been a movie version of “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”? Doy, there totally was a Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia movie.

In Which Jada Pinkett Gets an Obscene Phone Call

Sometimes your celebration of America begins with poking around online and finding a German-language poster for Scream 2. For a piece of promotional art that came out in the late ’90s, this poster pings all your old movie nostalgia censors. It reminds you of something that would have come out two decades earlier.

You don’t even mind that during the scant few minutes that Jada Pinkett actually appears in Scream 2, she never uses a phone, to say nothing from using an old-fashioned pay phone receiver. And you wonder what aesthetic debate went into the decision to feature Pinkett’s skin as being brown. Of course, her skin actually is brown, and that’s actually an important aspect to the role she plays in Scream 2, what with the discussion with Omar Epps about African-American representation in the horror genre and the general tendency to kill off the black guy first. 

In the poster for the first movie, Drew Barrymore’s face shows up ghostly white.

The American poster for Scream 2 features Pinkett too, but in the same ghostly white as Neve Campbell. (And yeah, in the first version of this post, I assumed that it was Courteney Cox appearing on the left side of the poster before a commenter pointed out that Cox does not have brown eyes. On second look, that is totally Jada Pinkett. I guess the white skin threw me.)

It’s interesting that this German poster, and only this German poster, puts Pinkett front and center in the way Barrymore appeared on the first poster and doesn’t change her skin tone.

Twenty Things You Can Do With Twelve Stitches in Your Nose

Inspired by real events!

1. Sit around the house and ooze on a humid summer day.
2. Get children to stare.
3. Get adults to do double-takes.
4. Get the grocery delivery man to make a “That’s gotta hurt” face when you open your front door.
5. Scare away a door-to-door solicitor who’s talking up some politician because he arrived at the precise moment you got a spontaneous bloody nose, allowing you to repeat the phrase “Not a good time” with increasing levels of hostility.
6. Generally look like you sent away for one of those “movie special effects makeup” kits for kids and then chose to wear your first experiment around the house for your own amusement.
7. Constantly notice your nose in your field of vision.
8. Get your t-shirt caught on a sharp end of the thread while undressing, and then stand there with your arms over your head and the shirt over your face, wondering what the most effective solution to the problem might be.
9. Feel like you are about to sneeze at all times.
10. Occasionally actually do sneeze only blood comes out.
11. Make your own Rorschach prints on your pillow.
12. Walk around the house feeling hyperaware of corners, open cabinets, all other obstacles, Final Destination-style.
13. Decline pool parties.
14. Decline alcohol because of the antibiotics.
15. Decline activities outside your home because you’re supposed to avoid sun exposure.
16. Not kiss anyone, or at least not to the satisfaction of any party involved.
17. Apply Aquaphor liberally because your dermatologist told you doing so would prevent scarring. When you go to actually get the stitches out, get told by the urgent care physician that you shouldn’t have done that, that you should never have done that and that you’ll have to keep the stitches in two days longer. Get told instead that you should let it dry out, even though the dermatologist explicitly said that would be the worst thing to do.
18. Wonder if doctors are just making it up for kicks.
19. Weep.
20. Watch the entire first season of Sense8 even though you can’t remember any of the characters’ names except for Nomi.

In case you would like to read the gripping story of how I acquired these stitches, you can do so here.

The Further Adventures of Homoerotic Anime

Last year, I started posting supercuts of the more conspicuously sexual parts of Saint Seiya, an anime series that started airing in Japan in 1986 and which later surfaced in English-speaking areas as Knights of the Zodiac. It’s pretty classic “dudes in armor” fighting action. It’s also gayer than gay sex. I don’t think it was meant to be so laden with innuendo, but it’s hard to read this series of grunts, glances and one-on-one fight sequences as anything other than thinly veiled dickbutt.

Free time has been harder to come by since the last post, but I’ve still been watching, grabbing spare scenes as I happened across them. Here’s the latest series of head-scratchers.

Some context:

0:01 — Hyoga gets his powers from Cygnus, the constellation shaped like a swan, and therefore must flap around like an elegant bird to create ice magic. Totally hetero, in the way a beautiful male figure skating routine is also totally hetero. His special move is Diamond Dust, which sounds more like a Sailor Moon attack, which should be familiar to those who grew up playing RPGs, and which is an actual meteorological phenomenon.

0:25 — Cygnus clutches his hands into a fist-pumping pose and fires off white energy blasts.

1:10 — Women play an odd role on the show. The female saints must keep their faces covered with a mask at all times, and that makes it all the stranger that Argol wields Medusa’s face as a weapon. There’s a theory that Medusa’s face is a symbol of the vagina dentata. Think about it: it’s a fanged, snarling version of a thing that’s usually not dangerous, and it’s lethal to even behold to say nothing about interacting with it. It’s also surrounded by coiled snakes which, if you’re taking this analogy to its full extent, could be interpreted a similarly dangerous version of pubic hair. Medusa is weaponized female beauty, and the fact that she attacks by making enemies rock hard? The symbolism is almost too much. Death-boners, all around, in the same way that that one Poison Ivy episode of Batman had gave people deadly, permanent wood.

1:18 — Argol has to turn his backside on enemies to unleash his weaponized vagina power. Hmm.

2:00 — Whenever anyone talks about putting anything into something that’s quivering, it’s easy to assume it’s sexual.

2:13 — I feel like Andromeda reads as a very feminine man. I mean, his name is Andromeda. He’s the only major male character to be named after a mythological character that is expressly female. But that makes it all the more interesting that his weapon is a snaking chain that lends itself to penile comparisons. In this scene, his chain goes limp.

3:27 — Perseus’ outfit. Just saying.

4:12 — Just look at the way Andromeda runs those chains through his hands. He’s like a snake-charmer.

And here are the previous clips.

(And there’s a little more on this particular weirdness here.)

How Tiny Toons Introduced Me to the Justice League

Let’s talk about September 1992. I had fairly recently turned ten, I had become the proud owner of a Super Nintendo, and I didn’t know what DC Comics was.

Everyone had seen the Michael Keaton Batman, of course, and the sequel had been one of the previous summer’s biggest hits, but I don’t think I had any real understanding of how Batman and his affiliates fit into any sort of larger universe. As far as I knew, Batman, as a series was a thing on its own, no more likely guest-star Superman or Wonder Woman than Spider-Man or The Incredible Hulk. The animated Batman series had only started airing on September 5, 1992, and that depiction of Batman was very Gotham City-focused. I had never seen Super Friends and had never opened a comic book.

Like The Simpsons and later Animaniacs, however, Tiny Toons taught me a lot of pop culture, even if I’d only understand the references years down the line. And on September 15, 1992, Tiny Toons aired a segment titled “The Just-Us League of Supertoons,” and it gave me my first look at an expanded DC universe.

Written by Paul Dini, who’d was also a writer for Batman: The Animated Series and its spinoffs, this episode centers around Batduck, the Batman parody the show had introduced back in 1990 — notably well before the premiere of Batman: The Animated Series, making it the first time I’d seen an animated version of Batman. And the episode has Batduck and his Robin stand-in, Decoy, joining up with an exclusive team of superheroes who are all Tiny Toons versions of actual DC characters.

There are Superbun and Wonder Babs.

The Flash parody is assigned to the Tiny Toons equivalent of the Roadrunner.



Aquaman is Aquamutt, and I think the episode is making a joke about Aquaman’s uselessness by having him played by Byron Basset, a Tiny Toons character without a clear Looney Tunes analogue and who never did much aside from sleep in a weird, dog-puddle formation.

Shirley the Loon, the most pop culturally complex character on the show, shows up here playing Hawkloon, a play on Hawkgirl and a hint at the future of the DC Universe, where Hawkgirl would become a more important character than Hawkman, the character to which she ostensibly serves as a sidekick. When Batman: The Animated Series evolved into Justice League in 2001, Hawkgirl was the team’s second female member, after Wonder Woman, and now the CW spinoff of The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, will feature Hawkgirl as a main character once again. I’m certain this Tiny Toons episode was the first time I’d eve heard of Hawk-anything, however.

It’s probably also the first glimpse I got of Black Canary, who in this parody is played by an actual canary and named Pink Canary. She doesn’t really do anything, aside from wear the teeniest set of fishnet stockings in the history of cartoons, but at least she doesn’t make a domestic violence joke.

Green Arrow becomes Teen Arrow, though there’s not any reason in particular that he’s being played by the Tiny Toons version of Wile E. Coyote.

And finally there’s Fifi playing Scentanna, a version of Zatanna, the Justice League’s No. 1 spellcaster. Just a few months later, Batman: The Animated Series would introduce Zatanna as a one-off character. Voiced by Julie Brown, Zatanna is the only non-Batman series character to show up in the original run of the series. It’s not surprising: Paul Dini is a Zatanna superfan and it may be no coincidence that he married a real-life stage magician.



Watching the episode today, it’s hard not to focus on the fact that they sexed Fifi up. I mean, look at this pose.

This is how fetishes get started. Sexiness aside, if this counts as a Zatanna appearance — and I’d say it kind of does — then this is her first-ever appearance on TV or in a movie.

You can view the entire segment below, should you be interested.

To me, it’s interesting to think about Dini getting these DC Comics characters show up in parody form years before they showed up in earnest on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, a show that sent me down many and many a research hole learning the characters’ long, weird histories. I’ll bet that Dini might have thought this parody might be his only chance to get these lesser-known DC characters to show up on screen. I’ll bet not even he thought that Tiny Toons would end up being a stepping stone towards building the DC Comics universe and getting more people invested in it.

Through this episode and in a lot of other ways, Tiny Toons helped make Batman: The Animated Series happen. And it in turn helped shape Batman at large, helped make Batman what he is today. Think about it: If Tiny Toons hadn’t happened, Paul Dini might not have had the opportunity to move onto the animated Batman, where Dini introduced the character Harley Quinn, who transitioned to the comics and who is now debuting in the live-action, big-screen Suicide Squad.

Weird, right?

Miscellaneous notes:

• Julie Brown would eventually also voice Minerva Mink on Animaniacs, another female cartoon character who was, for better or worse, sexed up more than most.
• What is the deal with sexualizing skunks? There aren’t that many anthropomorphic skunks out there, and most of the famous ones are overly amorous.
• The Just-Us League of Supertoons has better gender parity than most superhero teams on TV shows or in movies.
• Since this episode aired, all of the characters have shown up in some live-action DC adaptation — except for Wonder Woman. Batman v. Superman, which boasts the first live-action appearance of Wonder Woman since the Lynda Carter days, opens in theaters on March 25, 2016. The CW’s Legends of Tomorrow debuts sometimes in early 2016. Therefore, there’s a chance Hawkgirl will star in her own show before Wonder Woman appears in a supporting role in someone else’s movie. For what it’s worth, Ciara Renée already cameoed as Kendra Saunders in the season finale of The Flash. It was just a non-speaking role, but she already technically beat Wonder Woman to the punch.
• Speaking of Harley Quinn, the news that Courtney Love was briefly considered for playing the role in a sequel to Batman & Robin allowed me to point out to a whole new group of readers that the character was inspired by a scene in Days of Our Lives. I will never tire of pointing this out to people.