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Authors: Adam Carolla

Tags: #Essays, #humor, #American wit and humor, #Form, #General

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HERPES MEDICATION

You always know it’s a herpes commercial when the chick is kickboxing, mountain biking, or riding a horse on a beach. I wish I could get genital herpes just so I can start living. Whenever I see a herpes commercial I always think, Poor actress. People in snuff films are making fun of you. But then I realize the worst gig in TV is not the chick playing the herpes queen, it’s the stooge boyfriend who has to stand next to her and look understanding while she’s talking about not letting breakouts control her life. If you do the math, it’s fairly clear she didn’t get the herpes from this guy—her last beau gave her the big H during one of their very frequent pound sessions. And after her first outbreak, he probably moved on to some European lingerie model who was clean as a whistle. Now this sap is left behind to pick up the pieces and use a condom for the rest of his natural life. I wonder how the audition process goes. Here, put on this flannel shirt and try not to look too judgmental. Just a thought: You know how Native Americans get pissy when Mexicans play Indians in movies? I wonder if people with herpes get angry when nonherpes actresses depict them. If I was in charge, I would only hire actresses with herpes. And the good news is there’s no shortage of them.

DUMB GUYS IN COMMERCIALS

Look, let’s face it, guys are smarter than women. Ladies, please de-bunch your panties and open your ears. Men build all the bridges, all the dams, go to the moon, et cetera. It’s a fact. I don’t want to argue about it. If you don’t believe me, go down to the patent office, where, by the way, Einstein and his penis used to work, and see all the great innovations women didn’t come up with. But commercials depict men as simpleminded buffoons. The wife’s out of town and Dad’s left alone to prepare breakfast for the twins. Smash cut to the guy dumping the waffle batter into the toaster. Or how about the famous Carl’s Jr. campaign about how guys would starve without them, featuring a dunce in his mid-thirties attempting to make guacamole by putting a whole avocado in a blender? (You ladies are lucky I’m too lazy to look up what percentage of Michelin-rated chefs are men.) Or the same guy wants to lounge on the sofa all day watching arena football, but his lady convinces him to go with her to Home Depot to remodel the basement. We would complain about this unfair depiction, but we are too busy running Home Depot and the plant that makes the television the guy on the couch in the commercial is watching. And building, designing, and operating the camera and satellites that make it possible for you to see the commercial that makes us look like retarded chimpanzees.

Speaking of inaccurate depictions, I’ve seen seventy-five ADT home-security commercials and I’ve never seen a face darker than Conan O’Brien’s involved in the home-invasion scenarios. Imagine if an alien came down to the U.S. and just watched TV for a year and then took a tour of our prison system. He would be like, “These white criminals are the shrewdest of them all. They commit one hundred percent of the crime and almost never get caught.”

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS

We’ve all seen PSAs. When I was a kid it was Smokey the Bear talking about campfires and Woodsy Owl telling us not to litter. My kids can look forward to Fergie warning us about online predators and Zac Efron explaining the dangers of huffing copier toner. Radio and TV stations don’t run these PSAs out of the goodness of their own hearts or because they’re civic minded. The FCC mandates that they run a certain number of them a year or they’ll pull their license. We all make fun of the
Reefer Madness
–type PSAs of yore, but how kind do you think history will be to ones of today like David Schwimmer telling you to talk to your kids? (Little-known piece of TV trivia: Schwimmer’s character was the only one of the Friends who actually had a kid—you just wouldn’t know it because he never spoke to him.) Dick Van Patten wasn’t available? Or even the guy who played Joey? You had to get the one Friend who was a deadbeat dad? He spent more time with the monkey. And by the way … talk to your kids? This is all you could come up with? How fucking lazy can you be? “I used to just grunt at my kids and use semaphore, but ever since the guy who ignores his kid on TV and has no kids in real life told me to talk to mine, Harvard, here we come!”

The most popular PSA on television these days is the “Over the Limit, Under Arrest” one for drunk driving. Now, I know what you’re thinking. How can this asshole have a beef with a drunk-driving PSA? Well, this is why I’m the
writer
and you’re the
readee
. Simple: gender bias. This commercial shows cops pulling over six or seven drivers. All males. Women don’t get DUIs? I’m sure the makers of these PSAs would argue that more males get DUIs than females. Fine, but from here on out, every AIDS PSA has to start with “Attention fags.”

PSAs aren’t limited to your TV set. Hopefully your town has not degenerated to this point, but half the municipal vehicles, garbage trucks, cop cars, and so on in Los Angeles have a bumper sticker that reads
STOP SENIOR ABUSE
. (Between these bumper stickers and the barbed wire around the freeway signs, L.A. has to win the award for the most depressing city to drive in. A stroll through the Holocaust Museum would be more uplifting.) Does this bumper sticker actually stop anyone from abusing a senior? “I was on the way to Shady Acres to beat the shit out of Nana, got caught behind a street sweeper, and really did some soul-searching. Took a long look in the rearview mirror and didn’t like what I saw staring back at me.” Obviously this bumper sticker doesn’t prevent senior abuse. I bet if anything, it reminds people to abuse seniors. “Jesus, that’s right, it’s been almost a month since Grandpa’s felt the cold sting of his own slipper across his weathered face.”

But it gets worse. Next to that bumper sticker on the same street sweeper is one that reads
DON’T ABANDON YOUR BABY
. Is this what it’s come to? I don’t know why this is written in English. (I know that sounds like I’m a racist, but who’s the one assuming I meant it should be written in Spanish?) This is not asking you to raise your baby, it’s basically saying drop it off at the firehouse instead of the Dumpster. In the final tally, I’m sure these bumper stickers do way more harm to the collective psyche of the community than they do good.

Thousands of hours and millions of dollars are squandered each year on ineffective, no-shit-Sherlock PSAs. Meanwhile, barrels and barrels of oil are wasted and most of those rollover deaths in a Ford Explorer a few years back could have been prevented if the tires had been properly inflated. But nary a word about that. Maybe they’ll get to it when they’re done with secondhand smoke and self-esteem. Obviously our government, the FCC, and the Ad Council (the anemic, semiretarded, hypocritical, money-wasting morons who come up with the PSAs) have little to no interest in having a positive impact on society. I gotta go. I gotta get Schwimmer’s agent on the line. I want to see if he’s available to cut a PSA on wasting our most precious resource—my fucking time.

MOVIES

I love movies. I love good movies, I love bad movies. I just don’t like mediocre movies that are supposed to be great. Let me give you a couple of titles of movies that were mediocre but were huge successes.

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Nominated for best picture, best original screenplay, best supporting actor, and best supporting actress. It won for best original screenplay, and Alan Arkin won for best supporting actor. As far as best original screenplay, this is like giving song of the year to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And Alan Arkin was in the first half of the movie; his corpse was in the last forty-five minutes. He played a junkie, sexually addicted grandpa who taught his fat granddaughter to dance like a whore. He didn’t have a lot to do in the movie, and it’s a role that your grandfather could have pulled off. (My grandfather has been dead for ten years, so he’d require a little more time in makeup.) Alan Arkin was fine, but giving him the Oscar for this role was like awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a guy who broke up a bum fight with a garden hose.

LOST IN TRANSLATION
Another film that qualifies for the Emperor’s New Gay Clothes Award. A boring, look-how-cool-I-am movie made tolerable by Scarlett Johansson in her underpants that won for best original screenplay. I’ll bet when Alan Arkin and Sofia Coppola see each other at Oscar parties they exchange those knowing glances that couples who are fucking around on their spouses with each other do. “Can you believe what we got away with?”

TYLER PERRY MOVIES
I don’t blame Tyler Perry—it’s not his fault he’s a horrible writer. It’s not that hard to write horribly. It’s Oprah’s fault for making a star out of a guy who’s built an empire around a gun-toting, 250-pound grandmother whose conflict-resolution strategy involves threatening to put her foot up your ass.

Dear black community: You don’t have to support this guy’s subpar products just because he’s the same color as you. It’s not like I sit around and say to my white friends, “Rob Schneider’s got a new piece of shit coming out this weekend—let’s head to the multiplex. By golly, he’s white and we need to support our own.” (If you think I’m being too hard on Tyler Perry or Rob Schneider, I challenge you to watch
Diary of a Mad Black Woman
or
Deuce Bigalow
2.)

Here’s a handful of my favorite movies. I left out the
Gone with the Wind
s and the
Godfather
s because I figured you’ve seen those.

PAPILLON
Steve McQueen at his best. And if Arkin had an ounce of dignity he’d drop off his ill-gotten Oscar to the guy who is missing one, Dustin Hoffman, for his work in this movie.

LOVE AND DEATH
Woody Allen’s funniest joke-for-joke movie.

BREAKING AWAY
Funny, understated, and a great performance from Paul Dooley.

DEFENDING YOUR LIFE
Funny, poignant, smart, inspirational. Sad that most of you have seen
Happy Gilmore
and
Tommy Boy
250 times but have never seen this one. Best comedy of the last twenty-five years.
Lost in America
is another Albert Brooks masterpiece that never gets shown on TV. Why
Billy Madison
has to play on a fucking loop and
Lost in America
pops up once an Olympic season is not only confusing but cosmically wrong.

FARGO
No better Coen brothers movie. William H. Macy was excellent. Arkin, after you’ve dropped off the Oscar at Hoffman’s place, grab one of the loose Oscars he’s using to hold down the tarp on his barbecue and bring it by Macy’s place for his role in
Fargo
.

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
Best opening twenty minutes of any movie in the last thirty years. Important, moving, almost made us forget we hate Vin Diesel.

ELECTION
Quirky, funny, dark. All the things
Little Miss Sunshine
was trying to be.

CARS
(AND ALL THE PIXAR STUFF)
Entertainment for people four to ninety-three. I know you thought I was gonna say ninety-four, but the cutoff is not a day over ninety-three. Sorry, rules are rules.

OVERNIGHT
This is a great documentary. But I could have picked twenty others. The point is, you’re almost never gonna go wrong with a documentary. P.S. Don’t call it a “doc.” Now that Papillon’s made it off of Devil’s Island, there’s a vacancy for all you people who say “doc” and
“Curb.”

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
No better Coen brothers movie.

MUSIC

I love music. I don’t know anyone who says they don’t. The problem for me is I love good music, but based on what’s playing on the radio, the music everyone else likes sucks. So I’m forced to listen to that shitty music on the radio. Music is one of those topics that’s very personal and that people claim is subjective. But if you like “I Need to Know” by Marc Anthony or you don’t feel like you’ve heard the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Elvira” enough this week, you’re a brainless fuck who doesn’t know shit about music. The problem with those people is they’re dumb, and dumb people respond to repetition. Thus, they end up thinking songs that blow ass are good because they were beaten into their heads by corrupt program directors.

Here’s how stupid people are. “Having My Baby” by Paul Anka was number one in 1974. In ’06, CNN announced it was the worst song of all time. One of the best songs of all time, “Rosalita” by Bruce Springsteen, came out a year before but did not chart. On a positive note, it’s comforting to know that people had no taste and were nimrods almost forty years ago. Everyone always talks about today’s youth, how ill-informed they are and how bad the music of today has gotten. At least our parents were fucking idiots too.

How did we get into this mess? Rod Stewart comes up with an abortion of a song like “Passion” or “Hot Legs.” The label he’s on drops off a sack of cocaine and some money to a DJ and/or program director. They agree to play “Passion” three times an hour, you assholes hear it on the way to work two thousand times, and the next thing you know, you’re hooked on a subpar, piece-of-shit song. There’s no way, based on its own merits, that “Shout” by Tears for Fears would be a number-one song. Somebody had to get paid off.

You measure a good song the same way you measure architecture, fashion, or any other artistic endeavor. Time. You know when you see a picture of yourself from the eighties with a horrible hairdo and some stone-washed jeans and you think, “How embarrassing—what the fuck was I thinking? Why didn’t somebody stop me?” It’s the same thing Mick Jagger and David Bowie should be thinking every time they hear their cover of “Dancing in the Streets.” The point is, at the time it seemed like a good idea, just like kitchens with burnt-orange Formica and avocado appliances, den walls covered with fake brick paneling, and segregation—all horrible decisions that we now universally recognize as wrong. But somehow when it comes to music, we can’t just admit we made a mistake with “Emotional Rescue.” There’s always some dick who defends the past. “Hey, man, I lost my virginity to ‘Careless Whisper.’ ” I’m sure there was somebody who got laid for the first time on 9/11 but they don’t get a boner when they see the footage of the planes going into the tower.

Let’s start with a list of songs I never need to hear again:

“ADDICTED TO LOVE” BY ROBERT PALMER
Robert Palmer is a guy who flies under the shit radar. He had three or four horrible songs made tolerable by the coke whores pretending to play guitar behind him. “Addicted to Love” is a shitty, repetitive song that, sadly, I could belt out on karaoke night even if the monitor was broken. That’s the tragedy, that’s where the lawsuit should come in. I know all the fucking lyrics to “Addicted to Love” and “Bad Case of Loving You” and “Simply Irresistible” even though I’ve never bought a Robert Palmer album. When the first lick in “Addicted to Love” comes on the car radio, I pounce on it so fast I’ve almost gotten into accidents. If the knob broke off and I couldn’t change the channel, I would drive into the first eighteen-wheeler traveling the opposite direction. This is the essence of this chapter—all the shit that’s foisted on us, how we can’t escape it because it’s ubiquitous in our retarded culture, and all of the imbeciles who not only defend these hacks but turn them into millionaires while my ears are being raped.

“COCAINE” BY ERIC CLAPTON
Superslow and super-repetitive. The song should be called “Quaalude” or “Ether Rag.” It’s also ironic that just a few short years after Ed Sullivan told Mick Jagger to change the lyrics from “Let’s spend the night together” to “Let’s spend some time together” and told Jim Morrison not to say “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” Eric Clapton is allowed to do a fifteen-minute homage to booger sugar.

“I SHOT THE SHERIFF” BY BOB MARLEY
“But I did not shoot the deputy.” “Oh, our mistake. Sorry for the inconvenience.” Bob Marley’s a legend and so is Eric Clapton and there’s something progressive, evolved, and cool about a British guy covering a reggae song. It still does not prevent the song from blowing hippo ass, not rhyming, and not making any fucking sense whatsoever. He shot the sheriff but he didn’t shoot the deputy? Bob Marley would make an awesome attorney. “Your Honor, while it’s true my client murdered the sheriff, he did not, however, shoot his lower-ranking partner. We’ll take our apology in the form of a check. Thank you.”

“I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL” BY JOAN JETT AND THE BLACKHEARTS
This song is a one-two punch of shitty and fucked-out. It’s the melodic equivalent of getting crabs from a fat chick. Lose-lose. It’s a simplistic, repetitive, uncreative chorus that never ends. If that isn’t bad enough, I’ve heard it 235,000 fucking times.

“BORN IN THE U.S.A.” BY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN (SORRY, LYNETTE)
Bruce has got a lot of good songs—this ain’t one of them. Somewhere around the 166th time he screams he was born in the U.S.A., I start wishing I was never born at all.

“ABRACADABRA” BY THE STEVE MILLER BAND
“Abra, abra, cadabra/I want to reach out and grab ya.” Lyrically, this song is an abortion. Steve Miller gets some kind of free pass musically, and I’m not sure why. His songs suck, whether it’s the joker-toker song, or “Take the Money and Run.” His lyrics sound as if they were written by an eight-year old who was stricken with fetal alcohol syndrome. Have you ever uttered this phrase: “I could go for a good Steve Miller song about now”? I’ve had notes left on my car windshield with more complex rhymes. Is there something I don’t know about Steve Miller? Did his wife drown his five kids in a bathtub? Does he have full-blown AIDS? Is there some reason why we can’t all say out loud how much his music sucks and what an insult his songs are to everyone’s collective intelligence? Right about now you’re saying, “Ace, don’t be so hard. ‘Jet Airliner’ is a pretty good song.” He didn’t write that one.

“STUCK WITH YOU” BY HUEY LEWIS (SORRY, JIMMY)
Jimmy Kimmel’s favorite artist and one of the nicest guys in the world. So I’ll keep this short and give Huey the benefit of the doubt. I’m sure he was extremely high when he wrote this retarded nursery rhyme and never thought in his wildest dreams it would get picked up for airplay. This, by the way, is how you know you’re popular—when even your shittiest songs are getting a ton of airplay.

“THE GIRL IS MINE” BY PAUL MCCARTNEY AND MICHAEL JACKSON
This song is lame enough while they’re singing, but when they start talking to each other and using each other’s first names, it goes into the gay stratosphere.

“BRASS MONKEY” BY THE BEASTIE BOYS
It’s hard for me to bag on this song because if I couldn’t sing and had zero musical talent yet insisted on being in a band, I guess this is the kind of shit I would crank out too.

“BEAUTIFUL GIRLS” BY SEAN KINGSTON
A great example of a modern shitty song. A lot of new songs sound as if they’re synthesized and it’s intentional. In the past, when they found some hot chick who couldn’t really sing, they’d clean it up in the studio—but the whole plan was not to let you catch on. Now there’s a whole new brand of music that sounds as if it’s being sung by a Roomba, which goes against the very essence of music. No soul, no human beings, no connection. When I was a kid, all the futuristic movies would show humans sitting down for dinner and on their plate would be a pill that said “Turkey” on it and another pill that said “Stuffing” next to it. That is what this feels like. Plus it’s just a straight rip-off of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me.”

“AMERICAN WOMAN”
The Guess Who recorded the eight-minute version of it in ’69 and Lenny Kravitz did the four-minute version that feels like eight minutes in ’99. If you want to have fun, you can play a little musical Who’s on First: “Who had the shittiest song of 1970?” “The Guess Who?” “That’s what I’m asking.…” To be fair to Lenny, I don’t think he likes the song; he picks his music based on a complicated algorithm that boils down to what song he looks coolest playing in front of a full-length mirror.

“MANEATER” BY HALL & OATES
I know you guys love “Sara Smile” and “Rich Girl” and expect me to give Hall & Oates some sort of pass based on the work they did before “Maneater.” Well, guess what? O.J. has a Heisman and he rushed for two thousand yards. This is not only one of the worst songs ever created, it’s one of the worst artistic endeavors ever undertaken, and I’m including “Piss Christ” and those enema painter guys. It uses a shitty metaphor to illustrate a fucked-out theme, and just when things couldn’t get worse, there’s a horrible generic eighties sax solo. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my sax solos to have some relationship to the song they’re in. That sax solo sounds as if Hall & Oates reached into a pillowcase that said “Eighties Sax Solos” (picture Rob Lowe in
St. Elmo’s Fire)
. The whole song was done on a Casio and represents everything that’s wrong with music. Imagine if you resurrected Hayden, Tchaikovsky, Janis Joplin, and Wes Montgomery, sat them down in a room, and played them that piece of cat shit rolled in AIDS jimmies known as “Maneater.” Then you told them, “This song made it all the way to number one.” They would never stop vomiting. Other than that, it’s an okay tune.

I know what you’re saying. Hey, man, those are good songs, I like some of those songs. Please let me address this. None of these songs are good. They suck by all units of measurement. Cosmically and artistically, they all represent horrible work by the artist. The fact that you like them is a combination of the man pounding them into your brain and your brain being malleable enough not to fend off the shit barrage that program directors constantly bombard it with. My brain has a hard candy outer shell that is able to ward off the John Cougar Mellencamps and absorb the John Hiatts. That’s why I get to write a fucking book.

The eighties were simultaneously the best decade and the worst decade for music. Everyone always does that “Oh, you were in high school in the early eighties, and that’s why you like all that music.” I don’t like the cars from the early eighties, I like the cars from the sixties. I hate the architecture from the early eighties, I like architecture from the twenties. Are you starting to get the picture? So shut the fuck up. I like the music from the early eighties because the Pretenders’ first albums and Joe Jackson’s first albums and Elvis Costello’s first albums were great, not because I was fifteen. But you wouldn’t know there was this much great music in the eighties if you ever tuned in to the eighties station on satellite radio or watched any VH1 flashback eighties shows or listened to any eighties weekend on your local radio station. Then it’s a lot of “Union of the Snake” by Duran Duran, Wham’s “Young Guns,” “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, … it’s all the soundtrack to a really shitty Adam Sandler movie. It’s like we’re punishing ourselves. It’s called the Eighties Station, not the Super-Shitty Fucked-Out Horrible Songs from the Eighties Station. We could be hearing “Clubland” by Elvis Costello or “Stupefaction” by Graham Parker, but instead we get “The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats. This is the equivalent to getting a sack of trail mix, picking out all the smoked almonds and peanut M&Ms, and just eating the raw sunflower seeds. Why are we fucking doing this to ourselves? There’s tons of great music out there. Why are we forced to listen to the biggest mistakes of the decade? If we’re going to go this route, shouldn’t we take a number-two pencil and shove it into one ear until it pops out the other?

Indulge me for a moment while I directly address the gentleman who programs the Sirius XM eighties channel that’s in my wife’s car.

Dear Fuckstick:
You obviously don’t know shit about music or you’re a maniacal madperson who is trying to sonically punish those who pay a premium for satellite radio. If I hear “People Are People” by Depeche Mode one more fucking time on your piece-of-shit eighties station, I’m gonna buy a black-market Soviet ballistic missile and shoot down your fucking satellite.

THEY WERE SO GAY AND WE WERE SO NAÏVE

The Village People broke when I was in junior high. And even though they all had bushy mustaches and were singing about cruising YMCAs and shipping out with the navy, none of us had a clue they were gay. One of the guys was just dressed as a leather homo. He didn’t even have an occupation other than sucking cock. And we were still like, “Those guys must pull down a ton of chicks. It’d be awesome being one of the Village People. You must get pussy every night.” It’s not as though we didn’t know what gay was, we just couldn’t do the Village-dude math. And none of our dads or older brothers did it for us. Somehow in the era of disco, everyone was gay and no one was gay. Between the coke and the mirror ball, we were all temporarily blinded.

Another swish we should have seen coming was Rob Halford from Judas Priest. He dressed like an extra from
The Beastmaster
, no wife, no kids, man-gina goatee, and a studded codpiece. “Ram It Down,” “Point of Entry,” and “Hell Bent for Leather” are just a handful of their super-obviously gay titles that we didn’t get.

When Queen came out with that album that had all the nude chicks on the bicycles, I was like, “Freddy probably personally nailed every one of those bitches.” Freddy was giving us obvious clues, we just weren’t picking them up. It’s like we were standing under a gay basket, he threw us a no-look pass, but we missed the layup. His balls just clanked off our rim. The band was named Queen, he adopted a massive overbite and a biker-cop mustache, and yet we still didn’t get it. So he finally threw in the towel and said, “Fuck it, give me AIDS.”

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