A Tucker Punch

Dear Rupert: Please accept this short Gene Pool introduction as my official application for the job to replace Tucker Carlson as the face of your company. One of the reasons is my face. I am a flabby old man with no muscle tone and thus can furrow my forehead in phony concern even better than Tucker. Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, your network needs to move leftward and away from antisemitism and I am the only liberal Jew you will find who is sufficiently disgraceful for the job. Also, having been a lowbrow humor columnist for decades, I have a solid track record of entertaining immature, ignorant, gullible audiences. Please respond when you can; I know you are probably busy right now, fumigating.

Meanwhile the link below is a fabulous mashup from The Daily Show about the apology they wished Tucker had given.

Back to today’s regularly scheduled event, featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

The panel above was from last Sunday’s Classic Peanuts comic strip, carried in hundreds of newspapers and news sites. The whole strip is here. To paraphrase 1 Corinthians 13:11, there is a time to put away childish things. I contend that time has arrived for Classic Peanuts. I know to many this sounds like sacrilege.

As you can see, Sunday’s strip — a very old rerun, as they all are, since Charles Schulz died in February 2000 — seems to be ludicrously locked in a time warp from roughly 1978, the era of maximum popularity of CB radios.

Why are newspapers and media sites still running Classic Peanuts — usually in the paper news pages themselves? Partly because of nostalgia, but mostly because of editorial cowardice. For 30 years or so the media has been floundering financially and in fear of losing readers, so editors quail at eliminating long-standing features in a way that might get subscribers mad. The result has been the fact that papers and websites are still crammed with fusty old strips that haven’t had a new idea in forty years. I won’t list them here except for Hagar the Horrible.

Yes, online sites have opened up space for new, creative strips with heartbeats, but the real estate hogged by the tired old ones is precious and so often squandered. I remember not many years ago, Classic Peanuts had a real-time reference to Joe Garagiola, who hadn’t been a sportscaster for years, and might have already been dead.

Sparky Schulz was a creative genius. Many of his best jokes don’t really hold up now at all — they seem wan and punchless; I contend the world is doing his memory no favor by continuing to run this stuff.

The Gene Pool Gene Poll:

Important but boring boilerplate information:

After the intro (which you are reading now), there will be some early questions and answers  added on –  and then I'll keep adding them as the hour progresses and your fever for my opinions grows and multiplies and metastasizes.  To see those later Q&As,  just refresh your screen every once in a while.  As always, you can also leave comments. They’ll congregate at the bottom of the post, and allow you to annoy and hector each other and talk mostly amongst yourselves. Though we will stop in from time to time.

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Before we get to your questions and my answers, it is time for my new, weekly “Fud” feature, where I confront and destroy the modern convention of recipe-related online bloviation. “Fuds” deliver entire recipes — good ones I make — in four sentences or fewer, including parentheticals and semicolons. This one is for cauliflower soup. Ready? Bam. Recipe:

Break down a head of cauliflower into florets, toss it in olive oil, and bake it at 425 degrees for about 20 minutes, till it browns a bit and becomes partially caramelized. In a separate bowl, put a chopped onion in with more olive oil and salt and pepper, and cook for about 10 minutes over medium heat until the onion is translucent, adding a couple of garlic cloves and about 3 cups of vegetable broth and the juice of a lemon. Add the cauliflower to the broth, keeping it hot, cook for 15 minutes and then blend in a blender or processor for two minutes, adding salt and — this is necessary — a full stick of butter. Sprinkle with ground nutmeg and dine.

Okay, here we go.

Q: One syllable, one vowel, nine letters long,
With clustered consonants of stretchy lengths;
I hope the hint I give is not too strong:
What common English word has all these strengths?

A: Yes, I know the answer to the riddle. And I suspect most people do, now.

Q: Is it worth the effort to devein shrimp?

A: No.  I never do it. By the time the shrimp is cooked, the poopy part is kinda sanitized.

Q: Poopy Doody is the answer. What is the question?

A: Who is Howdy’s incontinent grandpa?

Q: In a scene in the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” Nash traces with his finger the outline of objects in the night sky, using stars like connect-the-dots. (This probably was made up for the movie, but that’s beside the point.) His future wife seemed quite impressed. I don’t get it. Is this not something everyone can do?

A: Yes, in fact even a fictional child can. After the great cartoonist Richard Thompson died, we had the 11-year-old Cynthia, in Barney & Clyde, redraw the constellations in the shape of Richard’s characters. Which reminds me: Counterpoint, which now syndicates Barney & Clyde, has just started a nifty Substack for it. Here it is.

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TIMELY TIP: If you're reading this right now on an email:   Click here to get to my webpage, then click on the top headline (In this case, “Tucker…”) for my full column, and comments, and real-time questions and answers. And you can refresh and see new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post from about noon to 1 ET.

Q: “Imagine how many more sales these famous books would have made with re-engineered titles, a la the modern style:  The Complete Works of Arthur Conan Doyle becomes The Adventures of No-Sh*t Sherlock!    Moby-Dick becomes F*ck That Whale!  Ulysses becomes F*ck Yes!  The Sun Also Rises becomes F*ck No!   Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat, by Jeff Benedict, becomes Eat Sh*t and Die.” Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles, becomes “ Get That Motherf*cker. Portney’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, becomes “ Liver? F*ck It!”

THIS IS SOME FUNNY SH*T! BEST I'VE READ IN YEARS!" 

A: Thank you.  As I wrote here the other day, The Post instantly killed that column.

Q: Did I see you at the Atlas Theater on April 15? If yes, would it have been OK to say hello (not interrupting any conversations) or would you prefer to be left alone in public? Thank you.

A: Yes, it would have been fine.  Didn’t love the play, though.   

Q: "Hi, Gene! It's your Twitter friend Elizardbeth, the former newspaper copy editor with the fries up the nose. I'm outing myself so you know I mean it when I say I love you without reservation but you are, as you know, wrong about Indian food. My late great best friend had a terrific curry recipe that I would make for you if I were still in DC, but instead I offer the recipe to you and anyone else who wants to expand beyond fenugreek and turmeric. It's phenomenal.

One thing: I sprinkle in a little MSG when I make it. I'm not supposed to tell anyone I do that, but, well, I'm trying to win hearts and minds here and it noticeably improves it. If you can't bring yourself to do that, add a shake of either fish sauce or, oddly, a little pinch of Parmesan cheese. 

A: That brings up an interesting point.  In the past when I have criticized Old Bay, I get emails from people saying, “sure I know what you mean but you should try it on fries, ice cream, etc.” Y’alls mean well, but the fact is, Old Bay has several spices and herbs I dislike, (curry, too) so I wouldn’t like it on anything…. I’m sure yours is delicious to people without my spice aversions. 

Q: Not thrilled about a Biden 2024 Democratic nomination, but I can't think of an alternative. Is there a better option? –- Steve in VA 

A: Conventional wisdom is that there is no better alternative to defeat Trump.  Has Joe mentioned if he keeps his Veep?  I assume he will.  

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Q: What's your favorite knock-knock joke, and have you ever considered writing an entire book of them? (If not, why not?)  

A: My favorite knock knock joke is one I made up 40 years ago:

Knock-knock. 

Who’s there?

Your underwear.

Your underwear who?

Your underwear the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent. 

Q: What's the most unexpectedly hilarious thing you've ever witnessed in public that made you question whether you were on a hidden camera show?

A: I once saw two dogs scooting on their anuses in the grass next to each other, synchronized, like ballroom dancers.  Scooting dogs is one of the funniest sights in the world. 

Q: What has been the reaction to your revelation on cancellation?

A: Mostly positive.  One reader wrote that I could have saved all the trouble had I shown  it to  some other people before publishing it.  Not that simple!  Five editors read the column and let it go in, including two Asian-American women.   The problem was appparently not as obvious as it seems in retrospect. 

Something amazing just happened, on this general subject.  Rachel and I were watching a 2016 episode of Crashing, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sitcom, on Netflix.  She remembered the episode, which included a scene in which people were making fun of Indian accents, and eating curry, and Phoebe vomited in the big bowl of curry in the kitchen, and no one noticed.  The food was still  passed around and consumed.  But in what we were watching, the vomit scene was now…. Gone. Someone had had the good sense to cut it for reruns.   But the accents were still there, and they were arguably offensive.

Q: How soon before we have the opportunity to again call T-rump a dickhead? I found it to be great fun.

A: Is there some prohibition on doing it now? 

Q: If Stormy Daniels were to give Donald Trump the nickname meaning "mushroom head which language should she choose it from? Here are some options found via Google Translator:

Danish svampehoved

Dutch paddestoel hoofd

Esperanto fungokapo

French tête de champignon

Galician cabeza de cogomelo

German Pilzkopf

Haitian Creole tèt djondjon

Hausa shugaban naman kaza

Hawaiian poʻo halo

Hungarian gomba fej

Indonesian kepala jamur

Lithuanian grybo galva

Maltese ras tal-faqqiegħ

Norwegian sopp hode

Nyanja mutu wa bowa

Polish głowa grzyba

Quechuah ongo uma

Russian Шляпка гриба

Scottish Gaelic ceann balgan-buachair

Shona howa musoro

Slovak klobúk hríbu

Slovenian glava gobe

Somali madaxa likaha

Spanish cabeza de hongo

Sudanese sirah supa

Swahili kichwa cha uyoga

Swedish svamp huvud

Turkish mantar kafa

Turkmen kömelek kellesi

Uzbek qo'ziqorin boshi

Vietnamese đầu nấm

Welsh pen madarch

Xhosa intloko yamakhowa

Zulu ikhanda lekhowe

A: I would say Hawaiian, because of both the poo and halo.

Q: Gene, why are pants so funny? And why is pants such a funny word? Is there a correlation between how funny a word is and how funny the thing it describes is? For instance, mangosteen is a funny word but mangosteens aren't particularly funny, although they are quite tasty. But clowns are funny and clown is not a particularly funny word. But pants are funny and pants is a funny word. Likewise, death is not a funny word, nor is death funny.

A: I think that some of its humor is that is a shortening of an even funnier word, pantaloons. 

Q: What do you think of this joke?   

A: Excellent joke.  Made me laugh out loud, and most Important i could not see the punchline coming. 

Q: Happy birthday gene. Is it actually your birthday? If not, happy unbirthday.

A: Oddly, several people have asked me this.  My birthday is in October.  Was there some gaffe online? 

Q: One-hit wonder singer Napoleon XIV died last month, and I was wondering if as the pallbearers carried his coffin off, they played his one hit "They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!" I think he would have liked it. Would you want a humorous song to be played at your funeral as they carry your casket away, and if so, which one?

A: Oddly enough, I have already arranged for it, but it has to remain a secret for maximum effect. 

Q: Would Trump get secret service protection if he goes to prison? I pity the poor agents who would have to go to prison with him. 

A: That might not actually be a stupid question!

Q:  As an expert in humor, can you explain why cats on the internet are so darn funny?, 

A: Cats are always funny because they have enormous, utterly misplaced and unjustified self-regard..

Q: Who would be represented in your garden of megalomaniac statuary?

A: Putin, Trump, Turkmenbashi the Great (who named a month after his mother and invented a new alphabet in his own honor and ordered that all doctors swear an oath to him instead of the Hippocratic  Oath)  Julius Caesar.  Thinking.   

Q: Whenever I read "King Charles," I think of the dog breed. 

A: He IS a little spaniel-like.  

Q: Would you consider legally changing your name to Buy Ritz Crackers in exchange for a payment of $10 million a year?

A: Of course!  Wouldn’t you?  Who wouldn’t?

Q: It now seems that Clarence Thomas's Billionaire friend actually HAS A CASE BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT. This is the same guy who provided all those vacations, and sweet real estate deals. Can we impeach or indict him NOW?

A: Wow.

Q: Is it as concerning to you as it is to me that once Carlson goes underground (or least out of such public view) that we no longer know what is going on the far right? I mean, at least he was saying the quiet part out loud.

A: This a fair point.

Q: What do you think about poems or lyrics where the rhymes at the end of lines stretch across multiple words? For example, from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat:

"Come and lie with me, love"

"I don't believe in free love"

It *should* be a perfectly valid rhyme, but somehow, to me, it doesn't feel quite right. Do you have any insight or opinion?

A:I think it’s good. Elegant, even. I like double-jointed rhymes.

Q: What I don't get about the transparent purchase of a Supreme Court Justice is that Harlan Crow has unlimited funds, but he paid what sounds like a fair price for Thomas's mother's home and the nearby properties. If you were looking to exert influence, wouldn't you pay $5 million? Instead he paid $133k.

A: Also a good point.

Hey, I am closing this down, folks. Meet Pat and me on Thursday over the Invitational.