Nerding Day: More Pac-Mania!

It was 1982 and Pac-Man fans demanded jokes. But Bally Midway gave them only despair. They released 96 pages of humorless, senseless confusion called The Official Pac-Man™ Joke Book: Pac-Mania!.

It wasn't much of anything. Pac-Man put on toupees or vaguely acted out idioms. It was nothing close to comedy. It was more like 96 runes found carved on the victims of Q*Bert Butcher. Pac-Mania! was a stupid embarrassment officially endorsed by the brand, it infuriated every child who bought it, and it was such a hit they rushed to get a sequel out that very same year:

In a world that made sense, this should be a better book. "Haller Schwarz" is now a veteran comedy writer, and the reaction to their first best seller must have yielded useful feedback like "what" or "this just says 'PAC-MAN WEARING A TOUPEE,' did I get the Hungarian version" or "foul scoundrel Pac-Man, you have betrayed me." But More Pac-Mania! is not an experienced Pac-Man humorist fleshing out the backstory of PAC-MAN'S MOTHER-IN-LAW. These are garbage fucking leftover "jokes" that didn't make the top 96 in their first book. These words will do nothing to prepare you, but you are going to hate every page of this.

This is the opener. No matter what direction you take in this creative process, this is trash. If you were told to draw a picture of "PAC-A-DOTS," this would be the worst possible effort. They're not on a thing you'd find with polka dots, like a lady's dress or the signature ascot of the Q*Bert Butcher; they are a bunch of Pac-Men in a void. And if you were handed this picture and asked to give it a caption you'd ask what goddamn joke you're supposed to put under 28 old Pac-Man skins. Maybe you'd think these Pac-Men are sinking underwater and say, "Oh, AFTERMATH OF THE TITAN-PAC, I guess? But a bunch of dying Pac-Men is too dark for a Pac-Man joke book, right? Right?" Right? That's me saying it now. That'd be crazy, right?

SUICIDE PAC. This is the fourth entry in the Second Official Pac-Man™ Joke Book. Two Pac-Men killing themselves together, maybe as an act of devotion, yet their expressionless pie faces tell us nothing. But they fucking have to know the fate that awaits them. We've all played Pac-Man. The dead in this universe come back as ghosts to get devoured again and again in a maze forever. And as unlikely as it is for a 1982 child with Pac-Man fever watch two Pac-Men commit suicide and laugh, it seems less likely a marketing executive saw this…

… and said, "Yes, exactly yes. That's precisely what our brand-representative, Pac-Man™, looks like when he's ending his own life. Approved. We've got another hit on our hands. I can already see the SUICIDE PAC tote bags."

If you were wondering what kind of comedy writer types SUICIDE PAC and calls it a day, author Haller Schwarz is actually seven men, at least one of them German. And what's great about their ABOUT page is it seems like they think they're better than this? With their little Juvenal's Cena Trimalchionis reference? They're seven grown men who couldn't write a single Pac-Man joke after 192 tries, and they're trying to portray themselves as slumming intellectuals? Well, you dumb fucks, Juvenal didn't write Cena Trimalchionis. That was Petronius, you remembered the wrong ancient Roman satirist. You were going for smart, but you sound like Dennis Miller telling his Toluca Lake hospice nurse someone is burning toast, babe.

Pathetic. As puns, as riddles, as jokes, these are less than the dumbest idiot's shittiest guess. There are no hard rules in literature, but if you didn't know the Pac-Man pun of "Wolfman Jack" was obviously "Wolfman Pac," maybe fuck the misfiring misery machine you call a brain. And he was a human with a beard, not an actual manwolf, so why did you draw him as Chewbacca's cervix? And then across from it we see MASTERPAC THEATRE, a television Pac-Man with no other clues or context. So this could be anything, and they decided from all the shows kids might know, Masterpiece Theater, and then didn't add anything related to that. Forget about the chances of that being funny; it also wouldn't work as a riddle because the terrible, unsatisfying answer is written right under it. There's simply no genre of thing across all human experience where this book makes sense. If you write WOLFPAC JACK. for any reason, you should have to tattoo it across your face so you can't hide from it. So people know.

The seven writers exhausted all their wolf puns with WOLFPAC JACK., so they tried something you don't normally see. They just replaced the "wolf" in "wolf in sheep's clothing" with "Pac-Man" and skipped the part of the writing process where you check if the thing you said was fucking deranged. They foolishly jumped right to the part of the writing process where Pac-Man grins mirthlessly, the hollowed skull of a lamb pulled around him like a condom. Pac-Man is in the sheep, kids! Those sounds are the bleats of Pac-Man!

This one doesn't make sense until you realize this Pac-Man was stabbed to death after a prostitute found out he was a cop.

I would have probably said this looks like a morbid German trying to draw American expressions he's unfamiliar with, but I think that's precisely what happened here.

Fuck this. This feels like we're gathering evidence to discover how six people went missing during history's worst game of Pictionary. This is something you'd show a bank teller to prove you're really Howie Mandel. And here's the worst part: it's barely not the same as a "joke" they used in the first Pac-Mania!.

Earlier that same year, someone looked at this piece of shit and said, "Yes. This is the template, boys! More like this one. Maybe not exactly like it, but so fucking close." Here's what happens to Pac-Man when he lies, by the way:

This might say more about me than it does about the authors of More Pac-Mania!, but I don't believe for a second that's anything other than Pac-Man's boner. I don't know where he keeps his nose, who could? But I know that's not it. The caption for this should say, "PAC-MAN WITH AN ERECTION DON'T PRINT THIS ONE THIS ISN'T FOR THE BOOK." Speaking of penises, here's NATO DEFENSE PAC..

Please remember this is the "official" Pac-Man™ joke book. In 1982, you could draw someone's mascot as a screaming urethra on the tip of a nuclear missile and their only note would be, "Pretty rad dick hole, cocaine buddy!"

Okay, sorry, let me see if I can find an official Pac-Man without a threatening dick.

The whole goddamn book is this. Concepts and idioms being misunderstood as literal by a German who can sort of draw circles. And I'd argue this one fails at that simple task. Cinderella is such a weirdly limp choice for this. Is it somehow defined by its "unlikelyness?" Pac-Man should be swallowing a book that says, "Earlier when I drew PAC-NOCCHIO, t-that was his nose."

I don't know what this means, but not in a "this joke doesn't work" way. It's genuinely confusing to me. Is it a conformity reference? Is CONSERVATIVE PAC-MAN supposed to be one of the flyover states? Is this what homeschooling does to a developing Pac-Man? It's frustrating since it's only a botched riddle in a 43-year-old book, so there's no research I can do. I can't ask Google why CONSERVATIVE PAC-MAN is square because it'll say, "Conservative Pac-Man is likely square because Henry Kissinger authorized Agent Orange to be dropped on pregnant Pac-Men in Vietnam, Agent Orange played 17 seasons in the NBA and coined the dunk known as The Pussytown Panty Slappa."

But it turns out there was research that could be done, and I did it. Check out this exact Pac-Man from the first Pac-Mania!:

Prehistoric? That doesn't help! It doesn't fucking help at all!

Am I wrong, or is this Pac-Man drinking a test tube of chemicals? I think this is supposed to be SUSPICIOUS LAB PAC-CIDENT. I mean this as an insult, but I'm still sincere when I say it's possible all these captions were put under the wrong pictures.

No, these are the right captions. Because that's definitely Pac-Man disguised as a pizza, a thing barely worth describing, so they didn't. PAC-MAN DISGUISED AS A PIZZA is how a coroner would comfort you if your parents died at a Little Caesar's. It's the annoying answer to the question, "Why is there a slice missing? Howie Mandel, did you steal some of my pizza?" The point is, I hate it, but I hated it more after I saw the next one.

He's PACSTRAMI ON RYE.! Which means sometimes Pac-Man disguises himself as food and comes up with a cute name for it while other times he just says, "I'm in the fucking pizza, fuck you." Did these dead-souled clowns, the seven celebrated writers of such hits as SUICIDE PAC and WOLFPAC JACK, think they were too good for "PAC-ARONI PIZZA."? Or even just "PERSONAL PAN PAC-ZA."? Absolute nonsense. The fact that Pizza Pac-Man wasn't a PAC-ZA means it never occurred to them. Which means they knew they had to get this book out right now. They knew the Pac-Man joke book industry was dying because they're the ones who killed it. But working so fast you never stop to consider how to mash the word Pac into the word pizza is no way to make art. It reminds me of a story of my own publishing experience.

You might remember at the 2014 Winter Olympics, the Russian Police Choir, which is exactly what it sounds like, sang a version of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky." It was a truly cursed spectacle, and at the time, I was working at a dying website called Break.com that was desperate to attach itself to any viral trend. The CEO called a meeting to get us to do something, anything on it. Even if it was just random screenshots, he wanted something up right now. I said, ha ha no, don't do that, give me three hours. And almost exactly three hours later I had made these:

Fun, right? More gay jokes than we're used to today, but that guy's name is Tortle Sputzna, and the only thing it says on his trading card is "Actual Size!" I think about him every day. This man is probably wearing ribbons for Hate Crime Leadership and Courage Under Journalist Execution, but I can only picture dozens of him popping out of coffee cups and giggling. Anyway, I made a whole bunch of these.

You can't rush writing. Sometimes you need to stare at a nerdy Russian cop and backspace silly names for thirty minutes until you land on Chip Fuckmaster. And sometimes you need to, over the course of decades, cultivate enough raw masculine power that you spontaneously type, "Crime is in heat. And I am the fucking." I'm a real manly treat. But whatever skills led me there, I finished my SEO-optimized, shareable article based on the fleeting viral meme as planned, and on schedule. And while I was doing that, the CEO decided three hours was too slow and had someone post this:

It's an article, shown here in its entirety, featuring seven screenshots of the viral video everyone had seen with thirteen circles around the faces you were already looking at and enjoying. And it was so rushed someone had to go back in and say, oops, we counted wrong, fourteen circles. This is the nonsense trash you get when you worry about getting something out rather than finished. And this happened at a publisher where they had an experienced editorial director, me, who said "don't do this." A committee of panicked rookie German comedy writers whose only goal was "something Pac-Man, done six months ago" had no chance. For instance:

This is so far from how jokes work, or how I imagine consumer price index adjustments work. This is something the Russian Police Choir would sing to you while beating your legs and misremembering a Beck song.

"Bally Midway corporate, thank you for holding, what can I help you with today?"

"Yeah, I'm writing the official joke book for you guys with some Germans, and needed to know what it looks like inside Pac-Man. Like if he's coming right at you."

"Of course, sir. A human ass presenting itself to two goat nipples, but scarier than I'm making it sound. Does that answer your question?"

"Yep!"

"Thank you for your call, sir."

I'm not saying LUPUS PAC-CINATION. would have saved this, but I'm worried hanging your punchline on a deadly disease is too edgy for 1982 children. It's hard to picture a young Pac-Man fan deciphering this pun and saying, "Oh, small POX! … … … That's funny." It's strange they didn't think to make this the more relatable CHICKEN PACS., but maybe they didn't want to step on this joke:

HENPAC-ED HUSBAND is probably my favorite one. It's funny to think how ordinary it used to be for a joke to be someone's goddamn fucking wife and no further details, even in a kid's Pac-Man book. I also like that Pac-Man's wife uses a rolling pin rather than simply closing her circle monster mouth and rolling around on the dough. Their kind are so much more civilized than I had pictured.

Is this supposed to be Gregory P–

Yeah, I agree, Gregory Peck! Where did that come from? Did Pac-Man catch you milking the twin uvulas of his horrible harpy wife or something?

"No, you dumbshit. This is Bandito Pac-Man, not Fastidious Pac–Man Eating With Napki–, but no. Now that I'm saying it outloud, yours is better. Next! Does anyone know what Gregory Peck looks like? Just a bizarre, violent scribble, right? Next!"

"Pac-Man will watch us fall, even the heavens we've built for our dead. Rot. Entropy. They are meaningless to a being such as he. In the end, all will become food for the Pac-Man.

…

…

Next!"

I'm not, like, a renowned critic of children's literature, but I don't like that Pac-Man's anus comes to a point when he is in heat.

I have a couple notes here. One, two puns might be two too many for this Pac-Man joke writing team. And two, that's not how you spell HITLER BASEBALL URKEL SWALLOWING PROSTHETIC LEG.

I don't have any little put-downs about this one. If you showed this to me I would punch you until you died. Though if you carry this darkness in your soul, there's no afterlife that will take you. The Russian Police Choir would have to sing me free on a technicality. Sorry, I might have reached my limit of painstakingly misunderstood idioms by amateur German cartoonists. I'll see if there are any regular deranged ones left.

Nope. You're eating a pillow, Pac-Man, you idiot fuck. Also, weren't you the size of a full Reggie Jackson two cartoons ago? Do you have a six inch diameter, or are you smashing home runs against professional man-sized baseball players, Pac-Man? No one is asking because they're curious how they'd fuck you, Pac-Man!

Look at them all. No matter what it means for Pac-Man's official size, these madmen are ramming every concept they know down the human-assed, double-uvulaed throat of this house-eating, Satan-eating, sometimes very tiny single pig-eating Pac-thing. This Pac-thing I thought I once knew. Give me a second. I'm sure I can find a fun one.

I think I hate it more when there is no awful play on words and they just explain the dumb thing Pac-Man is doing. This isn't ERIC PAC-TON. or EDDIE PAC HALEN-MAN., it's PAC-MAN SWALLOWING GUITAR.. And I'll tell this book the same thing I told my court-appointed psychologist– Mayor Starscream, that's an insane way to describe TITTIES GIVING BIRTH TO A TOOTHBRUSH..

"Income pac audit, is that anything?" asks the ghost of the 19th century accountant to the quiet boy at a divorce hearing. "Income pac audit, is that anything?" the spirit repeats, and then again, for the next 43 years.

That's not even the right number of legs, Pac-Man, you stupid son of a bitch.

This one works. It's a famous murderer, only it's Pac-Man and now it kills with its teeth. You might say it's a real… PAC OF LAUGHS.

My bad. This one was my fault.

I love the choice of adding the word HOPELESS to PAC-AHOLIC.. The illustrator gave Pac-Man a martini and a lamp shade because they think he's a fun guy. Pac-Man's partying! But the caption writer saw through it. This Pac-Man is running from a sadness that comes from new directions every day. Sorry, I'm sure I can find a nice, positive one.

Alright, here we go! Pac-Man is about to be executed by the state! It's why he's smiling! Pac-End!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Brian Seiler, a trickster god with no morals. It was he who duped the comedy writers then, and he who dupes them now! Repent, for there is no escaping his incredible pac-man based puns.

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