Upsetting Day: No Hang-Ups

Imagine it's 1983 and the person you're calling isn't home. Now add torture. Oh no, you've chosen the form of No Hang-Ups, a HUMOR book by John Carfi and Cliff Carle. This is your fault.

You get it! It's "FUNNY ANSWERING MACHINE MESSAGES". Or maybe you don't. In 1983, voicemail was handled by a cassette player you kept next to your phone, and this is a book of little plays the reader was meant to perform into it. Does that make sense? No? No and fuck my dark soul for showing this to you? Listen, you're right, but maybe an example will help.

It probably didn't. Okay, so this is an outgoing message you would record temporarily for the weekend of your grandmother's destination birthday. And yes, I'm sorry, most of this book is adapted from zany bumper stickers. No Hang-Ups is like a man in a WHO FARTED? shirt reading every desk plaque in a Spencer's Gifts, hoping one of them holds the key to his lost memories. But we can forgive that. This is obviously just a couple of normal dads who tried cocaine for the first time. It's not like the authors are professional comedians.

Oh no. Both of these men teach comedy. And one of them has a "comedic screenplay" and "is finishing a book." These two are nephews you would hear about at a wedding if someone found out you were a comedian. It's the worst thing we could have discovered. This is like a snake bursting from the mouth of a man in a WHO FARTED? shirt to say, "My stand-up coaches wrote a book of funny answering machine messages." This is far beyond any worst thing. This is forbidden. Stars go out with every word we read.

Maybe the most troubling thing about No Hang-Ups is the lack of jokes. I mean, sometimes an old one-liner is mashed into a phone message format, but then there are things like this. This is legally silly, but not much different than telling your reader, "maybe try one where you're the guy from The Twilight Zone, do your best, giggle." And speaking of, The Twilight Zone is an enduring cultural icon, but it was a show from the '50s. According to my math, this would be like someone's voicemail in the year 2041 exactly saying, "Hi, this is… Young Sheldon and I can't boing zaboo to the phone right now."

These comedy experts worked together on a procrastination message, and what they came up with was a Procrastinator's Society with a President who, outside of their duties in said organization, also records a new answering machine message each day? For no reason, but also, sort of never mind? Maybe they're actually doing it? Or maybe it's weekly? I promise I'm not making a procrastination joke when I say this is so much worse than writing, "We haven't figured out jokes yet, but we know we want one to be about procrastination." If you were the victim of stand-up classes from these two men, this fucking nonsense is what you'd show a grand jury.

If we're being honest, I think everyone familiar with the '80s saw this one coming. Now, I want you to ask yourself if given this premise, "Valley Girl Answering Machine Message," is it possible to be worse? Better might also be impossible. Maybe there's no second version of this. This is the example you would use to describe this idea as you were pitching it. If you asked 100 people to write a Valley Girl phone message, you'd get this precise text 27 times and 73 variations of "What could this be for? Fuck you. Fuck every thing and person who touched your life and allowed you to become this."

Finally, a hilarious and original concept executed with elegance by two seasoned comedy professionals. This is so far from a joke. Half of the premise is clearing your answering machine message with the McDonald's legal team, and the other half is a cautious poke at the corpse of an idea. If someone heard this they would have no reason to believe you weren't hospitalized by diarrhea. This is every mistake a joke can make. The premise is fucking broken, the setup is mind termites, and it doesn't have a punchline. Where would you pause for laughter? Where would you even smash a watermelon? Was this a maze built by 1983 comedian hunters to trap Gallagher?

So the two guys misremembering jokes they saw on t-shirts are now attacking cliches. This is like someone making fun of a Twilight Zone reference in 1983 making a… Gallagher reference! In twenty twenty-four, watermelon smash. But I am mostly frustrated by how John and Cliff can never get anything right. This is a bad concept, of course– saying you hate cliches and then saying cliches? A genius could turn that from annoying into cute, but no man or watermelon is making that funny. But then they fuck up the rhythm. It's supposed to go "badum, badum, BADUM!?" These dumb fucks went "badum, badum, Anyway leave a message at the tone– and badum." This should have said, "Hi, you've reached JANE, and I hate cliches. Anyway, I have no external sense of self, see ya later alligator, and my sense of humor is mostly an abusive need for attention. It wouldn't even occur to me to try to entertain anyone, BEEP…"

What a journey to go on to discover the authors aren't quite sure how moles, backs, or puns work. Forget this not being a joke. We have to make a decision about what to do with the person who wrote this. What a haunting and dangerous stupidity. These would be Lennie's final words if John Steinbeck lived in a world without rabbits.

Oh, right. It's 1983; there's racism. Incoherent racism, but incoherent in a different way than John and Cliff's comedy, so we get this tangled knot of incompetence. Can you imagine calling someone with sad or important news and getting this? Or calling for any reason from a place where Asian people exist? I think what happened here is these two idiots tried to adapt a racist sketch idea into an answering machine message and failed. But it could have worked! A surgeon who was trained at Benihana is a solid 3/10 MAD TV sketch. You have to commit, though. If I called you and your voicemail was, "Ching chong, you've reached Karate Chang: Benihana Surgeon, BEEP…" it would make the news of your wife's kidnapping so much easier to deliver. The only prayer John and Cliff's version has of landing is if your caller is a racist, but in the specific way where they think the only Asian restaurant is Benihana.

It's fucking nuts that these two men teach comedy. This isn't a joke. This is a sloppy puzzle conceived by a confused baby. These are the frayed ends of threads pulled on far too long by unremarkable minds. Like, we all see what they were trying to build, and yet look at what they've done. They want your friends and family to solve this riddle and assemble their own joke from its remains before they leave you a message. They went with this thin schizophrenic concept when they could have cut Bo Derrick in half and made it 10 2: 2 5s. They could have said, "Hi, Bo Derrick is starring in a new movie where she has a Pepsi-Cola dispenser on her back, and it's called Uncle Skin Diver Funeral." Ha ha what? Sorry, I have no idea what I'm saying. Where did that come from? Anyway, let's keep going.

Oh, right, now I know where I heard that joke.

This is just a typo, right? They're saying you should only attempt suicide by drowning if you CAN swim? That seems wrong, and I don't know if it's funny either way. Is this an original attempt at a suicide joke or an old bit they're fucking up? I honestly don't know and if I try to search for it, Google ignores your request and switches to crisis counselor mode. And that's the sign of a great joke– when looking it up is functionally identical to trying to kill yourself.

"Hi, here's a meandering story to get to… well, not a pun exactly. So you know how it's a custom to throw rice at weddings? And you know how people make little alterations to customs to mock pregnant women? Well, I'm a funny guy, heh, hard quotes, so I threw puffed rice, which I figured was the pregnancy of rice. You'd think no one would understand what I was doing or why I was doing it. I mean, would you? Even after hearing me explain it here, on my answering machine? Oh, but they did. I fucking ruined someone's wedding. I got pu– BEEP…"

You're saying these men taught comedy? Maybe instead of a tragedy, that's some kind of explanation. Maybe this book is some sort of radical teaching method. Because if you turned this chirpees joke in for your homework and your comedy professor published it in a book where everyone could see it, you would vow to never be this unfunny aga– oh, hell yes. There's an X-RATED MESSAGES section:

Ha ha ha definite classic. JOHN can't come to the phone because he's jerking off. For our younger readers, this was a normal thing to put on your outgoing message in 1983 because everyone's mothers were dead.

Ha ha, total classic. JOHN can't come to the phone because he's jerking off.

Ha, classic. JOHN can't come to the phone because he's jerking off.

This is going to sound crazy, but I'm sort of proud of John and Cliff for these last "three" jokes. Whether they work or not, they count as jokes! They have a turn! Each version was, at the very least, a nice try. I guess something about masturbation has really inspired these two sad, stupid fucks.

"Hi. Zany message! How did you know it was a game of strip solitaire and not a game of solitaire on a hot day? Did he know you were coming? Because if so, you missed a sexual cue. Your brother-in-law tried to fuck you and made a wild excuse when you weren't into it. Anyway, I have your son. I want $50,000, call me back."

They're so close. This is almost something. A guy is so lonely his inflatable doll is dodging his advances? Sure! I wouldn't mind seeing OJ Simpson mistime a reaction to this in a Naked Gun movie, but I'm not sure it works as an answering machine message. I'll tell John and Cliff the same thing my insurance adjuster told me: "Are you sure your outgoing message should be about how you can't fuck a sex doll? Anyway, I have your son."

Huh. When the authors promised X-RATED MESSAGES, I guess I was picturing racy references to sex keeping you away from the phone. I was not picturing incest dog play. But it does demonstrate the power of escalation in comedy. You start with a basic concept like "I indulge my uncle's fetish to live as a dog," and then you amp it up to the absurd by saying, "he is not allowed on the furniture." It reminds me of the classic Gallagher gag where he smashes a watermelon and then delivers the punchline, "I grew up in North Carolina."

The liquid metal robot thrashed in the lava, shrieking the lines from every mug he impersonated during his quest to terminate Jim Davis.

"Remedial comedy students, thank you, please hand in your homework assignments for 'Family Circus After Dark' on your way out, and be careful not to mix them in with the manuscript for our new book. Our editor is not going to proofread this fucking stupid shit."

As a comedy writer, this is pretty daring. It requires everyone calling this woman to follow along with this motif and realize she's suffering from some kind of sticky curse. It uses all the traditional stickies– closet, pencil, dipstick… which leads us to our punchline: her boyfriend's dick. It's not stuck in her yet, but with today's luck it might be! Like I said, attempting to build that joke is already brave, but I don't think they got there. This is more like an Olympian planning a dive with a 7.8 degree of difficulty but dying of polio before they learned to swim.

Sure, okay. It's hard to imagine this getting a laugh but at least people calling you will understand what you're doing and why.

What? Did they base this joke, the one published during the AIDS crisis, around a broken condom and a broken parachute being different conceptually? This comparison would have been a hopeless Laffy Taffy-like grab at comedy in any era, but they somehow wrote it when it was objectively wrong. I mean, Jesus Christ, these two accidentally stumbled into a jaw-dropping AIDS joke and still managed to fuck it up.

God damn it, what? I can't tell if they wrote these in a rush or chewed on every word until each one lost all meaning. This is barely more than typing, "Oh! Something about Miss Piggy and Kermit. S-sex? Yeah, sex!" If I called anyone and got this message I would assume I dialed the Devil by mistake and had seven days to live.

Fucking gross. What am I, the law offices of Jared Fogle's lawyer? What if someone calls me who isn't Jared Fogle?

This whole book I've been wondering what kind of routines these "professional stand-up comedians" performed. And this has to be it. They get to the sports section and suddenly the answering machine messages go from "Diaphragms, but also I'm a horse?" to "Y'all play sports? Bowling's crazy. You spend all day fingering holes to try for a 10 but you end up getting drunk and mashing your balls into a 4 and a 2. And football? Uh, whose foot? One guy's, and his name's like Hrjkeczvk? Get outta here, I feel like I'm at a Pepsi skin diver's funeral. BEEP…"

As jokes go, this "I am an alien, I'm talking like an alien" bullshit is a withholding dad's worst effort. The fact that it's printed next to an illustration of Oliver Hardy getting squirted on by a phone? It somehow makes it work.

They say toilet humor is the lowest form of humor, but I think we can make the exception for this, the basic idea of toilet and no second thing. I mean, come on, John and Cliff. Keep it light. Maybe add a dead dog or something to your poop joke?

I was wrong. This is my fault. It was a bad note!

"Hi, JOHN, this is LaDonna from Dr. Peterson's office. I have some good news. For me, at least. I was really dreading this call, but after hearing your outgoing message I'm happy to tell you your results came back and your condition is inoperable."

So if I'm understanding this correctly, people call me and I t-tell them to jerk off the… genie… r-robot? Inside my answering machine? Until it cums? What if someone calls who I love, or who loves me? John, Cliff… I'm not trying to hurt you, but have you thought about what happens when someone calls you? You monsters? You doll-fucking dad joke minstrels?

Hi, JOHN, are you sure you weren't in a deli, groping a ham? Hi, I'm the Internet's Seanbaby, Tacoma County Answering Machine Comebacks Champion (Gallagher-Reference and Under Division), and this perfect zing is an example of the kind of outrageous way you can snap back at an outgoing message with comedy humor of your own! You can read all about it in the authors' follow up book, 1985's GETTING EVEN WITH THE ANSWERING MACHINE: (what to say when you reach a machine) FUNNY RESPONSES.

This isn't a bit! They wrote that! We're not done with the article!

So you're not going to believe this, but their first book was a hit. Gift shopping nieces and nephews of 1983 saw a book of canned answering machine jokes and said, "Sure, that works." So John and Cliff, professional comedians, took their first idea and reversed it. Let's see how it starts.

Weirdly! So, in this message you play yourself– a first time answering machine user who ejaculates when they leave their phone number. "This is harder than we thought it was going to be," said either John or Cliff. "I'm at the doctor and at the movies and I'm you-know-whatting in my pants," joked the other one.

Some of these messages are for very specific situations. And it's possible these answering machine authors may have spent too much time thinking about answering machines, because a lot of the occasions involve answering machines. For instance, these three are for when the person who never answers your calls also never changes their outgoing message. Which is a sad thing to prepare for and a strange thing to expect from people. You're already the guy who bought a book about answering machine jokes and now you're calling answering machines hoping to read complaints about answering machines? Maybe everyone else is fine and you're in a hell of your own making?

"Hi, JOHN, I still haven't had sex. Call me when you have time to explain tape. Tha– CLICK."

"It's me again, JOHN. I found some pictures on an egg of pantyhose and I have some lady butt questions when you get a minute. Than– CLICK."

"I'm sorry, JOHN. This is going to take a couple minutes to set up and it won't pay off. Oh, pay off! That'd be a funny thing to do if I wanted a guy named Frank Off to call me pathetic while Mary Odds kicked my junk. Wait, Mai Junk! She could be there too. Maybe it's a kung fu message, and not a sex message? I'll call back now that I have the joke figured out, JOHN. Th– CLICK."

Incredible. This starts as a Chinese laundromat stereotype, but switches to a Japanese tourist stereotype without ever making a joke. Sorry, you're probably confused. See, in the '80s, there was an agreement among the casually racist that Japanese tourists took too many pictures. No one knows why they cared, but you should never underestimate a Mediocre White's capacity for intolerance. For instance:

This is fucking nuts. This is something you'd say to Green Hornet while you're dissecting his sidekick. This was a mistake. I shouldn't have shown you this. Let me try to find a fun one.

Oh, perfect. In this one you announce yourself as the Mad Jokester and ask what you get if you mix the name of a piano company with the name of a copy machine company, both spelled wrong for legal reasons. The answer? I don't know, but it had better honor the enduring glory of the White Race! "B+, great work," said one of my comedy teachers, either John Carfi or Cliff Carle. "One please! Sex boob, that is!" said the other one. Oh no, I'm losing my mind. Let me find an actual fun one.

Okay. They might be humorless racist virgins uninventing comedy from imaginary conversations with tape recorders, but I can't lie. The quote "Mmmmmm … Ahhhh … Ohhhhh …. ETC. Hi." got a genuine laugh out of me.

Is this a real suggestion? From two professional comedians? If a second grader told me this joke I'd hold it up and ask, "What dark wizard fucking taught this chimpanzee to talk?"

Another all time classic. Concise, clear– you're playing the part of a dog pound cold calling random numbers to get rid of a chihuahua who knows you will eat him, and potential owners can use that against him. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it might be too funny?

This is terrible, insulting, all that; sure. But look at the lore etched into this used book! All the company and celebrity names are misspelled to protect themselves from any defamation lawsuits, so the previous owner went in and fixed John and Cliff's "error!" Adorable! I don't have a joke, I just love this window into the thought process of the kind of stupid asshole who would read this book. "Oop, better fix this! I don't want to sound like a dummy when I'm telling my cousin's answering machine I'm Julia Child!"

Let's skip to the end and see how John and Cliff wrap this up.

Oh, no. Two trans jokes and a diarrhea joke? We can't go out like that. Let me see if these two published another book after thi– oh, shit. NO.

In 1986, Cliff ditched John and wrote a sequel to No Hang-Ups called No Hang-Ups II. I can't believe I'm saying this, but we have to look inside.

So I guess John was the funny one.

Notice the asterisk at the top of this one? That means it was sent in by a reader. And there's dozens of these. About half of the book was written by volunteer contributors. Do you know what this means? Well, in this message it means someone noticed we're recording genie handjob radio plays on our answering machines in a world where mothers exist. But it also means most random dads with a boner meet Cliff Carle's standards of comedy. And some of them are better:

This contribution is pedestrian and forgot to include a joke, but it's sort of fun. You'd leave a message after this without saying, "What the shit was that meandering story about Orientals, Cliff?" Let's compare it to a pop culture reference written by Cliff himself:

Even if the only thing I knew about Loni Anderson was her tits, why would I expect a tape playing her voice to have them? Maybe my sense of humor isn't sophisticated enough to get it, but if I was in Cliff's comedy class, I might raise my hand and say, "Professor Carle, sorry to interrupt. My notes say I go over to your house and honk the boobs of your Lony Anderson model answering machine, because Loni Anderson is a woman. That can't be right, can it? You boiled meatloaf of a bitch."

I've never seen a lower effort. This is like paying a professional comedy writer to write you a comedic French answering machine message and all they do is put "le" in front of three words of the standard answering machine message. Because that's what happened! That's what fucking happened!

I don't know how you get lazier than this. Maybe a message that just says "what?" alongside the words "insert your favorite racism."

No! Damn it, Cliff! I was kidding!

So let me understand this, Cliff. Someone sent you a joke where a dog, a talking dog, recorded an answering machine message while an entire family showered together. Then, while the entire family showered together, either the author or the dog character forgot how answering machines work. Madness. Chittering sex fetish madness. And then you, stand-up teacher Cliff Carle, writer of a comedic screenplay, thought, "Good enough for me! Special thanks to Duncan Sisterfucker, D.D.S. from Astoria. He is a toilet, and a toilet."

Cliff has had three years to get around to finishing his procrastination joke, which again, is a real thing that happened -not a procrastination joke- and this is what he came up with. It's a six line conversation between two performers– one who refuses to define words and another who can't fit looking up words into their schedule. I'd say he hasn't quite got it yet. This is the family showering together of procrastination jokes.

Cliff's jokes somehow find that spiteful place between groan and whimsy. What is this? Why is this? It is less than a first draft– a pointless rhyme on a cliche without a pun. You can't even call it wordplay since the author is clearly miserable. If this was your first attempt at a joke you'd be a piece of shit. If a primordial fish crawled onto land and said this, God would be right to throw us into the sun. I'm so glad Cliff and his former partner never wrote another book after this. Wait, no no no no n–

In 1993 Cliff and John reunited to goddamn fucking write THE GREATEST ANSWERING MACHINE MESSAGES OF ALL TIME. And maybe they're right. I'll let you decide while your ear gets surprise-fucked by an alien.

Ha ha it's 1993 and John or Cliff are both still virgins. Speaking of 1993, hit the RAP BEAT, boys.

I've made a mistake. I shouldn't have opened the fourth book.

It's not possible. This can't be happening. T-this is a greatest hits? Of 10-year-old answering machine message jokes!? But hold on. Loni Anderson was, like, 50 years old in 1993. Are they still going to honk her boo–

Oh okay, they replaced her with Madonna. Not molesting a lady answering machine would have been better, but they're at least revising some of their old work. I wonder if they ever got around to finishing the procrastination joke.

Nope!

Hey, wait. There's no asterisk? That means they not only wrote a fourth book about answering machine jokes, it's a copy of the first three including the ones they didn't write, only this time they're taking credit for them! How can this be real? How can t–

No, stop! Slow down, I ca–

How dare you do this! Fuck you, John Carfi and Cliff Carle! Fuck your meatloa–

No! NO!

No…

N-no.

Why reprint this one!? It was only a toilet flush! John Carfi and Cliff Carle, you had ten years to add anything more than toilet!!!

No. Not the alien one. Why would they keep th– oh, god. I just remembered the genie robot handjob. They wouldn't.

They did. THEY DID. These comedy ghouls. These subhuman joke vagrants. At least we can be thankful their other stupid book, GETTING EVEN WITH THE ANSWERING MACHINE, wasn't popular enough to cannibalize. That would be cra–

Oh, god damn it. In 1996 they added the words "and Voice Mail" to the gassy bog of their dad joke graveyard and pretended it was a new book. And that was it for John and Cli– alright, I'll stop playing games. You see the scroll bar. You know they weren't done.

In 2012 they were still having the same idea. Killer Voicemail they called it, cursed maggots fat from feeding on what was once their hearts. But as technology marched on at a slightly faster pace than the anti-Asian non-joke phone statements they wrote in 1983, John and Cliff knew they had to adapt.

"Funny e-mails?" said either John or Cliff with a meatloaf smirk. "Oh! Oh! GLEE-mail," said the other one, alien semen creeping from his ear. "Like, gag me with a spoon, I can make the gnarly meeting… I'm already writing a work GLEE-mail for a Valley Girl," said the first one.

You don't need a phone or a computer for this one! It's for dead-souled monsters to hide among us with pre-loaded responses for rarely asked questions! Look, nothing more needs to be said about the talent of John Carfi and Cliff Carle. You've seen it. Without exaggeration, there can and will never be worse comedy writers. Over the course of eight books and 32 years, they took every lazy shortcut, broke every family-fucking taboo and still never wrote anything funnier than a dental reminder card. Speaking of cards, John Carfi and Cliff Carle also wrote a book about how to be funny in greeting cards.

We're not going to read it, but I need you to know this copy NEVER A DULL CARD! has been autographed. Don't scroll down yet, I want to check something.

So this is a book about how to be funny when personalizing cards, personalized by the professional comedy writer who wrote it. Again, don't scroll down.

Now, under these circumstances, try to imagine the funniest way the author could have personalized this book. Okay, scroll down.

…

…

…

Ha ha ha ha just fucking "BEST." Ha ha ha I don't know if he did it on purpose, but after all these years Cliff Carle finally landed a joke.

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