Reflecting Day: Problematic Tennis Week Day

It's Reflecting Day, a time set aside for the zany antics of contemplation and thanks. Because thank you! You people really did it! We're still here publishing ad-free hilarity! You Patrons helped rebuild Internet comedy after it was turned into acquisition bonuses and Bhutani content farms, and it's the best. I've written for every medium under all circumstances, and I can honestly say nothing beats the lawless, structureless art of making fun of shit on the World Wide Web. And from the generosity born of your excellent taste, Brockway and I are now working with a full 🌭 team! Who I am now going to thank like I just thanked you!

Lydia Bugg comes in every week from a vector of madness we could never have anticipated. Brockway and I pull from an eclectic swamp of cursed sources, but Liddy will wander into the darkness and emerge scratching some unthinkable itch like "Have you ever wondered why Santa needs us so horny?" Or maybe, "Sean, Robert! This egg! Something is wrong with Cat Man's eeeeggggggg!!!"

She also used these sideways perception skills to almost help Brockway catch a killer in our groundbreaking five-part Megan Wants a Murderer podcast series: I, II, III, IV, V. She's done a lot of very strange good this year, is the point.

We love Jason Pargin, who has probably done more for Internet hilarity than anyone who will ever live. I think it comes from this strange thing he does where he educates as he's making jokes. Like instead of ever reaching contempt, his brain has this extra reserve of curiosity that lets him find another layer of nonsense or mystery. He can't just laugh at Hamburger: The Motion Picture. He's going to get to the bottom of it. Jason also understands the magic of this medium. A normal person sees a blank web page and thinks "top ten list" or "TV episode recap." Jason sees an opportunity to spiritually explore the time Sylvester Stallone used scissors to dismantle old pizza. Anyway, thanks, Jason. And buy his books.

Brendan McGinley has a dangerously encyclopedic knowledge of 80-year-old comic books and it's possible he might have exploded had we not let him evacuate it during Golden Age Comic Week. So I guess this is more of a "you're welcome" to Brendan than a thank you. Plus, it's good to have someone on the team who does what people tell me is "clever wordplay." It's probably a nice contrast to when I call someone four tenths of a Gary Busey sex scream or whatever.

Tom Reimann from Gamefully Unemployed recently joined us and immediately wrote two of my favorite 🌭 articles about Robocop and Virtuosity. He speaks pop culture like a first language, so if you show him a '90s robot shooting a man into parts, Tom instantly knows if it was a single maniac's fault or a shared insanity of an era. It might not sound that useful, but if you woke up next to him in the wrong timeline, he would know the rules of their universe simply by the shape of the seedy motel's cyberphone.

We didn't commission art for them, but we also want to thank some more contributors. Like Alex Schmidt, whose kind spirit and brilliant mind really get a nice rest here where he's allowed to make fun of karate pants. And Cracked legend, Chris Bucholz, who helped remind us that real robots used to punch. And crafty Hana Michels [haw-nuh mai-kuhls], whose exposure to troubling dog content made her into, as we found out on the Dogg Zzone 9000, an unrestrained agent of chaos. Thanks also to Cinderella Story Sissyneck, who went from 🌭 enthusiast to Official 🌭 Barn Porn Reviewer. And while we're on the subject of erotic noises, thanks to Zak Koonce, beloved podcast guest & theme song producer, and our audio engineer Jamie French, also beloved podcast guest & theme song producer.

There's one more behind-the-scenes thing I want to reflect on, and it's of course, tennis. If you're a Dogg Zzone 9000 listener, you may have heard me mention one of my favorite internal editorial suggestions-- Problematic Tennis Week. See, when we launched 1900🌭, I had the notion we could schedule every third or fourth week around a ridiculous theme. Here's why that immediately became a problem.

First, a theme week means an amazing idea has to get smashed into a group with similar but almost definitely less inspiring ideas. We trained for this at our old job, sure, but it's different here. If I was writing a list at Cracked, I could make #5 from "11 Things from Flash Gordon I'd Fuck" a stupid one. But as a standalone piece, "I Would Fuck That Weird Tree Hole Timothy Dalton's People Used to Test Their Bravery" doesn't quite work. I honestly think some people logging on to enjoy a daily comedy article would feel betrayed if they only got a single drawing of me with my dick in a dangerous space tree. I'm not talking about you. You know how to party, tree fucker.

But let's say we did schedule Flash Gordon Fuck Week and Brockway and I sat down to get started. We have some HR issues to go over first, like which one of us asks Liddy, our respected and married co-worker, how she feels about sex with hawk people. We're pretty sure we know, but us being smart isn't the problem in this scenario. Then, assuming there's a then, we start writing. Now on a normal week, I probably throw out an average of 2 drafts. It's not a big deal-- my library constantly hatches new horrors like a wet gremlin. But I've seen Brockway's process. When things aren't working, he doesn't give up. He will stay there while spinal fluid pools in his feet and strangle an article until it begs to be funny. So asking him to write 200 jokes about making love to Max Von Sydow among the stars could work, but it could also kill him. Which would be a fine death. A writer's death.

None of this is limited to theory. For the first six months of 1900🌭, we were always two entire weeks ahead of schedule. And then we did Rumble in the Bronx week. It was an obvious creative triumph, but the process of putting it together cut that two weeks of lead time down to about 0 seconds. Spreading many parts of a time-sensitive job across multiple "creatives" is a fucking nightmare, even if -no especially- if I'm personally several of those creatives. There's a reason every media outlet hires someone whose only job is nagging people and it's full time with an important title.

So now let me take you through the process of designing a failed spectacular theme week.

The main inspiration for Problematic Tennis Week was Dick Van Patten's Dirty Tennis. I found it in a thrift store years ago and have never stopped thinking about it. It will always be the first thing I reach for when a guest in my home wants to watch something really weird. At the risk of spending the next 2000 words describing it again, it's a parody(?) instructional video for tormenting your tennis partner with subtle psychological torture and actual guns featuring Caitlyn Jenner just barely not masturbating directly onto a bikini girl. It's a singular artifact of needle-burying derangement, and my instincts told me we had to build a whole week around it. My instincts were wrong.

One of the other options for the week was this one scene from Super Friends (episode 203B):

It starts off the way most Super Friends sequences do-- with a series of unforced errors by incompetent storytellers. Zan and Jayna are playing tennis, Zan clearly shanks the ball ninety degrees in the wrong direction, then Jayna returns it. You can sort of forgive them when the unpaid Korean child artists forget to draw feet or which one is Aquaman, but they chose to draw twenty frames of the ball going in the wrong direction. That thing fucking landed somewhere in The Pac-Man & Rubik Amazing Cube Hour. It's fascinating. Almost as fascinating as how a few rallies later, it pans over to reveal this:

Zan has somehow mummified himself in his own monkey, who is gagging itself with the ball and paddling him. For reasons known only to space, this teen superhero stopped a friendly tennis match with his sister for an every-sexual-fetish break. This is like renting a miniature golf club and asking if there's a corking fee for wrapping your asshole around the windmill. It's like setting up a free throw line dunk by peeing all over your stepmother. What are we still doing here, pretending there's order and reason to our universe when we saw this happen?

This is going to sound like a bad idea, but I'm going to do some more research to see if I'm missing something. Did the Super Friends maybe not know what tennis was?

Okay, this is strange. There's an entry for "Tennis" on the Super Friends Wiki and it's written for Super Friends fans coming into the idea of tennis cold. They're explaining what tennis is, not how the Wonder Twins are hilariously confused by it. See, kids, tennis is when two players with rackets and obscene, forbidden sexual appetites try to knock a ball int-- wait. Am I seeing that right? Is the goddamn word "ball" a link?

Oh my god. The Super Friends Wiki gives the history of "ball" across multiple planes of reality and literally half the examples are the time Batman and Robin tricked a giant plant into becoming one. Hey, madmen. Does that help you understand "ball?" I was sort of kidding earlier about the state of Internet jokes, but twenty years ago there were 10,000,000 comedy webpages and I was the only source of Super Friends information. Now here I am with the only remaining comedy site and anyone can humorlessly filter all human knowledge through the lens of Super Friends. I don't know if it means anything, but I do know it means our Internet has been conquered by some kind of sinister Reverse Me in the last two decades.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, problematic tennis.

Bill Cosby's Personal Guide to Tennis Power or Don't Lower the Lob, Raise the Net is something I would toss a wizard if they shouted for a talisman ignoble enough to contain all of Hell. My idea was for either Brockway or me to write about this:

It's a 1975 book of tennis anecdotes from history's zadoobledest sex monster. He thought it was a book to make up stories about Bjorn Borg telling him he should take up parcheesi alongside photos of him pantomiming "bad at tennis." And not several photos. Dozens. Hundreds. Each with a caption any Garfield fan would call "a decent first draft."

Page after page shows Bill Cosby gabadoozlin' and bibbydibbyin' around. "I play tennis," some captions say. "I am playing tennis," say others. It's maybe the smallest idea anyone has ever adapted into a book. There is nothing more to this book's origin than a rapist saying, "I like..." and someone interrupting to say, "Tennis? Ha! You should write a book!" And then him doing that.

This terrible thing just keeps going. Someone took 18,000 pictures of Bill Cosby swinging a racket and they used every single one. "Bending the knees," Bill Cosby would write next to a picture of him not doing that. "And accidentally sending the ball into the net," he would write on the next one, thinking maybe the captions should be literal, not sarcastic? "Who farted?" the comedy legend might ponder. What I'm saying is Bill Cosby put the same effort into writing books as he did cheating on his wife-- a confusingly huge amount of "low," and it's weird we let him get away with it.

Anyway, as all tennis articles eventually say, speaking of sexual misconduct, you'll be shocked to hear there's a bit of that in Bill Cosby's Personal Guide to Tennis Power.

Because of his history of dishonesty and half-ass joke construction, it's never clear when Bill is telling a true story. So maybe he really did force Bobby Riggs to put on a fat suit, play tennis from the center of a massive buffet (Bill parenthetically explains this is related to the fat suit thing), and put his mouth on a woman in the middle of a match? It's legitimately troubling. So maybe one of us could have done a full article on this book, but what form could it really take? Research into the history of celebrity tennis to find out which stories are true? Using Photoshop to rewrite the captions? Honestly, though; what would that look like?

I guess you can see how this theme week worked in my head. On Learning Day we would talk about Dirty Tennis. On Nerding Day, the Wonder Twins playing penetrato-pong zeta, or as they call it, "Earth Tennis." Upsetting Day would, of course, be the goddamn Cosby book, and maybe for Fucking Day we... I don't know, check Google for some forgotten '80s sex comedy? There's got to be one about tenn-- oh my God, perfect.

"WHACK IT!" Amazing. Done. So all we need now is a Punching Day and Problematic Tennis Week is complete. That sounds impossible, but as luck would have it, I own a 1974 autobiography written by Bob Hewitt, the original "bad boy of tennis," called...

It's bad, but maybe not the way he was hoping. It's Bob Hewitt, and someone named Rory Brown writing as Bob Hewitt, complaining about every single negative thing ever said about Bob Hewitt. If he got disqualified from a match for throwing a temper tantrum, Bob Hewitt would expect reporters to describe it as a terrific win by the best winner or he would declare them liars. It's 138 pages of a shitty idiot moaning about how no one cares about his side of each temper tantrum and then either never getting to his side or bragging about how his temper made him super cool, actually.

If you read that clip, you might already be seeing the problem. It's dull as shit. As an overall artifact, it's really something-- an entire book stitched together from non-apologies and anime avatar takes on police shootings, yet I have no idea how I would make it a fun article. Someone doing an academic study on the defense mechanisms of toxic men might appreciate me finding a source for their thesis, but not a single other soul. Let's keep going anyway.

If you ever heard one of Bob's double partners complaining about his shitty behavior, no you didn't, because why would they complain if his teams sometimes won!? You goddamn liar. Take it from Bob himself, the only double partner he is awful to is his wife, and you fool, he's kidding when he does that. It's funny, actually. Maybe you've spotted the pattern. If you saw Bob do something wrong, you can't prove it, and even if you can that rules and he did it on purpose.

He goes on and on. Everyone was unfair to poor Bob. Everything about poor Bob was untrue. And even if it wasn't, um, did you catch their tone? How absolutely dare they. Every page and chapter is like this, and not once in his entire book did this fussy bitch take the opportunity to explain a fair, true version. Can't seem to find a funny part, though... let me flip ahead...

... no, that's him being furious when nobody took his side the time he got furious...

... no, this is him saying how he would actually accept criticism of his behavior if they did it the right way. Come on, there's got to be a clippable funny part...

... no, I didn't mean "I got banned from Australia but i am not mad lol actually im laughing." An article about this would be impossible. This is the tennis autobiography version of the most downvoted comment on an article about women of color in video games. Just exhaus-- hold on, what's this? Guys, look!

In his own words, in his own book, this professional athlete admits to getting his ass kicked by a 75-year-old and how the general consensus from the world was it was about time. And Bob only learned later, from newspapers, that his attacker was a martial artist! Which means he lost the fight too fast to identify karate! This is it! This is the funny part I've been searching for!

So okay, let's head over to Google and see how bad Bob Hewitt, "THE BAD BOY OF TENNIS" was...

Oh, god damn it. I give up. Fuck you, tennis.

Tennis is a bounce-based activity played on milk or glass. In the 1979 episode "40 / Lava" Hawkman and Apache Chief used it to win back Wyoming from the molten people of Subterros. It is played by sex criminals and sex criminals.

...

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