Ackroyd
Araknid
Arkanoid
Aykman…
Very good Louis. Short but pointless.
When I was a sophomore in high school, in this one honors english class, we were asked to write up and present an anecdote. Our assignment was to take a mildly humorous story from our lives and try to make it more broadly entertaining by adding narrative embellishments. If I recall, the point was attempt making something sorta mundane and telling it in a funny way.
Of course, I wasn’t paying any attention, I was too busy drawing TIE fighters. So I had to write this paper and read it to the class, and I didn’t know what it was. I asked a classmate about the assignment, and just my luck it was a person who made it into the honors english class for something other than the ability to properly describe an idea. From what I managed to glean from this dude was that I was supposed to take a true story and make it funny.
So I wrote a page-long paper about how World War II was actually won by the US preventing Japan from supplying it’s population with cheese. Not a funny idea, in retrospect. I mean, there was no connection, it was just me trying to be random in order to elicit surprise, and for that surprise to be greeted by the class as humor. Sort of like when someone says, “Come to the dark side, we have cookies.” It’s not actually funny unless you’re still in that 16-year old state of mind of “lol randomness. I lost the game! Butt scratcher!”
The reading was met, as I’d hoped, with laughter from the class. They thought it was hilarious for some reason. It was nowhere near as actually funny as my senior paper on the history of barrels, but they really seemed to like it.
The project was divided into separate days, with students 1-5 reading theirs on Tuesday, 5-10 reading theirs on Wednesday, 10-15 on Thursday, and so on. The Wednesday students must have waited until Tuesday night to write theirs, because there were three other papers that included some aspect of history and an item of food. I think Vietnam and marshmallows was one of them. Although, I shouldn’t just say “other papers included some aspect,” because the other papers were literally “such and such conflict was actually fought over such and such food.” Plagiarism of the funny bone, I suppose. Of course, no one laughed because the original idea wasn’t all that funny, it just became popular spontaneously, and because people wanted to participate in the humor. The other papers were forced by their authors, forced to take the form of another (unpredictably) successful paper. And it showed, quite boldly, that they were just trying to piggyback.
Don’t be that guy, Shredder. Nobody likes that guy.
I love Kevin
Nohomo
Aww come on.. when I saw the common misspelling on the front page news item again,I thought it was the perfect companion to the GB 3 forum’s bill murray thread…as an added note, I guess it wouldn’t have been anymore original if I had actually put the most popular mispelling of ackroyd first ;o)