other fine humor

I made sure that some of my selections are less well known, so that you can probably find something unfamiliar here.

texts

Ashleigh Brilliant He's apparently the only person in the world who makes a living writing epigrams.

Famous quotes from the letters of Jane Austen Subtitled "or quotes that should be famous." Don't miss the sneaky caricature at the bottom of the page. After that, don't miss the rest of Jane Austen's writings, some of which can be found at the same web site.

The Godling's Glossary by Dave Krieger An Ambrose Bierce-like dictionary, updated for transhuman times. I link to A only; see the A-Z links on the left.

cartoons

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau To my mind, Doonesbury is the greatest comic strip of all time because of its breadth and its heart. Other top contenders, like Krazy Kat, Barnaby from the 1940’s, and Pogo, are all long finished.

music

Paranoid Larry by Paranoid Larry and his imaginary band An album purportedly sung by a man randomly discovered ranting on a rooftop—a fiction that nobody fell for. The standout track is “Jesus Shaves”, which despite its name shows caring and gentle humor, and there are several other well-written songs with smart and pointed satire.

Smell No Evil by Ookla the Mok A rock opera about a space monkey best friend and “the dawn of the day before the time of the land the lost dinosaurs forgot to remember.” Also a commentary on how people get along. Other Ookla the Mok albums are not as strong; I think that they love space monkeys most.

moving pictures

F for FAKE A fake documentary film about an art faker and his lying biographer. This clever and original movie by Orson Welles is an examination of the nature of art and truth, and of some of the conventions that we use to understand them.

FLCL FLCL, aka Fooly Cooly, is a Japanese animated mini-series of six half-hour episodes. It is frenetic, surreal, unpredictable, bewildering, funny, and deeply intellectual. On the surface, FLCL is a pastiche of gags and parodies, often manic. Many of the action sequences include gags which go by so fast that they can only be appreciated in freeze frame. The second level of meaning is a bizarre story of saving the Earth from a bizarre alien attack, a sendup of anime cliches. A collage of metaphors (an ideal technique to portray confusion) creates a third level of meaning to tell a coming-of-age story of the protagonist Naota, age 12, with themes like sexual awakening, honesty, and self-identity. The symbols go on and on seemingly without end, some obvious and some obscure. I personally see a fourth layer of meaning, but maybe that’s just me.

The Triplets of Belleville This animated, nearly-wordless French film is as great a satirical movie as I have seen. The story involves kidnapping a cyclist in the Tour de France. I haven’t found a review which interprets it the same way I do, so I wrote an analysis with spoilers. Other good satires are The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin, daring in its time, and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, which was poorly understood when it came out.