Philadelphia Weekly

ARTS AND CULTURE

Wrong Cancer

Mr. Tourette bites Jeff Foxworthy's face off.

By Steven Wells

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Nov. 8, 2006

Illustration by Hawk Krall

Wanna know why CDs and DVDs cost so much? Because publicists deluge hacks like me with tons of free stuff that you--and I mean you personally--end up paying for.

Case in point: This week I got a nice boxed set of Blue Collar Comedy Tour movies. Wow. That's three whole DVDs full of fake working-class, Bush-supporting crap comedians telling theaters packed with dull white people it's okay to be dull and white. Like Mister Rogers for Republicans.

It's called the comedy of conformity. I'm sure they have the same kind of thing in Iran. And the more culturally conservative the pseudo-blue-collar boys are, the more their scared and desperate-for-cultural-approval audiences lap it up. You should hear Jeff Foxworthy talk about women with tattoos. It's hilarious! And I'm using "hilarious" in the "like waking up depressed, constipated and alone in a cancer ward" sense of the word here.

Speaking of cancer, all week I've been telling people:

"Hey, I got the all-clear."

"For what?"

"For cancer."

"You had cancer?"

"Uh, yeah. Only wrote an entire 5,000-word bastard PW story about it with a picture of me, like, actually nearly dying on the front cover."

"Oh. You were being serious about that?"

And then they start telling me about their cancer--or the cancer that killed half their family. And their cancer is always way cooler and funnier than mine. The one I got, Hodgkin's lymphoma, is the Jeff Foxworthy of the cancer pantheon--a tedious little rat-'tashed, middle-class piece of unfunny boring shit. But try saying "cock cancer" without smiling. You can't, can you?

Or maybe you can. In which case I strongly suggest you avoid this week's other freebie. It's a book called Modern Toss. Inside you find a cartoon entitled Customer Service, where a bloke clutching a bike and a penis says, "This bike I bought off you ripped my cock off."

Then there's Mr. Tourette, Master Signwriter. In a typical cartoon, instead of painting "The Good Queen Esmeralda's Tour of the World" on the side of a ship, Mr. T writes, "the Queen's cunting boat." When the customer complains, our hero responds: "Listen you cunt, you're gonna have to be a bit more fucking specific."

Amazingly, Modern Toss is a mainstream TV show in Britain. (Its slogan: "the stink of excellence in a world gone tits up.") But you can get the book version (for 12 of your American dollars) everywhere they sell tomes packed full of jokes about shit, piss, vomit, blood, gratuitous swearing, mindless fucking violence and cancer.