That’s Incredible

As devotees of this humble “website” well recognize, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” fancy ourselves as humorists. We may be preternaturally inept humorists or even humorists manqué, but we’re humorists nonetheless.

Yes, seldom does a day go by on our collective calendar during which we do not attempt to make you smile. Unless, of course, you count Saturday, our one day off for the week. Which, if you think really hard about it, comes around quite often.

Anyway, we mention our aim to please for one particular reason. It has compelled many of our readers to ask us what humor “websites” we particularly esteem. As heavy-hitting professionals in the world of World-Wide Web yuks, we certainly have our own opinions on what’s side-splittingly funny.

In today’s humble “post,” dear reader, we aim to answer this fine question.

It would be great if we had a simple retort. But, to be honest, there are lots of funny “weblogs” out there on Al Gore’s Internet, and we’ve lost to pretty much all of them in back-to-back installments of the annual Weblog Awards.

Still, we must say that you can never go wrong with a fellow who calls his “weblog” (in its most recent iteration) The American Fez. Naturally, we have lots of e-favorites amongst the humor “weblogs,” but we simply must highlight Boston’s Stephen Baldwin as a particular delight.

In fact, we have long believed that Mr. Baldwin consistently composes crafty and cleverly cerebral “posts” that deserve a wide readership. If you don’t like his “weblog,” congratulations: You’re dumb. And you have bad taste to boot.

But we would be remiss if we failed to mention another primo source of comedy—albeit in this case comedy of an unintentional variety. We refer, dear reader, to the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM), a kooky collection of Mao Zedong enthusiasts who yearn for a Communist utopia…and write knee-slapping film reviews.

Boy, that’s a hard sentence to take in, isn’t it? Yet it’s true: MIM excels in crafting unintentionally hilarious movie reviews, one of which we highlighted here. The reviews are so uproariously lame that you’d swear to Stalin that they’re a joke. Yet our pals pining for another Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution are as po-faced as can be.

You needn’t take our word for it, dear reader. Just take a gander at a few passages from MIM’s side-splitting take on the Disney animated feature The Incredibles, which they have ominously labeled “post-modernism turned to fascism”:

We're supposed to be impressed with all the effort that went into the animations for "Incredibles" and give it a pass for its more intellectual side. Nonetheless, "Incredibles" relies on violence and bourgeois notions of heroes to sell, so we looked all the way into this movie. For this reviewer, it took a while, but eventually we all should conclude that this movie is mostly backwards and in fact leans solidly fascist.

Just as the heroic entrepreneur of Libertarian and Republican fame finds him or herself strangled by government regulations in Amerika, this story is about the restraints of the mediocre on the meritorious superheroes known as "Incredibles." What makes this a fascist movie is precisely the alleged exposure of bureaucracy in an insurance company, which by itself would be progressive or socialist. Combined with the notion of super-heroes being better than bureaucracy, the effect is fascist, because we do not really see an economic solution for the insurance company problem. Instead, the movie bemoans the competition that led to the creation of the insurance company while supporting competition of superheroes. It does not fit together coherently, but we've learned historically that fascism does not have to be coherent for the masses to take it up….

The directors of this film were probably just angry with previous MIM reviews trashing all the super-heroes as fronts for the police. So in "Incredibles" we learn that super-hero work is not politically neutral, just as MIM said all along, but "Incredibles" agrees only to ridicule the premise in typical Republican Party rhetoric.

Really takes your breath away, doesn’t it? We particularly savored the bit about the directors of The Incredibles being irate about “previous MIM reviews trashing all the super-heroes as fronts for the police.”

Yeah, we bet that was really on Disney’s mind.