The Comedian Is Dead, or: I Can Has Dignitee, Kthx?

In the spirit of the opening of Watchmen, a story that on at least one level is about people behind masks with hidden desires and motivations, I have a confession to make: I get a real kick out of LOLCats. I’ll grant you that, as confessions go, it’s not exactly admitting that I can’t get it up without wearing a V For Vendetta mask and my Batman utility belt, but one thing at a time.

What? Quit looking so Goddamned shocked and betrayed. Everybody has something. David Berkowitz loved dogs, Charlie Manson was sweet on The Beatles, and I get a kick out of pictures of cats speaking broken English. The only difference is that when they tell me to do things, I rarely listen. Hardly ever.

Look: when you’re working a tough job in a shitty economy and your employer knows full well that they can make you do anything they want because you can’t quit in disgust because you’re overqualified to shake a tin cup full of change on a filthy street corner and lack the upper body strength to defend yourself from the roving bands of feral former stockbrokers who will try to kick you to death to get their hands on the scrap aluminum… sometimes it helps to take a two-minute break, look at a picture of a cute animal, and console yourself with the knowledge that at least you still has a bucket. At least until the foreclosure and liquidation of your assets.

Besides: LOLCat pictures make excellent instant e-cards. When my girl’s  feeling a little down, it takes me literally minutes on I Can Has Cheezburger to find a picture, stick a caption on it, and fire it to her by email to brighten her day. And if I’m sometimes in a hurry and accidentally press the “Save and Submit” instead of the “Save” one to keep it private, who cares? ICHC get’s half a million visitors a day and almost as many daily LOLCat submissions, so it’s not like anybody’s gonna see it, right?

Right?

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The first issue of The American Jerk was published close to midnight on March 31, 1999, in the Wild West days of the Internet when it still seemed possible for two guys to parley jokes about balls into quitting their horrible day jobs with nothing but a computer and a dream. No, not a dream about balls. At least I don’t think it was. I can’t speak for Paul.

We went at the site hammer and tong for a year, in those days when a “google” and a “blog” were nothing potential onomatopoeic punchlines for a gag about the beer shits. We got early encouragement by being quickly included in the Yahoo directory for humor Web sites; back then, Yahoo was the most popular and powerful search engine, because their directory was controlled by actual human beings, who, as gatekeepers, basically controlled what you saw on the Internet. Today, those same people control what you see in your Burger King order, but I digress.

We got a lot of publicity by getting ourselves named Cruel Site of the Day (Kids, ask your parents what it was like in the pre-4Chan days, when you could only see one horrible and disturbing part of the Web at once!), and developed a decent little readership. Since then, we have published literally hundreds of thousands of words worth of carefully crafted dark humor. Well, mostly carefully crafted. You try being funny in public when you’re that hung over.

And after all that work, both Paul and I were able to quit our crappy day jobs… granted, to accept different crappy day jobs, but that’s not the point. The point is, in an effort to bring you the finest in dark humor, I have spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours working on The American Jerk.

And one day in the past three or so months, I spent five minutes putting a caption on a picture of a fucking cat for my girl, and I accidentally pressed the wrong button when I tried to save it.

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That LOLCat picture got picked up on the front page of ICHC (And no, I’m not telling you which one it is. My reputation’s ruined enough by admitting it was there without pointing you to the damn thing). Now… on The American Jerk’s best day, it got about 6,000 unique visitors. ICHC gets half a million visitors every… single… day.

After ten years and thousands upon thousands of words published on the Internet… I am best known for only six of them… and three of those are spelled wrong.

Which is Goddamned fucking humiliating… but I refuse to let it get me down or affect the way I write The American Jerk.

I will, however, allow it to make me start listening to what the LOLCats tell me.

[tags]LOLCats, I Can Has Cheezburger, dark humor, satire[/tags]