101 Dave Eggers Jokes, a.k.a. 101 Side-Splitting Jokes of Staggering Hilarity.

August 30, 2001 4:42 AM

101 Dave Eggers Jokes, a.k.a. 101 Side-Splitting Jokes of Staggering Hilarity. Parody or mean-spirited attack? You be the judge. Have you ever been the target of a website parody or attack?
posted by dutchbint (41 comments total)

He puts lox on them.

Why would someone put an important ingredient of rocket fuel on a bagel?
posted by Mocata at 5:01 AM on August 30, 2001

Mo - you put smoked salmon in your rocket fuel?
posted by jozxyqk at 5:36 AM on August 30, 2001

“You got smoked salmon in my rocket fuel!”
“You got rocket fuel in my smoked salmon!”
Two great tastes that taste great together…
posted by kirkaracha at 5:48 AM on August 30, 2001

I don't know, I kind of think he asked for this.
posted by bob bisquick at 6:01 AM on August 30, 2001

There's a funny rant against Dave Eggers and all "wry" humor in the Aug. 30 Rolling Stone (not online, unfortunately). The piece calls it Medium Funny," which is "not humor that aspires to be funny and fails, but humor that aspires to be Medium Funny and makes heroic efforts to achieve it, laboriously tiptoeing around anything so crude or crass as a punch line."

Quote: "You can see Medium Funny all over Dave Eggers' McSweeney's, the journal of cute fonts, and in his best seller, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ... Heartbreaking Work reads like some diabolical experiment to test how wry you can get without every crossing the line into funny. For more than 400 pages, it's consistently wry, painstakingly wry, deliberately and defiantly wry, with the closest thing to a funny line being the reference to French fries as 'potatoes in the French manner' ..."
posted by rcade at 6:03 AM on August 30, 2001

I'm sure the rocket in You Only Live Twice ran on lox...
posted by Mocata at 6:06 AM on August 30, 2001

Re McSweeney's, I reckon that's true up to a point. It's sort of the Onion for people who prefer smirking to laughing. But I think it's unfair to call it "wry", which is only one step up from "whimsical". And some of the pieces in it are straightforward funny in a smart-arsed kind of way, eg this one.
posted by Mocata at 6:15 AM on August 30, 2001

rcade - LOL
posted by johnny novak at 6:21 AM on August 30, 2001

Anyone can be the target of a web attack with this site.
posted by ph00dz at 6:34 AM on August 30, 2001

Don't get me wrong, I think McSweeny's can actually be hilarious, and Heartbreaking Work was also hilarious at times (the time when I wasn't cursing Eggers for being a smug jerk). But let's face it, the whole schtick does lend itself to severe mockery.
posted by bob bisquick at 6:41 AM on August 30, 2001

Although I enjoyed the rant, I think I'm a fan of Medium Funny. I certainly loved Suck's belabored, painfully self-conscious sense of humor.
posted by rcade at 7:03 AM on August 30, 2001

I think that it's awfully disingenuous for the same media sycophants who fell all over themselves to compliment Eggers when AHWOSG came out to now complain that he's not funny or talented and who does he think he is? Regardless of his supposed smugness, these jackasses are the ones who gave him the recognition in the first place.

Personally, I liked Might better than McSweeneys.
posted by cowboy_sally at 7:06 AM on August 30, 2001

rcade: And of course, Rolling Stone is the world authority on what is funny and cool. Wow. For heaven's sakes.
posted by raysmj at 7:09 AM on August 30, 2001

Parody? No. Mean spirited attack? With these half-assed witticisms - uh, no. Boring and stupid? You betcha. I do not comprehend the way the pendulum swings on these matters - one minute it's all about loving Egger's work, and the next, deriding it as a pale imitation of a pale imitation. All of which reeks of balls out jealousy, so color me wholly unimpressed and asking, 'What is the point?'
posted by gsh at 7:24 AM on August 30, 2001

Do photos of gas tanks with li'l Purina-like checkerboards at the top, and shot at no particularly interesting angles, etc. also lend themselves easily to parody?
posted by raysmj at 7:27 AM on August 30, 2001

I think this constitutes a well done parody - I'm rather fond of Eggers, and yet I found these jokes to be extremely funny. Especially the footnotes: "Forks, due to their solid nature, are incapable of leaking."

Brilliant.
posted by aladfar at 7:36 AM on August 30, 2001

A parody like the Royal's might have seemed funnier were it a little more timely... Even as lame as it it, it might have provoked a better response than the mild sort of, "Who? Oh yeah, that Toph guy..." At this point, with Dave's fifteen minutes already twenty minutes over, who really gives a shit?

Because after all, there's really only one Dave Eggers joke, and that's one he will be reminded of each time he catches his own reflection... Isn't just knowing that he'll be stuck with that "Dave Eggers" construct of his for the rest of his natural life torture enough? Let's just agree to consign him to the Land of the Misfit Boys where he belongs, just over there, next to David Foster Wallace and Bret Easton Ellis, and return to our regularly scheduled programming.
posted by m.polo at 7:40 AM on August 30, 2001

Er..who is Dave Eggers?
posted by salmacis at 8:15 AM on August 30, 2001

And of course, Rolling Stone is the world authority on what is funny and cool. Wow. For heaven's sakes.

To be technically correct, Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone is the world authority on what is funny and cool, since he wrote the piece I described.

Apparently, he makes a career out of things like this, because the first thing that pops up on Google about him is a 1997 item he wrote for Baltimore City Paper about the worst music ever, with a funny assessment of the band Live: "The tendency of post-adolescent males to take themselves seriously and feel intensely about nothing in particular has rarely been documented in such flawlessly blood-curdling detail."

I enjoy Live, but I can't recover from one person's mocking description of their lyric from The Dolphin's Cry, "God laid me down into your rose garden of trust."
posted by rcade at 8:20 AM on August 30, 2001

i'm a big fan of dave eggers, but i'm always up for making fun of him. i just didn't think this was that funny though...

Er..who is Dave Eggers?

author of this book
posted by lotsofno at 8:27 AM on August 30, 2001

I enjoy McSweeney's especially the "answers from a former literary agent" stuff. I also thought the book was quite good. I don't buy into the cult of personality stuff, whether it's created by Eggers or his public or both. The book just felt right to me, was well-written and rang true for me when I had just been through a similar loss.

I think you have to view the writing as standing on its own, and separate it from Eggers the phenom. It is disingenuous to devour all the hype (which you don't have to read) and then complain of its existence.

Oh I did get the Neil Pollock book, which was not even Medium Funny, and bordered on tedious. Anyone know if that was Eggers too?
posted by Kafkaesque at 8:47 AM on August 30, 2001

I think that it's awfully disingenuous for the same media sycophants who fell all over themselves to compliment Eggers when AHWOSG came out to now complain that he's not funny or....

How is a parody on a single website indication that the entire media and the known world have suddenly turned against an author they'd previously praised? I'm not convinced that those who originally praised Eggers had anything to do with writing the Royal website.

Have we become so jaded with the mass of information available to us that we now can't discern between differing sources, differing opinions and differing viewpoints, and lump everything as being by the one author, Mr I N Ternet?
posted by Option1 at 9:10 AM on August 30, 2001

Oh, rcade, I'm just tired of attacks on styles of humor. The anti-irony thing has become a cliche, so now we'll be anti-wryness. Sheesh. Just crack a joke of your own already. Also, I like whimsical, if it's pulled off OK. And again, the guy's writing for Rolling Stone. You write for a mag that doesn't have a half-naked teen or starlet or Jennifer Anniston's butt or something on it every other week, you can complain, but until then, no.
posted by raysmj at 9:14 AM on August 30, 2001

Neal Pollack's mom seems to grow tired of being asked to vouch for her son's existence.

I, for one, found Pollack's book hilarious. It's a grand send-up of post-WWII novel and article writing, recasting the writer-as-heroic-adventurer in an even more inflated and world-bounding mold.
posted by poseur at 9:20 AM on August 30, 2001

[off topic]

Okay, rcade, I couldn't let your comment about Live's lyrics go by. I too have been known to enjoy some of their stuff (in fact, two weeks ago, I savagely murdered "Lightning Crashes" at a semi-drunken karaoke night), but this is my very favorite in their oeuvre of ghastly lyrics (from the portentously titled "Insomnia and the Hole in the Universe"):

Angel, don't you have some bagels in my oven?
Lady, don't you know a man when you see one?

Now that's a winner no matter how you slice it.

[/off topic]
posted by Skot at 9:23 AM on August 30, 2001

Please do not slander Mr. Ignatius N. Ternet. He is the one true voice of all that is online. In fact, he is in control of what you are about to write, and even what you are about to think, so don't even bother trying to retort.
posted by thebigpoop at 9:31 AM on August 30, 2001

How is a parody on a single website indication that the entire media and the known world have suddenly turned against an author they'd previously praised? I'm not convinced that those who originally praised Eggers had anything to do with writing the Royal website.

I wasn't referring to this site in particular; I was referring to the snarkiness of the New York Times and the New Yorker and other publications (whose names escape me) who all stepped forward to praise Eggers when his book came out and who now seem determined to bury him. It's the attitude of "You think you're hot shit, but you're so last year, and we're tired of having to put up with your endless media exposure." This, from the same people who fawned all over him and gave him the media exposure in the first place.
posted by cowboy_sally at 10:07 AM on August 30, 2001

Cripes, I just repeated myself, almost verbatim. I didn't mean to do that. I just meant to emphasize that it's not just this website. I personally don't have a problem with parody; it's better than straight criticism. I meant to say that the critics must have lost all sense of "irony" (in the alanis sense) if they don't realize that Dave Eggers didn't make himself the media darling all on his own.
posted by cowboy_sally at 10:14 AM on August 30, 2001

Clever parody. But don't all clever parodies contain some mean-spiritedness in order to create the bite (of "biting satire" fame)?
posted by Vek at 10:21 AM on August 30, 2001

No one has really answered the question though - if anyone here has had to deal with a parody or an attack. Someone did this to me (plasticfag.org) a while back, and I have to confess that it felt like I'd been kicked in the gut for about a day. It's difficult to assess how much you'll affected by these things, I think.

In the case of Mr Eggers, all I can say is that for all it's strengths and weaknesses, it's nowhere near as cynical or as mean-spirited as half the jokes on that site...
posted by barbelith at 11:19 AM on August 30, 2001

I hate parodies and the people who do them.
posted by solistrato at 11:25 AM on August 30, 2001

Alanis Morrisette doesn't actually know what the word ironic means... I think you'll notice this if you listen to words and realize that the things she is talking about are maybe cliches, or coincidences, or "doesn't that always happen!" or maybe "I hate when that happens!" but not irony.
posted by bob bisquick at 12:36 PM on August 30, 2001

Alanis Morrisette doesn't actually know what the word ironic means...

Hm, yeah. That's why I put it in quotes. I was trying to reference the fact that Eggers' writing is constantly described as "ironic" when that's not really the case, much like the lyrics of that forgettable song. And because the critics don't know what irony means, then Eggers' media-made rise and fall as wunderkind....

oh never mind. It fell flat once already. :-)
posted by cowboy_sally at 12:47 PM on August 30, 2001

I wasn't referring to this site in particular; I was referring to the snarkiness of the New York Times and the New Yorker and other publications....

Fair enough, cowboy_sally, my mistake.
posted by Option1 at 1:26 PM on August 30, 2001

critics are just bitter people who secretly envy those they criticise. and this damn page keeps updating itself and placing itself on top of this window... making it hard to type =) AHWOSG was hilarious.
posted by Satapher at 1:35 PM on August 30, 2001

"Have you ever been the target of a website parody or attack?"

no not yet, but goddamnit i'm working on it.

i would SO DIG it.
posted by jcterminal at 2:16 PM on August 30, 2001

rcade: Rob Sheffield spent a decade writing for NME and Select before heading over the pond, and there are few places better suited to cultivating a writing style that's all raised eyebrows.


As for Eggers: I like enough of his stuff to forgive him for the bits that get on my wick.
posted by holgate at 2:16 PM on August 30, 2001

Question:
Where does Dave Eggers get virgin wool from?

Answer:
Ugly sheep!

- - - -

Footnote:
All sheep are pretty.


I like Eggers, but you have to admit, sheep footnotes are pure comedic gold.
posted by fidelity at 2:47 PM on August 30, 2001

my site got parodied once, sort of, but it was all in good fun (very much unlike yours, tom, which was quite offensive), and i thought it was brilliant.
posted by bluishorange at 4:24 PM on August 30, 2001

I read all 101 jokes.

Now I shall go lie down.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 4:31 PM on August 30, 2001

I liked Egger's Smarter Feller comic strip, because that's how I first discovered him.

He's gotten a lot more pretensious since then. Though, it's quite obvious that McSweeny's is a parody of prentensious, technologically-regressive poetry journals, so I don't mind him or his work at all.
posted by Down10 at 11:55 PM on August 30, 2001