I’m not gonna lie to you, Faithful Spoilerites. Yesterday was a rough one for your humble MS-QOTD, a perfect storm of derision, condescension, bad lunch and emotional turmoil culminating with the pizza joint losing my order. (Y’know it’s a bad one when my Twitter feed, containing the likes of Weird Al, Tom Lennon, Penn Jillette and Rodrigo can’t even cheer me up.) Fortunately, during the day, I was able to mitigate my ever-growing flash mob of “GRRR”, thanks to the calming influence of my favorite actress, and my evening was finally saved by watching Ted Mosby get beaten up by a billy-goat again. (It’s the again that makes it funny.) Though the adventures of Teddy Westside and his band of idiots are occasionally painful to watch, there’s a pleasant familiarity in their silly twenty-something life rituals that is calming, which begs today’s query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) had a bit of a rough time of it after the SPAM incident…
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…but I’m feeling MUUUUUUUUUUUCH better now, asking: What is your go-to pop-culture for decompressing after a bad day?
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One Piece never fails to cheer me up. There’s like 400 episodes up on Hulu. A rubber pirate. A naughty cook. A reindeer who’s a monster doctor. A thief who becomes a weather girl. Fish people and cyborgs. Lots to love from this show.
Video games are my go to with whatever I’m playing at the time usually works or I listen to podcasts especially the antics of the spoiler crew or frogpants will always work.
Critical hit or map.
There are a few options there.
Futurama, MST3K, Yugioh Abridged and the Robot Chicken and Family Guy Star Wars specials are pretty good at making me laugh no matter what mood I’m in, so they are usually the go-to.
Otherwise, losing myself in something fantasy (although not limited to the fantasy setting) works, be it reading a book, playing a video game or watching something like Super Sentai or Star Wars. It depends on what sort of bad day it was for me. For example, a video game may help if I’m in an aggressive bad mood, but might not if I had a bad pain related day.
Escape into a graphic novel. Atomic Robo comes to mind.
Usually some combination of Podcasts, PC games, webcomics and weezywaiter… I don’t know why, but his stuff is just fantastic.
Add some cookies to the equation and world peace is the next step.
MST3K, The Three Stooges, and/or the weirder episodes of Coast to Coast AM
Comedy is difficult. Something you might find hilariously funny I may find just plain unfunny and stupid. A good example of this are Mel Brooks movies. I don’t think Blazing Saddles is funny in the least. I hate it. On the other hand, Young Frankenstein is a work of genius, Space Balls is so stupid it is hilarious, and the second version of The Producers with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick is a hoot, though I find the original version which uses the same script to be mean, hateful and not funny in the least.
I find some silly, lighthearted anime helps brighten my mood. My current favorite – My Ordinary Life (Nichijo) – is a hoot. One of the protagonists is a young female hentai artist and tries to hide it. The other is an idiot who always becomes the victims of her own pranks. The third is a robot who nobody notices even though she has a windup key sticking out of her back. There’s talking cats, girls with guns, a rich dude who rides a nanny goat to school and all sorts of wackiness ensues. Sadly, the DVD release was cancelled, so you’ll have to watch it online.
And The Town Yet Moves is another underrated anime that is worth a chuckle. It’s about a dimwit high school girl who is the center of attention in her particular neighborhood. It didn’t do so well, sales-wise, because there’s no magical powers, no giant robots, no kung-fu fighting, just one oblivious teen bumbling her way through life, and yet when she is struck by a car and goes to heaven in the final episode, it leaves one choked up. Happily, her demise was only temporary. Odd thing about this show is that they animated the episodes out of order from the manga but didn’t correct the script, so in the last episode one of the characters is asking questions about something she learned the answer to in an earlier episode as if it hadn’t happened yet (the questionable events having occurred much later in the manga). Still, it is charming and funny and their all girl rock band (which you’ve got to see to believe) cracks me up every time.
As for manga you can’t beat Doctor Slump for outrageous humor. Dr. Slump was drawn by the fellow who drew the Dragonball epics and is chock full of poop jokes and other assorted juvenile humor and just plain bad puns. Dr. Slump is a hapless inventor who builds Arial, a super-powered robot that looks like a six-year old girl. Nobody seems to notice in spite of the fact that she routinely knocks houses off their foundations and crushes police cars, etc. In one hilarious episode, after Arial starts school, and changes clothes with all the other girls in gym class, she asks the professor why SHE doesn’t “have one” while all the other girls do? Dr. Slump, who has never had a date, is ashamed to admit that he’s never seen “one” in real life, and so he then proceeds to invent all kinds of wacky devices like x-ray glasses in order to try to see what one looks like so he can equip Arial with a proper set of female parts, and fate keeps intervening to prevent the good doctor from enjoying the fruits of his labor. In the end, it turns out Arial was talking about not having a navel. Hilarious!
“Had a bad day “by Daniel Powder