Dingleberry Esthetics
by Diebold Essen

A reader recently e-mailed with a compliment and a complaint. The compliment was for making her fall out of her chair laughing at our survey of cutlure, counter-culture, and anticulture. The complaint was that we do too much stuff about ideas and not enough humor. We couldn't agree more.

There's just one problem: so-called Reality. As more than one humor writer has noted, things in Reality have now come to such a pass that ten minutes of perusing a newspaper or watching TV is often (unintentionally) funnier than just about anything we can dream up.

Think about "humor" these days. What was the last really funny movie? Yeah, yeah, South Park was funny, but you were crying and laughing at the same time. As for TV, apart from hip layers of irony from the various animators, what is there? "Saturday Night Dead"? Jeez.

Put that stuff up against O.J., Clinton-Lewinsky, Let's Bomb the Chinese Embassy by Mistake, The World's Richest Man Is a Total Nerd (in all senses of the word), and it's no contest about what's funnier.

You get my point.

However. Occasionally one's errant mouse clicks one into a new corner of Internet Reality which is so seriously bad, so sincerely superficial, so crassly capitalistic that 1) you have to wonder if The Onion staff has branched out into start-up web site design, and 2) all you can do is laugh at the sheer awfulness of it all.

On the next page we are delighted to introduce you to the site of Fox International, Inc., purveyors of "fine art" (their words) to the Internet masses. You'll just have to forgive our own crassness, because all we could think of as we rolled on the floor was "dingleberry esthetics."

Dingleberry Esthetics >>

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