Humour
Below I’ve included two short, Clickhole-style parody articles that I wrote a few years ago while bored. They were just written as jokes to show my friends, but I realised that it would be much easier to show them to people if they were on my wesbite!
How much did Taylor Swift draw on 17th century metaphysical English poet John Donne when writing her song “Begin Again”? Probably not much!
,We’ve all been there. Listening to the 2012 album Red by Taylor Swift. Then we get to the 16th track and that question pops up again, the same as the other eight times you’ve listened to it today: just how much of John Donne’s metaphysical poetry did Taylor study when she wrote this track?
A finger-plucked guitar (I think, maybe) and some kind of violin (I guess, I’m not really sure) signal the beginning of the song. Begin Again. Ha ha. Someone should write a joke about that title. Then the lyrics start and we hear the place where TS could have turned to the movement of 17th century English writers for help.
As we all know, the lyrics here deal with some heavy topics, just like metaphysics. Tay Sway paints a harrowing picture of a tale of a person going through a break up presumably in modern day — though this is never stated and it could easily be set in Early Stuart Era England. Probably not, but it could be.
The opening line about taking a deep breath in front of a mirror is a big factor in this analysis as one Google search for “john donne mirror” shows me that the poet did have some mirror imagery in his work. I think. I didn’t actually read any of the results. However, when T-Swizzle talks about liking to wear high heels in the second line, all connection to metaphysics is lost as Googling “john donne high heels” gives no usable results. Or it probably wouldn’t if I searched it.
It’s towards the end of the chorus, though, where we see a truly earth-shattering moment of parallel between the Tennessee songstress and the English poet, scholar, soldier, and secretary born into a recusant family (thank you Wikipedia). Here, Taylor writes the phrase “...break, and burn, and end” which indisputably shares at least two words with the line from John Donne’s Batter my heart, three person'd God (Holy Sonnet 14), “Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.”
Need I say more? I hope not because I’m not paid by the word.
Throughout the rest of the song, there are no lyrics to support a connection between these two behemoths of their time. Yet I know for a fact that I speak for everyone reading this when I say that on the ninth listen of that album today, I’m still going to wonder if Tay-Tay had been reading The Flea or A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning before she put pen to paper in 2011 on Begin Again.
We surveyed 1,600 people about how they thought McDonald’s mascot Grimace would smell and the results will not surprise you!
When I look at the infamous fast food character Grimace, I think of three things: burgers, tax evasion, and smelling really bad. Since I already knew the public consensus on the other two aspects of Grimace’s personality, I decided to gauge people’s opinions on this purple piece of shit’s odour.
Now before I go into the data that I found, I want to lay all of my cards on the table. I do not like Grimace. He scared me as a child and he scares me as an adult, but in the interest of journalistic integrity, I’ve decided to say that this article is impartial which makes me immune to being criticised about it.
So I went into this survey with an idea of what people’s reactions would be. It’s obvious, isn’t it? Grimace is a large, imposing figure covered in thick, coarse, purple fur with a shag-like quality. I know for a fact that while working he also spends all of his time in or around McDonald’s kitchens where the air is laden with a thickness of grease and a stench of food which on its own is enjoyable, but can you imagine what it’s like when it sticks to matted fur like Grimace has and is left to stew? I can.
One survey question asked, “Don’t you think this oversized grease ball should just get off his ass once in a while and shower?” To which one anonymous subject* responded, “It scares me to think what would have happened in your childhood to develop this animosity towards a fictional character.”
*Editor’s note: upon investigation, the term “anonymous subject” in this context might have been used inaccurately to refer to someone who the writer asked personally as this response was not included in any of the online form results which we tabulated.
Without a doubt, overwhelmingly, the response to the question “Don’t you agree with me when I say that Grimace must smell terrible, like booze and alcohol from all of his benders on Saturday nights even though he had to take me to little league baseball games every Sunday?” was some form of yes, no, or statement of confusion. All of which obviously in this case mean they agree with the facts.
Interestingly, when asked to comment on the smell of the beloved and wonderful McDonaldland character Birdie the Early Bird, some criminals slandered the good name of Grimace’s poor unfortunate wife who’s just trying her best despite a hard situation — they said things like, “I guess feathers would trap smells in the same way that fur does.” Well they’re wrong because unlike some people, Birdie washed her costume every day after work by hand before microwaving me hotdogs for dinner, so she smelled great.
All in all, it’s obvious that Grimace needs to be fired from the Crystal Lakes strip mall branch of McDonald’s outside Richmond, Virginia so that he finally gets a wake-up call and maybe also realises that writing listicles can be a real job, actually. And everyone agrees with me.
And just to be clear, he stinks.
