Public Ridicule

People like H.L. Mencken make me realize what a vulgar, unimaginative ass I am. Does anyone today have the kind of wit? Has anyone since? Let’s honor this early 20th Century satirist by reviewing some of his great lines:

Misogynist - A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.

Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Nature abhors a moron.

A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don’t want to meet them.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

There’s nobody like that today. Mencken makes Andy Rooney look like Britney Spears. Who am kidding? Corky from “Life Goes On” makes Andy rooney look like Britney Spears - bad example. The point is that wit like this is sorely lacking in modern times. There are those who come close like George Carlin and P.J. O’Rourke, but no one really stands above it all the way Mencken did.

Oh, how I wish he were here today.

Bill Hicks is sorely missed. If ever there was a time when we needed his scalpel to expose the underlying filth of our celebrity-obsessed culture, it’s now.

If you don’t know Bill’s work as a comedian/satirist, you owe it to yourself to become familiar with his work. To call the man a comedic genius, is understatement to his ferocious, raw power as a performer. He can’t be called “ahead of his time”, because he was perfectly suited for the times in which he lived. I guess “eternally relevant” is a better term. You could easily substitute Bill’s example of Debbie Gibson with Hannah Montana in his rants about the sorry state of music. I’m not sure Bill could have imagined how much worse music has gotten since his death in 1994. Is it any wonder that “Hannah Montana” is the spawn of Billy Ray Cyrus? Bill once dubbed him, “that no-talent, cracker asshole” and dreamed of hunting him down with dogs to “put a shotgun in his mouth like a big, black cock of death. BOOOOM!!!”

Public Ridicule salutes you, Bill. Thanks for being a beacon of hope.

A show that will live on forever. Timeless in it’s relevance and broad in scope, MST3K is deserving of the first honorable mention here at Public Ridicule.

The premise is simple - a guy is launched into space by a couple of mad scientists and is forced to watch bad movies. He does the only thing he can do - he builds a couple of robot companions and ridicules the living hell out of the films.

Do yourself a favor and check some of the greatest episodes available on DVD:

Mitchell
Manos: The Hands of Fate
Santa Clause Conquerors the Martians
Space Mutiny
Time Chasers (this whole set is fantastic)
Pod People

The show has been off the air for about 10 years now, but the riffing has continued.

Original host and star Joel Hodgson is now riffing bad, public domain films under the name Cinematic Titanic with many of the original MST3k alums.

Later host and long-time MST3k head writer, Mike Nelson, is riffing current movies in downloadable audio format for Rifftrax and older bad movies Direct-to-DVD with his companions from his tenure on MST3k. They call themselves, The Film Crew.

Satellite News is a great repository for things going on in the MST3k universe.

Discuss this completely kick-ass show on our Message Boards.

Segment from episode 512, “Mitchell” - Host: Joel

Segment from episode 820, “Space Mutiny” - Host: Mike