Insane Entertainment Especially For Cure Fans

[SueC]

OK, so I'm new to the forum and had an insanely good laugh here already with various people posting witticisms and clips of insane things - like Otto doing a Heino caricature, which you can catch on the German "Parkplatz" thread here...

http://curefans.com/index.php?topic=9194.msg770382#msg770382

So I thought we should build a special thread of insane entertainment, where we can all post anything that has us in stitches.

As this is a Cure site, what better place to start than existentialism.  If you've not yet faced the tomes of Sartre etc, and / or you keep falling asleep trying to read them, and / or they make you weep so much you need IV fluids while reading, this little link will help you out tremendously, because it is such a nice summary of the ideas behind existentialism...

https://pvspade.com/Sartre/cookbook.html

While we are dealing with classical reading, here's some applied literary stuff: How to insult someone creatively while growing your vocabulary and maximising your own amusement...

http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/shake_rule.html

And if that doesn't make you laugh, surely this next thing will.  It is a collection of music jokes so mean that my husband and I once spent three hours nearly rupturing our diaphragms and weeping hysterical tears reading and re-reading it when we were really supposed to be asleep...

https://osbornmusic.com/jokes.html

After we recovered from acute acidosis of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles, we sent in the one about the difference between a harpsichord and a trampoline.  If you've got anything to add, just email the dude.

And now some music.  Here's an example of "alternative" alternative music...

And here's an old favourite Swedish TV chef...

Even Sesame Street has its moments...

A friend introduced me to this character...

My husband and I are quite crazy and play a lot of word games, like turn-taking impromptu storytelling where you get a sentence and then it's the other person's turn, and you can really hijack each other's agenda.  So when we do yet another story about the purple crocodile (a character we invented in an early game), he usually tries to kill my princess by having the crocodile make a meal of her, and I keep on saying, "But she wasn't really dead, and what really happened is..."  You can try that at home, it's great fun.

Here's a crazy story we made up together one afternoon:

https://sue.coulstock.id.au/the-garden-of-edam/

If you ever have a large group of people around, you can play the storytelling game by passing a soccer ball around and the person who gets it has to add the next sentence, and then pass it on.  If you do the passing on randomly (but include everyone), you can really keep everyone on their toes.  And for extra mayhem, you can play this game one word at a time, but this only works if your group has a good understanding of grammar, as well as the ability to hyperfocus.

Another good game is the drama game "House" - for which you need at least two groups of around 6-8 people. Each group secretly chooses a room they're going to represent, and each person in their group then chooses an item of furniture, or possibly an appliance, used in that room, which they are going to mime (no talking allowed, but noises are OK, like whooshing if you're a washbasin).  The groups practice in separate places, then come back and perform in front of the other groups, who have to guess what room the performing group is and what items each of their people are.  As one person in the group is always a token human, this person goes around their group making use of the items the others are miming.  Which brings us to another rule:  No sitting on other people - you have to pretend, e.g. for using a sofa or chair.  The funniest mimes inevitably include the wheelbarrow (garden shed mime), and the toilet (almost everyone miming that tends to kneel on the ground with their arms looped in front of them to suggest the toilet bowl).

What weird pastimes do you have?

And what has you in stitches?

While we're on this, a few years ago I saw a clip on YouTube somewhere of The Cure busking, doing Home On The Prairie.  This was hilarious.  I didn't bookmark it, and can't find it now.  Does anyone have the link?

[SueC]

Something else:  A lot of you would have enjoyed the comedy aspect of Love Cats (I thought the taxidermic specimens in the clip were a nice touch and wonder where they were borrowed from!).  Musical jokes on the theme of cats are a time-honoured tradition; in classical music, the most famous of them is probably Rossini's Comic Duet For Two Cats.  There's various performances of that piece on YouTube, and it's worth checking them out to see how different performers swing this one.  My personal favourite so far unfortunately has aspect ratio problems with the clip, but I thought it was worth looking past that because the facial expressions and demeanour of the two singers in it are so brilliant...

Other cat-related fun includes this classic from Aaron Copland:

If you like this kind of thing, we can recommend a little Australian compilation.  The title and tracklist are in the link; then you can take it from there.

https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/5751037?q&versionId=6686724

One of my favourite tracks off it is this... Wagner performed with flute, recorder, accordion and crumhorns...

A recording you can use to play tricks on people is this one:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/grunt-sandra-boynton/1111743346

It's a bona fide choir performing Gregorian chants, except they're surreptitiously singing things like Old Macdonald Had A Farm in Latin and Pig Latin.  You can put this on as background music when you've got particularly devout people around, and they'll think you're catering to their spirituality... even as the choirs intones E I E I O... hope you've got a poker face!


To something a little more modern, I'd like to introduce a fellow Australian to you by the name of Kate Miller-Heidke, if you've not heard of her already.  If you have because of Eurovision, forget that - this is different.  Here's her version of Talking Heads' Psychokiller:

Here in Australia, we have this aberration on television by the name of Australian Idol. Here's Kate's take:

By the last part of this song, I'm always crying laughing...

[SueC]

OK, who wants to launch a rocket in their own kitchen?

You will need a pair of scissors and an old-fashioned teabag - the rectangular type with a staple in the end and no crimping at the bottom.

Cut the teabag straight across the top close to the staple, and unfold it.  Put the contents in a teapot and brew the traditional way later.

You should now (if you had the right sort of teabag) have a tube you can stand up on its end.  Stand it on your cutting board in the middle of your kitchen bench (away from curtains and combustible objects), and make sure it is stable.  Avoid having draughts in the room - have windows closed, no fans going.  And then light the top of your rocket all around with a match.

Just when you think nothing is going to happen, it does!

If you're nimble, you can catch your rocket on its descent back to earth with the aid of a bucket or similar container.  Saves cleaning up. :-)

And now explain how it works.    (References to the kinetic theory would be great!)

[SueC]

In case anyone hasn't seen this yet...

[SueC]

Anyone who'd like a comic with a difference, this is from Brett's regular list, and both thought-provoking and amusing:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/102

A friend, when we sent her this, sent us the following clips in return:

[SueC]

Something fun that the lovely Elizabeth got us hooked on:

[SueC]

Here's a sketch on marriage counselling from the classic late 1990s Australian series Seachange, which pointed a fine lens at common Australian foibles. Bob Jelly here represents a man barely evolved above cave-man level; unfortunately we have quite a few like that here - and Heather his long-suffering wife, acutely in need of emancipation.  Delightfully acted...

[SueC]

[SueC]

We already had the Shakespeare Insult Kit in an earlier post; here it is again:
http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/shake_rule.html

These two related excellent pages have been kindly brought to my attention this week:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/10-shakespearean-insults-that-work-better-than-modern-ones-a6998416.html

https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/shakespeare-insults/

Thank you! 

[Ulrich]

Who would bring "insults" to your attention? Crazy people everywhere, huh? 

[SueC]

Well, I think the definition of sanity is the ability to cope well with the insanities of other people. 

[SueC]

I think it is time to turn our attention to suitable drama for this thread.  As such, I will recommend a couple of things:

Wrapping up for today with a re-interpretation of Mr Darcy's first doomed marriage proposal from the film in that last clip:

"...and please accept my best wishes for your health and happiness!" 

[Ulrich]

I think you might like this one:
https://lithub.com/lord-byron-used-to-call-william-wordsworth-turdsworth-and-yes-this-is-a-real-historical-fact/

...the Romantic poets used to make fun of one another using (what else?) the kind of wordplay that reminds you they were basically all adolescent boys. According to Michael Wood's recent essay in the London Review of Books, about Susan J. Wolfson's academic book Romantic Shades and Shadows (published in August 2018 by Johns Hopkins Press), the poets used to make fun of William Wordsworth's so-literary-it-can't-be-real last name. Samuel Coleridge playfully referred to his own poem "The Nightingale" as "Bird's worth," while Lord Byron, ever the jokester, referred to Wordsworth as "Turdsworth."

[SueC]

This is typical adolescent boy humour.  Irish comedian Dave Allen used to talk, in an exaggerated Irish accent, about "Richard te Turd"...

In Germany they used to say this (and I blush to repeat it, but will do so for the cultural comparison):

Schiller sagt zu Goethe, "Dein Arsch ist eine Flöte!"
Goethe sagt zu Schiller, "Dein Arsch ist eine Triller!"

Did the boys at your school parade this ditty around?

There's also a terrible Australian schoolboy version of Waltzing Matilda, whose lyrics I know very well because the boys used to sing them very loudly when I was a student.

It starts like this:

Waltzing Matilda
Who bloody killed her
Lying in the grass
With a dagger... (I'm sorry, I can't complete this rhyme...)

It is terribly crass and crude, and like most schoolboy humour, has references to excrement, orifices and body functions... but I have to admit, I had sympathy for their singing of it, because when you're made to sing something you don't want to sing, you can at least redeem yourself from sheepdom by changing the words...

[SueC]

After getting in the gutter in the last post, I think it's time to post a link to something more...elevated.    This is from my "other forum" where all sorts of strange things happen because it has a lot of people like me on it, with hypergraphia and strange senses of humour.   

This is for the subset of Cure fans who enjoy Physics and / or black humour and / or working with animals. 

Please note that the missing photos in the first post (because we can't do perpetual edits there) are, in order of encounter, a padded racing vest and knight's armour.

https://www.horseforum.com/horse-talk/falling-off-nerds-789799/#post1970533577

Enjoy!