Please Hold For Your Listing

LISTS ARE FUN. They are the shortcut to comedy. I published a lot of lists on Kittenpants over the years, like this and this and this.

But listing can become an obsessive habit that lasts forever. Uncle Sloppy, and I would get stuck on a topic and wear the fuck out of it until the list reached its pinnacle of cannot-be-topped. Then we’d forget about it for a while, and then list some more. Examples, you say?

Celebrity Knock Knock Jokes. (Richard Pryor who? Richard Pryor hands off that crack pipe! Etc.) This started as a road-trip driving diversion and lasted from rural Pennsylvania to Brooklyn, NY. Just as we pulled up in front of our apartment, John started to cry from laughing and finally choked out the words “Tempest Bledsoe!” I did not quite make it to the bathroom in time. Who’s there? Pee pants.

Rape lyrics. For whatever reason, John had a group of us substituting the word “rape” and other rape themes into every song ever written (“Despite all my rape I am still just a man in a cape“). This lasted for days – maybe weeks. It ended one night at 4 a.m. when I left him the following voicemail: “Clap your hands everybody/If you got what it takes/Cause I’m Kurtis Blow and I want you to know that These. Are. The Rapes!!“

Band Names. John’s the prolific one here, with his definitive list (an, [incredibly] abridged, 18-page version appears on KP) that has been crafted for over a decade. But my new Twitter is carrying that torch into 2010.

The Ninth Configuration of Morrissey. Okay, this is more inside-joke-gone-too-far, than listy, but John and I replace all Smiths lyrics with two quotes from The Ninth Configuration: “Colonel, what are you holding?” and “I cut off his head with a wire, but it kept on talking.” Just imagine singing either of those lines with Morrissey’s voice and you get it. You may not like it, but you get it. I like it and I get it.

I started listing in high school. All the cool kids were doing it, and I couldn’t withstand the peer pressure. Okay, none of the cool kids were doing it. Or maybe they were. We didn’t have cool kids at my high school. But it began when my friend Rhonda and I spent ALL NIGHT singing up new idiotic verses of the “Diarrhea song” (“When you’re talking to your dog, and your pants are full of smog, diarrhea…”) and has been a compulsion ever since.

Which brings me to today, and what made me think about my listing obsession. My friend Howard sent me the BroMania list-in-progress, which is a project fueled by hours in a tour van logged by the members of Centro-matic, and continued by the bros in Tre Orsi and The New Year.

Centro-matic bassist, Mark Hedman, explains: “See, wha’ had happened was, we started talking about the need to expand our list of salutations. Addressing someone as “cuz”, “captain”, or “commodore” will motivate a vanmate to pass the pretzels/current issue of Maxim only so many times… The solution? Delve deeper into linguistic depravity by commandeering the Abercrombie & Fitch attired salutation “Bro” and grafting it with the newly pioneered context reference technique of [attaching any noun or verb that could describe a person's current action or context].”

The result is the Encyclopedia Brotannica, conveniently Google Doc’d for you here. I asked Howard if I could talk about it in this article. He answered, “Brotally.”

Feel free to list your loves and hates of this post in the comments.