best one so far

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called ‘Ego’.

mildly amusing

Pair random Nietzsche quotations with random Family Circus cartoons. HERE.

And despite what one of the commenters says, my understanding is that parody virtually always has legal protection from copyright violation (though I’m certainly no lawyer).

ADDENDUM: Though I am almost never a snob when it comes to pop culture, I loathe The Family Circus. Come to think of it, I also loathe Garfield and several other popular strips. Those cartoonists are lucky I am not world dictator because I would tempted to abolish their livelihoods. I realize it’s mostly personal bias, and pass no judgment on those who disagree.

On the other hand, Bazooka Joe, which is objectively even more stupid than these others, is a strip I find so bad that it’s good. That’s an aesthetic question worthy of further reflection… When do stupid things cross the line from stupid banalaity to “so stupid it’s funny”? Admittedly the verdict would vary from person to person, but this relativistic observation always misses the interesting point… The interesting point is– given that a specific person finds something to be “so stupid it’s funny”, what are the characteristic features of such a scenario? And I suspect that those features are invariant from person to person, even if the verdicts on specific caes obviously are not. I think the same is probably true of beauty and all other aesthetic and comic effects.

The relativizing objection to any philosophical statement (“it’s all in the eye of the beholder”) never has much value except as a banally necessary precuation against overhastiness. I find it to be closely related to the “critical” method that I also detest as a pardigm of intellectual activity.

a Poe parody

Here’s the first stanza of a fairly well-known parody of Poe’s “The Raven” entitled “The Mammoth Squash.” The first line is genius, though the rest of it falls a bit short of its potential in my opinion.

Green and specked with spots of golden,
Never since the ages olden
Since the days of Cain and Abel,
Never such a vegetable,
So with odors sweetest laden
Thus in our halls appearance made in.
Who- oh! who in kindness sent thee
To afford my soul nepenthe?