Twinkie the Kid Killed in Shootout

 
GUNPOINT, AZ: Twinkie the Kid—adventurer, Western icon, and longtime advertising pitchman beloved by millions—was gunned down at noon yesterday in what witnesses described as a proper Old West shootout. Twinkie’s unknown assailant, identifiable only by a red kerchief and black hat, fled the scene on horseback and is still at large.

Born in River Forest, Illinois, Twinkie the Kid was filled with the spirit of adventure shared by lesser-known Old West figures such as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Woody Pride. This zest for life was fueled by his unconventional friendship with the disreputable Captain Cupcake, whose lavish lifestyle and wanderlust took the unlikely pair to all corners of the Earth.

The captain boasted often of having “a Suzy Q in every port,”
but for a time, he and the modest Twinkie were inseparable.

 
Twinkie’s reputation remained somehow unblemished by the poor taste and shady exploits of the dissolute Cupcake, who dragged the too-willing Twinkie into a notorious succession of scandalous escapades and dangerous adventures. None of these adventures were more famous than their ill-fated Nile River expedition of 1958, which ended abruptly when Twinkie, wandering intoxicated along the shores of the Nile alone after a forty-three-hour drinking contest with Cupcake and English actor Oliver Reed, was attacked and critically wounded by a vicious Chocodile.
 

His urge to see the world diminished by the slow, painful recovery form his gruesome injuries, Twinkie made his way to Hollywood, California, to try his hand at acting. His youthful good looks served him well in the movie business; while other actors aged and were put back on the shelf, Twinkie remained remarkably well-preserved even after several decades under the lights. 
 

Twinkie the Kid at age twenty-five (left), and again at seventy-eight (right).

 
Perhaps even more notable than his film career, however, was his long and tumultuous relationship with famed Canadian snack cake May West—a series of very public fights, affairs, accusations, and reconciliations that entranced the public and ended only with her tragic death from consumption. Ever the gentleman, Twinkie always refused to divulge private details of his turbulent life with the icy morsel, preferring to state only that their relationship was “wonderful and sweet, but terribly unhealthy.”

Above: a typically revealing racy photo of the provocative May West.

 

Already reeling from the loss of May, Twinkie spiraled into a deep depression after being indirectly blamed for the 1978 murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk. Worried that the public thought he’d finally gone bad, the Kid isolated himself for years, and after a failed attempt to break back into film—he narrowly missed out on playing Gozer the Destructor in 1984’s Ghostbusters, which catapulted the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man to the A-list—Twinkie quit the movie business and ventured back out to the American West that had loomed so large in his childhood imagination.

In Arizona he made a living as a rancher, rustler, merchant, and occasional gunslinger, the desert air clearing his mind and the hard sun baking his spongy skin a healthy yellow. But even there, living his dreams and filled at last with serenity, Twinkie the Kid could perhaps see the seeds of his downfall.

“Folks would always ‘go heeled’ around the Kid, trying to stir up trouble,” says Twinkie’s longtime friend and ranch-hand, Fruit Pie the Magician. “I reckon you’re shocked to hear about gunfights in these parts, comin’ from where you do, it bein’ the Twenty-first Century and all.

“Well, the Twenty-first Century ain’t gotten here yet. This is Arizona.”

Fruit Pie blows his nose into a red-and-white handkerchief and pauses for a moment to collect himself. “I reckon I’ll take solace in the fact that Twinkie the Kid died the way he wanted: with his adorable little cartoon boots on.”

The coroner’s report reads that Twinkie the Kid expired on June 24, 2011, at 3:00 Arizona Standard Time, from multiple gunshot wounds. Not mentioned on the report is how Twinkie’s puzzling physiology itself may have hampered his treatment—or so believes Gunpoint General Hospital’s Chief Surgeon, speaking off the record and under a guarantee of strict anonymity from his office on the hospital’s twelfth floor, right between the water cooler and the pharmacy:

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Twinkie’s abnormal physiology contributed to his death,” says the anonymous Chief Surgeon, stroking his distinctive handlebar mustache and his memorable horn-rimmed glasses. “When we open up a trauma victim, we usually see what we expect—heart, lungs, kidneys, intestines. Once in a while we spot something a little unusual like an internal third nipple, or a six-chambered heart, or a splancreas—but that’s all just normal biology. This just wasn’t the case with Twinkie.”

Small shunks of viscous white goop still stick to the hair of his forearms, all the way up to his elbows. They smell fainly of dried sugar, and vanilla, and death. 

He gestures at them, tries a couple of times to brush them away, but they cling to him like guilt, sticky, implacable, and delicious. “This is what was inside Twinkie—and nothing else. We tried everything we could, but in the end, I don’t think there was anything we could have done. Frankly, there’s not a doctor alive who has any idea what this shit is.”

He stands up and gestures politely to the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for lunch. There’s free sponge cake today in the cafeteria.”

 

Aflac Duck Not Insured against Stupidity

Abrasive comedian Gilbert Gottfried has been fired from perhaps his most recognizable job—providing the voice of insurance giant Aflac’s frustrated talking duck—mere hours after tweeting a series of jokes that made light of the destructive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011.¹ As of this writing, more than 1,500 people have died, and that number is almost certain to continue to rise.

Now, to be fair, the idea of “laughing in the face of death” is an old and venerated one. No less a writer than William Shakespeare illustrated it memorably in his gory and generally messed-up tragedy/revenge fantasy Titus Andronicus, in which the protagonist—we forget his name—having witnessed the last of a long series of horrific indignities and evils done to him and his family by his enemies,² bursts into not sorrow but laughter, stating “I have not another tear to shed” before starting to act crazy and getting down to some truly awful business.³ His laughter is jarring, even shocking, but it reveals a man not callously indifferent to suffering and misery, but one overwhelmed by it.

Duck (bottom), and dick.

But we would give Gottfried—probably neither the first nor last person to be given the nickname “America’s Creepy Uncle”—entirely too much credit by comparing him to Shakespeare,⁴ and there is significant difference between an imaginary character’s barking out mad laughter at the horror surrounding him, and a real live human’s making cheap jokes about real-world death.⁵ 

There’s much to be said about timing, too, and timing—despite generally being crucial for comedy—does not appear to be one of Gottfried’s strengths. At a Friars’ Club roast of Hugh Hefner, Gottfried famously joked about his concern that his flight out of town “had a connection at the Empire State Building.” He told this joke in New York City, mere weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The crowd did not respond well, but Gottfried managed to salvage the evening with a particularly inspired rendition of perhaps the most famously offensive joke ever told,⁶ and clearly left the building without having learned a lesson about things he shouldn’t say, and when and where they shouldn’t be said.

Gilbert Gottfried appears to have been unaware that laughing in the face of death is only noble—or even halfway human—if you’re laughing at the prospect of your own death. Laughing in the face of other people’s deaths is, almost without fail, disgusting.⁷ We don’t know the point in time at which it will become acceptable to make jokes about what has happened in Japan over the last week, but we’re very sure that that point doesn’t happen while rescuers are still searching for bodies.

NOTES

1. In the interest of good taste, those jokes will not be repeated here. In the interest of questionable taste and a desire to keep our readers informed, however, a link to a short list of them has been provided. If you can find it.

2. Among them: Titus kills one of his own sons for defying the Roman Emperor; the new Empress, wishing revenge on Titus, allows her sons to violate and mutilate Titus’ daughter; Titus later cuts off his own hand to spare the lives of two of his remaining sons, but they are executed anyway and their heads (and his hand) returned to Titus to mock him. After that, though, the play gets kind of messed up.

3. If you’re not interested in watching Julie Taymor’s intriguing but weird and exceedingly grim Titus, check out the South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die.” You’ll wish you hadn’t, but if you can filter out the weirdness, the Hannibal Lecter references, and the guest appearance by Radiohead, you’ll get the gist of Titus Andronicus.
4. A reasonable comparison between Shakespeare and Gilbert Gottfrield would involve their height: Gottfried is 5'5", and Shakespeare lived four hundred years ago, so he was probably pretty shrimpy. Also, Shakespeare, having acted in his own tragedies, probably died on stage plenty of times, and we suspect that Gottfried has too.
5. We’re basing this statement on the tenuous evidence that Gilbert Gottfried does, in fact, exist.
6. We would prefer that our readers do not attempt to look up this joke for any reason, especially readers that are, for example, our mom. That goes for “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” too.   
7. Eddie Izzard successfully joked about Hitler’s death, but of course that’s an easy exception to make because Hitler, as Izzard correctly understated, “was a mass-murdering fuckhead.” Exceptions to the rule against joking about others’ deaths are few and far between.

Walt Disney No Longer Spinning in his Grave

 

Your marketing department’s worst nightmare. Just ask Fathead.

Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, having passed for 3 touchdowns and more than 300 yards, was named Most Valuable Player in an exciting 31-25 Super Bowl XLV victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers on February 6, 2011. Perhaps as important as providing a thrilling game, satisfying advertisers, or entertaining hundreds or millions of American football fans worldwide, however, is the simple fact that Rodgers’ performance ensures that he, instead of alleged rapist¹ and established asshole Ben Roethlisberger, will be the one going to Disneyland:





The prospect of having to shun the Super Bowl MVP for their traditional postgame advertising bonanza must certainly have cost the folks in Disney’s marketing department several uneasy nights, but almost certainly not as many as the prospect of forcing millions of American parents to explain to their daughters that Disneyland was no longer the Happiest Place on Earth, or even a safe place to be.²

Legendary animator, theme-park entrepreneur, and overall nice guy Walt Disney is once again resting in peace.

NOTES

1. We at Bowling in the Dark understand that Roethlisberger was not actually prosecuted for rape, and hence will continue to use the word “alleged” in connection to the alleged actions of which we’re inclined to believe he’s guilty. We also respect the law to the fullest extent required by law. However, we would like to point out that Al Capone, according to the legal system, was guilty only of income tax evasion.

2. Especially the women’s bathrooms. Allegedly, of course.

Separated at Birth: V and the Burger King?

   

Clones, stunt doubles, or long-lost evil twins? And how are we to tell
which one is actually the evil one?

Geneticists and conspiracy theorists have long speculated on the possible relationship between V for Vendetta’s mysterious masked antihero and Burger King’s über-creepy masked, uh, Burger King. We may never know if these two are indeed evil twin brothers—or, if so, who we should thank for separating them so many years ago and sparing the world the horror they surely would have wreaked had their strengths been combined—but I’m not convinced that’s even the most important question to ask.

The crazy ones always get the girls.

More important is this: If you had to choose to be doggedly pursued to the ends of the Earth by one of these two, which would you pick? The verbose but violent, vengeful, potentially psychotic and mercilessly murderous anarchist V, a master of explosives, edged weapons, and poisons, with both the will and the ability to kill you in any of a dozen creative and probably ironic ways if he’s convinced you’ve wronged him . . . or the Burger King, a creepy dude with a ridiculous frilly collar, who wants only to sneak into your most private spaces, hand you a hamburger, and then leer at you with his fucked-up plastic head?

I don’t know about you, but I’d take my chances with the guy who’d probably plan to kill me. I’m pretty sure that once the Burger King is done with you, he takes your soul.