by Adam Carolla
I have to admit some hypocrisy here. I’m not immune to this. Typically I lie in bed on nonfootball Sundays and announce to Lynette it’s time to watch our shows. I don’t get ten seconds in before I need to pause it and break down the game film. We watch the Real Housewives, Biggest Loser, and one of my guiltiest pleasures, Catfish. For those of you not familiar, this is a show on MTV where the host helps guys who have been having online-only relationships finally connect with the women who, up to that point, they’ve just seen in pictures. Of course they’re disappointed and disillusioned that the person they’ve spent four years talking to, who they conveniently could never meet face-to-face, isn’t as advertised. If I had to describe the show in a tweet-length line, it would be “She’s the love of my life. She’s my soul mate. What, she’s fat? Fuck that bitch.”
It’s all made worse by the fact that the host, a guy named Nev, is the skinniest hipster dude in the world. Not one of the fat chicks he deals with has an arm circumference that is equal to or less than his waist. The only thing that makes people look fatter is putting them next to someone superskinny. He’s a waif model and his partner is a scarecrow with a camera. And not only is he emaciated, he’s dark-skinned, which makes the pasty, bubble-armed, corn-fed fat chicks really pop.
Every now and again I’ll also catch myself watching one of those ghost hunter TV shows, not because I enjoy them but because they make me mad. Every one of those shows is exactly the same. It’s a chick you would have wanted to fuck twenty years ago saying, “Did you feel it get cold? There’s a presence here, I felt it get cold.” That doesn’t mean you have a ghost, it means you have a draft. The sweep on your front door is no good. These people are frauds. I would like to do one of those ghost shows except in my version when the crazy brother-and-sister team with dyed red hair spout their bullshit about spirits and energy and feeling a presence, I pull out a .44, put it to their head, and say, “Do you really believe?” I’m not saying there isn’t unexplainable stuff out there. Ghosts could exist. I’m just saying they’re not going to present themselves to incest survivors who are pretending the proof is a two-degree temperature shift or footage from a video camera with the same night-vision technology Paris Hilton used in her sex tape.
I’M NOT OKAY WITH ALL THE K’S
Speaking of sex tapes and the decline of our culture, let’s talk about the Kardashians. Who knew we’d be talking about them this much? When that sex tape came out in 2007, Ray J was a much bigger star than Kim, and we’d never even heard of the other Ks in the Kardashian brood. Now we can’t escape them. If you combined the TV time of the Kardashian sisters, you’d have the life span of a sea turtle. They’re on Leno pitching fragrances, they’re doing reality shows about marrying NBA stars, they’re guest-judging reality shows as if they had some talent themselves. Someday there will be a President Kardashian. It’s never-ending.
It sadly occurs to me that at this point Kim Kardashian has spent more time being famous than Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, or Kurt Cobain. Andy Warhol said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” And for a while Andy was right. But nowadays everyone’s fifteen minutes of fame has become a three-day weekend. There’s no way Andy Warhol could have predicted the Kardashians. Imagine going back to 1968 and saying, “Hey Andy, remember how you were talking about in the future everyone will be famous but only for fifteen minutes? Well, there’s going to be a chick with a big ass who gets fucked by some black guy, we’re all going to watch it, and then she’s going to be a billionaire. FOREVER.” He’d take the brush he was using to paint a soup can, sharpen it, and stab himself in the throat. There is no expiration date on fame now. For the love of Christ, the fucking Octomom is still in the news. And of course she got into porn. A sex tape is no longer a scandal. It’s a career move. That is now the default for anyone with any kind of fame, or more accurately infamy. Hell, the so-called Tanning Mom who put her six-year-old in a tanning bed is now going to do a porn. Who is this for? Is there any guy out there thinking, “I’d really like to see someone fuck a leather purse”? This bitch looks like a California Raisin, the only reason anyone would watch her sex tape is for the pure gawk factor. Whether it’s Octomom, the Tan Mom, or the Teen Mom, we conveniently turn off our awareness that these are crackpots so we can all feel better about our own relative sanity and keep the perpetual motion machine known as TMZ going.
I was waiting to get my hair cut last year and saw the cover of a Life & Style magazine with Kim Kardashian on the cover. (I wouldn’t usually read this crap but I go to the ten-dollar Mexican barber and the magazine selection is usually this and Latina Entrepreneur.) It read “Court Bombshell: The Proof Kim Cheated.” Why the fuck should I, or anyone, give a shit about this? But more interesting was the subheading. “Her Dilemma: Settle for $7 Million or Suffer Public Humiliation.” I thought, “Suffer public humiliation?” You’re worried about your squeaky-clean image being tarnished by scurrilous accusations of cheating? I can pull out my phone right now, hop on the Internet, and within ten seconds watch a rapper nail you from behind. And second, settle for $7 million? You can accuse me of cheating for $7 million anytime. I’m sure Lynette would be just fine with it if I could bring home another seven million. Shit, I’d take it in the ass from Ray J for seven million.
AT LONG LAST HAVE WE
NO SENSE OF DECENCY?
And since our new role models are people who we’ve all seen fuck on camera, it’s game off as far as decency goes. I don’t want to sound like Pops Carolla, but as a parent, I can’t help but shudder when I see what this is doing to our kids. As president, I will do something about it.
Everyone lost their shit when Miley Cyrus did her whole twerking thing at the VMAs. For about ten minutes. Then we moved on to the next shiny object. We accepted it within a week. That’s the slippery slope of the slutification of America. Porn is now prime time. Every pop-star chick is trying to one-up the others in the shock value department. A few years before Miley, it was Madonna and Britney at the VMAs making out. By the 2015 VMAs I fully expect to see Nicki Minaj performing analingus on Justin Bieber.
This sexual state of affairs must be a windfall for sixteen-year-old boys. When I was a kid we had to wait for someone to steal a porn mag from their dad and pass it around. Now if there’s a pop star who gives you wood, just wait a week and a sex tape is going to come out, they’re going to be grinding on Alan Thicke’s kid at an award show, or you can catch a nice beaver shot of them coming out of a limo. For teenage boys nowadays, because of the Internet, the world and consequently your cock is at your fingertips.
When I was in high school my buddy Tom once invited me up to his place in the hills to watch Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. Tom’s dad was a hand surgeon and had some cash, so he had what was, at the time, a giant TV with this awesome new thing called “cable.” Tom told me about this masterpiece coming on two weeks in advance and the anticipation was high. For those two weeks I eagerly counted down the days. If my family wasn’t so pathetic we might have had a calendar where I could have diligently X’d out the days. After that long fortnight I dashed up the hill to gaze upon Mr. Meyer’s lovely, busty ladies, but when I showed up it turned out the whole thing was a ruse. It was the cover for my surprise eighteenth birthday party. It was a trap with Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens putting the bait in masturbation. There were 250 people from my high school there, all jammed into Tom’s backyard in my honor. This would have been a high point in anyone’s high school career and maybe life. But I was devastated. When they all screamed “surprise” I was crestfallen. Two weeks of titty anticipation only to get a case of birthday blue balls. At a certain point during the party I took Tom aside and asked, “But we’re still going to watch Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, right?” That’s how desperate we were for porn when I was a lad. Now you just need to put on HBO for five minutes and you’re going to see a couple sets of tits.
By the way, stop
trying to get me into Game of Thrones with your “lotta tits on that show” argument. I’ve seen tits. I have YouPorn on my computer anytime I want. I don’t need to wade through a bunch of gay shit about dragons and magic to see boobies. Jimmy’s dad talked my ear off for twenty-five minutes recently about this show. It was like when someone comes to your door to talk to you about Jehovah. I’m not buying what you’re selling. Move on. You might have gotten me back in high school when titties were scarce on TV and I had to suffer through hours of I, Claudius to catch a little side-boob. Now side-boob is on the front page of CNN.com. It’s like someone who lived in a desert subsisting off grubs and cactus moving into a 7-Eleven.
Not only has sex gotten more pervasive, it’s gotten more perverted. In a couple years when Sonny decides to pick up the family trade, he’s going to have a porn-of-plenty anytime he wants. He’ll be able to type in the name of any household object and watch a girl penetrate herself with it. If I showed my son a Playboy like his old man used to swap with his friends, he’d roll it up and beat me with it like a dog who chewed up a slipper. He’d be like, “No one is peeing on each other. This is an insult.” Plus he’s going to be in high school, have a crush on Becky and Suzy, and then come home, talk to his computer, and say, “Becky and Suzy lezzing out.” The computer will call up footage of that and Sonny will have at it. Or the computer will create a virtual version of it from the images on Becky and Suzy’s Facebook profiles.
And now that I’m almost fifty and have a daughter, this tramp golden age is not so much a boon for me as it is horrifying, or should I say whore-ifying. I came home recently and found Natalia in a bikini in front of a full-length mirror combing her hair. I asked her what she was doing. She replied, “I’m making a Rihanna video. I’m doing ‘Diamonds (in the Sky).’ ” She was going to film it on my wife’s iPhone. I’m assuming she was planning to use a new app called Daddy’s Little Whore. It’s not just seeing my seven-year-old daughter in a bikini wanting to emulate the chick who went back to Chris Brown after he beat the shit out of her that gets me, it’s that she has no idea that this video is forever. That shit is going to get dredged up eventually. With our constant Facebooking, Instagramming, tweeting, and Ustreaming, we forget that there is a future. It’s all about now. She doesn’t know that her future employer may see this and beat off.
You never saw footage of your parents fucking around, getting drunk, or screwing. My grandkids are gonna be able to find footage of their parents doing beer bongs and vomiting into potted plants, or worse, footage of themselves being conceived. When we were growing up all we had were grainy black-and-white pictures of our parents’ wedding and a trip to the Grand Canyon. Our kids will have footage of every moment of their life, high-definition glossy footage of their graduation, fucking around on skateboards or on spring break, and then their kids will say, “Hey, there’s mom at nineteen. She had a nice rack on her . . .”
My only hope is that it will all turn around. Maybe it will get so extreme that there will be a rebellion and kids will turn into bow-tie-wearing Mormons. Think about it. Punk rock gave way to preppies, which gave way to grunge. These things go in cycles. Maybe we’ve gotten so debaucherous that the only way to rebel will be to drive a horse and buggy, make your own furniture, and grow a beard with no mustache.
Even stuff that isn’t sex sounds like sex on TV now. The other night I was watching tennis. It was nine thirty, the kids were asleep, and the wife was upstairs. I think it was the U.S. Open, Serena Williams versus some Russian broad. The skinny Russian chick would let out this grunt whenever she’d serve or return, or when she was warming up, or really, all the time. I swear if a moth flew by and she swatted at it, she’d let out a hearty “UUUNNNGGG!” It sounded bizarrely sexual. My neighbors must have been thinking, “Carolla’s killing another hooker in the den.” I literally had to turn it down so Lynette didn’t think I was watching Skinemax. But then I couldn’t hear the announcers. So I changed the channel and switched to ESPN5 and they had the Strongman competition. A giant white dude named something like Magnus Von Magnusson was lifting four-hundred-pound boulders onto five-foot pedestals and making no noise. Complete silence. Think about that. Dead-lifting a four-hundred-pound boulder—not a peep. Swatting a three-ounce ball—the bitch can’t shut her trap.
My FCC will require a decibel meter on these female tennis players. It’s distracting. From now on you can make some noises, but you can’t sound like the Hulk taking a shit.
THE VAST WASTELAND OF KIDS’ TV
When it comes to modern children and TV, I think another problem is that the entertainment bar is too high. When we were kids we’d watch an episode of some Claymation crap like Gumby and Pokey or Davey and Goliath and that would be enough. Or remember the circus? When we were kids the circus was just a guy standing on a horse or a formerly hot chick who is now a little bit thick in the thighs holding a hoop for some poodles to jump through. Kids today cannot possibly be entertained by that. It’s going to be crazy when I have to explain to my twins that when I was their age we thought shadow puppets were entertaining. Someone would hang a sheet, take the shade off the lamp, and make something that looked approximately like an ostrich head, and that was our fun. Now kids need to see Travis Pastrana jump a Ski-Doo over a pool of nuns on fire.
As a dad, I’ve obviously had an assful of kids’ cartoons. It’s really sad. I’ll be sitting around with ESPN sports guy and fellow father Bill Simmons having a spirited discussion about Ni Hao, Kai-Lan and Handy Manny. We’re adult males, shouldn’t we be talking about the line on the Pats game and the latest edition of the Fast and Furious franchise? As a parent, you actually end up watching more of this crap than your kids. They only know when it’s not on. They’re usually not paying attention at all, but the second you turn off the Sponge-Bob to put on a little TMZ, they start wailing like stuck pigs. So you just surrender, and eventually you find yourself, again a grown-ass adult, picking the show apart and getting into it. You’ll be watching it, complaining quietly to yourself, “There’s no way a cat could bounce on its tail. This is such bullshit.” And then you spend your whole day with the stupid educational songs in your head: “If you have to go potty, stop, and go right away. Flush and wash and be on your way.” Oh good. I, a forty-eight-year-old man, definitely needed a refresher course on not shitting myself and then smearing it all over my hands.
And those are the kids’ shows that piss me off most: the ones that purport to be educational. When Mitt Romney talked about ending the subsidy to PBS and everyone went apeshit, I was completely on board.
This is a plan I will enact in the Carolla administration. Why should my tax dollars pay for this? Shouldn’t Sesame Street make enough off Elmo merchandise alone to fund PBS for the next sixty years? No kid can get through childhood in America without getting an Elmo bedspread, a Cookie Monster lunch box, and a Big Bird backpack. Where’s all that money going? Half of those episodes of Sesame Street are recycled shit from years past anyway. And how much writing really needs to go into one of those episodes? Do you need a team of people coming up with new ways to count to ten? “It’s taken us all night but I think we finally cracked it. We’ll count the oranges on a tree.”
The part where they say “this is educational” is such a cop-out. I’ve seen my kids watching these shows. They’re learning nothing. Mr. Moose is like, “Can you tell me which one of these is different?” Then he pauses for a 5 Mississippi and says, “Excellent. You’re so smart.” Meanwhile my kid hasn’t said a fucking word. He just sits there like one of the heads from Easter Island.
In fact I think most of this crap is making our kids dumber. Dora the Explorer is an attack on our intelligence. It’s for stupid people, made by stupider people. First off, she’s obviously a lesbian. Just look at the shorts and the haircut. Second, she has a sidekick that’s a monkey. That shit was fucked up in the sixties when Speed Racer hooked up with Chim Chim. Her other cohort is a Fox named Swiper. And guess what Swiper does? He steals stuff
. How fucking clever. I didn’t want my kids watching this crap, so I forced them to watch The Simpsons. Their nanny took me to task and told me it was too dirty. I said fuck that, I’d rather they be exposed to quality than some Hispanic bitch with a bob saying, “Can you find the apple?” and then pausing while they stare blankly.
There’s a couple other offenders too. Caillou is awful. The color palette is completely off and doesn’t make any sense until you realize it’s coming out of Canada. And why the fuck is he bald? Am I making my kids watch a show about a Canadian boy with cancer?
The worst, the one that sent me over the edge, the one that caused me to lay down the law with my kids and say no more was Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! There was a song on that show that epitomized everything that is wrong with kids today, and how we are ruining them. It’s called “Mr. Cool” and here are some of the lyrics: