An Open Letter to the Women at the Pool Last Night

Hello.  I'm not sure if you noticed me, or if you've seen me around.  I know I have seen you before, and while I don't know your names, I have come to know you as "They Who Lack Volume Control".  I had hoped that was your only vice.

Last night I encountered you at the BYU-H swimming pool, where three of you had decided to inhabit one of the swimming lanes.  As a person who swims laps, I and my ken are rather dependent on the existence of available lanes.  You, meanwhile, seem to have chosen to not only take up this lane, but to remain at the shallow end, wrapped cozily in floatation devices, talking to one another in the piercing voices that have become your trademark.

I could have excused this if there were an abundance of open lanes; if there were no area where you could sit besides the lanes; or if you were even occasionally swimming what could be called a "lap", but alas you fulfilled none of these exonerating criteria.  While there are many health advantages to swimming, there are relatively fewer to standing around shouting jovially at one another while partially submerged in water.  Your inactivity rather defeats the purpose of whatever you hoped to accomplish--as a matter of fact, I do not even have a clue what you were trying to do, but I do know you failed, so useless was whatever it is you were--and I use this word loosely--"doing".

I could see quite clearly that all three other lanes were doubled up for nearly the entire time I was there.  I noticed this while swimming back and forth, so you have no excuse for not noticing it while you were doing little but existing in a particular space, unless for you the mere act of existing takes up so much of your energy and focus you are unable to consider that others exist.  I have considered this possibility, as your existing moniker suggests.  Some people, myself included, even attempted to use the rest of the lane to work around you, functionally making you inanimate obstacles.  However, an inanimate object does not occasionally shift and shout and sway and cast dirty looks in just such a way to make working around it more difficult.  From this I can extrapolate that you are more useless than literally useless things.

I think you fail to understand that you could have stood just about anywhere in the pool.  Frankly, the pool was extraneous for what you were doing.  I'd wonder if you know how chairs work.

If you haven't gotten the gist, I hate you, mesdames.  You might not the worst people in the world, but your faults--that is, being so self-involved and stupid and stubborn that you are unable to recognize that you are not only being inconsiderate to others but gaining utterly no benefit from it--are the kinds of thing that I consider the worst traits a person could have.  You're the same kind of people who speed in residential zones and join pyramid schemes and I hate you.

How not to be a teacher

I've been attending schools of some kind for some fifteen years now, and in that time I've been able to pick up on some of the things teachers do wrong.  I thought I'd shine a spotlight on some of the stupidest and most easily fixed.

1. Don't discourage negative feedback.  This one goes first because it was only really a problem with one teacher, and I'm working my way from least to most stupid, roughly speaking.  If a few more had done it, it would be much lower on the list.

My Senior year of high school it was, in English class.  We gave two presentations during the year, one per semester, and the requirements for the audience were to write down the name of the presenter, their theme statement, the books or other works they cited, and a piece of positive feedback.  Only positive feedback.  We were not allowed to say anything bad about them, unless we cushioned it with about a dozen "Oh, but this part was so good so don't feel bad."  Bad enough, except that we, the presenters, did not even get to see what other people said, which defeats the point of feedback in the first place.

I've said it before: being a critic is simple, if not easy.  Find something you like, find something you don't like, explain why, and everything else is terminology.  If you don't discern between "good" and "bad" or otherwise analyze a work, then you're not reading a book or watching a presentation, you're watching someone jingle their keys in front of your face.

If I were to talk about all of the stupid things the students did with that relatively simple assignment, this would be an entirely different rant (I will say that I started doing mental shots every time someone referenced Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" speech), but for this particular bullet point I will just say that the entire point of doing a presentation in class is to get better at presenting and that's impossible if you don't know how to improve, or even worse (and what this teacher did) pretend there's nothing that needs improvement.

2. Don't teach a language like you're a phrasebook.  Teach grammar, not just words.  This one goes out more to those "You can learn X-language!" books than actual teachers, but people don't learn how to speak a language from phrases.  What they learn is how to parrot, which is not all that useful in the long run.  If even one of the words in each given sentence is changed, then everything they learned becomes useless, and considering how rarely those books update it's pretty much a guarantee the vernacular has changed since it was published.

But yes, there are teachers who teach like this.  In my French 1 class, we learned how to say "I am hungry" but we didn't learn the word for "food" until French 3, despite a couple of people straight-up asking the teacher "how do you say 'food'?"  Among other things.  Our school really, really did not have a good French program in general.

3. Don't grade essays based on your own extraneous guidelines.  Here are the guidelines for writing an essay: Make a point, then prove it.  That's it.  That's to what it all boils down.  Everything else is accessory to that goal.  Now, the point of things like MLA formatting and the intro/body/conclusion system are there because they make the essay clearer and they're a good way to organize your ideas, but that's it.  That means that if someone breaks from these molds, you should not grade them down if doing so makes their point clearer.

It gets even worse the younger you go.  In sixth grade, we were told we should never start two sentences in the same essay with the same word (or was it just the same paragraph?  I forget, since I've pretty much ignored it since then).  It's a decent rule of thumb to avoid getting repetitive, but it can also (very easily) be a good way to send clarity to hell.  But I had to do it anyway because I'd lose points if I didn't.

A recurring theme of this was being marked down for not including enough quotes.  If quotes are not conducive to an argument, then they should be omitted; they can be dead weight on your essay, particularly one based largely on induction.  Additionally, how can you use a single quote to wrap up an overarching theme from a large body unless said body outright states its point, which is downright bad writing on its part?  Paraphrasing the events of said passage and then extrapolating the point from it would be excellent form, but many teachers would tell students they should have used a quote instead.  Even worse, this can cause students to believe that just any quote will support their essay, since it will be graded all the same.  One of the student-made Animal Farm posters in my Freshman English class included four utterly inconsequential quotes from Snowball.  The teacher didn't care.  She deemed it not only worthy, but exemplary, and hung it on the wall.  This annoyed me from the very instant I first saw the poster, and told me that it wouldn't be a good year.

This can also go the other way: in the aforementioned presentations, we were required to have a visual aide.  For every single student except for myself and one other, the "visual aide" was a poster or collage of the movie posters or book covers of the works they cited.  This does not even vaguely help illustrate your point, particularly when your entire interaction with said visual aide is "For my visual aide, I used the cover of the book we all read and thus have all already seen the cover of, and the movie poster for Wall Street, which I cited."

4. Don't assign "fun" projects.  In that same Senior English class, we had to film a recreation of a scene from Hamlet.  Golly, that helped me learn about                     .

In fact, we weren't even allowed to make drastic changes, like when I suggested a science-fiction theme and was immediately shot down for being told it would be "too silly".  I'm going to put aside how that hurt my pride as a science-fiction fan, but it also illustrates how little this assignment had the potential to help us.  It would make sense if it was a film class--and in fact, I did do several similar things in my film class--but it isn't.  What practical English communication-related skills are we learning, except how much working with other people sucks?

I won't put scare quotes around "fun" if it is an activity which promotes learning which happens to be fun.  The problem is a lot of times "Oh, my students will enjoy this!" is not "How can I help them better understand the course material?  Oh, I've got it!  And it'll be enjoyable!"  I like watching ice water induce boiling, and it helped me understand how pressure affects phase changes.  That's fantastic.

Heck, even pointless showmanship is okay in moderation.  If you want to kick off a semester by showing off how awesome the course material is, you don't necessarily have to explain it.  As long as it slots into twenty minutes you couldn't have used otherwise.

If we could eliminate these "fun" projects that aren't all that fun anyway, then we could probably add another book to the curriculum or make the school year shorter.  I don't think many students would mind the change.

5. Don't penalize internet use.  One of the posters in my college's library says "Google can find you 10,000 answers. A  librarian can find you the right one."  Now, I've dealt with the BYU-H librarians, who are unable to find the correct answer to "Where is the fiction section?", but even ignoring that the quote (which, by the way, comes from a BYU-H faculty member since no one quoteworthy would actually say that) overlooks the fact that in the time it takes a librarian to find the correct answer you could have found nine or ten correct answers with Google.  I'd by the quote as accurate if he'd said Bing, but no one uses Bing anyway.

I'm still honestly surprised every time a teacher (like my 201 teacher, to whom I shall refer as Mr. Ludd) says "The internet is not reliable".  It's 2012.  Yes it is.  Are you unfamiliar with the massive list of citations at the end of every Wikipedia article?

To all the Mr. Ludds out there, yes, the internet is a fantastic resource.  I think you're just bitter that you didn't have it and you want to make your students work as hard as you did.  That's still possible, actually, but you're doing it the wrong way.  Instead, encourage them to use the internet, but then hold them to a much higher standard than you would have back in the olden days of yore since they have a much better resource.  It will lead them to make much better essays and research papers, which is a good thing, instead of forcing them to spend much more time to get an equal result, which is a bad thing.

6. Don't penalize reading ahead.  I haven't really had a problem with this one since elementary school, but it really, reaaaally got to me.  Because the class elected to read the book out loud, I had to sit and patiently wait for whoever was reading to get through any word more than one syllable.  And despite all his sputtering and vowel sounding and, he was not the one struggling.  But I dare not, oh, I don't know, read at my own pace, since when the teacher called my name and I had to backtrack six or seven pages, that counted as "being disruptive" and I was duly punished.  Great idea, teach.  That's how you get kids to enjoy reading, by making them stare at the same word for a good thirty seconds because little Billy, who is not me and whose reading ability is not mine and has no impact on mine can't figure out how to say "business".  Perhaps you could encourage better running speeds in PE by tying all the students together at the ankles.

How about instead, you give students power to opt out of group reading?  It would mean they get a better experience since they get to go at their own pace and it would mean the students who opted in get a better experience since they don't have to wait for the kid who got three chapters ahead to skip back to their level.  That's just one of the literally infinite better ideas than what they do.

7. Don't pretend you know things you don't.

Possible scenarios, from best to worst:

-Student asks question

-Teacher gives correct answer

-Student asks question

-Teacher does not know; looks up correct answer, gives student correct answer

-Student asks question

-Teacher does not know; tells student to look it up

-Student asks question

-Teacher does not know; instead, gives student over-simplified or otherwise wrong answer

-Student clings to this answer

It's okay not to know things.  It becomes a problem when you act on your ignorance.  If you're a teacher, then presumably you want your students to love to learn.  This begins with you being willing to do so yourself.

8. Don't grade homework.  Okay, this might not actually be the stupidest item on the list, but it's my list, and this is the one that has caused me the most grief at its sheer idiocy.

Homework is a good thing.  It's practice for the test.  The test evaluates how much a student has learned.  Learning is the point of the class.  How could we entirely subvert this whole system for the worse?

I've got it!  Let's grade homework.

Let's look at four very real and very common possibilities:

Like I said, homework is a good thing in theory.  But if a student does well on the tests, then it proves that she didn't need to do the homework, but if homework is graded, then she is getting penalized for not doing something she did not need to do.

For another example, let's examine the idea of grading rough drafts.  If someone does not do or turn in any rough drafts to a paper and turns in a great paper, that student should get an A.  They should not be marked down because they didn't bring in the paper three times prior so the teacher could tell them how to improve, because clearly the student figured it out on his or her own.  Again, they are being punished for being better than the teacher expected.

In addition, this means that students can often pass a class with little understanding of the subject or fail a class at which they have excellent comprehension.  I got a C in AP Biology; a class where I knew demonstrably more than the teacher, set the curve on all but two of the tests, and got a 5 on the AP test and 800 out of 800 on the SAT subject test.

I'd almost be willing to overlook this if it wasn't trickling up.  I sat in the dreary lectures I could have delivered myself and fantasized about when the grade would be determined 33% by the midterm and 67% by the final, but that hasn't been the case at all at my college.  Instead, they modeled it after high school classes.

To prove that class performance is not strongly correlated to understanding, I decided to compare AP scores and class grades here.  The resulting best-fit line has an a-score of .578 and an r² of .105, and for those of you don't speak Statistics that means "they're not related in any significant way".

If students are getting good grades on the homework and bad grades on the test, it means it's the teacher's responsibility to retool the homework and find something that works.

The interesting thing is, this one I can't really pin on teachers.  Studies on the subject show teachers don't like assigning homework any more than students like doing it.  The problem is actually a third element, the parents, who have an entrenched expectation that there be homework despite this.  This could probably best be overcome by an adamant teacher at Parent-Teacher night explaining the very simple reason why he or she chose not to grade homework in their class.

These are the big complaints I have, at least: the ones that deal with quality, not presentation.  Let me know if you can think of any solid justifications for the measures I questioned.

Why The Seltzerberg Movies Fail

Spy Hard, Scary Movie (partially), Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Meet The Spartans, Vampires Suck, and the upcoming The Starving Games and The Biggest Movie Ever Made 3D.  None of them are good.  The best among them is generally considered to be Scary Movie, which was composed of three screenplays mashed together.  Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg have yet to create a movie that rates higher than "bearable if you're doing something else while it's on".  Why is that?  Well, obviously, because they suck, but let's look a little harder at why they suck.

The movies are allegedly parodies.  Let's start there.  The first problem is that most of the time it's pretty obvious Seltzer and Friedberg have not actually seen the movies they are attempting to parody and instead think that just having seen the trailers they are qualified to mock them.  As a result, their parody is shallow and witless and usually involves jokes of which everyone else has already thought, if there are any jokes at all and they are not just recreating a scene from the trailer with their own actors.  Occasionally, they just steal jokes from other comedies and think that counts as doing a parody of said comedy.  But I digress.  To do a parody, you have to actually be familiar with the subject at hand.  My policy on parodies is that they should be funny to anyone, but get funnier the more familiar you are with what's being parodied, something that simply cannot be true when the writers have not actually seen the movie or, quite often, not even looked up its summary on Wikipeda or IMDB.

Now, a quick side-rant before I continue.  Most subcultures have a sense of humor about themselves.  That is, the D&D players, the metalheads, the goths, the science fiction nerds--they are all aware that what they're doing is at least a little bit ridiculous.  They take it seriously, just not 100%, and the people who do take it completely seriously are the ones that no one likes.  Despite the stereotypes of these groups being composed of the rabidly antisocial and humorless, most of them are perfectly nice people who happen to share an affinity for a certain game or genre or style and the culture surrounding it.  Back to the subject at hand:

As Mel Brooks said, "You have to love the things you parody."  When a parody is made with love, it will itself be beloved.  Many great parodies, such as Galaxy Quest, Metalocalypse, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and many episodes of Community are beloved by members of the culture they mock because of their affectionate touch.  In fact, in many cases, they even work as part of the genre itself (Dethklok's albums have sold quite well; Batman: The Brave and the Bold has some genuinely touching moments; Galaxy Quest won a Hugo Award.)

On the other hand, more direct or Juvenalian parodies such as Shrek (yes, it's a kids' movie, but hear me out) are made with a great amount of bile and hatred for their subject of parody (in Shrek's case, for squeaky-clean Disney values), but these can still work, if not quite as well.

The Seltzerberg movies, however, do not do any of that.  They are not motivated by feelings towards a particular film or genre, be it love or hate.  They are motivated by a desire to make money.  You'll recall in my Hot Chelle Rae rant I said "they don't want to make music, they just want to be musicians"; here, Seltzer and Friedberg do not want to make comedy, they just want to be comedians.   The result is a creatively sterile and utterly ineffectual non-parody of nothing in particular.

Of course, some parodies work even despite this.  Airplane! derives surprisingly few jokes from its genre of choice, aside from the overall story.  Instead, Airplane! makes use of a premise the writers found to be naturally ridiculous and instead of a parody, most of the jokes can be though of as using the premise as a vehicle for the Zucker-Abrahms-Zucker style of comedy, and it worked.  However, Seltzerberg fails at this because they do not write jokes.  They write references.  Airplane! uses plenty of references, but it always makes sure the reference doubles as a non-reference joke, even if it simply means ending the scene by having someone run into a control tower.  Seltzerberg movies reference pop culture trends and quote famous movies without thought of context or humor, thinking that just by pointing at something else they are being intelligent.

Now, why the Seltzerberg movies continue to exist is the subject for a rant for another time, but I always find (and hope that others who read this agree) that one of the best ways to learn how to do something better is by watching someone else fail and learning from their mistakes.  If nothing else, Seltzer and Friedberg have succeeded in providing a number of excellent non-examples of how to do a parody.

The Beatles

Holy crap, an update.

On the internet there has apparently formed a rather large backlash against The Beatles from people saying they suck various things they probably did not (I say "probably" because it was the sixties).  Anyway, the backlash seems to come less from the band's music and more from the fact that they are so often billed as "the greatest band of all time".  So let me state clearly: the most important and influential rock band of all time?  Perhaps.  The best?  Probably not.

Rock and roll, like most genres, changes and evolves as time goes by, and every once in a while it needs to be reshaped, typically whenever the existing style has started to grow stale.  The grunge revolution of the 90s, for example, or the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll attitude of the 70s.  The Beatles were one of the bands that did this, famously starting the British Invasion of the late 60s and early 70s.  So to understand why the Beatles were so huge, you should understand the stale state of rock and roll before they arrived.

Record company executives are not a new phenomenon, nor are they particularly worse now than they were in the 50s and 60s.  For years the basic formula was "pick up a bunch of kids that might or might not know how to play instruments, call them a band, sell a million albums, repeat".  And it worked.  Enter The Beatles.  The thing that made the Beatles so big wasn't so much that they were especially good, it's that they were better.  Now, I happen to own a pretty solid collection of vintage Mad Magazines from the era, and for several months after their introduction Mad was willing to brush off the Beatles as another one of the over-hyped talentless kludges of the era, albeit one that deserved a bit more attention due to their ridiculous hair and silly British accents.  They came around, but the fact that they could keep this up shows that the Beatles were not mind-blowingly talented performers or song-writers.  A lot of the backlash towards the Beatles comes from this period of music, and whenever someone says "The Beatles are the best band ever!", someone else is sure to bring up "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

The thing is, though, the Beatles were at least competent.  They could carry a tune, and pretty soon people were willing to admit they could hum along with most of their songs.  This is what I mean when I say "they weren't good, they were better"; they were better than just about anything else on the radio or in the record store, at least when it came to rock.  And unlike many performers, they didn't stop improving once they got famous.  They kept practicing and experimenting and getting better.  When people talk about the Beatles in hushed, reverent tones, they're almost referring to their later stuff, typically starting with Revolver or thereabouts.

Anyway, we all know the story.  John goes Yoko-loco and the band breaks up.  This is where we get to the other crucial part of the Beatles: their legacy.  The Beatles were pioneers of a number of things that have become mainstays of pop and rock: the I-V-vi-IV chord progression, the use of instruments besides guitars, bass guitars, and drums in rock music, multi-track vocals, even just the idea of slower, more methodical rock like "The Long and Winding Road"; even if they didn't invent the ideas or use them first, they were the ones that codified their usage and they're the reasons we still use them today.  A pretty impressively massive number of musicians will claim their inspiration was the Beatles or an artist or group who were themselves inspired by The Beatles.

Famously, when asked if he thought Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world, John Lennon replied "He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles."  So, no, I'm not going to ask you to like the Beatles.  Like any band, they have a particular style that some people like and some people don't.  But I am a little sick of hearing they suck.

"HAGS"

Back when I was in middle and high school, I hated yearbooks.  My policy was "I've been at this wretched place for four years.  I will remember it plenty without the aid of a $110 paperweight."    My Junior year, my parents forced* me to buy a yearbook, which I have since thrown away.  Since then, I have never once, even for an instant, had anything resembling regret my decision to not get a yearbook.

[* And I do mean "forced".  I tried to warn them.  I do not feel at all guilty about wasting their money.  They wasted it.]

Despite this, I do not have a problem with other people getting yearbooks.  That's your prerogative.  And if you wanted me to sign it, I did.  However, every time I did, I saw an acronym for which I have an intense hatred, one I have not been able to fully vocalize until now.

"H.A.G.S.", or "Have a great summer", is awful.  First of all, it doesn't sound good.  It could easily be replaced by, say, "Have a nice summer", which forms the much nicer acronym "HANS".  That sounds much better.

Of course, my problem with it is not how it sounds, it is what it means: nothing.  It means nothing.  "Have a great summer" is bad enough, but some people decide four words is too much.  Four words.  So they go with "HAGS".  What are you saying with that?  I reiterate, nothing.  You are writing something down but you are saying nothing.  You are recklessly wasting ink.

"But what if I can't think of anything else to say?"
Then why on earth are you signing their yearbook?  Either you don't care about them, in which case you don't need to sign their yearbook, or you don't need to say anything else to them, in which case you don't need to sign their yearbook.

If you were taking a series of surveys which included the options "If 'yes', explain below; if 'no', continue to the next question," you would not check "no" and then add in the comment box "I have nothing to say here".  Or "IHNTSH".

And while I didn't have a problem signing people's yearbooks, I do still think of it as stupid for pretty much this reason.  If you're not going to remember the person, why get their signatures?  Why get their signatures in a particular book filled with signatures?  Couldn't it just as easily be accomplished by, say, blank paper, if there is something that cannot be said any other way?  I could buy that using the yearbook would save on paper if yearbooks did not now include about a dozen empty pages just for signatures.  And if you do want to remember them, then you already have a book with their picture in it.

I've been out of high school for a little short of a year now, and I've already started forgetting people.  Does this make me sad?  Do I wish I had some way to remember them?  No.  I don't care about them.  Hence "forgetting".  I can therefore save that brainspace for things like how to avoid hangover, which despite not drinking is still more personal and interesting than any of the brain-dead banshee seatfiller in my assorted classes.

Facebook has already made this tradition (and yearbooks in general) more obsolete than phone booths and pet rocks, which still have some value for some people compared with the alternatives.  Yearbooks, meanwhile, cost somewhere between $60 and $110, while Facebook is free.  In fact, even if you couldn't afford a computer, you could probably get a secondhand laptop for less than the cost of two years' yearbooks.  One, if you found a good deal.  But enough about yearbooks in general.

If someone gives you their yearbook to sign and you just intend to say "HAGS", it would be far easier to just say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I don't really have anything to say."  That may sound rude, but they'll find out that's what you mean anyway when they read their yearbook and see that you just wrote "HAGS".  In fact, I'd have less of a problem if you just signed your name and nothing else, because that's at least not pretending you have anything else to say.  Saying (in essence), "This is my name.  This is how I write my name.  It is in your book," is quite exactly equivalent to "This is my name.  This is how I write my name.  It is in your book.  Have a great summer," but more concise and accurate.

You don't care what kind of summer they have.  At least, not in any real capacity.  You certainly aren't hoping they have a bad summer in most cases.  But does that count?  It counts in the same way as being against child abuse or cancer.  Who on earth is in favor of them?  And if you did care about them enough to actively hope for them to have a great summer, you wouldn't be writing "HAGS" in their yearbook.

The Nice Guy: A Webcomic Review

“The Nice Guy”, written by Michael O’Connell with art by Tim Watts and color by L. J’amal Walton, is a travesty of a webcomic which is held together only by its own myopia and utter ignorance of itself.

It starts out:

Didn’t they already make this into a show?  I think it was called “promptly cancelled”.  Your idea is not novel nor interesting enough to sustain a webcomic.  Typically one places the horse in front of the buggy, but hey, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job.

Actually I am.

Therefore, the soundest career advice I can give is “Quit now.  Stop trying.  Never touch paper nor a keyboard again.”

Anyway, the website itself is pretty well-designed, I’ll give them that much.  It’s about the only nice thing I can say about this travesty.  But hey, why bother talking about something that’s going to be so totally eclipsed as to cease to matter?  This webcomic sucks irredeemably.  Let’s talk about that.

Let’s take a look at the characters:

At the very best, we have a boring character.  We know nothing that makes him distinctive or memorable or which makes him seems like an interesting person.  The closest we get is that he’s supposed to be some kind of uber-nice messiah, our beleaguered everyman.  The problem is, real people aren’t like this.  They have interests more specific than “romance”.  This isn’t a character outline, this is a dating site profile that gets zero hits.

“Rejection” does not count as a “turn-off”.  No one likes rejection.  That does not make him special.

As a result, the only defining characteristic of this character is his name.  And even that’s pretty boring.  Seriously, “Jeff”?  You are bound by nothing but limits of your imagination, and you come up with “Jeff”?  You’re trying to make a memorable character and you name him “Jeff”?  That’s like one step above “Johnny” for boring male lead names.  By the way, has anyone else noticed how many terrible movies have leads named “Johnny”?

 Johnny.

 Johnny.

Also Johnny.  It’s like romance novels and “Grace”.  But I’m getting sidetracked.  The point is, Jeff sucks as a character.  But that’s okay.  Maybe he’s our Jerry Seinfeld, and the jokes aren’t about him, they’re him responding to everyone else.  Spoiler alert: he isn’t.  If he was, he wouldn’t be nice.  He’d have to be a jerk.  I bring this up because as we read the comic, we find out Jeff actually is a jerk, but he’s still not funny.  They have masterfully sidestepped any attempts at making this character endearing.

Okay, what about our supporting cast?  Next up is Frank.

Okay, at this point I’m beginning to suspect our author does not know what “turn-ons” and “turn-offs” are.

“But how else could I tell people up-front he’s cynical and apathetic?” says the author, hypothetically.

“You rewrite your character profiles, you idiot.  And while you’re at it rewrite your characters and your comic,” I reply.

Give him interests or something.  I get the feeling you didn’t fully think through this character.  Now, I’m a writer, so if I may, let me attempt to empathize with the author here:

“Oh, man!  I just thought of a great joke!  But how can I set it up?  Oh, I know, I’ll make one of my characters angry, because that’s the kind of character I need for this joke to work!”

I’ve been there.  So let me tell you, it is a terrible writing process.  Comedy comes naturally from well-developed characters and situations, not vice-versa.

Moving on now, we have Peg.

While in theory this meets my criterion of him having interests, I’d like to point out the list reads as: sports, clubbing, food, sex, cigars, picking things up and throwing them, beer, Call of Duty, leaving his underwear everywhere, forgetting anniversaries, and testosterone.  You see the problem.

Also his “turn-offs” just says “Hassles”.  Like, wow, really?  I would never have guessed someone disliked hassles.

And now perhaps the worst addition to this impressively-bad cast, Becki.

Becki is barely a character; the only thing that keeps me calling her a character is the technical definition.  She exists solely as Jeff’s primary conflict.  Oh, who am I kidding, only conflict; multiple plot strings is far beyond this comic’s capability.

“Aloofness”.  They aren’t even trying to be subtle.  This reads like Jeff wrote it, since it basically just lists the problems Jeff finds with her rather than, I don’t know, making her sound like a person.

Are you going to give us any insight into this, or just act like this is enough information?  What is her opinion on the matter?  Surely she must have realized she has a negative pattern, if it is the sole defining characteristic in her life.  She can’t even say, “I like knitting and I often pick bad men”.  She has literally nothing else about which to think.

“Men being nice to her” is a turn-off, says the self-described “nice guy”.  Okay, I’m going to come back to that.

So, our comic begins here:

Already we see some of the recurring problems with the comic.  The first and most important being: Jeff is not a nice guy.  He does not respect women for their minds, and he is not some poor maligned gentleman pushed aside by women only interested in jerks.  While you could say that I’m only saying this because real life doesn’t work like that, it doesn’t even work within the microcosm of the comic.  This author had the power to distort facts as much as he wanted, courtesy of artistic license, and he still can’t make his main character likeable.

The fact that she has a boyfriend means he no longer cares what she’s saying.  What she’s saying, need I remind you, is reflective of her personality, the thing about which you so fervently claim you care.  Because you can’t hump her as of the present.  You see the problem right?

The problem isn’t that you’re nice, Jeff, the problem is that you’re a jerk.  Speaking as an actual nice guy, I have, since about Freshman year of high school, had a nearly constant stream of beautiful girls throwing themselves at me.

Yeah, you laugh. 

Okay, fine, a little misogyny.  I’ve certainly seen worse things.  I’ve laughed at worse things.  If I need to remind you, I have in the past not only laughed at but made jokes about 9/11, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust.  The Nice Guy distinguishes itself by not being very funny.

 Funny.

Funny.

Not even a chuckle.  The problem is not rooted in its sexism.  I'm certainly no white knight, it's just simply not funny.

I guess my problem with this is sort of similar to my biggest problem with Twilight: it’s not just that the protagonist is an unlikable martyr-complex hypocrite, it's that we’re supposed to agree with them and all the horrible selfish things they say and do.

But don't worry about them just making unfunny sexist jokes over and over; they're making the same unfunny sexist jokes over and over.  I’ve got some punchlines here: let’s take a looksie.  First up, “making a bet”:

 Next, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

A quick aside on this one--most of the time when there are a certain number of characters it’s because that number is necessary to the style and structure of the work, at least in cases where the work is good.  In this case the roommates, Black-Haired Unit and Blonde-Haired Unit, are entirely redundant characters.

And of course their personal favorite, “You’re disrespecting women and I’m disapproving of you.”

Move over, Gary Larson.
Now, I’d like to point out that in every case, he ends with some variation of “I give up”.  Those are some solid convictions which you can not and will not uphold there, Jeff.

And of course there’s just the flat out “Guys besides Jeff are jerks" angle.

  At one point, eschewing all pretense, they just flat-out end with a “yo momma” joke.

Saying something is stupid doesn’t make your joke funny, especially so when you're blatantly laughing at your own jokes.  Saying something is stupid in a funny way is funny.  Learn the difference.

But of course the biggest problem with this webcomic is Jeff and his belief that he is the sage Nice Guy who just needs a chance to show Becki he can make her happy.  To him, I say this:

Clearly this show is important to you.  We know you’ve known Becki for a while.  And yet you’ve never had a conversation long enough for you to even tangentially mention Firefly?  The show you faithfully watch every month?  On top of that, your “soulmate”--hold on, those scare quotes aren’t big or sarcastic enough:

“ soul mate ”

is someone who doesn’t even like your favorite show?  I mean, in a relationship, it’s not required that you like every single thing the other person likes, but if you don’t have any common interests, it’s usually a sign you’re not meant to be together.  Which would be fine if you were just in it for the sex instead of a long-term relationship.  And for as much as Jeff seems to dislike that Filler Characters B and C only date bimbos, Becki seems to be a pretty stupid hot girl.  More importantly (and remember I said I’d get back to this), it seems to me all too likely that Becki is not turned off by people being nice to her, she’s turned off by Jeff because he is a colossal dick.

Okay, nerds love nerd jokes.  This is particularly true of webcomics, where “geeky” is considered the norm amongst the audience.

 The Nice Guy has the “nerd” part down... sort of.  Its references are skin-deep, but they’re there.  What it doesn’t have down is the “joke”.

I can’t really explain the joke here for the same reason I can’t tell you much about Bigfoot.  I can’t quite say it doesn’t exist, but the evidence is spotty at best.

See, here’s the thing: an homage is not the same thing as re-using a joke.  An homage requires creativity, taking something the creator admires and putting it in a new light that both takes new humor from it while it shows affection for the original.  To explain what I mean, I'm going to show you this example from Malcolm in the Middle, which I could not find in video form:

 Malcolm: (laughs) Check this out.

Reese: What does it say?

Malcolm: Just read it, it’s funny.

Reese: I don’t read.  Not unless I absolutely have to for school.  Otherwise I feel like they’ve won.

Malcolm: You’ve never read the paper?

Reese: No.

Malcolm: Not even comics?  Like Peanuts.  You’ve never read Peanuts?

Reese: Nope.

Malcolm: Are you serious?  You’ve never read Peanuts?

Reese: Uh-uh.

 Malcolm: Go ahead!  I promise I’ll hold it!

See what it did there?  How it turned the old joke into a new joke?  How it used what someone else made along with its own existing comedic context?

This is what The Nice Guy does:

We’ve seen this before.  It’s.  Not.  Funny.  It doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

So we’ve pretty much confirmed the writer has absolutely no understanding of how comedy works.  But of course, the comedy was just a secondary goal.  The primary purpose of The Nice Guy is for the poorly-disguised-if-at-all author stand-in can talk about how terrible it is being him.

Oh no!  Gaining a new friend!?  How awful!  Sex is the only thing that matters.

By the way, I’ve already touched upon the sexist overtones that border on the hilarious considering their context, but I feel like I should at least cover the rest of that comic:

Ha ha!  Frank slept with a fat girl!  Everyone knows that means she’s worth less as a person.

And Becki is such a great person, isn’t she?  I don’t know how Jeff keeps his hands off of her.  Seriously, dude, what do you see in her?  When you were a little kid, did you think, “Someday, I’m going to marry a woman that’s stupid, insecure, and easily manipulated!”  If you did, then I’m starting to suspect you might be evil.  Like, hard-core, old-fashioned, Lifetime-Movie-of-the-Week-husband material evil.

Showing Peg constantly scoring because he’s callous to his sexual partners?  You really do respect women, don’t you, Mr. Author?

Okay, I’m going to have to be discriminating here, since there’s something horribly wrong with just about every one of these ~75 comics.

 Ha ha!  Frank likes Firefly.  That’s the beginning and end of this joke.

You’re so thoughtful and considerate, Jeff.  That seems like the perfect time to solicit sex.

Aaagh.  It’s really hard to narrow it down.  I need to step out for some air.

*****

 Okay, while the comic is mostly episodic, it has had a few small story arcs, a term which is misleading in implying there’s a story.  There’s the “summertime”... temporally sequential comics and the “worker’s comp” temporally sequential comics.

The best part of Becki is how she looks in a bikini.

That’s being too generous.  It implies there’s another aspect for it to be better than.

For as much as I dislike the fact that they're so blatantly objectifying women, they have at the same time created a woman with no use outside of being objectified.  I'm not sure how to feel.

SO FUNNY.

The comics take place one after another, but there’s no build-up or pay-off as a result.  Story arcs are there to develop characters and tension in a way that episodic comic strips can’t.  What did we learn here?  It’s just repeating the same non-jokes that we’ve seen in every comic before.

The workman’s comp arc: Frank fakes an injury, sues the company, and then he gets found out when the insurance people catch him playing basketball.  I’m not going to show it here because it would be redundant.  You’ve seen it before.

I have one more complaint about the writing, but I want to save that for the end.  For now, I’m going to focus on the art.  What can I say about it?  It’s... okay... I guess.  I’ve seen worse.  At the same time, though, it’s pretty obvious they’re not trying very hard.

 

Look at those poses!  That’s how real people stand!

What, did you take an art class and drop out after the first day?  “Ha ha!  I’ve learned what I need to know!  So long, suckers!”  I mean, I’m no artist--

 --but even I find this shameful.  Also the mouths are all way too big.  They scare me.

I take it Ctrl + C is getting a lot of use there, eh Watts?

Okay, now one final complaint, lodged against what I believe may be the single worst entry in this portfolio of growing shame in my gender:

Wh... what is this?  Is he joking?  He thinks it makes him a good person to not consider date-raping a girl?  That doesn’t make you a good person!  That qualifies you as a person!  Are you so horrible that you would disregard everything you claim to believe for sex with an unconscious girl?  You unforgivable hypocrite!  “You’re better than that”--clearly he isn’t!   “I deserve some counterpoint”?  You’re trying to rationalize date-rape?  You’re asking for someone to tell you to rape someone?  Keep in mind, you’re arguing against the angels.  I think we’ve found our devil in this equation!  The devil is telling you to do things more innocuous than the thing you were already contemplating doing!  You horrible human being!  Have you no sense of morality!?  I can’t even ask “don’t you realize raping is wrong?” because you obviously do and you’re trying to talk yourself into it anyway!  You are Skeletor!  You are Verminous Skumm!  You are Judge Doom!  You are evil for the sake of evil!  You are not a “nice guy”!  At this point I am willing to say you are beyond saving!  Get out of my sight, you repulsive slug!  You tremendous waste of carbon and peptides!

This webcomic is terrible.  No one has any reason to read it, and I’d be happy to never so much as hear of it again.  I say good day to you sir!

-Curly

Good comics cited: Boat Crime, XKCD, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and Hark! A Vagrant
Johnnies from The Room, Battlefield Earth, and Cool as Ice, respectively.