Almost Meri'ed Bonus Materials or Samuel Cooper Stand-up Comedy

On January 8^th, Samuel Cooper tweeted some choice bonus book material (viewable here) for his dozen or so devoted followers, saying only, “Funny story from my book, Almost Meri’ed” and attaching a screenshot of 6 different jokes, supposedly all told to women acquainted with the Zero, of varying lengths. Since this material is promised, by the author, to be in my final copy (still holding my breath, waiting on my pre-order) I feel bound to give this stuff the old Bullshit Book Club treatment.

The Zero sets up his comedy routine by saying, “Here is a short list of some of the truly dumb things I have said to a woman. All resulting in some form of physical smack, slap, or at a minimum The Look:” Things that have resulted in the Zero getting smacked around? Color me interested.  Really, don’t hold back any detail of, what I hope, is merciless physical assault. 

Slapped you say?

 

Wasn't I was just saying a few pages ago that humor is ridiculously important to the Zero, despite not coming off as funny to any degree, and here comes this treat. We’ll get to see just what sense of humor our Zero has, maybe even why he holds humor as such an important value in others. I am all a tingle.

It’s the first joke and I’m already going to throw my bullshit card down. “Why does your mom have a pink rocket ship in her bedside table,” the 15 year old Zero asks his unnamed female associate. “… I found out later it was a neck massager,” ba dum tss. Yep, the Zero finds a vibrator and is just too gosh darned naive to know what it is, end joke. I think I’ve heard a joke like this before; I know I’ve actually seen it before- not recently, but within the last ten years. It was a commercial in fact- a banned Ikea commercial in 2008 in which a giddy 4 year old is happily playing with what he thinks is a rocket ship (you can view it here). 

It makes a hell of a lot more sense for this funny story to work with a cute clueless 4 year in 2008 than an idiot 15 year old in 1988; Kate is going to take one for the team and tell you why. I’m going to date myself and admit that I was barely alive in the 80s, I was born at the very tail end, and I had next to no idea what a vibrator looked like in 1988, when the Zero should have been 15 years old. So, I turned to Google and learned more about the history of the vibrator than I have ever cared to know. Apparently, in the 1980s the vibrator was still very much in the closet. To put it in context, even today, only 53% of study respondents, women aged 18 to 60, said they had, or were probably willing to admit they had, used a vibrator. Two decades ago the number would have been half that. Self-pleasure wasn’t a concept people were talking about; the 1989 film When Harry Met Sally is credited as being one of the first pieces of mass entertainment to broach the topic publically. Manufacturers definitely weren’t catering to this market back then; vibrators mostly existed for the purpose of personal or neck massage- what you did with them was your own business. They definitely didn’t look much like the streamlined phallic devices they are today- you’d probably mistake most of them for bizarre kitchen appliances before ever confusing them with a rocket ship.

NASA Rocket ship c. 1983

Joke two is absolute horseshit, has no basis in reality, and most certainly never happened. The Zero asks a female what a button marked ‘Do Not Touch’ does and sets off the sprinkler system in an office building by pressing it. Ba dum tss. I swear, you can find out absolutely everything on the internet; in researching this joke I ran across an article called “Fire Sprinkler Myths Portrayed on the Big Screen,” published for professionals working in the fire safety industry. Evidently this is fundamentally not how fire sprinkler systems work; they state that this myth most notably appeared in the 2006 movie Casino Royale, in which the villain pushes the same button in an airport, setting off all the sprinklers. “Of course, it’s pure fantasy, since no such button exists,” the Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition wrote angrily, and yes, apparently such a coalition exists. 

 Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition- visual approximation

In joke three the Zero muses, “I wonder what came after Z in the first alphabet, Z minus?” in front of Lisa’s parents and close relatives. Ba dum tss. I had to stare at this one awhile; even now I'm barely sure I know what it's referring to. I think the Zero is drawing some sort of lazy parallel between the alphabet and the grading system. No idea why it’s supposed to be funny, though.

Joke four invokes one of the most popular television tropes of all time, the “Your other left,” joke (Tv Tropes). The Zero is moving a couch with an unnamed female and asks her, “What? My left or your left? Your left looking down at me is my right! Your left or you left?” The female is then so disgusted by the banally common question that she leaves him holding the couch and slams the door “twice.” Ba dum tss. I can’t even with this. This is just so unfunny. Every time someone moves anything in my household, 'hey, are we going your left or mine?' is probably asked. No one is trying to be funny; outside of slapstick sitcoms, it’s a pretty valid question. If you responded by storming out and slamming doors I’d look at you like you’d grown three heads.  And where have I seen this "twice" joke delivery lately? It was definitely somewhere. 

Oh, weird. Well I guess it’s because the author is so close with his best friend that they’d tell a joke in the exact same way and with identical punctuation. Same great minds I guess.

I'm not wasting much space on joke five- it doesn't deserve it. The Zero asks a female, "How dumb is your sister? Just a little dumb or does she drool after she laughs," Ba dum tss. If some douche bag asked this about my sister they'd find themselves kneed in the groin, twice, because that makes it funnier.

In the last joke the Zero defends his title as the laziest mother fucker on the planet. The Zero didn’t know just what sort of animal a Llama was at the time of this joke; to this day, as a 42 year old business tycoon, he still doesn’t. It’s kept him up at night, but fuck if he’s going to invest any time to figure it out. He theorizes it might be some type of camel or a “giraffe slash horse thing,” but, in his mind, there’s really no way to be sure. 

 

Well, Kate to the rescue. “Google, what is a Llama?” A domesticated pack animal of the camel family found in the Andes, valued for its soft woolly fleece. Done! The greatest mystery of your life solved in 24 keystrokes. How should we be expected to believe the Zero runs a company? I’m surprised this sack of useless can tie his own shoes in the morning. 

Anyhow, the Zero’s unnamed female friend asks him what one sounds like. “Not wanting to sound stupid, I let off a combination of some donkey like HeeHaws mixed in with 2 squawks and followed it up with a few V twin motorcycle engine rumbles.” Ba dum tss. Hmm, I don’t want to sound stupid, and I know I’ve never heard a single animal in nature sound anything like a motorcycle engine… so I’m going to say they sound like a motorcycle. Solid logic. The Zero muses that, as a reader, you’re probably pissing yourself laughing as you try to imagine the sheer genius of his sound effects, “It will either make you laugh until you cry or think outloud This guy is a moron.” And try to remember, if you’re thinking the latter, that he’s got thick skin, doesn’t care what outsiders think and your brain is probably just too dumb to understand him properly. Unnamed female asks him to do it two more times before succumbing to a 10 minute long hysterical fit because it’s just the best thing she’s ever heard.

Guess what he thinks you sound like

If you meet Samuel Cooper today, you won’t by the way, he won’t tell you what a Llama sounds like. He’s discovered they don’t sound even remotely close to what he haphazardly conjectured. No, you don’t say. “Hey, I tried,” he insists. You did buddy, you really did; that's what makes all of this really really sad.

-Kate