Following a funnyordie.com lead last night, I came across a mildly entertaining sketch where Will Ferrell plays a scarily believable condo-dwelling slacker, dodging rent in an intense confrontation with his landlord. The catch? [record scrrrratch!] The landlord's a toddler! Will Ferrell stars in, Baby and the Lease... rated PG-13.While the actual content of this surprisingly popular clip makes you wonder why Ferrell is wasting his comedic genius on shit that looks like it could've been written by an 8th-grader, what was more bothersome about my visit to this page were the viewers' comments below the video. I cannot claim to be contributing anything of real significance to the internet community besides the hits I give websites which keep advertising dollars flowing, but I also haven't surrendered my voice to the endless, mindless fodder of pages like this one. I can't really imagine what is going through these peoples' alleged 'minds' when they scrawl this poignant commentary. A viewer labeled mellmo explains: "MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE!!! SO FUNNY!!!" This clip is the single best thing she has experienced; the rest of her life is painful
and gray. Fair enough, mellmo. Posts of this nature are common and to be expected, but the vein in my forehead really starts pounding when posters try to recapture the clip's mediocre comedy as though they were accomplished critics with a knack for pinpointing just what makes comedy successful. Blackpenguin enlightens us: "i love pearl she is so cute….........IM JUST BUZZED…....I NEED TO GET MY DRINK ON…..she is a cute little alcoholic…....at the end she says come mommy so funny." Wait, is that what the last subtitle said? LOL! That is classic. Thanks, Ebert! These people make me want to vomit and unlearn English, not because what they are writing is particularly stupid but because they seem to think they are writing something entertaining or even important. Blackpenguin made sure to post this gem twice.As I said, I don't profess to offering anything significant to the world of user-based content and maybe this rant is just another offensive example of wasted human effort and focus, but I still wish there were better standards for the comments people splooge onto message boards so regularly. Any online media enthusiast has surely read a post or two that could make even mellmo here sound like Melville. The web is ours now, some weird brand of democracy so I guess we have to wade through an ocean of asinine commentary; we could respond to their posts with posts of our own but no one should ever lower themselves to that sort of pedantic bitching. Really though, if the mentally challenged couldn't exploit the web's user-based content arena, where would they go? Outside in the sunlight? Now I'm just talking crazy. Maybe these people just need the net as an outlet to prevent themselves from slowing down our non-virtual society like they did in the old days. I guess I still just wish there was some physical mechanism to punish these people, like a spring-loaded mallet. The baby from Ferrell's act was just laid off so at least these particular ignoramuses will be out of business for a while. Just remember, we get to make the internet now so let's combat incompetence and banality with slightly less useless fodder of our own.
