McSweeney's Interactive

My bitter, cynical outcry has finally received an answer!

Today I wrote a letter to McSweeney's accusing them of no longer being funny, and I cited their week "McSweeney's Predicts" section as evidence. The letter, as it reached the McSweeney's Corporate Conglomerate, is as follows:

Dear McSweeney,
Not everything can be funny forever. Everything loses its humor sooner or later, so don't be upset when I say that you're losing your funny as I write. It happened before with the jesters of the dark ages, and the kings had them killed. It happened with Picasso, and then people started taking him seriously. It happened with The Simpsons, Tom Hanks, Saturday Night Live, the comics in the Sunday paper, and Democrats, and you, McSweeney, are next. I say this as a warning so that you might not follow their unfortunate paths.

I was not fully aware of your decline until I read McSweeney's Predicts. As I see it, your predictions fall into two categories: 1) virtual locks, and 2) uninspired and dull guesses. For an example of category 1, you give Lost a whole three year buffer before its cancellation. That's pretty generous for a show whose second season has been universally panned. They've only had two years so far, and only 50% of them have been good. They'd even be lucky if they had two more years of stories.

In category 2, you predict that Good Night, and Good Luck will win best picture. I can appreciate that because you were wrong, but it's not funny. It's normal. It's the kind of thing someone on the street would say. What might have been funny is predicting that one of the nominated films would not win best picture, though that would then have an 80% chance of being true and fall into category 1.

What makes you funny, McSweeney, is cleverness. Do not be dry for the sake of being dry. We are not British. Remember that.

With great concern,
Ben Robison

Minutes ago, I received a response from the McSweeney's "head honcho," as he delightfully did not call himself. It is as follows as well:

Ben:

Thanks for the warning. As you might imagine, I get one just about every other day declaring that we've sunk into irrelevance or unfunniness, or worse. Yours is more polite and reasoned than most. For example, the most recent one before yours came from a Steve who declared, "You suck beyond what I thought was possible in the realm of suckiness."

At the end of his message, he told us to "eat shit and die."

Strangely, most people are dismayed at us being "too clever," while you are concerned that we've lost our cleverness. I guess this illustrates the old you can't please all the Bens and Steves all the time axiom.

What can I say, but we do the best we can at providing free weekdaily entertainment. Invariably, and inevitably, we fall short in a thousand ways each and every day, but I've grown comfortable with that. It's worse to not try, or to swing like a pendulum trying to please Steve one day and Ben the next because then you're pleasing no one, particularly not yourself.

I'm sure our time will come eventually (or it has happened already) and people will stop reading or caring what we put in our Internet space. Some think we've never been funny, which may be true as well.

And yet, we will be here, forever, annoying the Steves and Bens of the world with our uncleverness (or overcleverness), because we believe. We believe.

Best,

John Warner
Website Editor

Though I appreciate this, I have a sneaking feeling that it's just a form letter with a programmable blank for my name. But what really dogs me is that he says he'd end up pleasing no one if he'd try to please the Steves one day and the Bens the next. Is he an idiot? He'd be pleasing everybody! I used to think the problem was that McSweeney was trying too hard, but now I realize they're all just lazy. This is perhaps a major reason why McSweeney's is not the brilliant whatever-you-call-it I once thought it was.

And I just realized that for his use of the word "shit," John Warner got a warning from Cigna telling him to shut up his potty mouth. I'm serious. They send those things automatically.