Monty Python, Hitchhiker's Guide, Illuminatus Trilogy, Tolkien...

In My Humble Opinion
41

Comic books. DC Silver Age. When it was new.

Science Fiction Week on the 4:30 Movie, especially any film with dinosaurs. Stop-action, guy in suit, lizards with horns glued on, it didn’t matter. Anything dinosaurs. And Angry Red Planet.

Earliest clear memories are from the Sinclair Dinosaur exhibit at the New York World’s Fair. The T-rex scared the spit out of me.

and Gilligan’s Island.

42

The Notebooks of Lazurus Long
The Callahan books
Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories
Allan Sherman’s The Rape of the APE(American Puritan Ethic)*
Highlander-the series

43

But Marge, these people are all nerds. And nerds are my sworn enemy.

44

You know Ernie and Louise Hill, over on Maple Street? Well, I was born the year before they were.

– Ukulele Ike, Older than the Hills

45

needless to say i agree with cruncy

46

In no particular order:

Weird War Tales and Sgt. Rock comics
The Hardy Boys
SCTV
Monty Python
Alice Cooper (ca. 1973)

47

FYI: Sgt. Rock sucks.
Sgt. Fury RULES!!

48

SNL. Especially(sp?) the years with Farley and Spade and Sandler and Rock and Carvey and Myeres and Hartman. Talk about funny.

49

slythe: While the Howling Commandos do have a certain “second banana” charm to them, Sgt. Fury was at best a pale imitation of Sgt. Rock.

Sgt. Rock was the OGI.

50

I am probably most influenced by Bloom County, Douglas Adams and Monty Python.

This probably also explains a lot.

51

You mean to tell me that not one of you Tolkein reading, comic book collecting, Douglas Adams fans have fessed up to having spent many hours sitting at a table with a bunch of other geeks playing Dungeons and Dragons?

I believe that most of you have sometime in your life wished that you could just roll 1D20 and get a natural and get double damage with your broadsword when someone ticked you off. And I bet some of you have wished you could just roll a save vs. spells to keep from getting a traffic ticket.

I must have more hours logged as a Dungeon Master as I have surfing the 'net. My Wand of Wonder spouts butterflies for all of you.

52

Dune Trilogy
Tolkien
Beatles
Heinlein

And of course the answer is 42.

53
  1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: If it weren’t for this bastard, I’d have a cushy job as a chemist perhaps, or a biologist. That’s what I trained for, before HE came around.
  2. On The Road: I attempted to manifest the spirit of Beat Generation for most of the Reagan 80’s. What a magnificent failure.
  3. Naked Lunch: I read this way too early, at 16. It made me vomit. (This is the sign of good literature). I read it again at 23 & found it to be the funniest bit of American wit since Twain.
  4. Ulysses: Sure, Finnegin’s Wake got me laid on several, weirdly interconnected occasions, but I lived with U. for 4 years straight - my longest relationship of that period.
  5. Book of Sand (Borges): He published better anthologies, but this was my 1st. Caused me to dream in Spanish, which was a pretty cool trick.
  6. Odysseus (Kazantzakis) overlooked classic. Better than MDMA - no headache.
  7. Cosmic Trigger I: RAW said all of the things I wanted to say about all of the weird things that had happened to me up to that point. The Illuminati Trilogy provided endless fodder for implementing Project MindPhuck at the local tap — CT:I executed those maneuvers on my own brain.
  8. Maldoror: At least, in the last 100 years, there’s somebody that thinks like me!
  9. Book of the SubGenius: The poster child for censorship. Perfect example of the wrong book at the right time. I did the Rant of the Sub-Genius on local radio, circa 1984. And now I am a Reverend!
  10. Still waiting for this one to be written. If I were to attempt to change the brains of semi-domesticated primates, these would be some of the tools with which I’d start.
54

Man, from my earliest days, I’d have to chalk up Mad magazine and Daniel Pinkwater. I read Mad off the rack in the 1970s and I also read the numerous paperbacks that a friend of mine had with the really good stuff: old Harvey Kurtzman Mad stories. Those are responsible for shaping much of what I am today.

Around age ten I first ran across George Herriman’s Krazy Kat in a heavy anthology in the local library. This was like a drop of pure LSD falling into my mind’s eye. My perception of the world was changed forever—again.

Later on, as a teenager, Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury shaped me considerably. In most recent years (the past ten,) I’d have to say Albert Camus and T.S. Eliot have had profound influence on me.

I’m sure I’m leaving some other important ones out, but those are all extremely important ones to me.

55

I’d have to agree with these… plus Frank Zappa, Adams, Spike Jones, tom Lehrer, The Dr. Demento Show, Python and blackadder

56
  1. Motown
  2. Marvel Comics ('specially Dr. Strange) (Sgt Fury as a pale imitation?! Hah!)
  3. Anything by Mark Twain (especially recommended: The Innocents Abroad & A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court).
  4. Bugs Bunny & all the other Warner Bros cartoon characters. (best quote: after escaping from Elmer Fudd’s house especially early in one cartoon, Bugs stops on the street, looks at the audience & says, “Aww, I just gotta go back and heckle that guy!”)
  5. Stairway to Heaven, by Led Zeppelin. Makes me get a buzz just thinking about it…