O mush-brained maid whose mind decays with every pill I slip her!
Not that I don’t greatly appreciate hostile literary criticism (I do), but are you objecting specifically to the BOTR’s writers stealing from Monty Python? They’d already written the book by the time the first episode was aired.
My high school pal and I found it on a college bookstore shelf, bought it largely on account of snippet in the front about the elf maiden opening her cloak and asking Frito if he liked what he saw, then were highly amused we’d been taken in. The style was quite unlike anything we’d read, so I’m puzzled you feel it was riding on anyone’s coattails.
As for “forcing parody names”, you mean the alternate names for Tolkien’s characters were hokey? Or that all sorts of products/events/people were name-dropped into the poetry, etc.? It’s quite difficult to conjure parody names, in my experience, which I won’t go into just right at this moment. The problem is that the parody names typically have several of the same sounds, a similar number of syllables, and/or similar stress, and must also in addition make some sort of sense, be easily readable, as well as being humorous. It’s pretty limiting.
Are there other parodies you prefer? If so, in what way?
I’ll close with a quote I chanced upon while researching this post:
“Heigh-ho, heigh-ho,
It’s off to work we go,
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, heigh-ho, heigh-ho . . .
‘Good! Good!’ yipped Moxie.
‘Yes, good! Especially the “heigh-ho” part,’ added Pepsi.”
(With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien, Henry Beard, the National Lampoon, and heck . . . whoever feels they need one.)
Some parodies work, some don’t. I felt this one seemed to forced and wasn’t particularly creative - but then they set themselves quite a task, to parody an entire story from beginning to end and keep everything pretty similar all the way.
I didn’t know if they came before or after Monty Python, but I was just using that as an example - you can see in “Live At The Hollywood Bowl” all the geeky college students that think they’re cool and funny because they like Monty Python. You know? And that’s what “BOTR” feels like to me.
In fact, it feels like the SDMB had written it in a post-by-post thread.
In any case, the point is I didn’t like it. Maybe if it had actual jokes instead of just a bunch of scene-for-scene character-for-character forced silliness, I would’ve enjoyed it more. Or maybe not.
A lot of us are just showing our age, GuanoLad. We remember it from the first time around. It was a silly (in the Python sense) parody of an obscure book only just becoming popular decades after its initial publication.
But there’s no harm in you expressing you opinion about it.
“And what do you be callin’ that?” asked Spam, who knew few songs.*
- Clean ones, at least.
How could anyone not like this book?
Anyway, yeah, just as a parody it’s not so hot, especially since most of the references are already hopelessly outdated. (Although the running gag about their breakfasts (“After a hearty feast of cherubim and seraphim,”) is classic and a great jab at the book.)
But you’ve got to love the segments where they just go off into nonsense. It reminds me of Woody Allen’s books, just unashamedly goofy. Thanks to the OP for reminding me about this book; I’d seen it before but never picked it up.
The map was great, too. The Nattily Wood, the Evelin Wood, the Islets of Langerhans, The Sunnier Clime, and something “(known to but a few)”.
Wasn’t it actually “Goldarn”?
“I call it ‘Heigh-Ho.’”
GuanoLad: so what’s your idea of humor? How do you feel about South Park or Beavis and Butthead? No, I’m not looking for a fight, I’m just curious. For reference, I think MST3K is lame. 
I used to like South Park, but it’s lost its edge for me, so I don’t watch it as much. Still makes me laugh, though. I have never liked Beavis and Butthead.
I do like Monty Python, but I can’t watch it over and over. I like “The Goon Show” if you know what that is. I write and draw some stupid stuff myself, at http://www.guanolad.com/main.htm, so you can see that really I should like BOTR, it appears, on the surface, to appeal to my kind of humour. But because it doesn’t, I can see that it has a forced and fake feel to it.
Elsewhere on this thread someone said that one of the original writers thinks it’s an awful book. I think he is saying the same as I am - he recognises the flaws in it; It could’ve been timeless and clever, instead of childish and try-hard.
Well, BOTR is definitely a product of its era–most of the pop culutral references are lost on anyone under 30–but it is still a very funny book to people who have a functioning sense of humor. “Any small, slow, stupid creature that turned its back on a crowd of Boggies was looking for a stomping.” C’mon, that’s good writing!
Excellent layout! Really effective use of space and perspective in your PigeonMan strip!
One notes the copyright is 1999. So you’ve moved on to other things?
Especially given that you like “The Goon Show”, one has to conclude you weren’t a teen or greater in the 1960s, or that you weren’t much immersed in the popular culture of that time. Except for pacing, BOTR seems slightly similar to “The Goon Show” now that you mention it.
"I wish I was dead’–moaned Moxie.
“So do I.”–whined Pepsi
“May the Good Fairy what lives in the heavens grant yer every wish.”—growled Spam.
We are the Stealthy Green Toup’es,
Stalking nights and sleeping days.
A team of silent , nasty men
Who all think Sorhed’s numba ten
Two
Four
Six
Eight
Tiptoe, sneak and infiltrate Ch-Cha-Cha!
I read BOTR on a camping trip with my friend Lissa when we were both ten. Our Tolkienite dads had copies. This was 1995.
We got precious little of it (although we managed to figure out that Moxie and Pepsi had impregnated some carrots, and joked about it with each other for years afterward).
I reread it two weeks or so ago, and still found that I didn’t understand a lot of the jokes, although I recognized a lot more of it than I did the last go around (I liked how they put in all the things with funny names in American history as random names–Hawley-Smoot, Clayton-Bulwer, etc). I’m assuming this is because I was born in 1985. Don’t get me wrong–a lot of it is funny, and I found myself laughing aloud far too many times. But so much of it is dated references that I don’t think the book can survive once the Baby Boomers are gone.
On a related note, I was looking to stir things up and decided to take a copy of BOTR to a signing with Peter Jackson, Sean Astin, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens (for those not as obsessed as I, these are people responsible for the recent FOTR films). Sean Astin didn’t recognize it, Peter Jackson claimed to have purposely refrained from reading it, and either Fran Walsh or Philippa Boyens gave a whoop of recognition and said, “God! This book is GREAT!”
So, there we have it, folks.
So my daughter was married this summer. Wonderful day, wonderful wedding.
EXCEPT…
One of the readings was Bilbo’s “I sit beside the fire and think…” What do you suppose is running through my head??? You got it:
*
“I sit on the floor and pick my nose…”*
Ace? 1960s? What’s unbelievable?
Had a copy I had borrowed, but someone stole it. Found it years later (distinctive tears and marks) at a used book store, bought it, and returned it to my friend. Pissed me off that I had to pay for it.
*Alligator *never got credited above. It was written by Michael Frith and Christopher Cerf in 1962. They reprinted it in the Harvard Lampoon 1966 Playboy parody, probably the best of the many Playboy parodies.
It’s unintentionally hilarious today to read commentaries on humor from the late 50s/early 60s in which every single pundit proclaimed humor to be dead and satire impossible.
I think it’s in S.M. Stirling’s A Meeting at Corvallis that two copies of the original BoTR play a significant role in the plot. Their respective carriers use them as the basis of an Altendorf cypher. When one is lost things turn ugly.
Mazel tov, BrotherCadfael! All good wishes to the happy couple.
I still say “Argle bargle morble whoosh?” to express confusion and bewilderment.
I had a copy of it once, but dumped it in one of my periodic “must reduce reading material” binges.
“O Nasa O Ucla! O Etaoin Shrdlu! O Escrow Beryllium! Pandit J. Nehru!”
Concerning this work, I have to align myself with GuanoLad. I haven’t read “Bored Of…”, and from everything I hear / read about it, I don’t want to. (Of course, “each to their own”, etc.) Some while ago, I started a thread about this matter.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=760970&highlight=Tolkien
I’ve been amused, since reading the earlier books in Stirling’s “Emberverse” series, by the character Astrid – the ultimate Tolkien geek / addict / impassioned enthusiast: she believes that JRRT’s works are literal historical truth; and she is the leader of a band of “Rangers”, modelled on Aragorn’s guys. Astrid ardently wishes for the blasphemous work “Bored of the Rings” to be banned, and obliterated from the world; and for anyone found in possession of it or reading it, to be terminated with extreme prejudice.