This morning brings our first guest post, from our friend Chella Quint at Adventures in Menstruating.
Nice guys don’t always finish last
Sometimes they come in…second.
Hear me out – I’ve (possibly in my sleep, which means this is one of my genius-or-madness-and-probably-madness ideas) come up with an award for positive use of menstrual comedy in a fictional work.
I’m calling it the Adventures in Menstruating Second Place Award, and, yes, it’s because second place at most good county fairs, municipal soccer leagues, and junior athletics tournaments is usually a red ribbon. I drew the one above to (badly) illustrate my point, mainly because I couldn’t find a photo on the internets that I could leglly use, and because my own red ribbon that I got for long jump in sixth grade is in a box back at my parents’ house. I’m sure you could also read all sorts into ’second place’, like the potential second class citizen status that menstruators are reduced to by the other kind of menstural humour. You know, the kind that presents women who bleed as bitchy, disgusting or insane? That doesn’t get a prize. (Well, not from me, anyway, although people who tell those jokes sometimes get their own comedy special. Go figure.)
Anyway, my award (which only exists in pixel form at the moment – sorry about that…) is for jokes that, refreshingly, do not make us the punchline. It shouldn’t be a novel concept, but there it is. I’ll add the ’second place award’ category to my links and post more examples of this as I find them, and invite you all to send me suggestions. I’ll add them to the blog as I get them.
We’re kicking off with last week’s episode of a comedy detective show called Psych (which I’m pleased to say co-stars and is sometimes written by an old Tisch classmate of mine) where periods very briefly feature in a verbal gag based on a simple misunderstanding: PTSD vs. PMS. Props to the writers, who could easily have made reference to the charater’s alleged demonic possession (long – and quite funny – story) and linked it to a cheesy PMS joke, but didn’t. It’s a good show – US viewers can check it out themselves this week online, and everyone else can grab it on DVD sometime in the future.
Look out for more second place awards.
Cross-posted at Adventures in Menstruating.
