The last supper

By Garth Paulson

If I had to have a swan song, it would be “Blame It on the Rain” by Milli Vanilli off of their album Girl, You Know It’s True, because if everyone around me is slightly uncomfortable and confused when I die, I can maybe go out with a smirk on my face like I’ve always wanted.

(If this was an audio/visual medium, there would be a record scratching sound right here, as though we were in an early nineties dance hall, and I had just stepped up to the burly downrock champion with my slick new uprock stylee.)

You see what I did there? I took the idea of the swan song-which everyone is familiar with-transposed it with an accessible pop culture reference and then invited you into my humorist’s ethos by explaining one of the possible implications of the connection, while still leaving it open enough for you to make your own connections. Secret of comedy. Well, it’s either that, or just blatantly ripping off Something Awful.

Since this will probably be the only opportunity I have to address you directly, student body, I’m really trying to get angry with you (like the two gentlemen sitting on either side of me at this moment). You’ve made me so furious over the years. You hipsters with your hilariously ham-fisted irony and Pitchfork evangelism: I make no distinction between you and the emo movement, save for the fact that most of you are old enough to know better. You chongos who talk loudly about what area of your beefcake torso you’ll be working out after class: your life is a joke and your fourteen dollar haircut’s the punchline. You pseudo-intellectual keeners who sit in the front of class and relate every point the professor makes to a pedestrian life story: die. Being in university does not justify you or your bullshit.

But-make no mistake-writing for a university paper’s mediocre humor section does.

And because I have to come to some kind of a conclusion with all of this, I suppose you could say this article represents my experience at the Gauntlet in miniature. Feeling inarticulately misanthropic, realizing how petty that makes me and then venting that out by making pop culture references and seductively whispering poop jokes into Ben’s ear while he tries to finish his work. Yeah, I’m so much better than you.

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