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Greil Monaco's No-Life Top 10 List-- The all-stupidest edition

Filed under: Imported

This blog has been nothing but a once-a-week movie quiz for a couple of months now, so I thought I'd break up the tedium with some stupid stuff I've never been able to clean out of my brain. As always, grovelling apologies to Mr. Marcus for sullying, if not stealing, his countdown thunder.

1) Rex Reed's origin story. On his '60s late-night ABC show, Dick Cavett asked Rex Reed why he became a critic. Reed's answer: "Well, I was opinionated right out of the wound." (P.S. I still think Reed had the finest description of Bush's expression in the book-reading moment from Fahrenheit 9/11: " . . . eyes sliding nervously in his head, like a moron looking for a bathroom."

2) Good lines from Dark Shadows. I remember these because I'm watching the stupid things again, the DVDs this time, and I'm in a good patch of episodes right now. A doctor, looking into his microscope, smiles and says, "Some of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen have been microscopic views of horrible malignancies." The ever-trustworthy Joe Haskell (played by soap star Joel Crothers) warns his ex-girlfriend about her new biker squeeze: "That guy's as much fun as a bag of spiders."

3) I discuss the work of John Steinbeck with an old nut. Years ago, when I had a really bad doctor whose idea of heaven was a waiting room packed with the sick and dying, I wound up sitting next to an agitated senior citizen who seemed to recognize the book I was reading, The Grapes of Wrath. "Steinbeck!" he said, "Brilliant man!" He leaned closer and asked, "Is that the book that has his theory of relativity?" I told him, no, this was a later work, and involved his theory of inbred relativity.

4) I overhear one of the stupidest reasons ever given for being unemployed. Decades ago, when convenience stores were just beginning to burgeon, I stood in line behind a beefy beer-buying oaf who was wrapping up the story of his life for the cashier: " . . . foreman got smart with me, so I smacked him. Now I'm out of a job. Must've been that rotten booze I was drinkin'."

5) One of the world's worst radio hosts gets pranked. For one summer in the late '80s, Des Moines' longtime R&R station went talk in the evening, but they hired a guy who couldn't get calls from a telemarketer. His first name was Jim, and one night deep into his routine begathon for callers, someone-- I suspect a co-worker-- phoned in with some early soundboards of DeForest Kelley, aka Dr. "Bones" McCoy. The exchange went like this:

JIM the inept radio host: Hello, caller, you're on the air.

The unreal McCOY: Happy birthday, Jim!

JIM: (snortin' laffin') Well, thank you! It's not my birthday, though.

McC: Damn it, Jim, you're hiding something.

JIM: (Still nasally amused) No, I'm not-- it's just not my birthday.

McC: It's all your damned rules and regulations, Jim!

JIM: Huh? What rules?

McC: He's dead, Jim!

JIM: What? Dead? What is this?

Then there was an explosion of laughter on the McCoy side, and, a second or two later, Jim's revisionist recap of the incident ("I knew what they were doing . . . "). Maybe you had to be there, but it was the greatest deflation of an asshole radio clown I've ever heard. If you have a similar story, please send it in-- I'd love to read it.

What kind of top-10 list stops at 5? An all-stupidest one!

Posted by Steve Monaco at July 20, 2005 5:00 AM

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