Jason Rayles brings us "I am such a donkey", a tale from the bad joke gone bad tradition, a premise with promise. But humor is a hard master, and demands a writing and rewriting absent here.
The twist in "Donkey" is that Jason delivers a birthday card with a gratuitous line about surviving life without getting shot, only to find the recipient had a dear friend who died after an accidental shotgunning. But this vector is intersected with such dead-end alleys as "Plus, Ben is like the easiest person on the planet to shop for", and "he's got this really styling beard and he's got this skipper-slash-professor-slash-indie rocker thing happening".
Plus.
Plus, Jason inserts like this really non sequitorious slash out-in-left-field slash "schlemiel with a sexy female" thing that, endeared as I am to languorous associative wanderings, just doesn't wrap back right.
Rayles' production concept is to have his trax read by a voice synthesizer. Problem is, the synthesized voice is remarkable good, or not nearly bad enough. It certainly isn't the astonishingly articulate instrument of homo sapiens' larynx and associated vocal architecture.
Think of the purest form of humor – the stand-up comic. It's writing and voice.
All art is choices, and "Donkey" (an odd choice for "ass" in a piece that features "shit" and "motherfucker" as locutions) chooses to skip the hard work of writing and voicing. So the plastic words play out on the computer speakers, alone.
Review of Such a Donkey
Geo Beach
Posted on September 17, 2005 at 08:34 PM
Jason Rayles brings us "I am such a donkey", a tale from the bad joke gone bad tradition, a premise with promise. But humor is a hard master, and demands a writing and rewriting absent here.
The twist in "Donkey" is that Jason delivers a birthday card with a gratuitous line about surviving life without getting shot, only to find the recipient had a dear friend who died after an accidental shotgunning. But this vector is intersected with such dead-end alleys as "Plus, Ben is like the easiest person on the planet to shop for", and "he's got this really styling beard and he's got this skipper-slash-professor-slash-indie rocker thing happening".
Plus.
Plus, Jason inserts like this really non sequitorious slash out-in-left-field slash "schlemiel with a sexy female" thing that, endeared as I am to languorous associative wanderings, just doesn't wrap back right.
Rayles' production concept is to have his trax read by a voice synthesizer. Problem is, the synthesized voice is remarkable good, or not nearly bad enough. It certainly isn't the astonishingly articulate instrument of homo sapiens' larynx and associated vocal architecture.
Think of the purest form of humor – the stand-up comic. It's writing and voice.
All art is choices, and "Donkey" (an odd choice for "ass" in a piece that features "shit" and "motherfucker" as locutions) chooses to skip the hard work of writing and voicing. So the plastic words play out on the computer speakers, alone.