Learning Day: Cats' Letters to Santa (Patreon)

It’s Tuesday! Time to check hell’s slush pile.

Fucking what? What alien infant wrote this? Have they seen a cat? Or tolerated Christmas? Do they think BIll Clinton’s a coercive elf? This is tandem writing with cyclobenzaprine. The brain is holding the pills back.

Let’s touch this up.

Good job, team. We can punch out early. Tune in next week for an owl monster representing alcoholism! It knows karate.

Fucking what? Why write this way? Or show others? If I typed this, you’d find out at my wake. Followed by an explosion.

Fucking what? It’s on the back cover? “Magnet for furballs” is this book’s ace. The trailer joke. Someone’s best effort to turn heads and fund more muscle relaxants.

That’s all I need to see. We can train with this. We can become stronger. What’s this virtuoso failure called?

On second thought, let’s not. I’m only human. I can’t drink this many fur-flavored tears in one sitting. The hair doesn’t digest, and tastes worse going up. Anything else?

I said no. I have rights. A whole war settled that.

Cats’ Letters to Santa sounds great.

Don’t fret if context clues haven’t helped, this defies reading. Your mind searches for content that’s simply gone. This is a coffee table book of pets writing like Hallmark children. Not real children–you never know what madness, idiocy, or generational genius will pop out there. Cats’ Letters to Santa freestyles, weaving a trail of near-jokes I might not recover from.

The results defy hope. Garfield jokes should feel like punching down, but the writer’s fighting for his life. He’s lost an arm to a stuffed shark. I can’t recall any one-sided creative feuds, but maybe something will turn up by press time.

And this quote’s typo-free. Bill’s idea of cat language is “preschool drunk.” Glancing at Dog’s Letters to Santa, that’s also his spin on dog and adult human language. I suspect he heard Seinfeld’s old “put the funny word last” advice, and his parasites missed the nuance. Imagine a child raised by housecats, and you’ll have one more idea than Bill.

Let’s help him out.

Granted, this is a team effort. Making Cats’ Letters to Santa either a cash-in, leadership failure, dawn of cat civilization, or disavowed shame. Editor Bill Adler has top billing, so he gets the lashes. Al Capone employed multiple violin players, but he got the headline.

There’s a co-defendant:

Cats’ Letters to Santa is a few grand short of whatever number makes Paul care. He’s an Oscar collector blinking at a CGI laser. I hope Portnoy’s Complaint’s cover made him more money, but checkout line chum builds skyscrapers.

Note: this isn’t hip-hop historian Bill Adler. If you’re the sinless Bill Adler on a self-searching spree, false alarm. Go in peace, and consider therapy. Unless you used your own name as a pen name, in which case this is performance art, and we’re enemies.

The maker of Dogs’ Letters to Santa plays both sides. This limped out first, so I assume Bill’s a cat cultist.

While I avoid back-to-back columns on faith, cats are a smaller cult. Eighth-largest, tops. That’s a blank check for blowback-free insults. Watch: Stonewall Jackson’s cat cafe was business as usual. Untaxed cat cafes spit on human progress. Cat cafes back Earth’s proudest rapist to fight premarital eye contact. Aren’t cat people silly? Let’s fix that letter.

Besides, this heat wave’s ideal for holiday failure. Every summer, Hallmark’s strongest warlocks resurrect Christmas in July, a once-winking summer retread of Christmas glurge. Brilliant. They can tap their vault of elf love stories twice. Winter pain complements dehydration perfectly.

I’m warmed up. No more testimony, only punishment. Present the first cat.

I spoke too soon. Give me a second. This hurts me in ways manifestos never could. My type weakness is non-efforts. Give me a bunker passion project any day.

This is page one. Some great comedies put the worst gag first. I assume. Mankind’s told stories for ages, someone’s done it. Hopefully they weren’t burned.

You could question point two’s logic. Don’t. I’ve wrestled pigs before, and no one appreciates the effort but the pig. Suffice to say, hacks are more invested in the pet war than either animal.

W-we can fix this. We’re clever comedy fans. This is fun!

I give up. No one can redeem this. They’d have their own holiday, instead of splitting rent with Coca-Cola.

Don’t expect this to improve. Bill’s mutant power is hating cats. Or loving them. All the wrath and/or lust is obscured by sloth. The more cat jokes I read, the more I wonder if we were meant to leave the trees. In some cultures, cats inspire great art. We’re not in one.

And cats hate Santa! Sure. I don’t have any insight into cat society to counter that. After endless bookstore fluff worshipping cats, I know less than nothing. That’s the magic of 21st century reading. Eager research tells you that Olympic boxers were born Martian.

As my mind dims with age, Christmas has grown on me. Even the half-year preshow–“be less unpleasant for a month” is a solid gimmick. This joke makes me relapse. Green first, mass theft, all of it. I might wake up in a Whoville cheer facility.

Nothing’s wrong with pet or observational comedy. I’ll never type that again, but it’s true. Junji Ito made hits about his cat acting like a Shoggoth. But you have to observe the fucking pet. “My cat sleeps” is not an observation. It barely registers as a thought. If a cat said it, they still wouldn’t be sapient. If a comatose patient said it, they’d still get unplugged. The Garfield shoutout only reminds me of other comedy DUIs.

Buh? I know vets are on the short list of cat nouns to blend into chum. I still don’t know how we got here. Or how these are jokes. If you said this in a car, they’d drop you off in traffic. If you read this on stage, they’d burn you with the book. If you said this on a date, they’d still call you back. It’s cold out there.

My brain’s melting faster today. These are like the Necronomicon audiobook at double speed. I’ll try a letter with a little more context.

This almost works! Before tipping the joke and death marching through a paragraph in Martian. Still, we try to be kind here, and you can imagine this working. So let’s take a moment to visualize better neutering jokes.

Manifesting doesn’t work. The bar’s sunk from pure vacuity to pets begging for their last dick. There are tags for that, but they’ve tolerated enough punchlines. These results are why I ramble about my nightmares: the gods skim our notes and do the opposite.

Lord. Some sentences sound crazier than “Pwease don’t castrate me” in baby-talk. I can’t type them without getting stuck with Nyarthlotep’s job. Or Vance’s.

This doesn’t deserve a response, and it’s the best joke so far. It’s cat-related and Santa-related, without prehistoric pop culture. The voice sounds less stilted than an anxious Terminator. And “Orca” only makes me figuratively groan. BIll could rally here.

You printed this trash twice, you cat-groping quarterwit fucks? One of a dying world’s last breaths, and you reused “It’s like a magnet for furballs?” When aliens find this shit in the ruins, they’ll strafe Earth for survivors. Twice. On your next Saturday alone with Mr. Paws, lean in and listen. He’s mewling “I hate you.”

Is the sketch different?

Jesus wept.

Now the picture’s getting a little clearer, despite reality melting into cat puns. Bill ran out of juice twenty years ago. Cats’ Letters to Santa came out in 1996, twenty years after anyone gave a shit about Morris the Cat–a bygone mascot for who cares. The failure’s been amplified by another two decades of half-assed ads, but rest assured this joke sucked in its prime.

Forget repeating the joke, and the pervasive cloud of fuzzy despair. We’re eight neuterings past that. Bill knew this gag was ancient. And still charged it head-first. They lie to you in art school: have less confidence. Obsess over everything. Tweak the gag playlist in your desktop photo. That’s how you survive.

Back to the pet despair: this dying cat sticks to baby talk. Missed opportunity. Consistency’s great, but perspective beyond “remember consuming?” would thrive. Vicky’s seen at least ten Christmas trees. She remembers Reagan. Vicky watched her owner kick coke and have kids. Or stick to coke. Or stick to coke and have kids. There’s nothing in this book for my brain, so I’m outlining cat memoirs. Don’t send help, it’s too late.

This isn’t worth it. Nothing is worth it. But what the fuck is in Dogs’ Letters to Santa if we’ve already sunk to Lassie? Why can’t we keep this PetCo sinkhole on topic? Why do we reward publishers for jokes we’d prosecute in person?

We’re four Palm Springs loops into cats seeing themselves/dogs on TV. Is Santa even involved anymore? Was he ever? Bill’s listing places he’s seen cats. The next four punchlines are litter boxes, dreams, snuff films, and asylum walls.

I’m losing…how many times can you lose your mind? I don’t have any mind left. I’ve taken enough psychic damage to get Genosha flashbacks. I need a helmet.

Classic flatscan humor: the last joke, but worse. The asteroid will be a mercy.

Maybe it’s me. Telling jokes backwards might have prog-rock appeal. I own too many Dream Theater t-shirts to call that a crime. Maybe this sucks less in all-male concert halls, with time to enjoy the nuances of cat humour with two u’s.

Nope.

Not to betray comedy writing’s publicly available secrets, but isn’t the third thing in the list usually different? Or anything? This paragraph doesn’t exist. You’ve read it, it occupies space, and yet there’s only the void. It might lead to the other side of the universe.

Though at least the joke involves Santa. I thought we’d dropped that.

Another backwards stillborn. The tired setup–an overfed pet–trails in after the tiring punchline. I’d call it predictable, but no one writes like this. There’s no reason to. It’s like cutting off your ear before the first date.

Bill has weight on his mind. Fair enough. That unease should make him funnier, but he’s still searching pet store receipts for material. And imagining stage animals understand anything happening beyond noises leading to beatings or dinner. Dinner doesn’t follow Bill’s voice often.

The Clinton joke! Again! And it’s not even a joke. That’s fine. Everything’s ending, why not let humor die first?

Fuck it. we’re not going out like that. Bill, a cat that votes is a fine premise. Let’s just lean in a bit.

One more. I can take one more. Do your worst.

Great start! Lust for fame and the famous is a classic theme. Every cat feels it. Let’s try a more direct angle:

This has heart. American Greetings might dig it.

It sounds like I hate the premise, team, jokebooks, cats, Bill Clinton, and Christmas. But only half of that’s true. This ship could have landed. Nowhere interesting, but it could touch tarmac without killing every ailurophile on board. Shame no one tried.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John Minkoff, who has been extra good this year and only asks that Santa purge the seed of Bill Adler from the Earth.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.