Reviewing Fridge Magnets

By William Curvan

Hi guys, print journalism is dead, so today I’m going to be reviewing quirky fridge magnets I found at a gift shop over break.

“I’m a Delicate Flower with a side of Fuck You”

This is a classic bit of millennial humor, and I don’t think it’s very subversive or interesting. Nobody goes around calling other people “delicate flowers” so the setup is contrived, and the punchline is needlessly hostile. The use of the f-word is really excessive. Their conventions for capitalizing words are throwing me off. 2/10

“I get it dark chocolate, I’m 85% bitter too”

I feel like the person who buys this probably enjoys a minion meme every so often. Once again though, there’s no identifiable structure to this, no punchline, and nothing being obviously parodied. Slightly more clever than the last one, though. 4/10

“Guess how many donuts I can fit on my dick”

This isn’t even edgy, it’s just needlessly sexual in a very juvenile, “I has bonar” kind of way. 1/10

“I’m not fucking stupid. I mean I used to, but we broke up”

This is actually quite good. It’s a well-structured joke, and clearly, a good deal of thought and creativity went into this one. The use of “fuck” is well-earned, because its meaning changes as you progress throughout the joke. It also contains a lot more subtext than the others. It implies that this character maybe sleeps with other people casually, you know, sex and stuff, and it’s no big deal because they’re a cool young person like that. Maybe their past relationship with “stupid” is actually a metaphor for having been in a casual, intimate relationship with someone they now have realized was not worth their time. There’s a story here, and I’m hooked. 10/10

“I dream of a world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives being questioned.”

This is a deeply bad joke that, at a very fundamental level, fails to understand the text it is parodying. On first blush it seems to make enough sense, but a deeper look lays bare the profound lack of self-awareness in this magnet.

Clearly, the magnet is parodying the classic joke, “Why did the chicken cross the road/To get to the other side.” But for a moment, I ask you to imagine that you’ve never heard this joke before. What would this magnet imply?

Well, I believe it implies that there exists some joke about a chicken that unfairly has its motives questioned. Furthermore, it implies that this joke reflects something bad in our society, something worth calling out – I mean, the language of “having a dream” is extremely evocative, wouldn’t you agree?

Consider, however, that the original joke does no such thing. Sure, the setup inquires about the chicken’s motives, but the punchline very succinctly tells the audience that no, you don’t have the right to that knowledge; the chicken did so simply to get to the other side. It answers a question about the chicken’s motives with a quippy non-answer about the obvious goal anyone would have when crossing the road. It’s actually a stunning defense of the chicken’s right not to be questioned.

The original chicken-road joke is an unappreciated satire of the societal forces that encroach on our personal lives. And in our modern age of ever-shrinking privacy, it is more important than ever that our personal philosophies and motivations remain personal. The chicken-road joke, in a sense, was oddly prescient about the age of social media; it’s a protest against unwarranted questions and a defense of privacy.

In this light, the existence of the magnet speaks to the arrogance of our modern society. The author failed to perceive the satire of the original joke, as though generations before us couldn’t possibly share any of our values. It butchers the original joke in order to smugly proclaim the exact same thesis, yet it still has the audacity to frame its ideology as novel.

To claim that you “dream” of a world where chickens may act as they will without needless and intrusive questioning is to ignore the very fact that the chicken-road joke has been dreaming of that world far longer than you ever have. Terrible magnet. 0/10

“The Older I Get, The More Everyone Can Kiss My Ass”