Linus Minimax
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On Bob's notorious Tiny Note Chart, each Quadrant* has an iconic film attributed to it. For the final Quadrant, the Dobbs Quadrant (the one Bob identifies with), the film is The King Of Comedy, about an unhinged fan of a late-night talkshow comedian who so badly craves a stand-up slot on the show that he takes the host hostage in order to demand it.
In one of these threads Joe Cosby urged Bob to try out his stalker schtick on David Letterman, as if that was his own Funnie New Idea. I guess he never bothered to glance at Bob's chart over all those *years* and MANY THOUSANDS OF WORDS he spent refining his armchair diagnosis... why bother to let him tell you about himself when you can look it all up in your gut, amirite?
It was stranger when Stang reported that he'd only just seen The King Of Comedy for the first time, and that for him it wasn't a comedy at all but a terrifying horror movie. If I had an honest-to-goodness psycho stalker who was providing clues about how he saw his relationship to me, I would uhhhhhhhhhh not ignore them?
But he does have a very conventional excuse for not having seen it before: for the first decade-plus since Bob put it on his chart, The King Of Comedy was still considered to be a misfire and an unfortunate stain on Scorcese's otherwise stellar reputation.
As 'web 2.0' and twitter became prominent environments, enabling random lunatics to talk back to celebrities, opinion started to shift. 2012 didn't see 'Lockdown Bobrule' but it did see The King Of Comedy officially rehabilitated as an important film. By 2019 the biggest film of the year was an homage to it. Nowadays Scorcese's gangster flicks are of course classic canon but The King Of Comedy is PRESCIENT.
Well, sorry not sorry to say, that means Bob was prescient. 2012 is the year associated with that quadrant, and that was pretty much the year that The King Of Comedy was salvaged. That prediction worked out pretty well.
But what really weirds me out is the fact that the 'real name' of the comedian-stalker (the name of the actor who plays him) reduces to Bob DeN.
...
I don't always *enjoy* Bob's interactions with alt.slack, but they form part of a larger epic quarrel that I find to be Very Funny in a post-everything, gods-laughing-at-humans, "my god this man is more stretched out than Monk!" sort of a way. In some sense, I can agree that he is The King Of Comedy...
... even without the astonishingly perfect 'Bob DeN' punchline.
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*"why are they called Quadrants when there are 5 of them?"
- the Disney movie about a magic ritual at the SkyDome