Army Man: America's Only Magazine.

A note from the editor:

We offer our sincere apologies for taking a brief hiatus from this newsletter while Kaleb “Spike” Horton recovered from injuries sustained during an altercation that forced him to run off the edge of a cliff. He quickly realized the regrettable impossibility of not being able to run in mid-air and darted back to solid ground, but the attempt was futile. He is recuperating at Cedars-Sinai, where he dictated the following post after scoring an unusually robust batch of painkillers.

Times have been really hard lately, for reasons too boring and legally compromising to get into here. My current plan is to just never mention my personal life again unless I’m obviously lying, which is what I should have been doing anyway. To that end, I am 57 years old and living in a shed outside of Edmonton, Alberta.

In the meantime I’m trying every possible method for relieving stress besides being healthy. The best method I’ve found is keeping my copy of Army Man on my nightstand and just opening it to a random page. It always makes me feel better, but without the horrible burden of trying to be positive about literally anything.

A surprising amount of people I know aren’t familiar with Army Man, so I’ll explain. It was a glorified zine published by George Meyer from 1988 to 1990. There’s not a whole lot of it (and all of it is here), but everybody who wrote for it got rich and famous, usually by writing for The Simpsons, most notably the legendary and reclusive John Swartzwelder. It’s basically just a joke magazine, but a joke magazine where all the writers are deliberately trying to sound like they’re in a psychiatric hospital. It’s where Jack Handey first published Deep Thoughts, but the whole thing is great.

I think I first heard of it in maybe 2007? In any case, I feel like I’ve always known it as a holy text among comedy writers, the place where all the secrets are. Mostly just to cheer myself up, I figured I’d list my favorite jokes. Here they are: