Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Drew's off. Today, we're talking about Jesus's farts, woodwinds, Monty Python, and more.
Hello Funbaggers (I'm assuming that's how y'all refer to yourselves), this is Rachelle Hampton, a non-Drew staff writer here at Defector. First: an apology, both for not being Drew and for being late with this week's Funbag. My household was felled by a plague that began with my cousin's adorable 8-month-old twins/disease vectors. But thanks to the wonders of modern medicine (shout out to amoxicillin) I'm on my way back to fighting shape and ready to answer all your burning questions.
When I was asked to sub in this week, I had a loose set of assumptions about how this would go. In a past life as an editorial assistant, I managed a few different inboxes for various advice columns, so I'm more than familiar with the liberties taken by those asking for counsel from someone mostly unqualified to give it. The parenting advice inbox prepared me for this place's fecal humor; nothing could have prepared me for the number of questions I simply could not even begin to answer. I apologize to all of you who wanted informed analysis of allegedly real figures such as "Nick Saban" and "Dan Fouts"; I tried my very best. I hope y'all have as much fun as I did.
Your letters:
Michael:
My girlfriend and I recently went to see an orchestra that was in town. There was probably 50 instruments, it was quite large. It honestly was really entertaining but I couldn't help but feel that even though they are all really good musicians they all looked really lame playing their instruments. It just seems like if I was musically inclined I would choose guitar or drums or something that makes you look cool. Am I wrong?
I can already tell that I'll reveal far too much information about myself over the course of this Funbag. My first lore drop: I played alto saxophone, very badly, for most of my junior high and high school career. As far as I know, saxes aren't usually considered orchestral instruments but plenty of their woodwind brethren are, which gives me the authority to say: You aren't wrong that some instruments are inherently pretty dorky. I spent enough time in my formative years watching trombonists empty their spit valves and oboists wetting their reeds to say that with confidence. Those instruments tend to be both the grossest and the ones with the steepest learning curves; there are few sounds more torturous than a bunch of barely pubescent children attempting to tune a French horn.
I wasn't a cool kid (see above) so I can't really say what the cool kids' musical paths entailed, but I'm fairly certain they didn't include the comical amounts of saliva or hours of private lessons that the adults you saw perform most likely spent their adolescent years mired in. Instead, the cool kids probably spent those years learning a few chords on a guitar in between smoking weed and making out. Presumably, only one of these paths turned into a career, which I suppose is the lesson of high school. Drag queen Trixie Mattel once said that the only high-school trait that ages well is being smart. Unfortunately, that trait rarely goes hand in hand with looking cool. Ask me how I know.
Jack:
Is there a movie you think you have watched more times than any other? (Not including any children's movies you watched a million times as a kid.)
For me it's probably something like Pulp Fiction or The Godfather or something else, but almost certainly nothing from the last decade or so because I simply haven't had as much time for re-watching any of them yet, and also because movies now seem to all be super hero type movies which aren't my cup of tea.
While I probably have more movies from the last decade on my chronic rewatch list than you do (I've seen the first two John Wick movies at least a dozen times each), the movie I've seen more than any other is almost certainly Nancy Meyers's 2009 film It's Complicated. I feel comfortable saying I've watched it at least 50 times. It's a hand-me-down favorite from my mom that I now watch whenever I'm sad or sick or in need of background noise. When I lived with roommates, they knew I was in dire straits or on deadline if they ever heard the calypso beat that plays at the beginning of the movie.
Justin:
What do you need to do to say you "lived" in a place?
As someone who has done a lot of extensive travel for work, spending sometimes several months in a new city, I often wonder what do you need to do to be able to say you "lived" somewhere? Does it depend upon a length of time (i.e. a year)? What if you never leave your home that entire time? So then does it mean it is dependent upon certain experiences in that place? Do you need to eat at a certain number or restaurants, visit a certain number of cultural sites, or walk through a certain number of parks? The same goes for being able to say you've "been" somewhere. If you stop in Indianapolis on a road trip and got lunch, can you really say you've "been" to Indianapolis? Obviously driving through somewhere or having a layover at the airport are different than spending a full week somewhere, so what is the criteria to say you've "been" somewhere or "lived" somewhere?
I love this question. As I mention probably far too often, I studied abroad in Paris for a semester. It was long enough that by the time I left the vintage train door handles no longer flummoxed me, but not long enough for me to learn how to successfully conjugate French verbs. I've gone back twice in the decade that's passed since that semester and each time felt, in a way, like coming home. Still, I've always hesitated to say that I ever lived in Paris. I feel the same way about D.C., where I spent six months interning in college. Both these cities are familiar to me; there are paths there I can walk with my eyes closed. I know more restaurants and bars and coffee shops in both these cities than I do for the one I ostensibly call my hometown. But saying I lived in either of these cities somehow feels like stolen valor, which I suppose is the crux of your question. What boxes have to be checked to call yourself a resident of a place?
I think you're right that driving through somewhere or having a layover at an airport is different from spending a full week in a place, which is also different from studying abroad someplace. I'll propose a taxonomy and I'm sure the commentariat will let me know whether they agree with it or not.
Any stay under six weeks is a vacation. Between six weeks and three months is a residency. Anything longer and you can say you lived in that place. And if you're still wondering if you can call yourself a resident of Indianapolis or Paris, feel free to ask yourself this question: At what point in my longer-than-three-months stay did I force myself to check out the tourist destinations? If it was in the last two weeks then I, Rachelle Hampton, declare you a resident.
Halftime!
Vince:
My question borders on blasphemy, but did Jesus pass gas? A combination of fish and wine is rough on my insides, but perhaps Jesus was immune to gastrointestinal problems? Assuming he did let one rip, do you think Jesus cracked wise with his disciples?
Longtime listeners of ICYMI, the podcast I hosted at Slate, will know that one of my favorite questions to ask guests was whether or not they thought Jesus was canonically hot. The answer I landed on was no, but he also wasn't exactly ugly. I came to this conclusion the way most theologists do: through a series of assumptions loosely predicated on scripture. I was taught that Lucifer was one of God's most beautiful angels before he fell and God doesn't seem the type to make the same mistake twice. It is true that humans, Jesus's primary audience, tend to trust beautiful people more, a fact that I'm sure God was aware of. Which means that He also must have been aware of the "beauty penalty" that researchers at Rice University discovered in 2006. According to a study titled "Judging a Book by Its Cover: Beauty and Expectations in the Trust Game," the additional trust we place in attractive strangers comes with a cost of higher expectations; when those expectations aren't met, attractive people are penalized more.
Managing expectations seems, to me, an important facet of the high-risk, high-reward game of salvation. And based on the people Jesus was hanging out with and advocating for—beggars, lepers, the meek—I would think it more prudent to blend in rather than stand out. So, in my opinion, Jesus was decidedly mid but with the force multiplier of undeniable charisma.
What does this mean for his farts? To me, it suggests that Jesus almost certainly passed prodigious gas in his 33 years of life. My man was rather famously a man of the people, and people fart. If Jesus was so human as to cry and sleep and eat, which he canonically did, then it tracks that his digestive system also functioned in the same ways that ours do.
What those heavenly farts smelled like is another question entirely.
Brad:
I was in 4th or 5th grade at a Catholic school and we had a "Say No To Drugs" assembly. They went through the whole "Drugs are bad, mmmkay" deal but none of that really stuck with me. The only thing I took from the entire assembly was at the end when they played the song "Dumb" by Nirvana. I'd never heard anything like that before (remember, Catholic school in 1994) and demanded my mother take me to the store to get the album with this song. Have you ever gone to an event but ended up taking something else away than the intended message?
I have a few glaring holes in my rolodex of cultural knowledge; sports, classic rock and Monty Python are among them. One of my best friends, a culture editor at the New Yorker, frequently gets free theater tickets as part of his job, so when he asked me in the fall of 2023 if I wanted to go see Spamalot on Broadway, I jumped at the chance. I've lived on the internet long enough to know some of the more famous Monty Python bits—'tis but a flesh wound and the like—but I had no real idea what I was in for. I went in with an open mind; I love historical fiction and musicals and had recently finished Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant which takes place in a post-Arthurian England. People in my life whose taste I trusted casually referenced Monty Python enough that when the lights dimmed in that packed theater, I was more than ready, even excited, to finally understand the hype.
What unfolded before me was one of the more perplexing theatrical experiences I've ever had. As the audience around us devolved into stitches of laughter, my friend and I exchanged bewildered glances. Our mystification had little to do with the cast whose ranks included Tony-nominated actors like Ethan Slater, James Monroe Iglehart and Christopher Fitzgerald. Instead, we were both struck by the feeling that we were party to an inside joke whose original reference we'd never encountered. In 2006, Sam Anderson, writing for Slate, described Spamalot as "shorthand Python" and "the gaudy climax of a long, unfunny tradition of post-Python exploitation—books, actions figures, video games—that treats the old material as a series of slogans to be referenced without doing any of the work that made the lines so original in the first place."
At intermission, we walked out. My friend, who I lovingly refer to as the biggest snob in my life, was apoplectic. I, despite our early departure, was both charmed and content. There are few experiences I treasure more than watching something beloved with the people that it's beloved by. I've never felt more disconnected from an audience then I did in that moment but that disconnection felt genuinely revelatory. Here was something I didn't understand, something I didn't necessarily like, but it had clearly formed the neural pathways of the people around me. When something sinks into your cultural DNA like that, to the point where the punchlines are less surprise and more comfort, it becomes a key to understanding; seeing Spamalot felt like seeing the childhood home of the hundreds of giggling people around me. I didn't want to live there but I was grateful for visiting nonetheless.
John:
Monday night I half watched the Cowboys and Bengals game while doing laundry and helping kids with homework. Immediately after the game I went online and saw nothing but posts about the Simpsons broadcast and I couldn't have been more confused. I ingest a ludicrous amount of sports content on the daily, watch 3-4 NFL games a week(usually not distracted by laundry), listen to several podcasts and radio shows at during work.....and yet, this was literally the first time I'd seen even a single mention this Simpsons game was happening. When I asked people at work, they looked at me like I was insane, according to them, it's been non stop ads for weeks about it. I feel like I'm losing my mind and being gaslit. I know we all have different algorithms, but still, how in the hell did I not know it was happening, and why is this scenario breaking my brain so hard? Have you ever completely missed some acute cultural phenomenon?
I was recently on the phone with one of my oldest friends; we met the first week of freshman year of college and have been inseparable since. We were beginning to plan the itinerary for a trip I was taking to visit her in Richmond in February. She mentioned potentially seeing a new movie starring Keke Palmer and SZA. I assumed she was joking because, up until that point, I had no idea of this movie's existence. Turns out there's a movie coming out on Jan. 17 called One Of Them Days, starring Keke Palmer and SZA!
Despite the fact that I'm in my 20s, black, a woman, and have had CTRL on repeat since 2017, none of the various marketing campaigns that I assume exist for this movie have seen fit to target me. It was one of my more disorienting experiences, not least because it's nominally my job as a culture writer to keep up with movie releases. What made the entire thing even stranger is that when I headed home to Grand Prairie, Texas, for the holidays, I was immediately inundated with ads for One Of Them Days while using my parents' YouTube TV subscription.
It is a brain-breaking experience to realize that even with the numbing onslaught of today's marketing campaigns that something can just fully escape your notice. The creators of the predictive algorithms we're surrounded by assure us that the point of all this data harvesting is that, before we even know we're interested in something, we'll know about it. Blips like this just confirm how empty those promises always were.
Adam:
The most recent Funbag tackled the subject of Christmas cards and it brought up something I think is amusing, but my wife finds a bit lame and annoying on my part.
You see, we moved into a new house a few years ago. This will be our third Christmas in this house. The previous owner moved just a few streets away (expanding family needed a bigger place), so I would occasionally drop off any of their mail that was still being delivered to our house while I am out walking our dog, including Christmas cards they received.
Even though this is the third Christmas of us being in respective new homes, we still receive Christmas cards intended for his family (about 10 of them to date). I made the decision to no longer deliver them to his house.. but I do stick them on our own fridge and create elaborate stories for each family and talk to my wife about them often (the Smiths aren't as happy as they look, Mr. Jones has gambled away all the savings, Ms. Appleton got caught with the pool-boy, etc).
That's the part my wife found humorous at first, but quickly got fed up with. She's also concerned I am going to break up a friendship because the Christmas cards didn't make it to their destination and somehow that will be the linchpin to the mythical fallout.
Anyway, it's a long way to ask.. am I an ass for not delivering the Christmas cards for the sake of my own little game and enjoyment?
I'm sorry to your wife, but I adore this bit. If the former residents of your house can't be bothered to pass along their updated address to the senders of the Christmas cards you're currently receiving then I can only assume that they're feuding. This feud should be included in your storylines going forward. And if the former residents ever stop by their old digs, just make sure to hide the cards so they won't be reminded of their former friends-turned-enemies.
