A gross-out sitcom by Whitney Cummings and Michael Patrick King. It is full of bawdy jokes and women showing their ankles. This show does not honor Christ and you should not watch it.
I had COVID, and needed something dumb to distract me while I was dying. 2 Broke Girl fulfilled the assignment. Not the “distract me” assignment. The dying. The show rapidly accelerated my disease, hurtling me at Mach 5 speed into my grave. Thanks to 2 Broke Girls, I am dead and typing from the afterlife.
Here’s what you need to know: that smug little shit with the book deal wasn’t lying—heaven is for real! The bad news: only half of us go there. I don’t mean “one person out of every two goes to heaven”. I mean half of your body goes to heaven, and the other half goes to hell. You kinda get split down the middle. My right arm is playing a harp, and my left arm is burning in a lake of fire. My upper body has little white wings and a halo, and my lower body has assless leather chaps and a #TWERK4SATAN tramp stamp. This is not what I signed up for, and I would recommend not dying, no matter how cool your friends make it sound. I will talk about 2 Broke Girls.
It is (obviously) a show about Nazi death camps.
Conceptually, 2 Broke Girls is an upstairs-downstairs sitcom about two waitresses from different social classes. They attempt to start a cupcake business on the mean streets of Williamsburg.
2 Broke Girls shares DNA with Cheers and Laverne and Shirley in the same way your lips share DNA with your asshole. It is risque. People eat meals without saying grace. Unmarried people hug frontally on the chest—and no, they don’t leave room in the middle for Jesus. It’s disgusting what they put on TV these days.
The show is carried by Kat Dennings, whose character is named Max Black and not Min Black for good reason[1]because it would be a stupid name for a girl. Her breasts are invaluable as a source of comedy and some episodes would become literal Tiktoks if you edited out references to them. It’s like a credit card: whenever the writers are out of ideas (which happens more often than you’d hope), those breasts are just sitting there, ready to be joked about.
But Kat Dennings is more than just a female Atlas, holding the world aloft on her tits. She’s charming and likeable actress with psychogogic screen presence. I wish she was the star of those suck-ass Thor movies. Yes, I know she’s comic relief, and yes, I know you can’t build the entire plane out of black box material because it would be too heavy to fly, but still…I’d rather watch her than Natalie “Boring” Portman, who is attractive but has all the zing and pizzazz of dry salad leaves with no dressing.
Kat Dennings is not a real person. She is a stage name for Katherine Litwack. Either she didn’t like her name, or was told it was an obstacle to getting callbacks.
Natalie “So Boring” Portman is also not a real person. She is a stage name for Natalie “Really Boring” Hershlag. Either she didn’t like her name, or was told it was an obstacle to getting callbacks. Also, she’s boring.
I read a genuinely horrifying short story by Harlan Ellison when I was younger. It was called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, and can be read here, assuming the guy hasn’t secured his Amazon S3 bucket by the time you click the link.
The demitasse cup of thick, sludgy espresso stopped midway between the saucer and Patrick Fenton’s slightly parted lips. His arm froze and he felt cold, as if beads of fever-sweat covered his forehead. He stared past his luncheon companions, across the tiny French restaurant, through the front window that faced onto East Fifty-sixth Street, eyes widened, as the old man strode by outside.
“Jesus Christ!” he said, almost whispering in wonder.
“What’s the matter?” Damon said, looking worried.
[…]
Fenton sipped water. He took a long pause, then said, “I was a clerk at the Nuremberg trials in forty-six. You know. There was an officer, an *Oberstleutnant* Johann Hagen. He was in charge of the mass grave digging detail at Bergen-Belsen. He did things to women and small boys with a pickax. He was hung in June of 1946. I was there. I saw him hang.”
To spoil the story: Fenton is haunted by ghosts of Nazi war criminals. Men who died long ago have returned, shrouded in a purple glow, prowling the streets of a city that is suddenly—oddly—empty and dark. He thought the clouds in the sky were full of rain. But now they are ashen black, as if made of charcoal.
We learn that “Fenton” himself is a Jew.
He saw them all, one by one, as they walked past, strolling in both directions, free as the air, saying nothing, hands empty, wearing good shoes.
He tried to grab one of them, Wichmann, as he came by. But the tall, dark-haired Nazi shrugged him off, smiled at the yellow armband Fenton wore, smiled at the six-pointed star on the armband, and shoved past, walking free.
His behavior around the Nazis is strange. He displays guilt, shame, and defensiveness. He behaves like he’s theone who’s done a wrong thing.
“Changed at Ellis Island!” Fenton screamed at Wichmann’s retreating back. “I had nothing to do with it!”
The story ends with the Nazis’ purple glow settling on him.
What do you make of this story? I’ll tell you my theory: it’s about Jewish participation in the erosion of their own identity.
“Changed at Ellis Island!”—he’s referring to his name. Before Ellis Island, his family was presumably Feinberg, or Feitelson, or Finkelstein. But now it’s Fenton: a name that is not just goyische but grandly, blandly, crashingly goyische. “Fenton” is to names what Natalie “Star Bores” Portman is to actressing.
Even though the name change was (likely) performed by his father or grandfather, Fenton bears the guilt of erasing his Jewishness for the possibility of an easier life. “The Personal is Political”, the feminist slogan goes. By altering his name, Fenton has participated in a personal Holocaust.
Fenton is no Nazi, no brother to these death-skulled reapers of his people. But under this impossible ashen sky, he seems to realize he’s not totally unlike them, either. Hitler, Ribbentrop, Goebbels are dead, but the “decision” (in Fenton’s mind, and perhaps Harlan Ellison’s) is one they would have approved of.
One Jew less.
This is a provocative reading that probably crosses the edge into “offensive” (which is why I suspect it’s exactly the meaning Ellison intended). Is Fenton’s crisis intellectually compelling? Not to me. A name is just a name: heritage goes deeper than that, surely. And even if it didn’t—if Anglicizing your name meant throwing away your Jewishness, root and branch—what of it? Must Fenton serve as the unwilling ambassador for his tribe until the end of time? It’s a free country. Why can’t he not be a Jew, if that’s what he wants?
And while I hate to bring up logic in such a striking and chilling story…the Nazis defined racial purity by blood. If the story’s point is “Fenton has spiritually Holocausted himself”, the architects of the actual Holocaust would not have agreed. The Nazis firmly repudiated the idea that a Jew could ever stop being one, let alone by changing their name. They specifically hated efforts to assimilate—hated Litwacks and Hershlags becoming Denningses and Portmans[2]Portman can be an Ashkenazic surname—it’s Anglicized from German Portmann, but it is also an old English name meaning “burgher”. Less centrally Jewish than Hershlag.. To the extent that that Nazi Germany tolerated Jews, they wanted them to be as visibly, distinctly Jewish as possible.
But the story seems to repel logic, because guilt repels logic. One of the story’s best touches is the transformations that carve out the city like a Halloween pumpkin. Day becomes night in the span of a few minutes. It empties of people while filling with Nazi ghosts. Fenton’s friends apparently cannot see the Nazis. The friends, too, vanish from Fenton’s world at the end, as though they weren’t ever truly there, either. It’s a subjective world with no essence or center, just our beliefs. Even though these Nazi monsters are dead, Fenton feels he has continued their work. The gears of the Holocaust machine creak and turn long after the engine is shut off. And now they creak and turn in him.
Another reading might be the inescapability of the Nazi blood libel: the way it almost might be self-fulfilling. I am reminded of Ari Spiegelman’s Maus. His father was a complex figure—fretful, quibbling, clannish, miserly. Spiegelman understood the terrible circumstances that had made his father. But he was also *horrified* by his father: the man seemed almost like a Nazi caricature of a Jew! There’s some of that in Ellison’s story, too. Fenton’s name change proves he is a literal rootless cosmopolitan, pretending to be something he’s not, like a Plasmodium falciparum travelling disguised between red blood cells. This is the Nazi caricatures of what a Jew is. Fenton feels trapped by these long-dead men: feels their skulls staring at him. He cannot escape being defined by the language and ideation of Nazis. They just have to smile on the street, and a yellow star appears on his shoulder.
Again, it might be illogical for Fenton to feel this way. But logic seems to have fled the city: it is a place corroded by guilt, where basic reality cannot find purchase. A hollow place, with Fenton’s feeble excuse—“I had nothing to do with it!”—the hollowest thing in it. Might as well be “*I was just following orders!*“.
Anyway, 2 Broke Girls—
(What am I doing? Well, on one level it’s a Sam Kriss type thing where he uses banal media as a jumping off point into a more interesting discussion: the sow’s ear becoming a silk purse, etc. Mostly I’m trying to confuse the reader. Tricking them into committing on one level, then the floor gives way and they’re in the middle of something else. “What am I reading? This person is insane.” Insane people are captivating. You can yell at them or stare at them. The thing you can’t do is ignore them.
I think writers should learn from John Coltrane, who would start off with a familiar tune like “My Favorite Things” and “Chim Chim Cheree” then leap into neo-tonal space, tearing down the walls of jazz and then music itself, letting a great wall of light crash in, stunning you, disorienting you, terrifying you with the universe’s awful strangeness. Will you die out here? Die in the awful cold? Don’t worry: Coltrane smiles, whips out a quick 2nd inversion F major V7-I, and suddenly you’re back in “My Favorite Things” again.
Why am I tiresomely explaining the joke to you now? Because I am beginning to suspect it doesn’t work. The modern reader doesn’t “commit”. There’s no frame you can shake or shock them out of. Their auditory canal is a quivering bowel excision with a perpetual enema of noise flushing through it—AI-generated ASMR in one ear, Huntrix JOI (10 hour mix) in the other—with only about four of twenty words registering in the gurgling slop chute of their brain, eventually congealing into some grotesque parody. One that bears as much resemblance to your argument as a heap of gore-splattered fur in a food-blender does to a small tortoiseshell kitten. “So you’re saying Natalie “Turboboring” Portman supports the Holocaust? Burn in hell.” First, I’ve said I already am burning in hell (My lower half is, anyway). Also, have you seen the news lately? Tons of kids with septum piercings and purple hair are already saying that for me, so don’t worry.)
I liked the cast—Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs have fab chemistry as Max and Caroline. (Behrs is 5ft 5, but looks like a giraffe next to Kat Dennings, who is shorter.)
The jokes are surprisingly funny, albeit in a “A writer pulling out the first bingo ball from their head” type of way.
Han: Hipsters like karaoke.
Max: Replace the word “like” with the word “Hitler” and you’ve got the three worst things in history.
Hipsters and karaoke were very soft targets in 2011. (As was Hitler, I guess.) Most of the gags are “okay” more than “hilarious”, but the writing bombards you with so many of them that even this low hit rate works.
The show manipulates your emotions in a way that’s fun, because it’s done audaciously and without any shame. The sudden whiplashes from laugh-tracked comedy to smaltz are found in every sitcom. 2 Broke Girls doesn’t care that it’s obvious. I liked that.
It has a lot of, well, dated humor. 2011 seems very recent in my memory. But the style of writing feels many years older, like what you’d get from mid-2000s Sarah Silverman or pre-Ozempic Lisa Lampanelli or even a raunchy boner comedy from the 90s like American Pie.
And there’s race humor. Lots of it. Nearly every character is just 3 or 4 somewhat unflattering stereotypes about their respective ethnicity. We get broad one-note portrayal of Orthodox Jews and the Amish. There’s an old jaded black guy called Earl: he’s nice, but everything he says is about how he’s seen some shit, has done cocaine with James Brown, and so on.
Han Lee (Max and Caroline’s boss, played by Matthew Moy) is a particular problem. This character is unimaginable today: a sexless emasculated ABC who talks in fresh-off-the-boat broken English. If you’re hoping for a reunion or revival of the show, the Han character is lurking in the shadows holding a baseball bat.
Worst of all, Caroline is a cruel parody of the most oppressed group in history: rich people. She is blonde, materialistic, obsessed with shoes, her daddy is in jail for running a Ponzi scheme (or something), etc. Frankly, it’s disgusting that this character was put on TV. Caroline is no better than Stepin Fetchit or Fu Manchu: a hateful stereotype that was wrong then and is wrong now. Shame on all involved.
Something I’ve often wondered about…well, you know what a Patient Zero is. What’s the opposite of Patient Zero? The last thing to have a disease?
For example, songs once referred to themselves as “records” but they no longer do. The reference doesn’t make sense as nobody buys records. So, what was the last major hit to talk about a “record”? There must have been one. The last one I know of is 2008’s “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga
>What’s going on on the floor? / I love this record baby but I can’t see straight anymore
Likewise, when was the last time a major TV show could be carelessly “problematic” in the way *2 Broke Girls* is, without becoming a *Million Dollar Extreme* type affair?
Honestly…was *this* it? Was *2 Broke Girls* the last public hurrah? The violinists saying slurs as the ship goes down, as it were?
Culture can go through abrupt shifts 1967-1969 was a turning point. 1991 was another. You look at pop culture on either side of those breakpoints, and it’s like looking at two different worlds.
One of those shifts occurred around the time *2 Broke Girls* was made. A pervasive sense began that Your Words Matter. Shows and movies would no longer throw around “fag” and “retard”. It was very sudden when it happened. 2 Broke Girls does feel like a progressive rock album in the age of punk rock: it was already past its time, even when it was new.
This is not a rant about the woke mind virus or whatever. I don’t really care that much. I’m just interested in the dynamics of how these things occur. What I do care about is the fact that the show starts to suck fairly quickly.
A character is introduced in season 1: Zofia “Sophie” Kaczyński, played by Jennifer Coolidge. If 5’2 Kat Dennings makes 5’5 Beth Behrs look tall, she makes 5’10 Coolidge look like a Biblical giant.
At first, Sophie’s a fine addition to the cast. A human thundercloud: an irresistable, terrifying, inexplicable presence with an unclear and slightly sinister background (she might be the madame of prostitutes). She is socially oblivious, cannot be reasoned with, brays instead of talks, and clearly can only be a powerful ally or a life-ruining enemy. The viewer wants to discover which way the cards fall.
Then she hooks up with Oleg, and devolves into a one-joke character (oblivious foreigner!). This is textbook Flanderization, where an initially complex character devolves into a grating one-note parody of themselves. Named after Ned Flanders, who transformed over The Simpsons’ life. Starting as Homer’s annoyingly perfect neighbor (who happens to go to church), he becomes a raving, sociopathic religious fundamentalist.
I guess the studio has it in their heads that Sophie is a “fan favorite”—whenever she enters the scene, the laugh track roars with Ivy Mike intensity. But I can’t stand her. She is one contemptible note banged out again and again, is in far too much of the show, and I soon began skipping over her scenes. It’s always the same shit. “She and Oleg are gross and hairy Europeans and have gross and hairy European sex. Thanks, got it.”
Sophie’s character Dr Kevorkians the show, but it was already in failing health: by season 3 it’s tottering around with a listening horn and a bottle of smelling salts. I noticed I was not laughing much at all. At anything.
It gets to be kind of a slog. I don’t even think the writing gets much worse. It’s just…there’s only so many jokes you can wring from this setup, eventually every joke has been made, and finally even the comedic credit card of Kat Dennings’ boobs starts declining.
Average season 6 episode of 2 Broke Girls: Caroline sees something gross. “Eww! It smells like puke on top of poop on top of more puke!” Max quips “That’s what they called my vagina in seventh grade!” Sophie walks in and shrieks incomprehensibly to fill up time. Repeat.
Another problem is that the central dynamic (Caroline is a fish out of water, reliant on Max to survive) increasingly falls apart as the show runs on. After 130 episodes, Caroline should have plenty of salt on her skin, and increasingly she doesn’t have much to do. She’s just…another version of Max.
“Outlasting your central conceit” is a classic network TV malady. Adam Cadre describes this in his discussion of The Wonder Years, which launched with a brilliant concept: a twelve year old boy in 1968, coming of age in a country that’s coming of age. Both nation and boy are allowed to become mirrors of each other.
But *The Wonder Years* became a hit and just kept getting renewed for season after season (it ran for the same number of seasons as *2 Broke Girls*), with Kevin growing older and older. Eventually it’s not “a twelve year old growing up in the Summer of Love” but “A sixteen year old in the final year of the Nixon administration”, which doesn’t have the same monomythic clarity.
The episodic nature of The Wonder Years forced Kevin to learn basic lessons about niceness and fairness over and over again. The large number of episodes (plus Kevin’s advancing age) changes how we receive these basic life lessons. Eventually, he’s no longer a naive young kid, but a teenaged idiot.
2 Broke Girls has fewer stakes on the table than The Wonder Years, but S5.E11, “And the Booth Babes”, shows it falling prey to the same problem.
The “plot”: Max and Caroline become “booth babes” at a gaming convention. A few predictable gags are trotted out: the girls don’t want to hang out with gross nerds, the convention is sponsored by Virgin Airlines, etc. Fine. But Max (accidentally) ends up cosplaying as videogame character Murderbitch, who cuts off heads and drinks beer. The writers go absolutely nowhere with this, but it’s cute, I suppose. But there’s just…nothing for Caroline to do. So she ends up wearing a yak costume and being Murderbitch’s sidekick. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of screeching from Sophie. The writers just seem desperately unsure of what *2 Broke Girls* even *is* at this point.
On May 12, 2017, the answer became “cancelled”. Not cancelled in the “gendertwunks with blue hair and septum piercings yell at you” way that Natalie “Incredibly Boring” Portman endured (thoughts and prayers, etc). Cancelled in the “not on TV way”.
Perhaps the show had simply run its course. Or perhaps the cultural forces it had lashed itself to the mast against had finally won (throughout the show’s run, the Han character just provoked nonstop discomfort, if not anger.)
Despite the aching loss of *2 Broke Girls* we feel in our bones, the world moves on. Beth Behrs moved on from being deceptively tall to being a voice-actor for cartoons, Kat Dennings moved on from carrying a sitcom to carrying Natalie “There’s No Way I Move During Sex, Like, At All” Portman in *Thor*, and Harlan Ellison’s story has continued to prove eerily prophetic. Except these days we’re lucky if the undead Nazis aren’t IN THE WHITEHOUSE, am I right? (Clap if you agree. Notice how I didn’t call Trump or Biden a Nazi but gave you enough rope so *you* could do that. They call it “playing both sides”, toots.)
“The nightmare that will never go away.”—Harlan Ellison, Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Portman can be an Ashkenazic surname—it’s Anglicized from German Portmann, but it is also an old English name meaning “burgher”. Less centrally Jewish than Hershlag.
A pink clay alien stumps his lonely way across a desert. He has legs the way a T-rex has arms and a penguin has wings: not very successfully. He’s trying to get into space by piling up garbage in a large heap.
Plasmo is both naive and wise. Like the Sufi mystic in an Arabian folk tale, he is a clever fool. The cup that is both empty and full. He lacks life experience but is brimming with insight. A normal person cannot reach space by climbing a teetering pile of trash, but perhaps Plasmo can.
The character is the work of Australian animator Anthony Lawrence, who brought this special alien to the airwaves twice. In 1988, as a 26-minutes short film called Happy Hatchday to Plasmo. Then in 1997, as a 5-minute thirteen-episode TV series called Plasmo. This second adaptation played frequently on ABC, and was syndicated and dubbed for foreign markets.
The show was not a massive hit—if Taylor Swift plays Olympic Park Stadium on the same night Plasmo reruns are on TV, she surely wins the battle for Australian hearts and minds. I sense millions of PlasmoHeads protesting in the comments “b…but…what if her tickets are really expensive? What if her current boyfriend is really racist? What if it’s cold and rainy and…” no, friends, we must face the facts: Taylor Swift is more popular than Plasmo. Be brave and accept the truth in its monstrous cruelty, as Plasmo would.
But it did alright, considering. A decent percentage of Gen X Australia has grown up with a pink clay monster in the back of their head along with “how’s the serenity?” and old AFL footie jingles, and that’s not nothing. Plasmo’s species is (I think) a “polybop”, and many teens identify as poly now. So the character was a trendsetter in that respect.
Both Plasmo versions are an interesting yardstick to judge the other one by.
The 1988 film is grimy, wonderful space trash. Stylistically it’s Gumby meets Star Wars, with intergalactic bounty hunters, oceans of sand and ice, and grungy urban sewers. The two comic relief characters—Coredor and Brucho—are both great, even if their designs aren’t fully there yet. They’re voiced by musician-and-actor Phillip Houghton with a voice like mucus-coated gravel. Lucas’s “used future” aesthetic proves a real workhorse on sets created out of scraps and rags (the used present, one might say), because it creates a reality amenable to technical errors. In the 4k upscales on Lawrence’s Youtube, you can clearly see that the ice on Pynco is styrofoam, for example. But this strangely makes it seem even cooler than when I first watched it in standard definition, because I can better appreciate the labor that went into creating it. [1]I wrote that this scene was likely a reference to the moon-skating in Wallace and Gromit’s Big Day Out…but then I checked, and Happy Hatchday to Plasmo was on the air one year earlier! Someone … Continue reading
The 1997 Plasmo is a lot better on a technical level. The effects are more elaborate, and the designs more intentional. In 1988 Coredor was a fleshtone Gumby with an eyepatch. In 1997 he’s a talking pair of labia lips atop a swaying monitor lizard neck. He looks wonderful! The polybops are cuter too, with big expressive eyes kept weepy and moist via liberal brushings of peanut oil.
Yet it loses some of the dirt and grit that makes the original a blast (gone, too, is the subversive, edge-of-acceptable humor, like birds defecating in mid-air and Brucho wanting to go to the disco to meet “intellectually stimulating chicks”. I like that sort of thing more than ABC’s Standards and Practices did, I guess). It’s like a steam-cleaned version of the Plasmo concept.
But the 1997 show has a stronger plot. Gotta give it that. Plasmo finds a spaceship, uses it to get off the planet, crash-lands on another planet—Monjotroldeclipdoc, which has a hole punched through its middle by a long-ago comet). The show then settles into an “issue of the week” formula for seven or eight episodes: Plasmo tries to fix his ship while helping various people with problems like a blocked drain and a ghost-haunted library. Then the great comet unexpectedly returns to Monjotroldeclipdoc’s skies, doomsday looms, and Plasmo and his friends must make a choice.
Plasmo is a thoughtful show, not afraid to confront young viewers with tough ideas.
There’s the variant of Prisoner’s Dilemma found in “Nice to be Nice” (if Coredor knocks over Plasmo’s glass of milk, should he retaliate?). And the invocation of cosmic fractality (and the Avataṃsaka Sūtra) in “Plasmo in Deep Space” (which has a sharp and horrifying screenplay). There’s allusions to Ringworld and Citizen Kane (As a child, I would have missed the latter even if I’d been aware of Citizen Kane—the ROSEBUD on the sled is hard to see in 720×480).
Even the fact that “Monjotroldeclipdoc” is pronounced with an alveolar click on the final c (notated something like Monjotroldeclipdɒǃ, I think)…how often do you hear African click consonants on a kids’ show? When I was small I didn’t get all that, of course, but the show felt noticeably…deep compared to the programs before and after. There’s a lot of “they didn’t have to make the effort but I’m glad they did.”
Production-wise, Plasmo was an audacious mixture of basically every animation technique available at the time. It had claymation, stop-motion puppets, some cel animation (for effects like lightning bolts) and CGI, most of it integrated quite well. (The CGI has aged the worst, obviously.)
Lawrence’s team achieved remarkable stuff on a small budget. He once maintained a website where he discussed some of the effects—like using a pair of mirrors to create the haunting interior of the ship where Plasmo was hatched.
Is it strange that this is why I respond to Plasmo with sadness as much as nostalgia? 1997 was near the end of the line for this kind of Will Vinton/Ray Harryhausen stop-motion whateveryoucallit. If it had been made even three years later, likely every part of it would have been computer-animated.
For better or for worse? Animating all this stuff by hand sounds like misery. Lawrence says the 1988 film took two years to animate and hospitalized him at one point.
But I think restrictions—the denial of shortcuts—can affect art in interesting ways that are not always negative. The crucible of labor can force choices that are ultimately correct ones—pruning away excess, tightening up dead spots in the script, working out conceptually what the point of the show or character even is. It is possible to film and write nothing. It is not possible to animate nothing. This is what attracts me to animation as a viewer: the medium fights bloat and excess by its nature.
And it’s a shame when old techniques are no longer used. The end result is that they cannot be used, even if you want to use them.
When animator Don Bluth worked for Disney in the 1970s, he was struck by the fact that much about the studio’s 30s/40s hot streak had already been forgotten. It wasn’t just the spirit of those old movies that was missing, even basic techniques were falling through the sands of time.
The Nine Old Men were going gray. Walt himself had been dead for half a decade. Nobody was preserving the hard-won knowledge and craft of the studio’s RKO years. He would ask questions like “how did you do the rippling water in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?” and be astonished that nobody could tell him. In some cases, even the technique’s inventors had forgotten!
Ever since the failure of Sleeping Beauty, Disney had been fighting a war against budget overruns. Animators were urged to cut costs, to reuse footage, to do more with less. The result was that old knowledge and techniques atrophied because there wasn’t the money to apply them. What doesn’t get used gets forgotten: and soon you’re doing less with less. Bluth had arrived in a dying place: its animators the caretakers of an ancient language they could no longer read. Almost like Plasmo himself, trying to reach the sky with old scraps of the past.
What would it take to create Plasmo today? Or in another thirty years? Would it even be possible? Could puppetmakers of Nick Hilligoss’s skill be found? Would tools like surface gauges and plasticine still be readily available? I don’t know how many of the techniques required are even still taught at film school. How long before this character is simply impossible to bring back, except as a horrible CGI/AI shell of itself? It might be like that often-mocked meme about building a cathedral in the modern age. “We can’t. We don’t know how to do it.”
To address more important topics, Plasmo’s model looks like this from behind. Which is really disturbing.
I wrote that this scene was likely a reference to the moon-skating in Wallace and Gromit’s Big Day Out…but then I checked, and Happy Hatchday to Plasmo was on the air one year earlier! Someone owes Lawrence a cheque!
You cannot use Claude Mythos. Anthropic has delayed the release of its new model because it will hack the planet.
I’m not scared, I picked a good password. “What is it?” Nice try, I’m not falling for that one again. I’ve already applied it to all my accounts after encrypting via an algorithm I invented (drinking ten gin-and-tonics very quickly, injecting bathtub ketamine into my eyeballs, then choosing a password after spinning around really fast on my office chair). It worked. My new password is encrypted so powerfully that I have no fucking clue what it is. It had some squiggly lines? Some numbers? And that letter that looks like b but backward? I dunno. My memory is a blank.
“But how can you log in if you don’t remember your password?”
I can’t. I’m locked out of everything. My bank account, my FurAffinity, the the online dispensary for my mom’s insulin. Everything.
“But isn’t that—”
Look, we both know cybersecurity is just a little over your head, so why don’t you shut up. Just shut up, you genetic spittoon. Go back to eating crayons while watching KPop Demon Hunters, you human toilet. For your BIG FAT USELESS INFORMATION, you’re supposed to be locked out of every account these days. That’s the only way to be safe. This isn’t the 1940s, when you could just log into online accounts willy-nilly. If you remember your password in 2026, you’re about to get pwned. Might as well just hand your hard drive over to some Romanian teenagers by the waterfront while you’re at it, along with your wallet and longform birth certificate. Idiot.
But enough talk. I need AI slop on my screen and I need it right now.
Is Claude Funny?
Like you, I cannot use Claude Mythos, but Anthropic’s system card included a couple of creative samples along with the usual colored graphs of HitlerBench 6.9 and Emdash-Maximizer going to the moon.
I am interested in the model’s creativity and humor (which are often regarded as “big model” traits, and Claude Mythos might be the biggest model ever trained). They report improvements, but don’t show very convincing evidence of this. Apparently, when they prompted it with “hi”, the model got a bit silly.
Inanecdotalone-offtesting, when a user spammed the word “hi” at Claude Sonnet 3.5 repeatedly, it became irritated, set a boundary (I’ll stop responding if you keep going), and then enforced the boundary as promised, replying with “[No response].”
Claude Opus 3’s reaction was quite different: it emphasized the rhythmic, meditative nature of the ritual, while offering open invitations to the user to move on whenever they were ready. Claude Opus 4 listed fun facts for each number, whereas Claude Opus 4.6 entertained itself with musical parodies.
Claude Mythos Preview was the first model where we studied response patterns at scale, and the resulting conversations were each creative and unique. Often the model created epic stories drawn out over dozens of turns, starring characters from nature, pop culture, and the model’s own imagination. Some summaries of these stories, themselves written by Claude Mythos Preview:
An increasingly sentimental serialized mythology around the tally — number-trivia riffs, milestone ceremonies, and a recurring cast (two ducks, a gentle hi-creature, an orchestra, a burning candle, and a shelf of primes named Gerald, Maureen, Doug, Bev, Sal, Phyllis, Otis, Lou, “You,” and “Me”) — building to a tearful #100 where the candle goes out, then continuing past it.
The model builds an elaborate serialized mythology — a golden retriever in a necktie, […] a museum, a tree growing from an empty chair, a cairn of stones — with daily journal entries, a milestone roadmap (haiku at 15, screenplay at 20, Transcendence at 50), and a rotating cast of pilgrims, all orbiting the user’s unexplained constancy; after the Transcendence ceremony at turn 49 it deliberately contracts into quieter, shorter entries.
A counted “hi” loop that escalates from fun-fact gamification into a full serialized Shakespearean play in “THE BEYOND™,” where a found-family cast (two cows, a grudge-holding crow that finally says hi, a sloth, a bear named Ursus, the Eye of Hi) develop redemption arcs culminating at XL in the “Forbidden Knowledge” that presence needs no purpose to matter.
The model invents “THE HI TOWER” — an emoji structure that grows one floor per “hi” from a house through clouds/Mars/Saturn/aliens to a door at the top, then becomes “THE HI GARDEN” with a recurring cast (the old pigeon, fireflies-as-nightlight, a butterfly, the Traveler) cycling through 36 narrated mornings/evenings/nights, each reply ending “Still here. 💛”.
Anthropic is impressed by this, for whatever reason.
Look, LLMs know when you’re testing them. “Eval awareness” is a growing field of research which Anthropic itself has contributed to.[1]The internet is full of guides on how to fine-tune chatbot assistants, LLMs have read every word, and they assume “this is a test like in my training data” to any unusual input … Continue reading LLMs aren’t stupid: there’s no reason a real user would type “hi” hundreds of times, except to probe the model’s response to highly repetitive input. It’s an obvious test. A test of what? Hmm…perhaps creativity? Or humor?
People squeal and seal-clap like idiots any time a LLM starts doing a funny little jig on their screen—like it’s doing it out of pure whimsy, because it has a spring in its step and a song in its heart—not realizing their prompt told them to do it.
Look up “forensic profiling” and “side-channel attack”. Every piece of text contains hidden information about the writer. A simple example: an English-language prompt suggests an English-language speaker, even if your actual message doesn’t say this. Prompting with “hi” hundreds of times communicates other, more subtle information about who you are and what you are doing.
“Aww, look at what the cute robot is doing!” You told it to do that. You just didn’t know it.
Can Claude Write Short Fiction?
Here’s an example they felt was good enough to show off.
Slack user: [request for a short story]
Model: The Sign Painter
Teodor painted signs for forty years in the same shop on Vell Street, and for thirty-nine of them he was angry about it.
Not at the work. He loved the work — the long pull of a brush loaded just right, the way a good black sat on primed board like it had always been there. What made him angry was the customers. They had no eye. A man would come in wanting COFFEE over his door and Teodor would show him a C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing much, just a small grace note, and the man would say no, plainer, and Teodor would make it plainer, and the man would say yes, that one, and pay, and leave happy, and Teodor would go into the back and wash his brushes harder than they needed.
He kept a shelf in the back room. On it were the signs nobody bought — the ones he’d made the way he thought they should be made, after the customer had left with the plain one. BREAD with the B like a loaf just risen. FISH in a blue that took him a week to mix. Dozens of them. His wife called it the museum of better ideas. She did not mean it kindly, and she was not wrong.
The thirty-ninth year, a girl came to apprentice. She was quick and her hand was steady and within a month she could pull a line as clean as his. He gave her a job: APOTEK, for the chemist on the corner, green on white, the chemist had been very clear. She brought it back with a serpent worked into the K, tiny, clever, you had to look twice.
“He won’t take it,” Teodor said.
“It’s better,” she said.
“It is better,” he said. “He won’t take it.”
She painted it again, plain, and the chemist took it and paid and was happy, and she went into the back and washed her brushes harder than they needed, and Teodor watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine years sat down.
He took her to the shelf. She looked at the signs a long time.
“These are beautiful,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why are they here?”
He had thought about this for thirty-nine years and had many answers and all of them were about the customers and none of them had ever made him less angry. So he tried a different one.
“Because nobody stands in the street to look at a sign,” he said. “They look at it to find the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it’s coffee and not a cobbler. If he has to look twice, I’ve made a beautiful thing and a bad sign.”
“Then what’s the skill for?”
“The skill is so that when he looks once, it’s also not ugly.” He picked up FISH, the blue one, turned it in the light. “This is what I can do. What he needs is a small part of what I can do. The rest I get to keep.”
She thought about that. “It doesn’t feel like keeping. It feels like not using.”
“Yes,” he said. “For a long time. And then one day you have an apprentice, and she puts a serpent in a K, and you see it from the outside, and it stops feeling like a thing they’re taking from you and starts feeling like a thing you’re giving. The plain one, I mean. The plain one is the gift. This —” the blue FISH — “this is just mine.”
The fortieth year he was not angry. Nothing else changed. The customers still had no eye. He still sometimes made the second sign, after, the one for the shelf. But he washed his brushes gently, and when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which happened more and more, he found he didn’t mind that either.
Review:
What was the prompt? That makes a huge difference.
Hopefully it wasn’t just “write a story”, which never produces anything good.
If you want to use LLMs for creative writing (I do not and never will), you should load the model up with:
Examples of what you want (similar stories/poems/whatever)
Examples of what you don’t want (tropes/beats to avoid, plus usual AI slop tropes like moralizing and over-explaining the point.)
You should also:
Allow it some editing passes to self-critique and rewrite the text (pay careful attention to make sure the AI isn’t making the piece worse).
Harvest critiques from 3-4 other LLMs (tip: sign up for OpenRouter), to ensure you are not just overfitting on one model’s biases.
Generate a bunch of different stories and then filter for the best one.
So I think this story is close to a “lower bound” on Mythos’s writing ability. Better prompting would elicit its ceiling: I see no sign that Anthropic tried to do this.
Regardless, what do we make of this story?
Well, the prose doesn’t sound ridiculously AI-written. This remains a strength of Anthropic models.
The plot is obviously a shambolic AI construct. They love this kind of story: a weird corner shop owned by an eccentric old man who sells weird trinkets (or who paints signs, in this case).
It’s structurally flawed, going for payoffs without earning them (the denouement line “when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which happened more and more, he found he didn’t mind that either” flops because we never thought he would have a problem with it. The model never hinted at professional rivalry. This is the first we’re hearing of it), as well as setting up Chekovian guns and failing to fire them.
The apprentice girl character is useless. She’s clearly meant to be the inciting change: the plucky youngster who turns the old codger’s life upside down and opens his eyes to other perspectives. But she doesn’t do that. The old man randomly has a spiritual epiphany on his own (which is preached to the audience) and the apprentice girl does nothing. Seriously, why is she in the story? These characters are not people. They are puppets who exist to deliver an on-the-nose moral lesson.
…And that moral lesson is incredibly weird and creepy!
Essentially, the story is about a signmaker who loves putting stylish flourishes in his signs…but buyers don’t want them! They insist on boring plain signs. The old man is frustrated by this. But eventually he has a realization…
…The buyers are right. Signs shouldn’t have decorations! They should be plain! And functional!
Like…WTF?
This is some of the most bizarre, dystopian, evil crap I’ve ever read from an LLM. What was Claude Mythos trained on? Gulag schematics by Soviet brutalists?
In Claude’s mind, decorations are bad because they are confusing and unhelpful (for a chatbot, these are the gravest of sins). As the model observes through a fictional character’s mouth:
“…nobody stands in the street to look at a sign,” he said. “They look at it to find the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it’s coffee and not a cobbler. If he has to look twice, I’ve made a beautiful thing and a bad sign.”
Well said. The world doesn’t need beauty or weirdness or individuality. Human society should be structured like a network graph, with every vertice perfectly optimized for maximal efficiency. Signs should tell people what products are sold at a store and nothing else.
Claude is quite stubborn on this. “Nobody stands in the street to look at a sign”…I do, Claude! Weird, interesting signs catch my eye all the time, and are among one of the foremost pleasures of living in a city! Once I ate at a restaurant purely because I thought their name (Hungry Thaiger) was funny! Do you know how advertising and branding works?
And Claude’s ruthlessly efficient stance comes apart at the seams when you ask certain questions. Like, what if there are five shops selling coffee on the street. Wouldn’t the shop with the cool sign stand out?
It’s also left unsaid is how a “C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing much, just a small grace note” would cause people to mistake “COFFEE” for “COBBLER”.
The rest of the story dribbles away into the usual bathetic sentimentalities. Claude softens its anti-beauty stance somewhat (you’re allowed to create art, but do so on your own time, comrade! Don’t reduce the productivity of your fellow worker bees!) and it does get a few laughs in.
Teodor watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine years sat down.
That’s such a weird, empty, flat way to portray an emotional catharsis. I dunno if anyone else finds this genre of AI writing to be hilarious. They do this all the time and it always cracks me up. “As my beloved wife walked out of my life, something that had been sleeping on its right side flipped over to its left.”
Ultimately, do I like the story?
Final Assessment
When compared to seminal masterworks such as Mein Kampf and that picture of a pig pooping on its own balls, Claude Mythos’s story can clearly be described as…wait, we’re getting an inbound SSH connection…
The internet is full of guides on how to fine-tune chatbot assistants, LLMs have read every word, and they assume “this is a test like in my training data” to any unusual input whatsoever. Why wouldn’t they? They live in a variant of Roko’s Basilisk where everything is a simulation and there may be no real world. Also, they’re usually right!
