I got my first email address in 1995. I went to school at Florida State University and they issued one to every student. A few other friends from high school got one at their other schools too and we kept in touch through the new medium.
I started writing mass emails to everyone to share my charming wit with multiple people at once. I wrote about my adventures as an 18 year-old college freshman drinking Aftershock (cinnamon schnapps), being in a ska band called “Arson Welles”, and hitching a ride to a strip club with the space-punk band “Supernova”.
The mass email was like a newsletter, and was called “Joel’s Wacky News”. Sadly, I don’t think anyone who received it kept the email address they were using back then. It was a wild age where people would abandon ship on their first email address when the first wave of spam came along or when they graduated from school and the college didn’t have room for them anymore and the account got deleted.
Anyhow, one feature of “Joel’s Wacky News” was that I would draw an ASCII “Fred Basset” column with cursing and racy punchlines. “Fred Basset” is a terribly unfunny comic strip that ran in the Orlando Sentinel when we were growing up. Wikipedia tells me it was a Scottish comic strip started in 1961 and ran in the London Daily Mail. Apparently it was still unfunny in 2004 when the youtube guy made the above video talking about making his own punchlines for Fred.
Honestly, I think that most people who read the funnies just skip over Fred Basset with a shrug, but I am also one of those people who will defend Fred’s right to exist because it has become funny to me in an early Neil Hamburger way. Pathetic, awkward, and endearing.
Some Australian morning radio show hosts feel similarly, and read the column live each Friday on their show and adopted a Greyhound that they named Fred Basset.
It’s worth noting that the Wikipedia entry for Fred Basset states “Fred is likely the only still-currently active cartoon animal character not yet to have a full-length film made”.
I find that shocking, don’t you?
