Not The Nineties!

The May 2000 issue of The Last Laugh contained a do-it-yourself board game as its centerfold. It was called Not The Nineties!

I don’t know if anyone ever played it; I doubt it. The potshots are pretty brutal for a fun diversion. What can I say, the 1990s were actually pretty brutal themselves. The game provides a reasonably accurate simulation of trudging through ten unpleasant years.

(Printable game board included at the end of this article!)

What you need:

1 die (six-sided, you D&D freak)
Mutilated copy of this issue
One penny for each player
2-4 players

How to play:

Roll die to see who goes first. Punch him/her. Roll again. Move around board following instructions on the first space you land on. First player to make it to the year 2000 wins the game. If you’re lucky, the game won’t be as agonizingly long as the actual decade. But, like most sex partners of the ’90s, this game has not been tested.

Let’s look at the “game pieces”. They are:

Bill Clinton with saxophone and lowered trousers
Bill Gates with laptop and cash bulging from his pocket
A heavily-armed school shooter with JNCOs and wallet chain
O.J. Simpson in uniform with gloves cleaning a knife

Instructions for game pieces: Cut on dotted lines, then fold on solid lines. Glue backs of character together (but not circular base). Once dry, use glue, tape, or snot to secure circular base to penny. You do have four cents, don’t you? Oh, you poor bastard.

I can guarantee that there are references on the game board you’ll have forgotten. A can of Ok Cola lies in the bottom right corner. The change in the $100 bill. Janet Reno burning down the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, causing the deaths of many women and children. Blurry images from the Hubble telescope. It’s a real time capsule of crap. A time crapsule.

Monica Lewinsky’s soiled dress is depicted at top. If you have any respect for Bill Clinton, you weren’t alive or paying attention during the years we had to hear about this Arkansas shit-bird’s filthy spunk. On, and on, and on it went, and then all the women Bill raped in his career started to come out of the woodwork, and the motherfucking bumpkin deserved impeachment. That sick malaise many of us feel all the time- it kicked in when the president of the United States lied under oath. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Bill took it upon himself to illegally campaign for his estranged wife Hillary at polling places. Politicians are all whores, but the Clintons are the whoriest.

If you look close, under the Hubble image, I took a swing at myself with a tossed-aside issue of Drop Dead:

It’s for the best that no one did.

The low-hanging fruit continues with a bullet-riddled Barney doll next to Reno, and the “Ridiculously Small Game Cards”.

Cut them out on the dotted lines, then glue them to cardboard (unless you want them to look shabby). Because we could only fit this many cards, we suggest you place cards on the bottom on the deck after you use them. Otherwise the game will be even more brief and frustrating than it should be.

Could I talk this thing down any more? I don’t think so.

The jokes on the cards are fairly succinct in their targets; O.J. again, grunge bands, Jon-Benet Ramsey, until the last four.

This really happened. The mastermind behind it is truly disturbing to behold. He thought there was a spacecraft following the Hale-Bopp comet. By all accounts, there was not.

Although this is somewhat clearly aimed at South Park, which was four years old at the time, the fire-starting references the dumb kid who torched his trailer (killing his sister) and blamed Beavis & Butthead. Call me spiteful, but you can identify who that crude scrawl is meant to represent, can’t you?

Cheers was one of the most popular sitcoms in television history. Its first spinoff that really took off was Frasier, featuring Kelsey Grammer, David Hyde-Pierce, and John Mahoney. Moving the setting from Boston to Seattle granted the latter a fatal case of over-exposure. The city brewed into an overnight cliché, lattes, space needle and all.

The last card is the real doozy. See, there was this amazing time called Pre 9-11.

I used to drive friends to the airport; I used to fly commercial airlines. I used to jump into my car and drive to another city. I used to go to the beach and surf with a boogie board. I used to talk to people on the phone, for hours on end. I used to want to go out and do things.

I used to think the people in my country were on my side.

On the Comedy Channel/Central that I jape at in this game, there were occasional bumper shorts, with the commercials. They were seldom hilarious, and were run much too often, but sometimes they hit upon comedy gold. One in particular was a rapid-fire song raging about the “Long Island Lolita” scandal that pummeled America before O.J.

Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco
Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco, Buttafuoco, butta butta butta

I really wanna puke when I see Buttafuoco
I don’t even wanna look when I see Buttafuoco
Buttafuoco

Whomever created the song was adept at deftly spitting out that horrific Italian name. He got less inspired with the second verse, “I really really wish I never heard of Amy Fisher”, but it was still catchy. I presume the success of the short granted him another shot, so he focused on a different item in 1993 news.

“Mohammed Salameh“. You know, perpetrator of the first WTC bombing, the one under Bill Clinton’s watch. It gets forgotten nowadays, or confused with the hundreds of other attacks perpetrated by Islamic men named “Mohammed”. The lead hijacker in the 9-11 attacks was named Mohammed Atta.

I’m just pointing out that life was a lot better before we had to deal with this nonsense. Plus, it’s perfectly okay to point out that there have been numerous white mass murderers named “Dylan”. Right? But the “Mohammed every time” thing, that’s better left unsaid.

Anyway, it’s interesting that Comedy Central caught Mohammed-phobia in recent years, because the “Mohammed Salameh” song laid it on pretty thick in ’93. It sounded like Mariah Carey’s horrific “Fantasy”, with a stereotypical Arab voice singing along with the ba-bip-bips.

Mohammed (Mohammed Mohammed)
Salameh (Salameh Salameh)

What went wrong?
What what was it?
When I went back
For the deposit?

Salameh went back to U-Haul for the deposit on the rental van he used to plant a bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center. That’s how fucking dumb that religion makes you. You go to a flight school and only ask how to fly the plane; no need for landing instructions. You try to blow up your shoe.

And the media is so much more stupid, and terrified, they refuse to address it, or criticize it in any way, opting instead to vilify regular Americans for things they said or wrote.

At the fade-out of “Mohammed Salameh”, the titular terrorist mumbles to himself “God damn it, Mohammed. You really stepped in the camel-cocky this time.” Salameh failed his driving test four times. He fucked up driving so badly he put a fellow terrorist in the hospital. He probably inspired the movie Four Lions, or at least Jeff Dunham.

Isn’t a religion awesome when it leads you to attack the country that fucking heals you and gives your fucking deposit back for your piss-bomb van? Hasn’t the last quarter-century of taking this bullshit been wonderful? Isn’t it terrific how I could lose my career or even my life for cracking these jokes?