KNOCK KNOCK FULL

KNOCK KNOCK FULL

He sang of blood-red birds, a headstone on a wharf, a widow’s ghost driving a horse cart full of apples. In “ To Be of Use,” he admitted in a sad, honeyed voice, “Most of my fantasies are of/Making someone else come.” As masculine myths of young adulthood go, it was the oldest story in the book: the class clown with a curdled heart, just waiting to be made whole.Ĭallahan’s lyrics gradually grew from post-adolescent expressions of garden-variety self-loathing into something far more unusual and often more ominous, in the sense that they seemed wrapped around actual omens-magic phrases throbbing with eerie portent. “I’m gonna be drunk, so drunk at your wedding,” he taunted in one song in another, he sighed, “Maybe you should have a drink/I don’t know why you ever stopped anyway.” He could channel real ugliness, speaking the language of ne’er-do-wells and abusers, but the tenderness in his music could be as unexpected as the bile. On albums like 1995’s Wild Love and the following year’s The Doctor Came at Dawn, the guitar tone became cleaner, the stereo field more uncluttered, the words darker and more biting. But over time, the outline of an actual songwriter started poking through the haze of busted stompboxes, pause-button edits, and Dadaistic pranks. When Callahan played guitar, he might have been attempting to decipher hidden messages from moldy John Lee Hooker records. In the beginning, Smog’s music fit the moniker: gray, formless, acrid. Not exactly an outsider but definitely not an insider, he occupied a liminal space-making out-of-the-way sounds in out-of-the-way places, forever trailing rock music’s dominant strains the way a decommissioned highway shadows a six-lane interstate.Ĭallahan had grown up with a transistor radio pressed to his ear at night, listening first to soft-rock AM stations and then the hardcore punk he discovered at the far left of the dial, and it showed: His taste for low volumes had been tempered by the former, and his fondness for scabrous textures forged in the fires of the latter. Beginning in the late ’80s, he had put out a handful of self-released tapes on his own Disaster Records, named after one of his zines by 1992 he’d graduated to Drag City, a fledgling Chicago label cultivating a roster of acts like Pavement, Royal Trux, and Silver Jews-bands that took the willful ethos of American underground rock and flipped it into stubborn high art, scruffy and proudly nonconforming. (Who doesn't love the interrupting cow?) And bonus points go to jokes that actually use people's names, since that's what you're most likely going to hear as an answer to a question 'Who's there?' Whether you think they're brilliant or cringey, whether you've heard these a million times already or they're new to you, keep these classic and fresh jokes in your back pocket for an instant kid pick-me-up.By this point in his career, Callahan had built a tidy little reputation as Smog. ('Isabel not working?') But once kids catch wise to that, it's also great to hit them from left field with something completely bizarre and unreal. If you have a kid in that knock knock joke sweet spot - say 4- to 11-years-old, when they can anticipate the formula without guessing the punchline - then memorize these hilarious knock knock jokes for kids, and keep them at the ready in case there are ever a dull moment.īut what makes a good knock knock joke funny, anyway? The most effective ones actually play around with the idea of opening a door. That's because the formula is so rigid and predictable, and yet they're still endlessly repeatable. But funny knock knock jokes? They're almost an art form in and of themselves. When it comes to the best jokes for kids, puns can be funny.

Knock knock