Group Wants Parents to Stop Encouraging Kids
Published February 2013 0 Comments | Share:
Parents have been asked to stop telling their children that they are funny.
MOBILE, AL – In an effort to ensure kids grow up to become successful and that comedy remains funny, parents have been asked to stop telling their children that they are funny.
During a conference aimed at reducing the amount of unfunny and unsuccessful teenagers, the American Society for Child Development, the Comedy Writers Guild of America and the American Association of Psychologists all agreed that children should not be told they are funny by their parents.
“Parents. For god’s sake, stop telling your kids that they are funny. It’s ruining everything,” said ASCD Chair Devin Viana. “I realize that parents are just trying to make their kids happy but they have to understand that happy kids now equals miserable failures later. It’s a proven fact that success and funny only come from sadness and addiction and dark places – not positive feedback. Positive feedback is the last thing a kid needs.”
Viana organized the conference after seeing a parent tell a loud, annoying child that the child was being “super funny right now.”
“Kids just really aren’t funny and telling a kid that they are funny is really, really bad for them,” said AAP spokesman Brad Lee. “When you have kids growing up being told they are funny and surrounded by love and positive feedback, only bad things happen. Look at Dane Cook. He was told how funny he is every day growing up and now… well, the facts speak for themselves. We’ve lost one generation of teens already and if we don’t change now we will lose another.”
The CWGA was asked to attend the conference to provide perspective on what constitutes funny.
According to the CWGA, there has never been a good, successful comedian that was told he or she was funny by their parents.
“Everyone knows that good comedy only comes from kids that are fucked up and unhappy,” said comedian and CWGA member Dave Hollis. ”All these kids today grew up with their parents telling them how special and funny and clever they are and now those kids are unfunny as shit. Like that Fred kid. The hell is that? Kids need pain and suffering or at least addiction – look at Richard Pryor or even more recently Maria Bamford. They probably grew up being ignored or told to stop being funny. You can’t really get funnier then those two.”
The ASCD, CWGA and the AAP point to the large and growing number of terrible and unfunny YouTube videos made by teenagers as evidence of the epidemic.
According to statistics provided by YouTube, the number of unfunny YouTube videos made by teenagers has increased by 573% over the last three years and continues to increase year-to-year as teenagers gain easier access to the technology needed to generate such content.
“Have you seen YouTube? I mean really seen what’s on YouTube?” said Lee. “YouTube is almost entirely unfunny kids posting unfunny videos. Like that banana kid. There is nothing funny going on there. But just like him there are millions of half-witted kids out there with a YouTube channel that has 800 videos on it.”
Members of the ASCD fear that if parents don’t make changes now, another generation could be lost.
“The kids that are out there now are going to have major problems once they hit the real world,” said ASCD president Samuel Wicker. “For example, on my way here today I stopped to get some coffee and the dumb kid behind the counter made some terrible joke about my last name, which didn’t make any sense, so I slapped him. And I wasn’t the only one. While I was there the stupid kid was slapped by six different people for no other reason than the fact that he is just a stupid, unfunny kid. Unfortunately, he’ll probably just go home and have his mom tell him how funny and clever he is and then he’ll post a video with his stupid, fat face on YouTube. Then the whole scene will be repeated again tomorrow.”
In order to correct the current generation of teenagers, the groups recommend turning the teens to drugs as soon as possible.
“These kids are all going to be addicted to drugs soon anyways – because they can’t cope with life and their parents can’t and won’t be around every second of the day – so we might as well speed that process up and get them out of the way,” said Wicker. “In fact, I’m going to go back to that coffee shop tomorrow and just give that dumb barista kid a bag of meth – just to do my part.”
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