The Friday Random Ten+5 a) laughs and b) encourages the rest of the world to laugh with it.

If the last couple weeks have proven anything, it's that I am one funny motherf&%$er. I'm not just spinning that out of whole cloth; it's been empirically, independently proven. Perhaps as a result, I've had a few people ask me recently, "So, Doug, what do you find funny?" Some of those things you already know, but as someone who likes to laugh, there are some completely random-ass things that are guaranteed to elicit at least a chuckle from me every single time. Today I'm going to share a few of those things with you, dear readers, because the +5 this week is Five Random Things I Find Hilarious:



Little kids getting really, really angry
Little kids getting angry and throwing tantrums are pretty funny to me to begin with, but what's really funny is when it's a kid of a certain age, i.e. one who's just learned how to cuss but isn't old enough to really know how to do it yet. Because that's when you get constructions like "KISS MY HELL!" or "PISS YOU!" and I'm sorry, it's hard not to laugh when you hear something like that. And what makes it even better is that they're so mad and want to be taken so seriously, but there you are laughing at them, and that just makes them madder. There were these two kids I used to babysit for all the time when I was in high school -- a six-year-old with ADD and his four-year-old brother -- and they were always tearing each other up over some silly thing; one day the older one got irate enough at his little bro to call him a "piece of fuck," and after I picked myself up off the floor laughing, I made him go stand in the corner and face the wall until his mom came home. At which point, of course, I told on him. Man, I'm going to be an awesome parent.



Butters from "South Park"
I've already told you guys that Butters is my favorite "South Park" character, but he's also the one I identify most closely with -- my parents never psychologically abused me or got caught in gay bathhouses or anything like that, but I was a pretty meek and shrimpy kid, easily put-upon, and about as worldly as a newborn (an Amish newborn at that). Even today, I'll do something ridiculously Butters-like, such as developing an unrequited infatuation with a Hooters waitress or subjecting myself to all kinds of abuse in an effort to make friends. But anyway, whether it's in spite of the close kinship I feel with Butters or because of it, I think he's one of the funniest cartoon characters ever. And no episode of "South Park" has had a funnier last line than Butters' at the end of the "Imaginationland" trilogy.



The porn industry
You may or may not believe this, but I don't find porn films the least bit erotically stimulating; they're just too funny. I mean, here we have two actors who have engaged in many times more sex acts on camera than I have in any kind of situation, but we're supposed to believe that they're really enjoying this one, and thus their cries of "OH! YEAH! GIVE IT TO ME! HARDER!" are authentic. Sorry, that's just a little too much willful suspension of disbelief even for me, but that doesn't mean that it isn't richly hilarious in its own way. Plus there are just so many opportunities for average Joes like you and me to play along, i.e. coming up with your "porn name" (if you use the middle name/first street you lived on construction, mine is the deeply awesome "Clark Dudding") or trying to come up with porn versions of each year's Oscar nominees (I mean, if someone will actually green-light a porno called "Shaving Ryan's Privates," there's no reason to think they won't go for "A-Bone-Ment," "There Will Be Cum," or "Charlie Wilson's Whore"). Fun for the whole family!



Wendy's "Ranch Tooth" ads
Again, I've already made my feelings clear about this one, too, but . . . what can I say? Ranch tooth, hilarious. I can't explain why. Maybe it's because I can identify, having a "booze tooth" of my own. I don't know.



"Ex-gays"
I know this isn't especially compassionate on my part, given that these folks are surely going through a lot of inner turmoil, but come on, people -- nobody seriously believes you can actually "cure" someone of their gayness, not even de-gaying therapists (or whatever you call them), because they know they can't stop people from having homoerotic thoughts, they're just trying to cram them back into the closet far enough that their man-lust won't be able to fight its way back into the public eye. Not to mention that for every person who comes out of gayhab saying they've been "cured," there are two more who either get caught in gay trysts within a few weeks of release or who meet each other in gayhab and become a couple. I think an awesome reality show would be "Gayhab Island" where you take two dozen "ex-gays" and put them on an island and let nature take its course, and every time two of them break down and nail each other, you kick them off. Or maybe a sitcom where a gay dude comes out of gayhab, moves into a condo in Florida to start a new life, only to find out that his condo development is also the spring-training home of a professional baseball team. Can our hero's shiny new sexual orientation stand up to the sight of Derek Jeter working out by the pool? Tune in next week to find out!

And now the Ten, chosen at random from a music collection containing a level of unintentional hilarity all its own:

1. Kylie Minogue, "Falling"
2. Fatboy Slim, "Demons"
3. Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, "An American in Paris"
4. Fatboy Slim, "Soul Surfing"
5. The Chemical Brothers, "Galaxy Bounce"
6. Dimitri from Paris, "Nothing to Lose" (instrumental)
7. Modest Mouse, "Black Cadillacs"
8. DJ Shadow, "In/Flux"
9. Pet Shop Boys, "Closer to Heaven" (slow version)
10. Miles Davis, "Moon Dreams"

How 'bout you, readers -- what do you find funny (for intentional or unintentional reasons, either the ha-ha or the boom-boom varieties)? Gimme your own personal laff riots and/or Random Tens in the comments.