And Now, for No Reason, Here’s a Review of ‘Genesis of the Dead’

hi every1 im new!!!!!!! holds up spork my name is katy but u can call me t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m!!!!!!!! lol…as u can see im very random!!!!

— popular Internet meme

There’s an old xkcd comic where writer Randall Munroe theorizes that the supposedly “random” things that Internet culture finds hilarious — e.g.: pirate zombie ninja monkey penguin!!! etc. — can be explained entirely in terms of metrical feet: every damn one of them is a trochee, which if you slept through English class, is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (PI-rate, ZOM-bie, etc.). Ignoring for a moment that probably half the nouns in English are trochees, this actually sort-of makes sense. English is naturally iambic (unstressed-stressed), so reversing this has an “unsettling” effect, and — depending on how they’re handled — unsettling things are either funny or frightening (or both). It’s why Poe wrote “The Raven” in trochees, and it’s why all five lines in a limerick open with trochees. And apparently, it’s why everyone on the Internet thinks pirates and zombies are hilarious.

CAPTION CAPTION CAPTION!!!

Given this, it was only a matter of time before my generation — the Lazy, Entitled Millennials™, the first to be raised on the Internet — grew up, started writing books, and started inserting pirates and zombies into them in an attempt to be hilarious. And since there’s already a pirate version of the Bible — one that launched an entire religion, no less — it was inevitable that we would get a zombie Bible as well. The potential should be obvious: think of how different the Bible would be if all the characters were zombies!

Unfortunately, the answer turns out to be: hardly different at all.