🎨 Artcow Iconoclast / Jonathan Mack Sweet - The Chris-Chan of Arkansas

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Yeah, but then they had Cabot pretend-killed and written off the show for a while, and Benson was kind of furious when they brought her back because she wasn't in on the ruse cruise (part of which she spent undercover as "Persephone Jones," environmental activist infiltrator) and there was a substitute blonde during Cabot's absence, but Benson couldn't stay mad with Belzer and Ice-T playfully sparring at their desks... *COUGH* I mean yes, I agree, there are things like literature courses, and literary theory would have been the bane of Sweet's existence in grad school.
 
are you sure y'all aren't talking about Criminal Minds with the pretend-killing and interchangeable blondes
Yeah, college English is essentially a study of how people have communicated their thoughts and ideas in a written medium throughout the history of the language, so most of the emphasis is on analyzing those writings, understanding the styles and methodologies used, learning how certain genres developed and how written English changed over time, etc. I imagine it's a popular choice for people who fancy themselves writers, probably either because most writers read a lot and are interested in the history of their craft, or - as Sweet probably believed - because they think they already know all about written English and will breeze on through with no problem.
 
When you get down to it, you do a graduate English degree out of love. As @Shadow Fox has neatly outlined, you do it because you love the English language, its history, the engineering of it, what has been done with it and what can be done with it -- or, as Sweet tried to pull off, you do it because (well, he loved the idea of a perpetual student lifestyle, and) you love every damn word that dribbles out of your own mouth.

People drop out of master's programs before they ever even have to think about their candidacy exam or thesis committee. It's not always the people you would expect. A very smart friend of mine reevaluated her life after orthopedic surgery and is now a children's librarian in Minneapolis. Her equally clever friend dropped off the radar altogether and was last seen having many, many kids and dogs. A prototype SJW who was perfectly intelligent but perpetually angry probably just exploded after reading the nth poem by a dead white man. I just wonder on what basis Sweet even got in, because he was doomed by his own qualities to drop out. Was ASU that hard up for money from whatever source -- the scholarship money, or however he paid for it? Did they just kind of automatically pull from their own English undergrad pool? (That would be weird, because it looks far better on an academic CV to do subsequent degrees at a different school than your previous alma mater, especially master's and the unattainable-to-Sweet Ph.D.) I wonder if @Dr. Merkwurdichliebe 's sources might have anything to say about that. (A friend of mine in Germany confirms that the "strange" in "Strangelove" really ought to be "merkwürdig." Sorry. Sorry. If I hadn't been an English major, after reading the last few posts above mine, I would probably know how to make a group for former English majors.)
 
You gotta love how that wiki carefully explains, in case we didn't know, what characters are ripped off from what pre-existing intellectual properties. Sweet keeps referring to himself in the third person, because we totally need to know the origins of every single minor character (and we could not have figured out that A. Null is a play on "anal"), and thinks "Call for Rotch, is Mike Rotch here?" jokes originated with the Simpsons episode (see also "Mike Hunt" and the sanitized version, "Mike Howe").

I'm sure that when a reader painstakingly decodes Sweet's godawful lettering in a given issue, their first question is, "Has this character ever appeared before? If so, are they now appearing only as an arm [this is the French waiter character who is given a Spanish last name because Sweet is deaf and thinks "Jacques Cruz" sounds anything like "j'accuse" and that the latter would be a funny name for a waiter] or in something totally unrelated to the original wacky gag in which they appeared?"
 
NobleGreyHorse said:
When you get down to it, you do a graduate English degree out of love. As @Shadow Fox has neatly outlined, you do it because you love the English language, its history, the engineering of it, what has been done with it and what can be done with it -- or, as Sweet tried to pull off, you do it because (well, he loved the idea of a perpetual student lifestyle, and) you love every damn word that dribbles out of your own mouth.

People drop out of master's programs before they ever even have to think about their candidacy exam or thesis committee. It's not always the people you would expect. A very smart friend of mine reevaluated her life after orthopedic surgery and is now a children's librarian in Minneapolis. Her equally clever friend dropped off the radar altogether and was last seen having many, many kids and dogs. A prototype SJW who was perfectly intelligent but perpetually angry probably just exploded after reading the nth poem by a dead white man. I just wonder on what basis Sweet even got in, because he was doomed by his own qualities to drop out. Was ASU that hard up for money from whatever source -- the scholarship money, or however he paid for it? Did they just kind of automatically pull from their own English undergrad pool? (That would be weird, because it looks far better on an academic CV to do subsequent degrees at a different school than your previous alma mater, especially master's and the unattainable-to-Sweet Ph.D.) I wonder if @Dr. Merkwurdichliebe 's sources might have anything to say about that. (A friend of mine in Germany confirms that the "strange" in "Strangelove" really ought to be "merkwürdig." Sorry. Sorry. If I hadn't been an English major, after reading the last few posts above mine, I would probably know how to make a group for former English majors.)
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Your friend is correct. Merkwürdig is strange in German. I discovered my mistake shortly after creating the account, but didn't change it as a reminder to do better research. I actually found a clip from the film, listened to the pronunciation and typed in search with the soft g spelled ch, got some hits and went with it. My penance is looking at the misspelling every time I visit this site.

On to other issues. Yes, Sweet was in grad school in the fall of 1998. This link right here takes you to the page of graduate student photos in the 1998-99 yearbook. It shouldn't take you long to spot Sweet among all of the photos of normal people.

While most grad students aren't that interested in having their photos in the college yearbook, the fact that there are only 46 of them pictured is surprising and lends some credence to the idea that the school was desperate for students working on post-graduate degrees.

Even at ASU, I strongly suspect that Sweet was admitted to the graduate program as a probationary student because of a lackluster undergraduate resume and/or poor scores on the GRE. If he were a regular grad student in English, he would have been expected to work as a GAT (Graduate Assistant Teaching) or a GANT (Graduate Assistant Non-Teaching) in the English department. If he had held such a position, he would have written thousands of words about it and created 50 comics on the subject. It is remotely possible that he was not a probationary grad student and that he didn't have an assistantship because the head of the department knew him to be a psycho who couldn't be relied upon to teach a freshman English class or even grade papers for a couple of the professors in the department.

I do like the idea of Graduate Student Sweet teaching freshman English.

Nervous 18-year-olds from God-fearing homes in rural Arkansas walk into their first college English class on Day One. There stands Young Fidel Castro, mangy beard in wild disarray, glasses askew, head cocked to one side, obscene buttons flashing in the fluorescent light. The students edge into their seats, uncertain what is to come. At last, their instructor begins to simultaneously gesticulate and croak: "I am here to warn you little fartknockers . . . blah blah blah . . . Herald conspiracy . . . blab blab blab . . . barely legal Betties . . . blibitty blibitty . . . jigaboos will attack in seconds . . . blabitty blabitty . . . scrumptious buffets . . ." Sweet would be alone in the room within 45 seconds.
 
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Dr. Merkwurdichliebe said:
Yes, Sweet was in grad school in the fall of 1998. This link right here takes you to the page of graduate student photos in the 1998-99 yearbook. It shouldn't take you long to spot Sweet among all of the photos of normal people.
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Good grief. Apparently, the first strike from the shovel-wielding photographer landed directly on Jon's face, then the second strike was just a light whack on the left side of his head, then they took the shot.

EDIT: Yeah, so, I went to the wiki that @ Chan the Wizard put up, and I happened to come across Jon's description of his evil clone, Demi-Jon:

"
Fictional character biography
Hiss Hole and Prof. Fruitcake created a clone of Jonathan Sweet using a mass of raw stem cells. The cells were infused with Jon's DNA (using a device that read, ionized and transferred a copy of his genetic code onto special disks). They morphed into an exact double of Jon, which they dubbed "Demi-Jon" and trained as a soldier (as well as Hiss Hole's adoptive son).

[...]

Demi-Jon then put the second half of his plan into action. He sent two forged notes--one to Jon, one to Angela and Josh--requesting to meet in the junkyard outside town. When Josh and Angela showed up, Demi-Jon (as Jon) met them. However, the real Jon then showed up, and Demi-Jon immediately claimed that he was a fake created to fool them. Josh, however, had brought with him a weapon that would temporarily nullify Jon's powers (he had anticipated [sic] to use it on their leader as a last resort). He elected to use it on the fake; however, Josh and Angela couldn't decide which was which.... Angela then realized the fake Jon wouldn't be circumscised and ordered them both to "drop trou" (though, suddenly overcome by girlish modesty, she chickened out, instead pointing out Demi-Jon's lack of a bellybutton (as he wasn't "born"). Josh shot Demi-Jon with the neutralizer, knocking him unconscious."

So, yeah, once again, we are given a generously ugly reminder of the things on Jon Sweet's mind. Yeesh. Not to mention the fact that the whole thing is downright dumb. Angela would have no way of knowing Demi-Jon wouldn't have been cut. They could have simply asked the real Jon something the fake couldn't possibly know, but of course, that would prevent Sweet from making a perverted joke about his "wang," as he put it.

Oh, incidentally, those links to wikipedia about navels and circumcision? I did not add those. they came directly from the site.
 
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Gah, every time I see a picture of Sweet I want to recite that horrible line from Contact, but instead of a poet 'they should have sent a lovecraftian horror author'.

I could have gone my whole life without knowing the circumcision status of Sweet's dick. That future is lost forever now.

Also, I agree with @He Sets Me On Fire that they could have just asked a question only the real Sweet would know but either way 'Josh' was still there. Couldn't he have looked? (Though I am somehow relieved these fictional characters were spared that indignity)
It's not even a joke. It potentially could have been if after "drop[ping] trou" the fake Sweet was revealed to have no genitalia or something.

The only purpose it serves is forcing the reader to be reminded he has a penis.
 
Oh wow, that yearbook. There is one sort of fitting punishment, though (that isn't really one -- it might make Sweet squirm, who knows).

The guy on Sweet's left in the rows of tiny yearbook mugshots is no beauty prize winner either, but looks Native. The guy on his right is Black.
There is a beauty prize winner on the spread: the gorgeous Black woman on the right-hand page, who apparently literally was a beauty pageant contestant. (One of my useless talents is reading upside-down and/or really, really tiny print. Ah, the scars of publishing.)
At the top of the page, above Sweet and cohort, are two Black men: one was a comedian from New York doing MC duties at ASU's Apollo Night (which I would, until now, have thought to be a completely impossible clash of cultures; note to self: JMS does not represent all of his state) and the other, a Black guy lip-synching, is billed as "Huggy Daniels" and dressed as a character right out of Sweet's own comic book.

Therefore, if Sweet bought and kept his yearbook from that year, every time he looks at himself, he is forcibly reminded that ASU at the time was actually much less Jonathan Mack Sweet than it was Sweet Sweetback's Baaaadasssssss Song, at least as far as taste in entertainment: to put on an Apollo Night, of course, you have to be reasonably confident that X number of people will buy tickets -- you wouldn't need a lot of expenses for set dressing, but they did hire an MC from out of town, and he would have wanted to be paid and/or flown back and forth, put up, etc. So actually, the so-called "jigaboos" of his nightmares didn't so much attack in seconds, rather stand up for hours and get applause, the way Sweet could never do. Man, no wonder he's pissed.
 
NobleGreyHorse said:
Black woman on the right-hand page
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I actually didn't notice the graduate student photos for a second because I was quite taken in by her gorgeous smile. It's not even a good angle and I still think she looks rather stunning.
Sweet says his portrayal of blacks is a product of the area he was raised but considering what we can see in the yearbook it becomes all too obvious that he wants to take them down a peg via his shifty comic after spending time around far more attractive and successful black people than he.

We all knew this, but I think it's the final nail in the coffin that cements his true nature.
 
Speaking of "[J-word] Junction," I had thought that was just a one-shot "joke" in that one comic Sweet drew. NOPE. It's a recurrent location in Belch Dimension. But it's totally not racist because Sweet "grew up in a lousy neighborhood," you guys!

Ever the scientist said:
The cells were infused with Jon's DNA (using a device that read, ionized and transferred a copy of his genetic code onto special disks).
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Why does DNA need to be ionized to copy it?
 
Oh @NobleGreyHorse , that's a beautiful catch. Jonny boy is so racist because he got :trump: ed by not-white people for much of his college years. He wanted to be a funny guy? Crashed and burned while his black graduate mate killed in seats with his own jokes. And most of these people in that photo went on to lead more successful lives than he. Jesus no wonder he is so salty about minorities.
 
MrsFrizzle said:
White supremacists are always their own best counterarguments; Sweetums isn't alone there.
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You know what the hilarious part is, besides the fact that Sweet is severely autistic, Sweet doesn't see himself as a white supremacist or a racist.

TOTES NOT RACIST GAIZ said:
Where I grew up, if you were white you couldn't go to certain areas of town, or the blacks would get you. I'm sorry to say that, but it was just a fact of life. There's a story called "Ear-Phonies" in there, the second half of the ish. It's got a running gag where a gang of blacks--the same ones on the cover, in fact--keeps showing up to beat this poor white kid up. It's a very funny, very surreal joke, but there's some truth to it. That's me when I was a kid. I mean, it's actually my brother Benjamin and Billy depicted there, but, eh, you see what I mean. That's my world. That's my childhood... I'm a social commentator, holding up a mirror to the world, and I can't help it if some folks don't like what they see. I mean, I had black friends growing up, and black teachers I respected, but for the most part I stayed out of neighborhoods where I knew I was going to have trouble.
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Quote was taken from the AJM Interview of Jonathon M. Sweet/Dr. Belch

Sweet, as usual, rationalizes his obscene and idiotic behavior. The fact is this: Sweet hates black people because he grew up with the notion that they're inferior because of the whole slavery thing he learned about in history. Later, when his mom was attacked, Sweet then selfishly used that as an excuse to further hate on blacks. As for those yearbook photos, yep, JMS is a petty jealous bitch boy who uses the success of black people as another reason to further hate blacks. Sweet Bro is one of the most petty, immature, pathetic, hate-filled person on this planet. And guess what? I feel sorry for him. Being consumed by hate is a HORRIBLE thing. One of the worst things a human being can go through. JMS will go nowhere because he's a slave to his own hatred.

Sweet prides himself on hating others. In fact, when he was explaining on AJM why he doesn't drive, one of his excuses is this: "It's a good thing I can't drive tee-hee, I would use my car to track down and harass my "enemies" so yay, that's my reason for being too autistic to drive".
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Sorry to double post, but if you want my honest opinion, Sweet got into trouble with blacks for the same reason he got into trouble with other non-black people. He was autistic. He probably creepily stared at them while walking past them and they took offense... like any person would. Sweet has proven just how socially stupid he is with his online postings. He creeps out others by being a sperg that stares at them. When you stare at others, people don't react kindly. Sweet wants people to make exception for him because he's a sperg who can't understand basic social rules, but he can't acknowledge his own issues.

Sweet, I've said it before, I'll say it again, you burn your own bridges by picking fights with anyone you can.
 
I just realized that if Sweet lived in a high-rise dorm, then there's no way he ever peed out the window.
 
trombonista said:
I just realized that if Sweet lived in a high-rise dorm, then there's no way he ever peed out the window.
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I can see him trying, along with pissing down the sink. He is that much of a horrid pig to do that. I mean, he is so goddamned lazy he couldn't even walk to the bathroom and piss, even though he could still hear da cartoon playing as he does so.
 
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