Hippo World Guest Book

Published Wednesday 8 August 2007 at 16:35 by Gerald Berkowitz

To credit Chris Goode as author of this piece is misleading, as he happily admits. Except for an opening explanation, the entire text comes from a website he stumbled on devoted to hippopotamuses and the comments left by visitors between 2000 and 2006, Goode’s contribution consisting of selecting about 10% of the total and then reading them, grammatical errors, misspellings, all-caps shouting and all.

The result proves considerably less consistently delightful or amusing than he might have hoped, creating an hour where the basic joke wears very thin, with far too little variation to sustain it. As one might expect, there are several postings of the ‘I love hippos too’ sort, sometimes with the shouted variations ‘Hippos rule’ or ‘Hippos are kool’, and then some more cynical responses about how lame hippos are and how weird hippo lovers must be. A few small hints of pathos encroach in the messages of people who have clearly come to the wrong site or misunderstood its premise, a couple seeming to think it is about hip-hop music. Even so, a show where the highlights are ‘Hippos taste like chicken’ and ‘All hippos must die. They are working with the squid to take over the world’ has not set the bar very high, and despite the enthusiasm and amusement with which Goode reads the entries, audience attention begins to flag long before the hour ends with the site being overrun with spam and closing down.