More Like Citizen Sucks Donkey Balls: 7 universally revered things that are actually total shit. — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Let’s face it: there’s some stuff in life that just about everyone agrees is wonderful, terrific, transcendent, the gold standard. But is that stuff really great, or is it actually total shit?

7. Citizen Kane

If you’ve suffered through Film 101 or really any film course in high school or college you’ve probably had some pretentious professor try to convince you that Citizen Lame, oh I’m sorry, Citizen Kane, a boring black and white movie about something called newspapers, is some kind of “masterpiece”, or maybe even the greatest film of all time.

We get it! You like CRAZY camera angles #snooze

Newsflash: when it comes to entertaining millennials, Citizen Kane has nothing on the Marvel cinematic and television universe. Guardians of the Galaxy and Jessica Jones just plain speak our language, whereas Citizen Kane speaks some weird old-time newspaper language. You don’t have to be that Rosebud guy to know that Citizen Kane seriously sucks.

Worst of all, Citizen Kane is just plain boring. There, we said it. B-O-R-I-N-G. Don’t shoot the messenger!

6. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Unless you grew up in a cave, you’ve been subjected to ubiquitous propaganda about how The Beatles were, like, the best group ever, man, and their masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is like, totally far out, man.

Plus, I'm pretty sure they were on the drugs

But has anyone actually listened to the damn thing? Because it sucks! “For The Benefit of Mr. Kite?” Please, Wes Anderson called! He wants his twee back! You’d have to be “getting high” with a little help from your friends to think this was anything better than a silly mediocrity. Sure, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band tells a story, but it’s not exactly Harry Potter or The Hunger Games so contemporary audiences are right to coldly reject the Beatles and their hopelessly dated oeuvre, most of which, honestly, sounds like it was recorded fifty years ago.

The movie at least improved on the album with some cool disco flourishes but let’s face it: the dumb original album is beyond redemption. And boring! It may just be that I’m not taking my ADD medication, but this didn’t hold my attention at all. Nor does anything else, and that’s because the Beatles are shit.

5. Breaking Bad

Bryan Cranston won, like, a million Emmys and Peabodys for Breaking Bad for his supposedly masterful performance as both mild-mannered chemistry teacher Willy “Einstein” White but all of the critics gushing about the show’s so-called brilliance are choosing to ignore one thing: Einstein’s hat is so fucking stupid it ruins the entire thing.

Honestly, as soon as he put on that hat, I stopped watching Breaking Bad because I have better things to do than watch some asshole in a derby sell crack cocaine. Isn’t that kind of a dumb idea for a show, anyway? And why does that Jesse Pinkman guy have to yell so loud? Doesn’t he know that I’m extremely sensitive to loud noises? To put things in terms even “Screaming” Jesse Pinkman might understand, “Your show is boring, bitch!”

4. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

You were probably forced to read The Great Gatsby in high school. And you probably fell asleep because F. Scott Snoozgerald’s sleeping pill of a so-called “great American novel” is devoid of pretty much everything that makes pop culture fun, like contemporary slang, hash-tags, dick-pics and snap-chatting.

And even though it’s called The Great Gatsby it’s narrated by this whole other dude #confusing. More like not so Great Gatsby!

Old F. Scott Fitzgerald probably drank himself to death because he secretly knew that his most legendary book was actually really boring.

3. Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency

People are always going on and on about how some old guy named Abraham Lincoln “saved the union” and chopped down a cherry tree, and could never tell a lie. At the risk of slaughtering another one of your sacred cows, the sad truth of the matter is that Abraham Lincoln was a weird loser with a dumb hat. Sure, he won the Civil War, but so what? Is that really such an accomplishment compared to say, Justin Bieber’s 95 million Twitter followers? Which matters more to the tweens of today?

If you really look at Lincoln’s public addresses, he was really boring. I made it about two pages into a book of his collected speeches before I gave up. Would it kill Lincoln to throw in the occasional hashtag or emoji to appeal to contemporary audiences? Of course not, because being relevant in 2023 seemed to be the last thing on old Dishonest Abe’s overrated mind. I cannot tell a lie: Abraham Lincoln sucks donkey-dick.

2. Tony Kushner’s Angels In America

Tony Kushner’s so-called masterwork was treated as perhaps the most important piece of theater in the 1990s, as well as a heartbreaking and emotionally shattering elegy for the AIDS crisis and the unforgivable silence of the establishment in the face of an overwhelming tragedy.

Get a load of this Nanny McPhee-looking-ass seraph!

I’ve got another word for it: boring. I took two Ambien before seeing a revival and fell asleep within a half hour. True, I’d had a long day and I was already kind of sleepy, so I’m not even sure why I took the Ambien other than I have kind of a problem, with Ambien and pills in general. But that’s not the point. The point is that Angels In America couldn’t keep me awake, and therefore is terrible.

Kushner called his “magnum opus”, a “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” Uh, hello? Pretentious much? What happened to just calling it a play? I guess that’s not good enough for Mr. Fancy. Whatever. We’re just going to call it a lame fantasia on sucky themes. See? When it comes to lyrical turns of phrase, Kushner has nothing on us, and that’s why we feel entitled to stand in sour, stern judgment of him and his work.

1. The collected works of Shakespeare.

Is there a writer in the English language more overrated than Shakespeare? Your boring teachers and professors insisted that he was the greatest writer of all time, but when the makers of the Amanda Bynes vehicle She’s The Man wanted to make Shakespeare’s story relevant to modern audiences they had to throw out all that lame old-timey talk.

Gosh, not good enough for an Amanda Bynes vehicle? That sure doesn’t sound best-ever to me. But maybe that’s because I’m not some insufferable snob who goes around reading Shakespeare plays. I’ve glanced at a few and I gotta say: not impressed. They’re full of hard-to-understand language and the tragedies are really depressing, if their Wikipedia entries are to be believed. His comedies, meanwhile, don’t speak to modern audiences Matt Rife’s Tiktok videos do.

Looks like we've got a real Shakespeare here, in Shakespeare

Worst of all, Shakespeare’s entire canon is really boring. Now at this point, you might be asking, “Haven’t you literally claimed that every single item on this list is boring? Doesn’t that ultimately say more about you and your inability to properly appreciate or understand these universally revered works of art than it does about the art you’re so glibly and smugly judging and dismissing?”

Nope! That is not the case at all. This list conclusively proves that everything people think is great is actually terrible, and if you don’t agree then you’re also terrible, and, I hate to say this, also pretty boring as well.

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