Dear Tina - What does 'Slap the Penguin' mean?

by +Tina Cruris

Dear Tina, I have recently discovered your website and have spent quite a bit of time reading it. I particularly like reading Brad's posts. He is so funny... is he single?

Anyway, the reason I emailed your awesome advice column is to find out exactly what 'Slap the Penguin' means. I have Googled it and looked on Wikipedia, but I have not yet found the answer. My friends have their own theories, most of them are sort of rude so I need to prove them wrong and I figured you would probably know the answer.

Thanks, Miss Inquisitive.

Dear Miss Inquisitive, thanks for emailing me with your excellent question. It really makes a nice change from getting the usual relationship advice requests. Your intuition is entirely correct when you guessed that I would know the answer.

First, let me cover the most important part of your question... Brad is single, mainly because he is not good with women. He is a typical nerd, who has more geek t-shirts than Kristin Chenoweth has teeth.

Now a little history lesson. When this website started out it was a one man show known as My Twist, and was supposed to be a commentary on the major news story of the day, "Not unlike a Leno monologue," according to Ian C. With the addition of supporting writers, the format of the site evolved with the addition of regular features and specialized posts. However, it wasn't until September 2011 that Slap the Penguin came into being.

The forehand penguin slap

"Due to an oversight the mytwistnews.com domain name lapsed and we needed a new one," Ian C. told me. "We needed a name that was memorable, thought provoking and irreverent and Slap the Penguin seemed to fit that profile. The name was reminiscent of 'Drop the Dead Donkey' a 90's British sitcom about a TV news studio which was satirical, irreverent, topical and most of all funny."

Many people have likened the term 'Slap the Penguin' to 'Spank the Monkey', a colloquialism for male masturbation, and truthfully I think that sexual element was definitely considered with the selection. A fair proportion of the humor on our site is aimed at appreciated by the Monkey Spanking demographic. The rest of the humor is unfortunately only appreciated by the top 1% of the intellectual community, which probably accounts for the lack of mainstream popularity.

Anagrams and dick references Q.E.D.

Ultimately, Slap the Penguin can mean whatever you want it to mean. To us it means ...a creative outlet for some of comedy's brightest minds, or an opportunity to showcase our humor in an attempt to secure a professional comedy writing job.

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