by ANDREW HICKS
A while back, my wife and I were watching our neighbor’s 2 year old, and he spent most of that time grabbing individual DVDs from the shelf, walking over to me and asking, “Harry Potter?”
ME: No, Ben, that’s 9 1/2 Weeks, Kim Basinger’s smoldering turn in a tale of eroticism and obsession.
He’d toss the DVD, grab another one, present it to me. “Harry Potter?”
ME: Not Harry Potter. That’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s metaphorical journey into the spiritual influence of history and time on our universe. It’s letterboxed.
“Harry Potter?”
ME: This one’s called Birth of a Nation, D.W. Giffith’s epic 1915 portrayal of a young American through the Civil War and its aftermath. Griffith’s villains are white actors in blackface, and the Ku Klux Klan rides in to save the day. It won a bunch of awards.
Then the 2 year old asked me what the hell I was doing with a three-hour, century-old racist silent film. I told him it syncs up really well with Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet album when you’re stoned.
We're Not Funny 
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