The five funniest pieces she wrote for The Stranger? Impossible question.
The five funniest things she wrote for The Stranger? Impossible question.

Yes, I know, Lindy hasn't worked at The Stranger in years, and yes, I know, she writes for the Guardian and GQ and places like that now, but her Stranger archives run deep, so in honor of her memoir Shrill being published yesterday (get it! Here it is on Indiebound if you hate Amazon), I have been looking through her archives and jiggling with laughter and narrowly avoiding asphyxiation by Trader Joe's Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups all afternoon.

It's hard to decide what her five funniest pieces are. There's a case to be made for the popes piece, but times change, the pope has changed, and it didn't make the cut. Sorry, Christians!

There's a case to be made for that time when she reviewed the Billboard top 10 ("Sometimes Katy Perry feels like a plastic bag. You know? It's probably because she's made of plastic and is literally a bag.") but it seemed too Katy Perry-related, finally.

I thought about putting that time she toured an auction house full of Michael Jackson's stuff, but it's really the photos that do the talking there. (What's that? Twenty-seven photos of Michael Jackson's batshit crazy stuff is not enough crazy for you? Here are 17 supplemental photos of Michael Jackson's batshit stuff.)

For novelty's sake, I thought about putting her review of Din Tai Fung on here ("Everyone has an OPINION, and everyone is RIGHT, and everyone ELSE is a degenerate hayseed with the palate of a sucking chest wound"), but Angela Garbes has a dumpling piece coming out in The Stranger tomorrow, so I'm a little dumpling'd out.

I thought about including that time she wrote the Morning News drunk after hanging out at council member Mike O'Brien's house, but one of those posts was unbylined, so it didn't meet my own criteria that I made up as I was writing this sentence.

I thought about putting up that piece where she had to write a feature and didn't have one ready so she wrote five partial rough drafts of features and we ran them all together as one article. But one of the pieces of art for that piece that's supposed to come halfway through the piece shows up at the top of the page even though I looked at the HTML and everything, and since I couldn't figure it out, I moved on.

I thought about putting her Slog series about things she found on the ground on the list below (oh c'mon, you remember that series) but just then the words "literary merit" were seen tumbling through the darkest recesses of my mind, I'm not sure why, what horrible boring words those are, and figured, well, since there weren't too many words in that tiny-snake photo, maybe that wasn't literary or meritorious enough. Although I still think about very tiny mice crawling around Lindy's old desk.

Anyway, without any more ado, I present to you the funniest pieces Lindy wrote at The Stranger.

5. Lindy West on women throughout musical history.
"Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. Women? Playing music? What'll they think of next!? Dogs playing poker? Asians playing hooky? Women playing doctor? In actual hospitals? (It's just a sexy laugh until somebody gets their menses all over the equipment. Bone saws don't grow on trees, you know.) Well. It's come to my attention that the ladies have organized a little coffee klatch for themselves to do their little ditties and jangle their little jingles and toot their little lady-flutes out in a field somewhere."

4. Lindy West on the Game of Thrones books.
"Basically—here is the dark, mewling shame-baby that's been calcifying for years in my brain-womb (medical term)—I will read anything with a fucking fictional map in the front."

3. Lindy West on the different kinds of people that there are.
"Listen, old people. Pigeons do not love you. Much like robots and the British, pigeons do not have the capacity to feel love. They only have the capacity to desire croutons. And when you spread infinity croutons across the grass outside MY house, for the purpose of making pigeons love you (WHICH WILL NEVER HAPPEN), the only result is infinite feces."

2. Lindy West on The Beaver starring Mel Gibson.
"Over the course of my medium-length life, I have wanted many things. Pizza, for instance (right now). And the widest bell-bottoms possible (7th grade). And a 'beading loom' (you were right, Mom). And world peace (psych, I'm totally a war profiteer!). But never, ever have I wanted anything as much as I want to reveal the ending of The Beaver to you in this column right now."

1. Lindy West on Sex and the City 2.
Duh.

Now go buy her book and don't forget to go to her reading at Town Hall on May 25.