The Wobbit Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Preface

  And What Is a Wobbit?

  A Note to Readers

  I. An Unexpected Trilogy

  II. /r/oastmutton

  III. A Short but Very Expensive Rest

  IV. Overtook in Underwear

  The Plotz Thickens

  VI. Treehuggers and Muddafuggers

  VII. Dänsing in the Dårk

  VIII. Rockabilly Bagboy

  IX. Ready to Roughhouse

  X. How to Desolate Your Dragon

  XI. A Bildungsroman Moment

  XII. The Coolest Part!

  XIII. The Last Stage Before the First Stage of the Books That Actually Matter, or There and Bored Again

  Dedicated to John Marquand, our wobbit

  PREFACE

  For everyone who has delighted in J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy masterwork—or anyone who’s just looking for a good laugh—this is the million-copy-selling comic extravaganza that will convince lovers (and haters) of fantasy that they’ve finally experienced it all and that they’ll never need to read another fantasy parody again.

  Anyways, that’s the slug line we used for Bored of the Rings, the fantasy parody we published in 1969 that ended the fantasy parody genre. So here’s another. Please buy a million copies of this one too, because after this we’re out of ideas.

  Sincerely,

  The Harvard Lampoon

  AND WHAT IS A WOBBIT?

  Wobbits are little people, smaller than Little People. They love peace and quiet and food, especially food—meats, poultry, fish, carbs, dairy, and, of course, meats. Berries too. Botanically speaking, a berry is any simple, fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary. It may surprise you to learn that many fruits we don’t commonly think of as berries—bananas, avocados, tomatoes, and even pumpkins and watermelons—are actually true berries. Oranges, kumquats, lemons, and other juicy fruits one might peel fall under the category of modified berries. Even more surprising, though, is that some of our most cherished, everyday berries are not berries at all. Blackberries and raspberries are properly classified as aggregate fruits (they contain seeds from different ovaries of a single flower), while mulberries are multiple fruits (easy enough to remember) because they incorporate multiple flowers packed closely together. Even the beloved strawberry is not an actual berry—it is an accessory fruit, so called because the part you eat is not generated by the ovary. Meanwhile, in the category of just-because-they’re-funny names, apples and pears are called pomes, and olives, plums, peaches, cherries, and anything else with a pit around the seed are called drupes.

  Great. And What Is a Wobbit?

  I don’t know, why don’t you read the stupid book you just bought? Idiot.

  A NOTE TO READERS

  In this version several minor inaccuracies, most of them noted by readers (without whom, we acknowledge that books could not happen), have been corrected. For example, the text on pages 38 and 39 now corresponds exactly with the runes on the map in the front of this book that were written in a font that was supposed to be impossible to read. Thank you, trollhunter44 of lotr.wikia.com, for pointing this out. More important is the matter of chapter five, which was originally lifted directly from my dream journal and was not intended to be the foundation of 1,200 more pages of literature. There the true story of the Riddle Game is given, as it was eventually revealed (under pressure, which is now retroactively relevant) by Billy to Dumbledalf, according to the Purple Book, an entire book I had to write to correct this problem. This is in place of the version Billy first gave to his friends and actually set down in his diary (which, even though I never mentioned it, I can assure you exists, trollhunter44). This departure from truth on the part of a most honest wobbit was a portent of great significance. That’s right, trollhunter44, your tireless work has resulted in a portent of great significance. I’m sure that makes it all worthwhile. It does not, however, concern the present story, and those who in this edition make their first acquaintance with wobbit-lore need not trouble about it. Please, save the troubling for trollhunter44, who will save us all. An explanation of this apparent inconsistency lies in the history of the anklet, as it was set out in the chronicles of the Purple Book or The Similarillian, or wherever the hell I put it, and is now told in Bored of the Rings. Thank you, trollhunter44, for your loyal patronage, and I hope the Moblin whose dialogue you made me alter on page 51 kills you in your sleep.

  I

  An Unexpected Trilogy

  In a hole in the ground there was stuck a wobbit. Not a stupid, useless, wet hole that you might dig at the beach because your parents drove all the way out here and your dad said that sandcastle set cost twenty damn dollars so you’re just going to have to make holes and you’ll like it, dammit, nor yet a desperate, useful, dry hole you might dig twenty-eight years later at that same beach because you were just trying to get your dad to respect your career choices and you can’t have this on your record just as they were about to move you off of beef-coloring duty at the local Taco Knell. No, this was a wobbit-hole, and that, dear reader, means various things depending on your Google Image SafeSearch preferences.I

  The hole had a perfectly round door like a doughnut, glazed like a doughnut, with a smaller, half-eaten jelly doughnut stuck in the exact middle. This was meant to replace the doorknob the wobbit had eaten in an unfortunate (but all too common) jelly-donut-doorknob-switcheroo. The door opened onto a tube-shaped hall, which was like an underground bowling lane, inclined and polished at just the right angle so that, having expended all his limited energy opening and/or eating his way through the door, the wobbit could simply roll himself down the hall in a prediabetic stupor and burp-bounce his way into any of the many round doors opening out of it. No going upstairs for the wobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, pantries, sitting rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, pausing rooms, breakfast nooks, mouthbreathing facilities, lunch-meat storage areas, sweating chambers, cheese lockers, and mirrorless Tempur-Pedic gorging zones—all were on the same floor. “Floors” was, in fact, an utterly meaningless term in Wobbottabad, ever since the city council outlawed stairs for implying an impractical amount of effort and escalators for basically being passive-aggressive stairs.

  Now, this wobbit was a very stuck wobbit, and his name was Billy Bagboy. The Bagboys had lived in the neighborhood of Wobbottabad for far longer than anyone could remember, while steadfastly retaining the shortest life spans of any of their neighbors. People considered the Bagboys very respectable, not only because they had a rather delightful job where they could take secret bites of everybody’s groceries, but also because they were almost completely immobile and, even better, unsurprising. You could tell what a Bagboy would say on any question without the bother of taking the mayo-cake out of his mouth, as the answer was almost invariably, “Yum. Mayo-cake.”

  The mother of our particular wobbit—what is a wobbit? I suppose wobbits need some description at this point, as the very act of you reading this book in printed form shows that you must be nowhere near a viable Wi-Fi network. According to Legend, a particularly chatty man sitting across from me in Starbucks who has a hat that says “BACKWARD” on the front and ironic tattoos of gauges on his earlobes, the wobbits used to be much like us. Then came the wobesity epidemic, so named because wobbits wobble but don’t fall down (until they do, then they usually give up and that’s pretty much the end of that). Their cankles became canktellas, and their cank­tella
s became canktellocks. Their muffin tops met their sausage bottoms, and they became scornful and judgmental of the Vertical People, or total flatties, as they call us. Wobbits have no beards, but they have hair everywhere else on their bodies because Gillette’s combination razor-blade/backscratcher can only reach so far. They wear no shoes since their Crocs melded with their feet. There is little or no magic about wobbits, except the ordinary gastrointestinal sort, which helps them to digest the bones of the various fish, birds, and marsupials that periodically hopped in from the wild seeking a zoo. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that these guys are really, really fat.

  As I was explaining, the mother of this wobbit—of Billy Bagboy, that is—was the famous Instadonna Gram, one of the three remarkable daughters of the old Tele Gram, head of the wobbits who lived across the Street, a distance which seemed just significant enough to call a different town and be done with it. It was often said that long ago one of the Gram ancestors must have taken a Pilates class. Such a tale was, of course, absurd, but certainly there remained something not entirely wobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Gram clan would go and have YOLOs.II They discreetly disappeared, and the family ignored their hashtags; but the fact remained that the Grams were not as respectable as the Bagboys, though they undoubtedly got more likes.

  So it happened that one fateful morning (which is really more like fateful 1:30 p.m. in Wobbottabad), Billy Bagboy was stuck in the doughnut-door of his wobbit-hole. This happened just about exactly as often as one might expect, so every sensible wobbit kept a pipe to smoke and a preheated wobburrito to munch on under his doormat as he waited for the cracking wood grain to finally give way. Billy was a respectable wobbit, of course, so the pipe was entirely medicinal wobbit weed, prescribed to combat the chronic no-hungries that afflicted so many wobbits from time to time. It was just then—as Billy was considering whether or not it was possible to take a bean and cheese and wobbit weed hit through his wobburrito—that Dumbledalf came by.

  Dumbledalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only made it through, like, half of the fourth book, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale—literally any sort, as Dumbledalf was getting up there in years, and he tended to get a bit confused at times. However, all the unsuspecting Billy saw that morning was an old man with a staff. He was tall, thin, and very old, judging by the silver of his hair and beard, which were long enough to tuck into his belt. He was wearing a tall pointed blue hat, long robes, a long grey cloak, a purple cloak that swept the ground, a silver scarf over which his long white beard hung down below his waist, and immense, high-heeled, buckled black boots. It was all simultaneously unoriginal and a bit confusing, but one thing was absolutely clear: this guy was pretty gay.

  “Hey, man,” said Billy, and he meant it. Dumbledalf was a man, and “hey” was the least you could say to a person before they left you alone with your food. But Dumbledalf just looked at him from under his long bushy eyebrows and through his half-moon spectacles and over the cat he had found on the street, from whom he was currently trying to obtain spoilers for season four of Downton Abbey.

  “What do you mean?” Dumbledalf said. “Do you wish to greet me, or mean to identify me as a man made of hay; or are you making a short list of things you might see in a typical barnyard; or simply writing the chorus of a hit folk-rock single?”

  Billy had never in his life been accused of doing much of anything, much less four things, all of which sounded like a bit much. It didn’t help that he had inhaled a good quantity of hardened cheese, which he now proceeded to choke on. Meanwhile, grumbling that he could never find the damn power button on these Transformers, Dumbledalf tossed the cat into the air. As the laws of probability and surface area would dictate, the cat landed on Billy’s stomach, dislodging the hunk of cheese onto the grass before him.

  “Very pretty!” said Dumbledalf. “But I have no time to trade cheese this morning. I am looking for someone to share in a YOLO that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone. Even my Grindr spell came up empty!”III

  “I should think so—in these parts! We are plain, fat folk. We don’t want a photo and we certainly don’t want any YOLOs. Nasty, unpleasant things. Somewhere between a Carpe Diem and a DGAF, with half the intelligence of the former and twice the effort of the latter. I can’t see what anyone sees in them,” said our Mr. Bagboy, and with a giant bite of his wobburrito, he managed to snap himself out of the doorframe. He went about trying to put his door back up, pretending to take no more notice of the old man, which would have been easier if Dumbledalf had not taken an extreme interest in licking the back of Billy’s head.

  “Just as I suspected: you’re a wizard, Hairy!”

  “I am not! My name is Billy Bagboy, and I am a wobbit!”

  “Is that so?” Looking puzzled, Dumbledalf spat out Billy’s hair and began to chew on his own beard. A look of delight broke out on his face. “Just as I suspected: I’m a wizard, Hairy! I wonder what type of wand I’ll get.”

  Billy had had quite enough of this by now. “Sorry! I don’t want any YOLOs, or hair tasting, and I just remembered I left the oven on and the microwave on and the stove off, which is a problem because now I won’t have any pancakes to go with my pot roast and popcorn. So good-bye, and you and twelve of your closest friends should all come gorge yourselves in my home sometime soon.” Billy didn’t mean this last part of course, but it was only polite in wobbit society to propose a gorging whenever one ends a conversation. With that, he pulled the door shut, passed out, and rolled down the hallway in a trail of his own sweat.

  Dumbledalf, in the meantime, was still standing outside the door, and laughing long but quietly. Then he ran full speed at the door, leaving a symbolic lightning-bolt crack in the door and a nonsymbolic, amorphous bloody smear on his forehead. He picked himself up and, muttering something about improper fractions, limped slowly away in search of somewhere else to be a wizard.

  The next day Billy had almost forgotten about Dumbledalf, as short-term memory loss is a common complication of type 2 diabetes. He spent the whole day building a bird feeder that would feed him birds at the exact rate of his ability to swallow those birds, and he had almost gotten the calibrations right when there was a tremendous knock on the door. Remembering Dumbledalf, he quickly ate three more crows and ran to the entrance, stopping only three times along the way to catch his breath.

  “I’m sorry to keep you waiting!” he was going to say, but instead he blurted out, “Black person! Black person!” and quickly closed and locked the door. Of course, this was the same door that Billy had broken the hinges off the previous day, so his visitor had very little trouble moving it aside. He was a Little Person with a blue beard tucked into a golden belt, very bright eyes, about yay tall . . . other things that set him apart from everybody else in Widdle Wearth? I don’t know . . . did I mention he was short? Also right now he was angry, but that’s just right now, so you mustn’t take that as a permanent character trait or some sort of universal thing for . . . people like him.

  “Excuse me?” said the Little, otherwise unremarkable Person.

  “I’m sorry,” stammered Billy. “I just . . . I mean, I was expecting a—”

  “White man?”

  “Yes! Noooo. No. A wizard. Like a big, tall, impressive . . .”

  “Grand?”

  “Yes, like a big, Grand Wizard! I mean—” Billy had put his foot firmly in his mouth, which served the double purpose of shutting him up and allowing him to finally eat that last pickled chicken foot he had been saving. Luckily at that moment another Little Person appeared at the door. He looked . . . like the first one. I mean, not exactly alike. I can definitely tell them apart.

  “What’s the matter, Drawlin?”

  “Well, Ballin, it seems our host may not have been expecting people like us.”

  Ballin looked at Billy’s panicked face and sighed. “We’ve talked about this, Drawlin. He’s
just a product of a literary tradition that has systematically reduced the idea of a racial other to a fantastic, categorical enemy.”

  “All I’m saying is, it wasn’t the system that locked the door as soon as he saw who was knocking.” The two Little People stepped inside and made their way to the dining room as they continued this discussion, which is a totally worthwhile dialogue to have and I’m not switching focus just because I’m uncomfortable. Billy swallowed his foot and watched them walk away, completely at a loss over what to do and whether or not to ask if his two guests were related.IV He was about to slip out the door and give up on this hole entirely when another set of visitors appeared in his way. These two were clearly brothers.

  “What can I do for you, my regular-colored Little People?” he said, with visible relief.

  “Fili at your service!” said the one. Nothing, said the other one, because he was a kiwi, an indigenous flightless bird of New Zealand.

  “At yours and your family’s!” replied Billy, remembering his Anglo-Saxon manners this time.

  “Drawlin and Ballin are here already, I see,” said Fili. “Let us join the gang!”

  “Gang?” thought Billy as he speed-dialed the police and then hung up because he didn’t want to be that guy. However, he was also upset about what the additional number of visitors implied. “I’m sure there won’t be any more of them,” he said out loud and, satisfied that this statement would not be comically undercut in a few seconds, he put his door back up and turned to join the Little People—when, ding-dongs-ho-hos-twinkies, his bell rang again.

  “Sounds like four more,” said Fili. “Besides, I saw them coming along behind us in the distance. I have keen eyesight.”

  “I am a Southern Brown Kiwi,” implied the kiwi.