Everything Is Terrible! Brings Five Years Of Wrong-ness To Holiday Special At Lincoln Hall

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 10, 2012 4:00PM

The Holidays are the time of year when we engage in our most cherished religious and family traditions and also when those traditions are most relentlessly exploited for that other most-cherished American tradition, making money. It is no surprise that some really odd things pop up in this Holiday media nexus, such as the relentless drumbeat of ambiguously self-aware cognitive dissonance about the season's "true meaning" and plenty of things that are just plain wrong.

For the past five years, the peerless psychonauts at Everything is Terrible! have been mining the late 20th century's seemingly endless supply of VHS ephemera, watching all manner of forgettable Holiday programming to extract the strangest bits. They've come a long way since sharing the secret of giving your cat a massage with the world, and the Holiday clips they amass never cease to amaze us. They add them to an ever-refined clip reel of surreal Holiday exploitation, a sort of Deepwater Horizon of media-drenched post-ironic irony that shows no sign of ever being plugged.

This year's Mayan calendar brings an end-of-time vibe to the end-of-year event, as the EIT crew today kicks off two simultaneous tours (one out West and one in the East), culminating with with events at their two home bases, Chicago on Dec. 21 and Los Angeles on Dec. 22. If anything can bring together Holiday junkies and Holiday haters, it's this compilation of "fist fights over toys for tots, erotic Santas, Nazi elves, and an endless parade of singing kids," going down at Lincoln Hall. In addition to the videos, we are promised puppets, sing-alongs, and a visit from "the big man himself."

The Everything is Terrible! Holiday Special happens on Friday, Dec. 21 at Lincoln Hall, 2424 N Lincoln Avenue, 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available online.