The De-Textbook

by Cracked. com

If Renaissance art is to be believed, Jesus walked around with blond highlights; soft, wavy hair; a fair complexion; and, occasionally, blue eyes. His homeys were a healthy mixture of guys with pink cheeks and chestnut hair and guys with pink cheeks, chestnut hair, and beards.

  THE TRUTH: Actually, they looked more like the guy on the left.

  As you can probably guess, Yeshua of Nazareth, the man Christians think of as Jesus Christ, actually looked a lot more Middle Eastern, seeing as he was . . . y’know . . . actually Middle Eastern. Figure 3.6 is an artist’s rendering based on what literally everyone in the general vicinity of Nazareth looked like.

  So why have you never seen a historically accurate picture of the person whose likeness has been depicted by more artists from more cultures than anyone else in human history? Well, there’s the fact that the artistic masters of the Renaissance were Italian and liked the idea of a light-skinned, pretty, Italian Jesus. But the biggest shift to a pastier body of Christ happened in medieval times, most likely because, in the age of the Crusades, the Christian Church didn’t want to remind its soldiers that the Muslim guys they were fighting looked a hell of a lot like the little brown Jew they were fighting for.

  FIGURE 3.6 Biblical scholars believe Jesus looked like this, based on how well he held up without sunscreen, and how little of the New Testament is taken up by everyone he meets freaking out because he looks like an albino alien compared to literally every human being they’d ever seen.

  We Have the Ancient Code of the Samurai Almost Exactly Wrong

  THE MYTH: Samurai followed an ancient tradition of honor and loyalty to their masters called Bushido. Samurai longed for a noble death in service to their masters, committing suicide if they failed.

  THE TRUTH: That’s a combination of modern propaganda and terrible historical research.

  The idea that samurai were loyal to their country and eager to die in battle is approximately as old as Walt Disney. It dates back to a hugely unreliable book written in 1900 called Bushido: The Soul of Japan. It’s not that the book is complete fiction; it’s just that its author, Inazō Nitobe, researched how samurai lived by reading a rule book written for samurai. In other words, it’s the equivalent of some future historian reading a high school handbook and determining that today’s teenagers lived by a strict code of attending class, wearing proper clothing, and turning in weed dealers to the cops.

  BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: Teenagers, in fact, do not do those things.

  According to Karl Friday, a history professor at the University of Georgia and the author of a bunch of smart books on Japan, the history of the samurai is notable for a complete lack of evidence that they were at all happy to die in battle or even a little bit loyal. In fact, the evidence paints a picture of samurai who look more like modern professional athletes than what we see in our martial arts films: They’d fight and kill for you, as long as the money was right.

  So why did that other guy’s shoddily researched book become the accepted truth? Because of World War II. Japan needed something that would boost its men’s fighting spirit and willingness to crash airplanes into Allied ships. When Inazō Nitobe sucked at his job badly enough to write, “The way of the warrior is to die,” they all just sort of nodded and said, “Yep, that’s the way of the warrior, all right! You guys all want to be like the samurai, right?”

  Basically Everything You Know About Ninjas Is a Lie

  THE MYTH: Ninjas were badass silent assassins who practiced ninjutsu and covered everything but their eyes in black pajama fabric.

  THE TRUTH: Ninjas were badass silent assassins, but they probably dressed like workers, monks, merchants . . . anyone whose clothes didn’t scream “ninja!”

  This way they could sneak around unnoticed, day or night. It’s the same reason undercover agents don’t walk around in uniforms these days. On those rare occasions when a ninja needed to move through the dark completely undetected, they still didn’t wear black: dark blue was the color they wore to blend in to the night.

  Our current misconception of ninjas actually comes from the theater, an institution commonly associated with “Not ninjas, that’s for sure. Certainly not ninjas.” During the Edo period (about a hundred years after ninjas were around), playwrights needed a trick onstage to show how sneaky ninjas were, as well as a way to make them into “invisible” assassins. The stagehands already dressed in all black, so the audience had long been used to completely ignoring them. So actors playing ninjas started dressing up in all black, too. It would cause the whole audience to jump when one of the stagehands would transform into a ninja, leap out of nowhere, and kill another character.

  FIGURE 3.7 The next time you think of ninjas, stop imagining the picture on the left and start getting slightly more terrified, because they were a lot closer to the picture on the right.

  As for that ancient martial art ninjutsu (aka the martial art of the ninja), it’s probably not a real thing. Throw a shuriken in your average martial arts dojo and it’ll hit someone offering to teach it to you, despite the fact that modern America lacks a strict class system, honor-based fighting rules, and any real opportunities for assassinating feudal lords. You can thank a guy named Stephen K. Hayes, who popularized ninjutsu in the West in the 1970s (and spawned a torrent of ’80s action movies that were just infested with ninjas). Hayes claims that his methods are based on a bunch of “ancient scrolls” that, by the way, he won’t show anyone. Also, no traditional martial arts schools in Japan take him seriously.

  So you just have to go to Japan to find the real deal, right? Actually, even there no one can prove they have access to anything ninja-related going back earlier than the twentieth century. The man who claims to be Japan’s last “real” ninja, Jinichi Kawakami, says that he learned ninjutsu from a mysterious stranger he met as a child and who mysteriously left no evidence of ever existing. Though we guess we should expect nothing less from a ninja.

  The Vikings Didn’t Look or Act Like That

  THE MYTH: Vikings were fearsome warriors who plundered coastal towns all over the Western Hemisphere, leaving every culture they touched in cinders before sailing back home to their land of perpetual winter.

  Even their religion was badass: Bloodthirsty warriors were rewarded for dying in battle with a seat in the massive hall of the afterlife called Valhalla, a place where everyone sits around drinking and fighting, because heaven to a Viking is just more fighting. And that’s exactly what makes them so awesome; they lived their lives by double-headed axes and never got caught up in all the guilt and shame of Christianity.

  THE TRUTH: All those pagan beliefs that define the mythos of the Viking are based on the Prose Edda, a book written by one man two hundred years after Scandinavia had already been Christianized.

  While everything we know about Norse mythology was being compiled in the thirteenth century, a number of elements stolen straight out of Christianity managed to make their way into the Viking texts. For instance, the primary god, Odin, sacrifices himself and gets hanged from a tree while getting stabbed in the side by a spear; then he is resurrected a few days later. Sound familiar? The tale of Ragnarok, which is supposed to be a battle marking the last days of Earth, is basically just a rehashing of the book of Revelation. So ultimately there’s no way to tell what the mythology was and what’s been painted over by Christianity.

  FIGURE 3.8 History is the solemn process by which humanity judges its people and cultures, etching legacies in stone for all of eternity—or as historians describe it: BOR-ING! On the (apparently frequent) occasions when professional historians get bored by history, they like to play screenwriter, mixing and matching props and costumes to Hollywood things up a bit. Or as it’s known among five-year-old girls, playing dress-up.

  The one thing that we do know about their mythology is that Viking priests tended to wear horned headgear during ceremonies. Unfortunately, Viking soldiers raiding the shores with horns on their helmets are about as historically likely as Catholic soldiers storming the be
aches of Normandy in pope hats. Aside from the unnecessary weight it would create while the wearer was trying to rape and/or pillage, the last thing you want strapped to your head during a close-quarters fight is a set of handlebars. The misrepresentation arose years later, when Europe stopped fighting and started arting, during the Renaissance. Master painters and historians, jazzed about having nailed one authentic detail, and needing a terrifying helmet to put on the bad guys, assigned the ritual headgear to everyone. As the devil, Darth Maul, and the priest from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom would go on to prove, you can’t go wrong with horns.

  Studio Notes:

  Love the big, tough Vikings, OOH, scary! Still, we’re just a tiny bit worried that they’re not clearly reading as “evil bad guys” right now. We were thinking you could give them giant tusks? Like an elephant’s tusks, except for a man, like have giant, ivory tusks sticking out of their faces because RAWR, scary y’know? Do we have Viking skeletons that back up our theory that they had elephant tusks on their faces and long tails, another thing I added, just now? If not just put spikes on their hats or whatever.

  Chaz Blazer

  Studio Exec,

  Pieces of guys like you in his stool

  3.B

  Miscast Stars of World History

  The Most Remarkable People Who Ever Lived . . . Were All Turned Into Insulting Caricatures of Themselves

  Miscast Stars of World History

  We tend to think that history is where the truth eventually comes out in the wash. We may be obsessed with idle gossip today, but we assume that historians will remember the important stuff that great men and women said and did. But in looking back at some of the most important figures throughout history, we find that most of the stuff we “know” is based on rumors and amusing anecdotes. Not surprisingly, what we’re left with is oftentimes complete horseshit.

  FIGURE 3.9 (left) So laid-back that he was known to take naps on the field of battle. Posed for paintings while poking his hand through his waistcoat, presumably to hold up his dick.

  FIGURE 3.10 (right) Angry little mascot for the short and insecure. Known to get trapped under his enormous, overcompensating hat like a mouse under a cake dome.

  William Shakespeare Was the Quentin Tarantino of His Day

  THE MYTH: Wrote fancy plays full of lengthy speeches delivered to no one in particular. Only gross when they gave your English teacher a boner.

  “The Bard.” “Father of the Modern English Language.” “The Greatest Writer of All Time.” “Big Willy Shakey-spear.” “Chocolate Thunder.” These names, and many others like them, all refer to one man: William Shakespeare. Just his name makes you think of poetry, or love, or the merits of being versus not being. He’s known for love stories, like Romeo and Juliet, and whimsical comedies, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and all of those boring history plays, like We Can’t Remember Any of Them. Probably a “Henry” or Two, Right?

  He was an amazing writer who seemed like he was just born to write plays and poems that were designed to be dissected and written about in boring high school English class.

  Meanwhile, when a movie full of profanity and boner jokes comes along, the dignified critics of the world immediately draw two conclusions:

  1. We have reached a new low point in popular culture.

  2. The population is steadily getting more and more crude and immature over time.

  You would certainly never hear Shakespeare characters use the F word. Right?

  THE TRUTH: Shakespeare would have gotten a hard R from the MPAA.

  Well, here’s an excerpt from Henry V, act 4, scene 4, wherein the awesomely named Pistol uses clever wordplay to announce his plans to give a French prisoner the kind of “hard r” that rhymes with “cape”:

  Master Fer! I’ll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him. Discuss the same in French unto him.

  If you think “firk” sounds like “fuck,” it’s because it totally does, and that’s totally what it means. Shakespeare’s heroes didn’t just like to declaim odes about bands of brothers. They also liked to tell prisoners of war they were going to straight up rape them.

  It’s worth bearing in mind that these plays were performed in front of an audience that didn’t have a script to follow along with. Exchanges like these would easily be lost among the rapid-fire delivery of other lines, and anyone who caught them would probably just assume that they’d misheard.

  But Shakespeare knew, and the actors knew, and it must have been fun to know they were being paid to stand up and shout F-bombs to an audience that often included the royal family.

  FIGURE 3.11 More like A Midsummer Night’s SCREAM! And King FEAR! And MURDER-Hamlet!

  He Also Could Have Written a Pretty Badass Saw Movie

  Shakespeare was one twisted motherfucker. You might only remember the romance and the Hamletting, but that’s because your English teachers hated you and wanted to keep all of the cool stuff to themselves. Here’s what you need to know: Shakespeare wasn’t some stodgy, prudish, ultraproper poet; he was the sixteenth century’s Quentin Tarantino. He was Eli Roth. He was whoever wrote the episode of South Park where Cartman made that one kid eat his own parents.

  Titus Andronicus features two characters, Titus and Tamora, as they take turns enacting horrible, horrible revenge schemes on each other. And this isn’t harmless, sitcom-style shenanigans we’re talking about here: Tamora kidnaps Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, murders Lavinia’s fiancé, and encourages her sons to rape and mutilate Lavinia. Lavinia actually begs Tamora to be a “charitable murderer” and just kill her and spare her the rape (“Keep me from their worse than killing lust / And tumble me into some loathsome pit”), but Tamora says, “Oh, no way, my boys did such a dope job of killing your husband, they deserve to do whatever they want to you” (we’ve paraphrased).

  Tamora’s sons (in an effort to keep Lavinia quiet) cut off her hands and tongue and, like good little sociopaths, exchange a bunch of stupid jokes about it. “Go home . . . wash thy hands,” one of the sons, Chiron, tells Lavinia. But, silly Chiron, she has no hands to wash! Because you cut them off, you fucking monster.

  But don’t worry, because Titus eventually gets back at Tamora, but do worry, because it’s exactly as awful as you’d expect (assuming you’ve now accepted that, were he alive today, William Shakespeare would be producing the Human Centipede movies). Titus invites Tamora, Lavinia, and some other friends over for a dinner party, where he feeds them some lovely pies, the secret ingredient of which is the bodies of Tamora’s sons, whom Titus killed earlier (after hanging them upside down and draining them of blood, because sure, why not?). Before telling Tamora, “Hey, you just ate your kids—oh, by the way, I killed your kids,” Titus murders his own now-disfigured and defiled daughter in the middle of dinner, because he’s like one of those man-eating bears you’ve heard about—he’s gotten a taste of delicious, delicious crazy and therefore will never be satisfied with anything else for the rest of his life.

  Shakespeare didn’t put all of his crazy in Titus Andronicus; in King Lear, he has one character (Cornwall) tie another character (Gloucester) to a chair and rip his eyes out with his bare hands. Remember the scene in Reservoir Dogs where Mr. Blonde cuts off the police officer’s ear? Shakespeare just made that scene throw up in disgust.

  BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: In A Winter’s Tale, one character leaves the show with this utterly bizarre stage direction: “Antigonus exits, pursued by a bear.” He didn’t spend the beginning of the play teasing a bear or anything. The bear and Antigonus are never mentioned again. One minute, Antigonus is standing on the beach, talking to the audience, and suddenly holy shit—bear! Shakespeare knew that random bear attacks were hilarious long before you did!

  Marie Antoinette Never Said That Thing You Think She Said

  THE MYTH: Most people know her as the bitchy queen who said, “Let them eat cake,” when she found out the people of France were out of bread.

  Hell, some of you knew only that saying and di
dn’t even know who said it. So Marie Antoinette’s bitchiness is more famous than she is.

  THE TRUTH: Jean-Jacques Rousseau totally made up the world’s most classic “Marie Antoinette was a bitch” rumor.

  It was Rousseau who wrote the line, “Let them eat cake.” However, he could not have meant for this to be attributed to the queen, since she was about eleven and still an Austrian princess at the time he wrote it. All he says in Confessions, his own autobiography, is that he had heard that a “great princess” (possibly implying the wife of Louis XIV) said it at some point.

  While Marie Antoinette was functionally illiterate and very sheltered, there is no reason to believe she was a bad person. She was disliked by the people for her Austrian ancestry, something she could hardly help. Imagine if you married into a dysfunctional family when you were only fourteen and they hated you for purely xenophobic reasons and blamed you for all of their problems and they were French. How would you react? Well, by all accounts from those who actually knew her, Marie Antoinette was a sweet and caring wife and mother who expressed deep concern for her adopted country. The “Let them eat cake” story came about at a time when the tales that made people shout the loudest were the ones that stuck.

  It would be like future historians looking back on us and basing their textbooks completely on YouTube comments.

  Winston Churchill Was a Failed Politician

  THE MYTH: The great defender of democracy, freedom, and not-Nazism was cherished by the nation he saved from the brink.

  Imagining tackling Adolf Hitler without the genius of Churchill is like imagining tackling a hot dog without a bun. Don’t bother. You’ll only end up in a puddle of your own sweat.