Top Ten Awkward Moments at 2023 Burning Man

Excuse me—what?
What's so awkward about setting quirky sculptures on fire?
It's good that they forbid cash commerce, because I don't have any cash. What will you give me for this butt-activated jellyfish?
Not to worry—Silicon Valley elites will have their fancy RVs extracted from the mud by their powers of self-reliance
Let me get this straight—there's really a festival in the Nevada desert called "Burning Man"? Because that's weird
Used the extra time stuck in the muddy playa to film scenes for "Independence Day 3"
Huge ruckus when it was discovered that one of the mutant vehicles is powered by an internal combustion engine
Tense confrontation when crew tried to remove the owner of a single-lettered social media company for being Matter Out Of Place (MOOP)
Festival organizers began to question the principle of radical self-expression when a 77 year old nude woman wouldn't stop singing "I Got You Babe"
Members of Kiss showed up because they confused Black Rock City with Detroit Rock City

Posted September 11, 2023

Commentary

The germ of the idea for this funny top ten list was triggered when we kept seeing internet headlines about muddy conditions at Burning Man, which we had trouble getting our heads around without first getting the answer to the question: "Um...what's Burning Man?"

See, we're based squarely in Waffle House territory, which is pretty far removed from the West Coast. So Burning Man was a new term for us, and frankly we had trouble getting past the name of the festival. How could a festival called "Burning Man" possibly be a good thing? Frankly, it sounds like a particularly gruesome disaster movie from the 1970s. Is it too bold of us to ask whether the organizers of the festival need a new VP of Branding? Just sayin'.

Since then we've done some research on the festival, and decided to try to spoof it via one of our funny top ten lists. Many items are spoofs on underlying principles or characteristics of the festival (items 9, 8, 7, 4, 3, and 2). As is our tendency, we also threw in an item about pretending to misunderstand words (item 1), because that's always fun.

This image of "an RV stuck in the mud" was created by Klugmeister using artificial intelligence software. (It's not an actual image from Burning Man.) The image was reviewed by Klugmeister before posting on this web page.