Recently, a friend tweeted something about Mike Meyers not being funny. This tweet went straight to the heart of my “Yeah Baby” shirt-wearing inner child, and made me very sad. I grew up on Mike Meyers movies. They helped me learn important facts like these:

1. What horny means

I loved Austin Powers wholly and completely, even though I was only 9 and didn’t really know what James Bond was. After watching it for the 5th time or so, I went up to my mom and asked, “What does he mean when he says ‘horny?’”

“It means he wants to have sex.”

4th grade’s a lot easier when you’re the one with this kind of information.

2. Beatniks can be cool, regular dudes

I learned about beatniks twice in my life. The first time was from the movie So I Married an Axe Murderer. The second time was in 10th grade, when I started reading Kerouac and all his buddies. According to them, beat culture was about road trips, non-traditional lifestyles, obscurity, complication.

But then I thought back to So I Married an Axe Murderer, where Charlie sings “Rose, jail bird” and then drinks a cappuccino with a cop and hangs out with his parents. It was comforting to think regular dudes could be a beatnik just sometimes, to get laid and stuff. You can do art without the extreme lifestyle, and be chiller for it.

3. Don’t be scared of heavy metal bands

How many times did I watch Wayne’s World growing up? Too many to count. While that movie taught me many important lessons, I think it was his encounter with Alice Cooper that really stuck with me.

To elementary school me, Alice Cooper seemed pretty scary. Face paint, flames, the works. Wayne seems to expect them to be scary too. He gets to go backstage, where he gets on his knees with Garth and they weep, “We’re not worthy.”

But instead Alice Cooper just has them get up and hang out. Instead of doing cocaine off a chick, he explains what Milwaukee means: “It’s pronounced “mill-e-wah-que” which is Algonquin for “the good land.”

I never forgot this moment. It helped to learn that people who put on a front to scare religion teachers are often real nice dudes.

Other things I learned from Mike:

-What haggis is

-That Rob Lowe is not to be trusted

-Seth Green can have a role outside of Buffy

-Elizabeth Hurley is both classy and sexy

-The camera one/ camera two eye trick

-How to make fun of product placement (little, yellow, different)

-Elaborate costumes and accents will do “meh” things for your career

-Flock of Seagulls was a band

-The Cantonese word for “cool”

–Becky Lang