OK, a little Bono-fueled schadenfreude, a sentiment that probably deserves its own term.

I saw an early preview of the (similarly Bono-fueled) Spiderman musical near the end of 2010. The performance I saw was one of the least eventful in the show’s original run. At one point Spiderman got stuck in mid-air over some balcony seats and we had to wait a few awkward minutes as a stagehand reeled him back in, but there were no obvious incidents or accidents — which at that point was notable.

Actually, the production itself was quite awesome — you could see where the millions upon millions of dollars in budget went. With the massive, glowing sets and spectacular costumes and thrilling aerial displays, Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark sure was something to look at.

But whenever it came time to focus on anything besides the visual spectacle — namely the music or plot or dialogue — holy hell. For one thing, there were multiple times during the show that the entire audience laughed out loud at lines that weren’t supposed to be funny.

Most of all, though, it became clear that Bono got involved because he has some sort of Peter Parker complex. You could just imagine him watching the Spiderman movie at home being all like, “‘With great power comes great responsibility!’ That’s like my whole thing! I’m going to show the world the great burden that comes with all these talents I have, and I’m going to do it by making this into a Broadway musical! Get The Edge on the phone!”

And then Bono and The Edge — assuming they weren’t watching Spiderman together — discus the ways they could make the plot of Spiderman deeper and darker by incorporating a love affair between Spiderman and the Greek spider-godess Arachne because how badass is that, bro? Then The Edge is all, “oh hey Bono you know that one guitar sound I make all the time, like, ‘changety chang chang chang!’? Whaddaya say I put that on all the songs in the Broadway musical, and then in case that doesn’t make it obvious enough that it’s an awesome rock musical, we stand some dudes randomly on the corner of the stage playing the guitar like, ‘changety chang chang chang!'”

Then The Edge says, “My name is ‘The Edge.’ Isn’t that cool?”

And in the end they — with the help of Julie Taymor — wind up with an impossibly convoluted play notorious for injuring cast members with a bunch of songs that sound like U2 b-sides, except “Vertigo,” which is randomly played in the middle at some point. The show ran in previews for months before it was finally shut down for a re-write.

Anyway, the failures of Bono and the Edge on Broadway in 2011 were emphasized by the successes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, them of South Park and BASEketball and Team America: World Police and not in any way “Stuck in a Moment,” who won about a million Tonys for The Book of Mormon. I haven’t seen that yet so I can’t say much about it except that it’s not by Bono and it is by the South Park guys, both of which seem like pretty ringing endorsements.