Wisconsin News Roundup - January 28th, 2009

This wasn't funny so I deleted it. I'll make another one.

Wisconsin News Roundup - January 21, 2009

In this first edition of Wisconsin News Roundup, a program dedicated to mocking news from all over Wisconsin, I cover the impact of the Obama inauguration on Wisconsin, a new report on deer collisions, and the scandal over the Mayor of Racine's attempts to pick up teenage girls on the internet.

Couple notes: In the future, I will turn down the volume on the microphone so I don't spike it as often. I will also move my script notes to the side, as opposed to right under the camera, so I don't look as crosseyed.

A list of things that I just don't understand.

• Why people like the movie Marley and Me... I saw it 20 years ago when it was called Turner and Hooch. Only difference is that Turner and Hooch had Tom Hanks and sweet buddy cop sequences, which make it the far superior work.
• People who think parrots are good pets.
  
• How I never knew plow trains existed until a few weeks ago.
• How people other than me don't think plow trains are the most awesome thing ever.
• The Society for Creative Anachronism.
• Tim and Eric.
• Why FedEx still delivers on MLK Day when the Post Office doesn't. Does FedEx hate black people?
• Gin in forms other than "and tonic"/"and juice."
  
• How Kelly Clarkson can do a song like "Since You've Been Gone" that talks about how much better her life is now that she is out of a bad relationship but then go and do a song like her new single "My Life Would Suck Without You." With lyrics like "Being with you is so dysfunctional, I really shouldn’t miss you, but I can’t let go," and "I know that I’ve got issues, But you’re pretty messed up too, Anyway, I found out I’m nothing without you," Ms. Clarkson is clearly in a destructive, co-dependent relationship. That's backsliding, Kelly, for shame.

You used to be so strong, Kelly.

• Twitter.
• The fact that people in Madison aren't scared of the end of the Bush administration. The drop off in sales of Anti-Bush buttons and bumper stickers is going to kill off 10% of the stores in town.
• How Jesus jokes can still be considered edgy.
  
• People who still use Hotmail accounts.
• Why Michael Cera won't sign on for the Arrested Development movie.
  
• What makes pomegranates so amazing.
  
• How the economy works.
  
• How Battlestar Galactica can get so much press coverage when, like, 5 people watch it.
  
• Why it's so damn difficult for me to come up with a name for my one-person "production company."
  
• That I didn't realize that we could have ended racism years ago, all we needed to do was have Wisconsin State Journal editoral cartoonist Phil Hands do a strip about it.

Phil Hands: 1, Racism: 0.

Wait, I haven’t had my scandal yet!

Guest Blog by: Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Steve Preston

Hi, everybody, call me Steve, I’m the HUD Secretary for the United States and I can’t wait to get started on my scandal. Sure, almost everyone in the cabinet has had some sort of scandal but 2009 is Secretary Preston’s time to shine. And by shine, I mean 'disgrace the country.'

Hold up, you are saying the Bush Administration is over? But I haven’t had my scandal yet, it’s why I went into politics. When I was a kid, I grew up watching all the scandals of the Nixon years with Agnew and the rest getting involved in all sorts of shady deals. All of America knew who those men were and what crimes they had committed… and that’s just the point, all of America knew who these scandal artists were. That’s when I, a little boy growing up in Janesville, Wisconsin, figured out that real fame isn’t just getting power, it’s abusing it. Nothing gets your name in the papers like a scandal!

I spent my time waiting to get into a position where I could have a scandal, working as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers (if only I had stayed there, what a fame-making scandal I could have been involved in there) up to Executive Vice President of cleaning conglomerate ServiceMaster. I thought of cooking the books at ServiceMaster but I figured that wouldn’t make news past page 5 of the Chicago Tribune so I continued to hold out for that brass ring: the Bush Administration.

In 2006, I did get a job working as for Bush as the head of Small Business Association but I have to admit I was a little intimidated to make my scandal right then. With Brownie at FEMA bungling Katrina as the flavor of the month and continual superstar Rumsfield continuing to piss off the troops in Iraq, I didn’t know how to compete with those heavy hitters. I mean Margaret Spellings was using the Department of Education to wage a culture war and that wasn't even being picked up on NPR, what chance did I have to make a scandal as a rookie? But since this June, I’ve finally had my chance. HUD, baby! That’s cabinet level shit!

And what have I done with this position? Nothing. Due to the housing crisis, I was so busy fulfilling the duties of my job that I never got around to completely ignoring those duties for my own personal gain. Oh, don’t give me the excuse that I haven’t been in office long enough, Schafer in Agriculture managed to get a scandal going in less than 100 hours as Secretary of Agriculture as he defended the practice of feeding America cows that might be carrying disease. But now I’ve wasted my time in the cabinet and haven’t even been involved with as much as a travel scandal.

I should have used housing funds to help build Homeland Security Chief Chertoff's illegal border fence idea. Ugh, you always think of the best ideas after the face.

Now when history looks back at the Bush administration, they will list this entire cabinet as horrible failures, there will be remembered for generations as some of the worst people to serve in any of these positions. But what about old Stevie Preston, I’ll just be noted as doing a serviceable job with a difficult situation that I inherited. Sigh, no one remembers those who are just serviceable. Maybe I can still go get a car out of the HUD motor pool, as long as security will still let me in, and knock over a 7/11. Oh what’s the use, the media’s already onto the Obama cabinet’s corruption. Sigh, I’ll never be famous.

Wait, I’ve got it, maybe I’ll run for governor in my adopted home state of Illinois! I’m sure to do something morally corrupt in that job!

Comedy Writing: The Misses

I have spent a lot of time writing comedy over the years, mostly in a series of spiral notebooks that I frequently lose. During the holidays, I looked around and found a lot of these old notebooks and it was fun to see the origins of a lot of the funnier ideas I’ve had. But along with seeing the good stuff, I also had to read some of my other ideas, the terrible ones. You see out of twenty ideas I write down, maybe 1 or 2 are actually funny and have potential. Here are some examples of those 18 to 19 not-so-funny ideas that I had completely forgotten about.

Here are some ideas that were forgotten almost as quickly as they were written down:

• Ghostbusters, the musical.
• Where are they now: The Noid (rejected only because of the difficulty in creating/finding a proper Noid costume)
  
• Going to the DMV and Having an Absolutely Wonderful Time (I had a similar idea witb Who’s On First where both people clearly understand that the names of the players on base are “Who” “What” and “I Don’t Know” without any confusion whatsoever)
• The Rotten Urban Core of the North Pole (Ha ha! Thug Elves!)
• The world’s first bar (What would the tip be? Whooaaah! I bet it would be something wacky!)
• Dan Po-wacky, in-home clownery (I might still use this one)
• Dildo Warehouse, factory-direct dildos.
  
• Nudist Colony Secedes From Nudist Empire
• Blackwater Home Security, the Brand America Trusts! (Basically a Brinks ad but anytime there was a break-in, they would come and cause huge amounts of collateral damage. Not a terrible skit idea but would cost way too much to do on my budget of $6.12)
• People who reenact Civil War Battles reenacting Battle of the Network Stars.
• Allergic to Dinosaurs (What does that even mean?)

Somehow this idea sounded funny to me for at least 5 seconds.

Beyond the one-sentence concepts , there were several ideas that I spent more time working on and actually fleshed out into scripts.

Tailgating for a play.

• Casey and I came up with the ideas of decidated fans tailgate outside of Death of a Salesman like they are tailgating outside of a major sporting event. In line, they mock the ‘opposing fans’ i.e. people going to see Our Town. I actually still really like this skit idea.
  
• Selected Excerpt: “Thorton Wilder, more like Thorton MILD-er!”

311 was an inside job.

• You know 9/11 Conspiracies, that same thing, except for the band 311.
• Selected Excerpt: “Come Original skyrocketed up the charts through the path of most resistence. No guitar rock becomes a hit like that naturally.”

Increased Risk Assassin

• The premise of this skit is that the assassin would do his dirty work by raising different health risks for the people he was hired to kill. I.E. changing the target’s milk from 1% to 2%, inserting cigarette ads into the target’s copy of People magazine, lobbying Congress to raise the speed limit in the target’s neighborhood. I think this skit eventually become Freelance Assassin, one of the worst Public Drunkards videos. In retrospect, this original idea was a lot funnier than the finished video skit.

Cellie the Cell Phone gets PTSD after being the cell phone that recorded Saddam Hussein’s assassination.

• Jon, Casey and I came very close to making this one, where our giant cardboard cellphone would have gone all Deer Hunter and almost killed himself. The only reason we didn’t make it is that the costume got thrown away and the Saddam-hanging reference would have been way too dated by the time we made it (and by ‘we,’ I mean, by the time Jon made it while Casey and I sat around and played Wii).

Wii Bulemia

• After Wii Fit, a Wii game that would give you an eating disorder. I was going to make little graphics of a stickfigure putting a Wii Remote down a throat.
• Selected Excerpt:Mario: (on tv screen) Oh, look at you, you flabby sack of fat. What’s that Pikachu? (holds up Pikachu doll to his ear) Pikachu says he’s disgusted by all of your rolls of lard.
  

Ron Paul 2014

• When the ‘Ron Paul Revolution’ was tearing up the internet, I wrote a script about what American would be like if Ron Paul got elected. It was mostly a long rant about how I hate libertarians.
• Selected Excerpt:Future Guy and Ron Paul Fan appear in 2014.
  Future Guy: Welcome to 2014, buddy.
  Ron Paul Fan: I’m so cold.
  Future Guy: Yeah, here in the future, Americans have learned to be energy independent.
  Ron Paul Fan: Finally, free from foreign oil. But why is it so cold?
  Future Guy: You don’t understand me. Now that oil, natural gas and other stuff is all controlled solely by the free market with some fairly rampant deregulated price gouging, average Americans have learned to be independent of needing energy.
  Ron Paul Fan: Wait, you’ve still got my clothes. Give me those back, I’m cold.
  Future Guy: Sorry, man, you fell for the clothes-not-surviving-the-time-stream scam. That’s the oldest time travel grift in the book. These are my clothes now.
  Ron Paul Fan: You stole them from me, give them back or else I’m calling the cops.
  Future Guy: Okay, police department has been privatized so you better be prepared to pay up.
  Ron Paul Fan: Of course, limited government. Without high federal taxes, we should be able to afford private alternatives, yes, I’ll pay to have the cops come. (whips out some cash)
  Future Guy: Heh, that money’s not really going to help you. When Ron Paul banned the IRS, that kinda took out the treasury and federal bank that backed the dollar making your old currency worthless. Do you want some crack though? (lifts up some crack) No war on drugs, so we’ve got plenty of crack. No government interference to stop you there.
  Ron Paul Fan: We’ve got to get out there, make some change. We’ve got to get a leader elected who will fix these problems.
  Future Guy: Dude, it’s 2014, we already had another election in 2012 and Paul was reelected.
  Ron Paul Fan: Why the Hell did people reelect Ron Paul?
  Future Guy: Well, any candidate who wanted to restore the government needed at least some form of tax in order to pay for bringing back basic order and who is going to vote for a candidate who wants to raise taxes?