Smoking Lizard Media

© 2017 G.N. Jacobs

I wrote a joke a few nights ago. Don’t all whoop it up all at once, but for me it’s a weird milestone…an actual joke. I’ve spent a lot of years working on books and scripts that might have been mildly amusing with funny, or at least smile worthy, scenes. I do black satire, I repeatedly said. Not actual comedy with jokes. 

Truth be told, I didn’t write the joke that I wanted to – A priest, a pastor, a rabbi and an imam walk into a bar… I never got any farther than that setup so rife these days for restarting/enhancing all the many religious wars on our planet. And I went back to other things. This potential joke still remains unfinished. And no, I don’t believe I’m particularly afraid of anything offending all four of the major religions. I’m just not terribly joke-funny enough to finish the joke in the hope that I could get out of Dodge while everybody else is still laughing before they realize that I just honked off about 40-percent of the world’s population. Alas.

So anyway, the joke I did write –

Why was the quantum physics professor across the road found dead with his eyes pecked out? Why was the chicken farmer found dead in a box, mauled?

A: Tired of it all, the chicken and Schrödinger’s cat made a deal to trade murders.

Rim shot, please! The joke, such as it is, needs the help. Maybe even a little booze to help the murmur in the tough room that I imagine going so silent as to be an audio black hole, waveforms go in but the curvature of spacetime is so convoluted that nothing in three dimensions ever gets out. A comedy Roach Motel if you will.

By comparison, these are the vignettes I think are funny and have gotten chuckles from people who hear –

A kaiju (in this case a trademark safe generic name for Godzilla) attacks Los Angeles rising out of Santa Monica Bay a little to the north of the Santa Monica Pier. A pretty blonde young reporter (unless the station does a bit of diversity pandering and goes for the pretty Latina reporter, is there any other kind?) is on hand to catch the monster on camera with her camera guy.

Reporter: Holy crap! A real monster! But what do we call it? Godzilla is under trademark to Toho Studios!

The cameraman says nothing for a moment trying to keep the monster in frame and in focus.

Camera guy: Dunno! We might want to run, though! It’s getting awful close. Angelzilla, maybe?

Reporter: Angelzilla? Works for me, we’ll use it until Legal says stop! You were saying something about we need to run! Let’s boogie, most Riki-tik!

Reporter and camera guy run away only to watch Angelzilla stomp the shit out of the Santa Monica City Hall which, if you care enough to Google the geography, is only a few monster steps inland from the Ferris wheel. Angelzilla, acting at my behest, made short work of the City Attorney’s Office on the third floor. I freely admit to a little anti-lawyer pandering.

More recently, I rewrote a scene you’ve already watched…Commander Spock about to die in a volcano. My addition to a scene I really liked and didn’t want to change too much…create an excuse for Spock to say in his deadpan delivery FUBAR, three times no less. A Vulcan saying Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition is hysterically funny to me. Maybe, it isn’t to you, but since it’s my script and my hands on the keyboard…Muhahahahahahaha!

Okay, now that I’ve checked Wrote a Joke off the bucket list even if it’s basically the unholy love child of a chicken joke and a Schrödinger’s cat joke if Alfred Hitchcock had paid attention in Physics class. A few social media likes and rolled eyes doesn’t make it funny, but rather cute.

I’m sure I’m supposed to go into full blovius going on and on about why we tell jokes and such. But, quite frankly I didn’t read those books before filling up a slow news day bragging up that I wrote a joke, just not the one that seems to matter. Truthfully, I know that I don’t really care about settling what happens when…a priest, a pastor, a rabbi and an imam walk into a bar, but it is funny to see the personally insolvable puzzles that we get hung up on. Like it’s supposed to be my job to write jokes on top of figuring the intricacies of the Action Movie?

So I invite anyone who cares to fire back the punchlines to the unfinished joke that come off your smoking word processors. Oh, one more element, I’m pretty sure various nuns do the dancing at this bar. Why? Who doesn’t love the Busby Berkeley dancing nuns from Mel Brooks’ History of the World Pt. 1? With that “send in the nuns!”