The stand-up comedy routine that never stood-up

So I originally wrote this thing on November 27th, 2005 in a notebook. I know the precise date because I radiocarbon dated the loose leaf page to establish a base, then conducted a sophisticated chemical analysis of the ink to determine the difference between the ages of the paper and the ink and then extrapolated from there to the top of the original page where I had written "11/27/05."

Feel free to laugh at it or with it. It isn't complete (i.e. there's no intro) and needed a little editing for coherence, but it does represent that week of my life where I wanted to be a stand-up comic. Maybe it was a Thanksgiving hangover or something. I never performed the routine and only a few people have ever read it, but I didn't want it to be completely forgotten and it's my fucking blog so I'll post what I want, okay? Just remember that the material is almost four years old at this point and some of the jokes are pretty dated (while I think some are even funnier in light of later events). Others, like Bush-induced self-inflicted thermonuclear war, will never get old. Or so I hope.


Saddam Hussein's spider-hole really didn't seem that bad to me. I was looking for apartments around DC and I saw some worse places. I mean, I bet his rent wasn't that bad. Out there in the middle of the Iraqi fucking desert...a war going on around him. You know how it is...depleted uranium contamination is always driving down prices. Throw in some daily suicide bombings and a little white phosphorous sprinkled in here and there and you've got yourself a buyer's market!

Couldn't you see Saddam living like that in DC, though? They should've picked up his little hole in the ground, airlifted it to Columbia Heights and just told the fucker to settle in and make due. Of course, the landlord would be the first one on the scene to make an assessment. "Okay, we got an efficiency, 40 square feet, no gas, no electric, no running water, no laundry on premises, dirt walls, dirt floor, 5 foot ceiling, it'll fill with a foot of water every time it rains and you've got to enter through a trap door...hmmm...twelve hundred a month, you're near a Metro."

Shit, Saddam would think he meant twelve hundred Iraqi dinars, which would be like four bucks. He'd be working it out in his head: "Well, that's a little more expensive than the place near Tikrit, but if I run the jihad a little bit tighter I should be able to swing it. I may have to cut back on the Martyr's Benefits program...and I'll have to lease for car bombings." Dude thought he hated America before, just wait until a homeless guy is pissing down onto his bed every night. That kind of shit'll motivate you to keep an insurgency going.

Yeah, but we shouldn't be worried about bombings over here, though. No one's going to burst the housing bubble with a 5,000 pound truck bomb, right? Imagine what that shit would be like, though. Cable news would be all over it. "Welcome to Fox News Channel, where the spin meets the gin. I'm Dumb-Son-Of-A-Bitch and with me is Brainless-Bimbo-That-Brings-In-The-Male-Demographic. In tonight's top story, crazed affordable housing militants have destroyed the housing bubble in an evil attack on America's values! With the nation gripped in paralyzing terror, the White House plans to issue a statement just as soon as President Bush is finished playing 'Choo-Choo Train' in the Lincoln Bedroom."

Then you know how it goes. Once Bush receives the report of the attack, he immediately declares a War on Bubbles. Seven seconds later Congress unanimously passes legislation allowing all of our nuclear weapons to be automatically fired against whoever was responsible...which turns out to be Saddam Hussein, trying to knock a few bucks off his rent.

So now all the nuclear missiles go up from their silos and submarines and they all gracefully arc through the atmosphere, converging on DC. Of course, now everyone in the White House and the Pentagon is going crazy, running from situation room to situation room, trying to stop the missiles. But because Bush is never wrong, he fired the guy with the abort codes the day he took office. So now they realize that they're totally fucked and try to board the emergency evacuation helicopters, but all the generals and political officials are giving the pilots contradicting orders, so they just wind up criss-crossing DC until the missiles arrive.

And there you have Saddam standing on a street corner on his way back from the Giant, carrying his grocery bags. And he casually looks up, while waiting for the walk signal. And you can see the reflection of all the missiles streaking across the sky in his eyes. And his shoulders slump and he mutters, "Oh, shitballs."

And in an apocalyptic flash 5,000 thermonuclear weapons simultaneously detonate above DC.

And all is silent. Until the survivors emerge from the rubble...because there's always survivors. They're burned, they're scarred, they're poisoned, they're desperate for food, water and shelter. And they find the landlord sitting among some twisted beams, counting his cash. And they ask him if he has somewhere they could rest. And he says, "Well...I do have this one place. It's an efficiency, 40 square feet, no gas, no electric, no running water, no laundry on premises, dirt walls, dirt floor, 5 foot ceiling, it'll fill with a foot of water every time it rains and you've got to enter through a trap door that was incinerated in the recent blast, which also so thoroughly irradiated the place that you'll be nauseous every minute you spend inside of it...hmmm...sixteen hundred a month, you're still near a Metro."

Thank you!