. . . fun not!
For wretched excess is the only path to happiness!
Casts Las Vegas spell. All are engorged by all-night buffets, slots, poker, keno, and blackjack. Hordes of leisure-suited cowboys amble to and fro, slack jawed, eyes unblinking, tears streaming down their cheeks.
“LOOK AT ALL THE FUN WE CAN’T STOP HAVING.”
Scene cuts to an open mic comedy night where eight million stand-ups have signed their name to an endless sheet of yellow legal pad paper.
“LOOK AT ALL THE FUN WE CAN’T STOP HAVING.”
Beelzebub takes the mic. Infernal vistas burn into the mundane hotel basement barroom setting. Beelzebub asks the barbed wire-bound crowd for a common household object and a verb.
“LOOK AT ALL THE FUN WE CAN’T STOP HAVING.”
And so we arrive at an exterior view of Planet Earth hanging in the sublime dark of outer space. Many hydrogen bomb explosions flower all across the surface of Gaia. Headsplitting animal wail of pain. Planet Earth flashes crimson.
“LOOK AT ALL THE FUN WE CAN’T STOP HAVING.”
Screen glitches. Scrolling error messages in no known human languages. Machines speak for us, now. Jump cut to a strong, succulent bowl of macaroni and cheese with ham cubes. A fried chicken breast scoots and grunts toward the bowl. It moans, and uses a flap of fried skin to claim the mac’n’cheese. Other fried chicken breasts join in the fray, and they lash each other with their skins, thereby contesting ownership of the savory treasure.
“LOOK AT ALL THE FUN WE CAN’T STOP HAVING.”
Roll credits. Comically protracted reel of antipiracy warnings in numerous languages before you are kicked back to the main menu. Like . . . NOW they tell you not to copy shit? You already sat through the ludicrous FBI Warning pre-movie-and this is plastic you PAID for-you spent your fuckin’ money and time and energy on this piece of shit and they’re still throwing scare tactics at your ass-like, Jesus Christ!
“IT’S OFFICIAL. ALL THE FUN . . . HAS BEEN HAD.”
POSTSCRIPT: Audiences have long known better than to attend these miserable, interminable open mic nights, and so a permanent audience has been installed consisting of crudely carved statues resembling freaky extraterrestrial interpretations of human beings complete with stern, unsmiling faces, and unblinking, hostile eyes. It goes without saying that actual laughter was banned by the Comedian’s Guild some time ago, but this was widely seen as a face-saving measure as no naturally occurring laughter had been recorded or recounted anecdotally within the Open Mic ecosystem in seventy or so years.
