“I wanna thank you for meeting with me in this super-secret high-level meeting in the White House, okay. I brought you here… I am really good at bringing people and stuff together, by the way… I brought you here so we could make the Marx Brothers great again, okay? We are going to make a new Marx Brothers’ movie. It’s going to be great… really tremendous.”
“Wotta you sayin’, boss? The Marx Brothers is dead. How you gonna make a movie with dead guys? You gonna dig ’em all up and do a Frankenstein number on ’em, or what?”
“No, no… We will play the roles ourselves. I’ll be Groucho, you know… the really smart one… the one with an amazing mind. I really am very smart you know. Everyone says so.”
“And who am I gonna play?”
“Steve, you get to be Chico. You know, the fast-talking Wop guy. You think of the greatest plans. They are really great, you know.”
“Okay, boss, I got one already.”
“Really? What is it?”
“I think we gotta do an executive order.”
“Executive order? What’s that?”
“It’s a order you give like Obama did, you know? You take a pen and phone and say something in writing that everybody’s gotta do, and then, because it’s an executive order and you signed your name to it, you gotta execute somebody.”
“Ooh! I like the sound of that. We’ll call the movie Horsefeather Soup. It’ll be tremendous. The most tremendous thing people have ever seen.”
“Yeah, and the executive order will say we are banning Muslims from random countries. You know, just the ones where you don’t have hotels. And we can say we are doing extreme vetting so we are keeping America safe from terrorists.”
“Ooh! Yeah! Extreme vetting, rhymes with bed-wetting. Tremendous. But what if people say I’m being racist again?”
“We say we intend to protect Americans from those really bad people you keep talking about, you know? We’ll claim that nobody who’s innocent will get hurt. And the good thing is, the immigration people will just know that anybody who is a Muslim is a bad person. We’ll get everybody that way.”
“Good one, Steve, I mean… Chico.”
LAX after the executive order. (Possibly people waiting to be executed.)
“Wait a minute, boss, who do I get to be in this movie?”
“Rinse, you get to be Harpo, okay?”
“My name is Reince, boss.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, Reence.”
“REINCE!”
“Okay, Harpo doesn’t talk, so shut up, Rinse! Here, take this bicycle horn and, when you go on Chuck Todd’s show and he doesn’t let you talk either, just honk it at him. It will be really great.”
“And me, boss?”
“Oh, Kellyanne. I almost forgot about you. What’s the name of that other brother? Dumbo? You get to be that one.”
“Hey boss, we gotta get goin’ on this executive order crap. Somebody needs to get executed in the worst way.”
“Oh, yeah! The worst way to execute is the best way. I feel the need tweet about it. This new Marx Brothers’ movie will be the best, just the best. It will be so bestest that America will get tired of bestiness.”
Trump, Rinse, and Steve ready for Muslims, Mexicans, and protesters.
Catch a Falling Star 
When You Can’t Laugh at the Clowns
It is sad that Ringling Brothers, Barnum, & Bailey will be closing for good this coming May. I have personally gone to the circus and enjoyed the spectacle under the big top (though actually in arenas) about fifteen times, first with my parents and then with my own kids. I loved the elephants, the wire-walkers, the lion tamers, and I laughed at the clowns. And now that will no longer be possible. I have gradually lost more and more of the most important things in my life as I have gotten older. I lost mobility with arthritis. I have lost financial security through health problems. I have lost the ability to do the job I devoted my life to and so deeply loved. And now I can no longer laugh at the clowns.
The problem is not that there are no clowns left, even though most of the greatest ones, Emmett Kelly, Bob Keeshan, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and the man who played Bozo, have all passed on. The problem is not that my kids are afraid of clowns, scared to death of people who aggressively get right up in your face while theirs is covered with grease paint (especially since my kids are now grown and can sock the clown in his painted mush if he gets too close). The problem isn’t even that the clowns are not funny any more.
The problem is that the Clown in Chief has killed the laughter. He has become an agent of instability and chaos. When he is mocked brilliantly by Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live, he has to mount a tweet storm on Twitter and uses his limited twit-wit to angrily denounce and threaten and belittle instead of laughing at the jokes as other politicians like the current President and Vice President have graciously done, even sometimes using self-deprecating humor to get in on the jokes themselves. Even notoriously humorless political clowns like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin have more grace in ignoring mockery and smiling at insults than this Great Orange Face that we put in charge of the country’s most serious business.
The ability to laugh at oneself is a very serious thing. When the whole “golden showers” business made it into the national debate, this manic moron did not make it seem mere political hum-buggery by laughing it off. No, he got deeply offended and defensive, the same way a person who is actually guilty of the accusation would react. So, if it is not true, the Crybaby in Chief has only bolstered our belief that it is most probably true. As ridiculous as the accusation sounds, you have to admit that Trump’s behavior in the past makes you at least entertain the possibility that it is a true thing that he has done.
And now, he has over-reacted again, this time to the very real concerns raised by Congressman John Lewis, an honest-to-God civil rights hero, with cruel and crusty criticism that lowers my respect for Trump as well as lowering all future expectations. The man isn’t even sworn in yet, and he has already shown such bilious badness in his character that I truly dread living in this country under his rule.
I am a man who lives to laugh, and laughs to live. That is how I overcome the things that bother me as well as the things that hurt me. I use laughter as medicine, not as a weapon. And I hate to see the viruses in our society that I have always been able to inoculate myself against with humor become totally drug-resistant in that way.
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Filed under angry rant, clowns, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, politics, satire
Tagged as Bozo is dead, clowns, Donald Trump, politics, rant, Ringling Brothers closing