I’ve been a little busy with my various schemes to put much thought into what I’m going to write next for this site. Since I don’t really feel like forcing anything, I figured I’d steal a trick from Jay Pinkerton and just post some dressed-up pieces I’ve written for the Cracked Forums over the past few months. Most of them were just spur-of-the-moment things I banged out when some random comment activated my imagination.

I’ll do my best to provide context and background, and also correct some of my more glaring mistakes of formatting and punctuation. Oh, and if this whole business seems uncharacteristically lazy and narcissistic, then you obviously haven’t seen my Twitter account.

Let me put it this way: Dane Cook LOVES my Twitter.

Okay, today’s forum bit was inspired by 5 Ways To Stop Trolls From Killing The Internet, an article by Cracked editor David Wong, and was posted in the discussion thread on the forums. It’s a script of an idyllic little father-and-son scene that will play out in the not-too-distant future, after the Internet has been legislated to death.

This script contains a lot more ridiculous scene-setting than I generally trouble myself to do in comedic scripts (I find characters and what they’re doing much more interesting than where they are. This is a bad habit, and seeing how well this script turned out makes me think I should really break out of that rut.) I inserted this ludicrous imagery because I had recently been reading through the archives of Anthony Clark’s site, Nedroid. For those of you not in the know, Clark is an inexhaustible fountain of riotous whimsy, and this was my attempt at aping his staggering imagination.

In addition to being very funny, Clark is an amazing artist. He also recently started doing the colors for Dr. McNinja, so you should really go check him out.

This script is also something of a record-holder in how fast I turned it out. All 500 words of it were written between 10:00 and 10:30 on the morning of November 11th, 2008. November 11th is Remembrance Day in Canada, and I was meeting my sister to attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at 11:00. Remembrance Day is sort of a big deal in my family, and neither my sister nor I have ever missed a ceremony, so I wasn’t about to bail because I was too busy making dick jokes on a comedy forum. However, I also knew that the images in my head wouldn’t survive the ceremony’s proceedings (paying respect to our nation’s fallen being something of a somber business, you understand.) Thus, the finished product suffered somewhat in terms of formatting (I normally agonize over every bracket, space, and italicization,) though you will be enthused to note that I have cleaned the errors up for this occasion.

So, with no further masturbatory rambling, I present to you: THE FUTURE!

Ooh! Aah!

The scene: a quaint suburban backyard. Father is on the deck in some comical apron, barbecuing all-American meat products. A robot drifts casually by, as though this sort of thing were completely unremarkable in the near future.

Suddenly, the virtual holo-door performs its opening animation and through dashes Junior, looking cute as a button and wearing impractical future-clothing.

Father: (Seeing his offspring approach, he lets go of his tongs. They continue to flip bratwurst independently of foreign impetus, looking totally rad.) Junior! I didn’t expect you home from E-School so early!

Junior: Father, you know that we get half the day off for the remembrance of the LoLocaust! You know, the day all those years ago when all those brave lawmakers gave their lives to scour the Internet of trolls?

Father: Ha ha! I remember, now that you’ve reminded me! Of course, in my day-

Junior: (Wearily cutting him off.) -in your day, you called it Christmas. I know, Father. You’ve told me before.

Father: (Embarrassed.) Yes, of course.

They stare off into space for several seconds. In the distance, three more robots float by, followed closely by a dinosaur.

Junior: (Obviously anxious to break the silence.) Father, I stumbled across something queer during my mandatory government-ordered three hours of browsing Wikipedia.

Father: Oh? And what did you find in the single largest and most trusted repository of human knowledge?

Junior: I’m not quite sure what to make of it. (He pauses. His voice quivers with uncertainty.) I was looking at the memes, you see. They all seemed rather foolish, but then I came upon what I thought must have been an error.

Father: (Leaping back with a start.) An error in the infallible Wikipedia!?

Junior: I could scarcely believe it myself, Father! The article was entitled “Milhouse” and the body consisted entirely of “Milhouse is not a meme.” It confused me ever so greatly, Father.

Father regains his composure and chuckles easily to himself upon hearing the source of his boy’s consternation. He walks over to and sits down in a deck chair, which morphs into a Lay-Z-Boy-brand recliner at the push of a button. Neither father nor son appear to regard this as remarkable, which is stupid, because it is. Father beckons to Junior to sit on his lap. Junior obeys.

Father: (Picking his words carefully.) You didn’t find any error, my boy.

Junior: But Father -!

Father shushes Junior.

Father: You didn’t find any error, but what you did find was one of the strangest artifacts of the wild days of the Internet.

Junior is rapt.

Father: You see, Junior… (He pauses, savoring the melodrama.) “Milhouse is not a meme” is, in fact, a meme.

Junior ponders this for a very long time. He scratches his head and furrows his brow. While he thinks, Father again stares into the distance, where the dinosaur can now be seen to be wearing rocket-powered rollerblades and sunglasses. Finally, Junior speaks.

Junior: That’s… stupid.

Father nods sagely.

Father: Yes, my son. (A single tear rolls down his cheek.) Yes, it was.

Fini