They did the mash, the monster mash

It is a dark and stormy night.

Three thunderous knocks on a door.

The heavy door creaks open, faint classical music in background.

VIKTOR: Oh God, it’s you, Monster.

MORRIE: Master, we’ve been through this. (beat) You know I prefer Morrie.

VIKTOR: (sighs) What do you want?

MORRIE: I was just leaving the barn and noticed all the chandeliers blazing away in the mansion. Are you … having a party?

VIKTOR: What?! No… Nooo, I was just … looking for something.

MORRIE: And you left the candles burning in all the rooms?

VIKTOR: Morrie, you may not have noticed this, but, I’m really, really rich.

MORRIE: Well, see, I also thought I heard music.

VIKTOR: Oh! Um, Gundula is just messing about on the piano.

MORRIE: I thought I heard strings.

VIKTOR: She’s lilting the violin part.

MORRIE: There’s more than one violin part, it’s the Trout Quintet.

VIKTOR: She’s throwing her voice.

A faint trumpet.

MORRIE: That was a trumpet!!

VIKTOR: Okay!! Fine! (beat) I have a small chamber orchestra in the mansion, because (beat) I am in fact … having a party.

MORRIE: And you didn’t invite me… (beat) Are Dracula’s Wyrd Sisters here?

VIKTOR: That’s Count Dracula to you, peasant! And … yes, they are. And what’s it to you whether they’re here or not anyway? You’re a married man!

MORRIE: HA! Some marriage. She can’t stand the sight of me!

VIKTOR: Oh come on, you two were literally made for each other.

MORRIE: You were there! She took one look at me, and screamed. Not a word, just a shriek of despair when she saw my face.

VIKTOR: Well, who wouldn’t shriek when they see your face for the first time.

MORRIE: What?…

VIKTOR: Without wishing to hurt your feelings, Morrie, I could have done better. This hideous looking face, the bolts, I mean, you’re not my best work. If we’re being perfectly honest I was only 60-40 certain of success with you. If I’d been 80-20 I would have rooted around the graveyard a bit more for better materiel, like I did with the Bride. That’s why she’s such a knockout.

MORRIE: Talking of knockouts! (beat) HUBBA HUBBA! Who is that foxy lady?

Viktor slams the door shut. Faint music disappears.

VIKTOR: Are you trying to get us both torn limb from limb?! You better hope she didn’t hear that. You can’t call her a foxy lady, she’s a wolf-woman. That happens to be Miss Lycanthrope Bohemia.

MORRIE: Oh Master, you got to let me in to this party.

VIKTOR: No, absolutely not. You can’t come in, for two reasons. First, I have a lot of sophisticated ladies in there. Not only do I have Miss Lycanthrope Bohemia, but I also have three former Miss Transylvanias; one of whom went on to be Miss Balkans The last thing I need is you (beat) rampaging around the place roaring ‘HUBBA HUBBA’ at them. Second, I have the Golem of Prague in there, and he’s a very nervous character. One look at your misbegotten misshapen just awful face and he might go to pieces, literally. Then instead of driving him home to the Chief Rabbi in my best carriage in the morning, I’m shipping him back in crates. And Shlomo is a personal friend. I don’t want to tell him he’s got to do the Kabbalah magick from scratch again over some clay because my Monster scared the life out of his Golem.

MORRIE: (beat) Sometimes I think you just try to be hurtful.

VIKTOR: Oh, don’t I do enough for you, Morrie? For instance, don’t you and the Bride have to go to couples counselling at 9 tonight, with the therapist I suggested?

MAURICE: How did you know that?

VIKTOR: What?

MAURICE: We always go at 5, but Dr Bergmann sent a carrier pigeon to the barn earlier, moving it to 9, and I haven’t been out since then, and neither has the Bride, so… Wait…

Viktor noisily opens the door. Faint music reappears.

VIKTOR: So, if you’ll just be on your way, I have a party to get back to…

MAURICE: (beat) The only way you would have known … it had been moved to 9 … was if you asked Dr Bergmann to move it to 9, just to keep me away while you were having a party!

VIKTOR: Okay!! Fine! You got me.

MAURICE: Master, if you don’t let me in to this party, I’m, I’m going to do something drastic!

VIKTOR: Oh yeah, like what?

MAURICE: I’m, I’m going to gatecrash the next party you throw. And by God, won’t you be sorry then, Viktor!

VIKTOR: That’s Baron Frankenstein to you, peasant!

Viktor slams the door, then immediately creaks it open again.

VIKTOR: If you pass Igor on your way tell him to forget the new silverware, the werewolves are being picky enough eaters as it is without that slap in the face.

Suggesting Several Screen Siblings: Part II

I’ve noticed two actors who I think would make a damn good pairing as siblings, so here is a suggestion for their team-up and the movie.

Aubrey Plaza & Stephanie Beatriz

Legion star Aubrey Plaza, Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz, and Genesis Rodriguez were fearsome sororal superheroes known as the Furies. But then the solar flare that had made them gifted flamed out and erased their powers. Reeling from the loss the older sisters became estranged as the once-telepathic Plaza became an FBI special agent while the once-invulnerable and super-strong Beatriz retreated from the world and became a reclusive successful comic-book artist, struggling to be taken seriously for her legitimate painting. After nearly a decade they must grudgingly re-unite to solve the murder of their younger sister, who had become a reality TV star. But as the sisters work the case a new solar flare begins to erupt and their powers begin to falteringly return. Whoever killed their kid sister should be very afraid because whatever investigation these two begin with conventional weapons and tactics won’t end that way in this mordant neo-noir and lo-fi superhero movie.

Montgomery Micawber-Mycroft’s 9 rules for living elegantly

In this time of lockdown when dress codes are in sad abeyance and the whole world is going to hell in a handcart what one needs are edifying rules, says discreet Hollywood power player Montgomery Micawber-Mycroft who spoke exclusively to B. Bradley Bradlee, as they both self-isolate in a yacht off of Key Largo.

1) A gentleman is judged by the quality of his repartee

Any dweeb can be polite, but a gentleman always strives to be witty and leave the other party feeling amused and valued

2) Never ever wear brown shoes

An Irishman called PJ Mara once told me of his stricture against brown shoes and blue suits, I have expanded it

3) Always travel with a pen and paper

You may need to make notes, and in dire straits a piece of paper can be made to look a pocket square from a distance

4) Potted plants are all that separate us from mere anarchy

Even if all you can do is maintain the health of a cactus while stranded at sea like we are currently, maintain a potted plant!

5) Sandals are all well and good, but in their place

I winter in Los Angeles, but summer in England, for a reason, my good Bradley, I respect the sandal, but do not love it

6) If you have to give a speech, never paraphrase Churchill

There is no faster way to making a prize ass of yourself than to plagiarise Churchill and expect people to applaud or ignore it

7) Burgundy is a dashed tricky colour to pull off

I have been defeated many times over the years, and in the end have decided the best I can do for it is a tie

8) Black shoes always, but light gray for Chelsea boots

Always wear black shoes, but when it comes to Chelsea boots always a shade of light grey that goes with light blue suits

9) Don’t take Alexander Kraft seriously at all

A man willing to be photographed wearing black socks, brown shoes, and white trousers is not a man worthy of your time

President Trump announces plan to 25 himself

President Donald J Trump will shortly be removed from office, writes B. Bradley Bradlee who talked to Trump exclusively; after he was mysteriously teleported from quarantine in Hubei province to the Presidential suite in Mar-a-Lago when Bill Nye’s attempts to prove Chopped do not slice salads to subatomic level backfired.

Trump said the idea came to him while watching Donald Sutherland as the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded

President Trump explained that he had decided to sign a letter invoking Section 3 of the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America; removing himself from office until such time as he shall write another pursuant letter reinstating himself in office; after catching the end of The Matrix Reloaded on Fox the other night. “I was watching that, with the Architect. You know the scene. Everyone knows it. Tremendous actor, Donald Sutherland. Great guy. Great American. Really loved him as the wise leader in the Hunger Games movies. You know the Hunger Games movies? Everybody does.”

Trump then came to the point – “And he says, this is what he says, in the movie, I couldn’t solve the problem, because I’m too perfect. Isn’t that something? I couldn’t solve the problem, because I’m too perfect. It wasn’t that he couldn’t solve the problem, it was that the problem, it could only be solved, by somebody who wasn’t as perfect. And I thought, My God, that’s me! You know?” When pressed Trump confirmed he was talking about the Wuhan Flu Coronavirus. “What the country needs now, Bradley, is for me to step away, because I’m just too perfect.”

Trump continued, at length –“Did you know it says it, right there in the Constitution, that the Constitution is there to form a more perfect Union? Did you know that? Most people don’t know this. But it’s right there. I know it. Nobody knows more about the Constitution than I do. And I thought about that and it makes sense, of course it makes sense. If I’m perfect, that’s what I should be focusing on – not just Keeping America Great Again, but making America as perfect as I am. So that’s where my focus should be for the next while.”

When pressed on when he would resume office Trump speculated “the 4^th of July has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? I think that would be a good time. Mike Pence can handle this Wuhan Flu Coronavirus. I mean don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy, very appreciative of what I’ve done for him, but he’s not perfect. If it wasn’t for me he’d probably have lost the election in Indiana to that kid Mayor. He’s exactly the kind of lesser mind you need to stop everyone from getting the common cold.” Trump then asked whether I was with Fox. He was puzzled as to why a German weekly had been granted access, and how I didn’t sound German. I explained I was American, writing for a German weekly, but had worked for — at which point the President instructed the Secret Service to “kick this bum to the kerb”. As I was being manhandled out of the suite Trump asked how I had got in. I protested that with quantum physics it’s hard to assign blame, but the bag should probably stop with Bill Nye, and he roared “The SCIENCE Guy?! You liberal elite ARE all working together!”

B. Bradley Bradlee is the fictional editor emeritus of The New York Times. He is currently a roving reporter breaking quarantine by strange physics for the German weekly Die Emmerich-Zeitung.

*Bill Nye wishes to clarify that his experiment slicing salad did not ‘backfire’, it simply disproved his hypothesis, and that is why science is science; failure always teaches you something – in this case that overly sliced salads can open wormholes.

Zhang Yimou presents Tour de France 2020

The French sports minister’s suggestion the Tour de France could be held behind closed doors caused much confusion yesterday. But this was not a comment lost in translation, there is in fact advanced pre-production on the plan with a film director, writes B. Bradley Bradlee from lockdown in Hubei province.

The spectators this year will be animatronic, but their clothes and hair will be changed daily to fool the peloton.

Roxana Maracineanu’s statement at first appeared to be garbled, and then after clarification simply insane. The Tour de France is after all defined by taking place outdoors, and with or without spectators the peloton rides as tight as a flock of birds and social distancing be damned. But the plan is as logical as only the French could think. Social distancing will not be enforced because the riders, their teams, and their accommodation will all in fact already be quarantined – as the race will take place behind closed doors, on a proposed 60 acre soundstage in the south of France.

This would be 43 times the size of the 007 soundstage at Pinewood and is already at an advanced stage of pre-production, preparatory to Chinese military flying in for construction in a planned 10 days. A number of animatronic spectators are already being manufactured, with a bewildering array of costumes and wigs being sourced so that the peloton will believe them to be different each day. A small herd of goats will be installed on a mountain laid with real grass so that a sniper operating a zipline camera can recreate the effect of animals fleeing the noisy helicopter camera.

Zhang Yimou, acclaimed film director and maestro of the 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony, is masterminding this production. He is also on lockdown in Hubei province and spoke to us across the balcony. “This is for me like taking a theatre production on a cruise ship, you can’t go back for anything you forgot once you’ve started, so it’s high-stakes. Once the riders and their teams are in, that’s it. The ‘hotels’ better have all the rice and pasta they need…” We asked how the Tour would showcase France while indoors? “Huge greenscreen backgrounds, cutting edge! Real time footage of Provence”.

As well as complicated projections in the background for television, the physical space the riders travel thru will be something between an Escher staircase and a Victorian stage spectacle involving levers and pulleys. While unwilling to reveal details of how he would achieve an undulating terrain the director cackled, “The King of the Mountains will be as confused as he is exhausted by the end of this trek”. Apparently the French are resisting having Chris Froome mauled by a lion who will then be shot live on air. The director grumbled about Coppola being allowed to kill a water buffalo, and insisted that getting #ClaudetheLion trending on Twitter could only add to the publicity of the race. When pressed he admitted drinking an awful lot of green tea during this lockdown, but insisted the idea still had genuine artistic merit.

B. Bradley Bradlee is fictional editor emeritus of The New York Times. He is currently a quarantined roving reporter for the German weekly Die Emmerich-Zeitung.

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XXVII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Reloaded Revisited

I recently watched The Matrix Reloaded all the way thru for the first time in many years when Sky One idly decided to screen it. Oh, the wasted intellectual time and energy that went into trying to make this movie more than it was when it came out in May 2003. To indulge in hyperbole, between May and November 2003 sci-fi fans engaged in more delusional counterfactual speculations and fantasias than people wasting their time trying to disprove Darwin since 1859. Some of these fantasias were rather good, unfortunately the execrable Revolutions dynamited all the sophisticated ways that people had sought to frame Reloaded as both smarter and more successful artistically than it was. It is awful. It is memorable in places. But that is not enough to make it not awful. The film is almost an object lesson that merely subverting expectations doesn’t actually achieve anything. Cutting your climatic action sequence to pieces at the start and end of a film, ending a film with the climactic action beat being impenetrable polysyllabic gobbledegook in a room, having your plot be a ‘get that thing, to do this thing’ which only starts 40 minutes into the damn movie – all of these choices subvert expectations. And they are all awful. The proof of the pudding is that nobody has taken these models of subversion and run with them in the way that Skyfall and The Avengers both pilfered “The Joker planned to be caught. He wanted me to lock him up in the MCU!” from The Dark Knight. The Architect is memorable, but that scene is awful. Lines from it, bitterly engraved on my soul from fruitlessly going over and over the VHS, and from the memorable Ferrell/Timberlake MTV take-down of it, float across my consciousness from time to time. As Michael Gove lays the foundations for flouncing out of trade talks that haven’t even f***ing begun yet by announcing an impossible and arbitrary timetable one line seems … apropos. At some point it might even be uttered by M. Barnier to Gove. On being flatly told, “You’ll cave, Germany needs British car sales to survive”, he might riposte – “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept”…

Billie Eilish mourns 007?

Oh dear, here we go again… Sam Smith’s derivative and embarrassing caterwaul ‘The Writing’s on the Wall’ should have tipped us off that Spectre‘s artistic decisions were not coming from the top drawer. Now we finally have Billie Eilish’s much anticipated Bond theme ‘No Time to Die’, and it is a mournful dirge. Why is it a mournful dirge? What happened to the musician who wrote the earworm hook of ‘Bad Guy’? Why is it that only Adele seems to have really nailed the archetypal Bond song in all of Daniel Craig’s outings? (Though Chris Cornell comes a close second).  Perhaps this was Eilish’s genuine musical response to seeing an early cut of the aged Craig in action, which should make us very afraid for what No Time to Die is actually like. I don’t know that there’s much that Hans Zimmer can do with this barely there song in the score, but that’s okay, John Barry twice magisterially ignored songs he didn’t like in favour of other songs for his Bond scores for Thunderball and The Living Daylights. Back in 2015 I suggested pressing Radiohead’s celebrated cover of ‘Nobody Does It Better’ from the mid-90s into action instead of Sam Smith. This time round I am not that exercised. I fear this song may accurately reflect a lethargic tiresome film.

Presenting 1930s Batman

I was talking about the parlous state of film criticism with Friedrich Bagel, John Healy, and others when Bagel unleashed this zinger, “Basically there haven’t been any decent films since the first superhero movie came out in 1930 or so”. What if they had been making superhero films in the 1930s with the top stars…  

I hope we can all agree that there is only one man in the 1930s firmament who can play Bruce Wayne/Batman. If you didn’t shout yes, obviously Clark Gable, then pick up your fedora/fur and be on your way out of this fantasia.

 

The Good Guys

Bruce Wayne/Batman – Clark Gable

Commissioner Gordon – Nigel Bruce

Chief O’Hara – Edmond O’Brien

Vicki Vale – Jean Arthur

Zatanna – Joan Crawford

D.A. Harvey Dent – Humphrey Bogart

Talia Head – Merle Oberon

Robin – Mickey Rooney

Batgirl – Judy Garland

 

The Rogue’s Gallery

The Joker – Jimmy Cagney

Harley Quinn – Jean Harlow

Two-Face – Humphrey Bogart

The Riddler – Peter Lorre

The Penguin – Walter Huston

Catwoman – Greta Garbo

Poison Ivy – Maureen O’Hara

 

I see at least six movies

 

The Batman in New York

The Batman Faces Death

The Batman Strikes Back

The Batman Takes Over

A Date with the Batman

Batman’s Brother

Any Other Business: XXXIII

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a proper blog post? Why round them up and turn them into a thirty-third portmanteau post on matters of course!

Ancient Aliens: I don’t want to believe

I had the misfortune recently to come across a paean to Erich Von Daniken on the History Channel, a special of their disgraceful Ancient Aliens series. Erich von Daniken, author of Chariots of the Gods?, was, probably tongue-in-cheek, used by Roland Emmerich as an adviser on his preposterous 10,000 BC. His patented pig-swill has popped up in everything from Battlestar Galactica to Stargate to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to Prometheus. And as it doesn’t seem to show any signs of going away it can’t be treated as the joke it is anymore, it’s become harmful. The memorable verdict of the court psychologist looking into Erich von Daniken’s mental status after his epic embezzlement had got him jailed was that the man was a pathological liar and his book was a marvel of nonsense. It is a marvel of nonsense. It should be obvious to anyone who reads it why. There are some very clever Biblical reinterpretations like Lot’s wife being got by the flash of an atom bomb, but there’s the rub. Everything that the ancient aliens do on earth is from the technology of von Daniken’s time. They dress like the Apollo astronauts. They set off atom bombs. But, Erich, we barely made it to the moon at that level of technology, if these bozos travelled here from a far-off galaxy which we can’t detect why did they apparently travel dressed in vintage couture? Could it be that because von Daniken lacked the imagination or understanding for futurism that his aliens only had the available resources of 1968? Odd that they don’t have the internet, or wi-fi, or cell-phones, or quantum devices. Odd that humanity has developed so much since that book was written, and yet people are still, and perhaps increasingly, under its spell; which has the stupefying message that humanity cannot advance without alien assistance.

Worth waiting for? Probably, not.

When you play the game of thrones, you watch or you win: Part II

Previously I compared the reaction to Game of Thrones’ finale to the eerily similar meltdown everyone had in 2010 at LOST. I’d like to tease out the perils of serialisation. I remember reading a piece about LOST which suggested the flashbacks gave just enough of a narrative hit, of a story told within an episode, to keep those plebeians who watch network shows coming back for more; despite the frustrations of a never-ending story that flailed around for 6 years, and ultimately revealed it was always insoluble. I also think of an episode of Boardwalk Empire, where the episode ended with Nucky looking at his footsteps on the carpet, and it occurred to me the episode could have ended at any point in the previous ten minutes and it would have made no difference. But it was bad of me to think that, because there is an almost secular theology at work – the virtue of pointlessness. A story that gets wrapped up in an episode?! That’s for muck savages! The sort of NASCAR-attending mouth-breathing trailer trash who’ve kept NCIS on air since 2003. No, sophisticates only watch serialised shows, where nothing ever gets wrapped up in an episode. They are above needing a narrative hit; they are doing their penance thru endless pointless episodes for their reward in the future of a grand finale that makes it all worthwhile. I think that in serialised television, if there’s no episode by episode hit of story begun and concluded then the stakes get dangerously high that the end of the show must provide the meaning that makes all the perennially delayed narrative gratification worth it. And when everything is in service of a grand ending, there never is a grand ending. People howled at the end of The Sopranos, LOST, Game of Thrones: How many times can this three card trick be played before people get wise to it? It may not even be possible to play that trick, even if you have the ending up your sleeve. Smallville’s ending was clearly something they could’ve done at any point for the preceding number of years because it was an ending that made sense but was totally disconnected from anything immediately leading up to it. LOST and The OC ended with cutesy call back to the pilot imagery which pleased only other TV writers. [LOST writer Brian K Vaughan’s pointless Y: The Last Man ended with an image he said he knew from the beginning, the problem being it was literally an image, and the comic could have ended years earlier with it.] How I Met Your Mother stuck to the original ending, not realising that too much time had gone by with the story under its own impulses to bolt that ending on without enraging everyone. It’s a Kierkegaardean paradox: stick with your original ending and ignore the life the story took on of its own volition, or do not stick with your original ending and do not ignore the life the story took on of its own volition – you will regret it either way. When I think of shows that ended well, they tend to be network or basic cable: Buffy ended with a Mission Accomplished, Angel ended with a screw you cliffhanger and a quip, Veronica Mars ended with a bittersweet exit into uncertainty, Justified ended with a character moment after an episode that wrapped up its plot surprisingly early. Their Whedon X-Files model in common? Every episode a story, every season a bigger story – complete.

Any Other Business: Part XXIV

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a blog post proper? Why round them up and turn them into a twenty-fourth pormanteau post on matters of course!

The Valley of the Short

National Geographic’s Valley of the Boom has been an odd watch. Coming off the back of 4 seasons of The West Wing re-runs on TG4 it’s been quite nice to see Bradley Whitford in light suits walking around corridors again, but this time affecting a drawl and dispensing gnomic wisdom. Elsewhere it’s been fascinating learning about Facebook before Facebook in the shape of TheGlobe.com, but there’s no compelling reason this couldn’t all have been a documentary; even if that would mean losing Josh Lyman himself. Making it a docudrama is a baffling decision, and one which ‘creator’ Matthew Carnahan seems to have interpreted as license to war on the fourth wall to make sure we understand that what little drama there is is not as factual as the documentary surrounding it. Interestingly enough in light of Vice’s suffering the law of diminishing returns when employing the tricks of The Big Short the deployment of those self-same tricks here actually work reasonably well, and even include a musical number; something filmed for but dropped from Vice.

You Don’t Know Dick

All roads lead back to Vice… The more I’ve thought about Vice the more uneasy I am about it. McKay’s interest in Dick Cheney is that which animates all Presidential biographers – the years in the Oval Office. So why bother making a film about the years leading up to it as well, and not just zero in on those eight years? Those eight years, after all, are what really (and clearly) gets McKay’s goat. And yet Vice gallops thru them, offering Cheney’s infamous (and cheerfully repeated by myself and Emmet Ryan during writing sessions, explicitly mentioning that Vice-Presidential imprimatur) “Go F*** Yourself” to Senator Patrick Leahy, and his accidental shooting someone while hunting, almost totally decontextualised, purely because they had to be included; because they’d been fodder for the SNL writers, as McKay once was. The scene in which Cheney demands to see all intelligence, no matter how flimsy, is presented as his quest for a fictional casus belli to invade Iraq. I’ve been thinking though of how that scene could be written, with the same misgivings by the agency directors, and the same outcome, but an entirely different and equally plausible motivation for Cheney’s actions. The truth is that is possible for many scenes in Vice, because McKay always assumes the absolute worst of Cheney, usually in the absence of any information whatsoever. So try this on for size as reason for trampling the constitution beneath his feet:

CIA: There’s only one source for that, Mister Vice-President, that’s why it’s not included.

CHENEY: I want to see everything.

FBI: But, Mister Vice-President, we have to sift thru the intelligence to determine what’s credible.

CHENEY: Do you? Is that what you did when you dismissed as ‘racial profiling’ a flag on an Arabic man saying he didn’t need to learn how to land the plane, just how to fly it? 3,000 Americans are dead because we dropped the ball. We dropped the ball, and they died. So from now on I see EVERYTHING. I don’t care how ‘credible’ you think it is. I need to see EVERYTHING. We are not going to have another 9/11, not on my watch. Now get out of here, and don’t fumble the f****** ball again…

And now perhaps imagine how McKay would handle a similar scene involving President Obama justifying lethal drone strikes on American citizens without any due process.

 

Our long national nightmare is over

And once again with The West Wing re-runs on TG4, because Declan Rice’s statement last night contained a fatal phrase that immediately had me humming Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore ditty. I have felt, almost from the beginning of this will he/won’t he saga, that it was unseemly. And as it progressed I felt it was increasingly humiliating for us to be so desperately begging someone to play for us. Especially as he is ‘a proud Englishman’. Sing it!

But in spite of all temptation

To belong to other nations

He remains an Englishman!

Mike Pence, like Batman, only has one rule

VP Mike Pence has been having, it’s fair to say, a hell of a time… If he goes to a Broadway musical he gets heckled, from the stage. If he goes to a football game the anthem gets disrespected, from the field. If he goes to the Winter Olympics he gets insulted, by the American athletes. But the death of Rev. Billy Graham, famous for his rule, has seen indiscreet whispers that Pence has suffered ordeals worse still emulating Graham, as Friedrich Bagel now reveals.

July 6, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Brown – RTX3ADUJ

Mike Pence was kidnapped by the President of Mexico. The Mexicans kept him prisoner and tortured him by forcing him to have dinner nightly with a woman who was not his wife, thus forcing him to break the Mike Pence rule. They also referred to him as Miguel Peso.

 

—

 

In Mike Pence’s office all female secretaries and officials have to wear a Ruth Pence face mask, but at one point the mask slipped and Mike had to abseil out of a White House window.

 

—-

 

Mike was on board Air Force One when he realized that there were no crew present and the pilot’s announcements had revealed her to be a woman. He immediately parachuted out of the airplane but unfortunately landed in a nunnery.

 

—-

 

Ruth Pence got a new haircut and makeover which rendered her unrecognizable. She entered the Pence household and Mike had her escorted from the premises by the female security detachment, who were all wearing the Ruth Pence Prime outfits.