The Dopple Gang: Smart Humor By Dumb People

Who Or What Is The Dopple Gang, Exactly?

Although The Dopple Gang refuses to be categorized, it should be noted that we are a humor, satire, and parody blog, and expect to show up in Google searches as such.

Our writers have written for such esteemed drivel outlets as Saturday Night Live, The Onion, McSweeneys, and The Punch Bowl. This is, of course, of no concern to you, esteemed reader. For to actually reach this site is more challenging than ascending the crags of the Himalayas to commune with a guru or two, so it is you who deserves to be saluted, and not us. However that saluting will have to be outsourced to India, toot-sweet, as we are busy churning out puns in the back of our ramshackle chuckle hut. Our readers are as cultivated as the finest wine, and equally rare. Count yourselves among the lucky few, because we make no effort to count you at all.

We are all evil twins. Of different people. Duh. Our good twins run another blog somewhere on the internet about politics and charity, but those people are lame-oids and we wish nothing to do with them.

It has come to our attention that Web 2.0 revolves around communities. We find this as distasteful as you surely must. Personally speaking, the Gang cannot wait until 3.0 returns the internet to the iron fist of the capitalist oligarchy, as it was in the sweet sweet days of Prodigy. The internet service provider, not the band. Although those days were fairly sweet as well. Until then, the obligatory bone to social networking shall be thrown. Feel free to email us about your wacky comedy blog, although we promise absolutely nothing in return except perhaps menacing laughter in a soundproof room at your expense. However, maybe we will link to you or something. I doubt it, but it's worth a shot, and a few laughs, to try.

So please, peruse our pages at your peril, and perchance you will be piqued enough to post a pleasant postulation upon our...uh...comments section. Percolate.

Please enjoy the site, and feel free to leave non-troll-like comments and suggestions wherever you please.

Love,
Chris Van Orden (The Cute Evil One), Michael J. Weingarth (The Evil Party Animal), and Johnny McNulty (The Evil Neurotic One)

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Founds The Dopple Gang

           “Hey Mike, why don’t you go get some toner for the printer?” my boss asked. It was my first day working as an analyst in an unnamed financial firm in Connecticut. Being a mild-mannered farm boy from outside New Haven, I naturally was having a hard time adjusting to the amount of salmon, Nantucket Red, and gay-as-your-Uncle-Ray pink colored shirts floating around the office. Never the less, I got up from my desk and went to get some toner, because Dad always said, “Judge a man by his work, not by his clothes” and “Mow the lawn already, god damnit.”
            Well, I went to go get the toner for the boss, and sure enough, I opened the door and was magically transported into a really predictable plot twist. All of a sudden I was in a medieval castle! Now for some, this may have been a life-long dream come true. Playing at being a knight, jousting, winning fair-maidens hands, and finally losing their virginity- this was truly a nerd’s paradise. But me, well, I’m as practical and passion-less as they come, because Dad always said, “Superstition is for blind fools and blind rhythm and blues artists, like Stevie Wonder," and "better to control your emotions than let your mother know how to manipulate you.  Or me.  Don't tell her anything."
            Sure enough as I was born, which I was, these ramshackle guards came a-ramblin’ and a-shacklin’ up the steps in their armor and brought me down in front of the king.
           “Who are you, stranger! Who dares trespasses in my chambers at this hour? Surely, he is a spy, an assassin no less, sent by my mortal enemy Sir Not Very Nice!” King Arthur boomed, the royal timbre of his voice shaking every unaccented syllable.
            “Why, I’m Michael James Weingarth,” I replied.
            “And where, Mr. Wine-something, do you hail from, bearing such strange clothes and such a hideous helmet?” Arthur bellowed.
             “It’s not a helmet, it’s my face, thank you very much.” As much as I tried to play it off, my cheeks reddened. “And I hail…FROM THE FUTURE!” only I said “future” like it would sound if it was really from what the future was in the nineteen fifties, so I said “Few-Tour!” and everyone went “WHOAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH” and “Hark, hither dude hath journeyed from whence to thither!"
             Arthur, not having any of this, sent for his ramblin’ tamblin’ sentries, and, I, eager to move the plot along, got unreasonably angry.
            “Don’t!”  I warned, holding out my hands. “I am a powerful sorcerer and I will destroy any who dare oppose me!” This, of course, aroused the suspicion of the local 401 Magic union, comprised at that time of soley of the one man Army-of-Dorkness: Merlin.
            “Take him away!” Merlin ordered.
            “So be it!” I said, and, pulled out the Glock 9mm I always carry on my person, since Dad always said ‘A man is smarter than a crowd, but a crowd has more power unless the man has a gun or a microphone’ and ‘You can’t trust Mexicans.  Ever.’. As finding some quick evidence of my powers, such as a lunar eclipse which I happened to calculate Deus-ex-machina, would’ve been extremely difficult, and the time for explanation seemed rather short, I pointed the gun and shot the court jester. “I warned you!” I yelled. Everyone stood back. Merlin attempted to revive the jester but had no luck. In five minutes, I had the entire court groveling for mercy.
            “On your knees you limeys!” I yelled. “Listen, it’s about time we got things straight.” And off I went, on a huge tirade about how stupid everyone in the past was, and immediately went about having shenanigans and tom-fooleries which would’ve made for a delightful Mark Twain book, had he not been such a shitty author in his later years.
            Some time later, after I had usurped the throne with my chief adviser, Count Glock De Boom, who spits metal and speaks only in death, I was called upon to quest for the head of a dragon that had been terrorizing the land. Being a really lazy person, I thought this was pretty uncalled for. But what the hell, what the people believe is true, so I set out, on foot, in my work slacks and collared shirt, still, for this “dragon”. Sure enough, after about fifteen minutes of ambling, there he was, complete with damsel in distress.
           “Hello there, scaly fella,” I shouted, because he was very tall.
           “I have excellent hearing, there’s no need to shout,” he explained. He frowned down at me.
           “I’m sorry. Anyway, I was wondering if you’d be so kind as to kindly jog on,” I asked him.
           “Well, I have the damsel, and you are just a knight, and the legends say that no knight can kill me with a sword.” He smiled a smarmy sheet of teeth.
           “Well, I’m from the few-tour and I have super-powers,” I explained, rationally.
           “Oh, is that so?”  and he inhaled a big break of oxygen and snorted flames.
           “When you laugh really hard, do flames ever come out of your nose like that?’ I asked. I had to, I’d wondered that since I was five.
           “No.”
           “Oh.”
           “Although sometimes, if I’ve just eaten someone, and one of my friends tells a good joke, then I’ll have an arm or a shin pop out of there. Embarrassing.”
           “Seriously. Anyway, I’m very powerful, and if you don’t leave the damsel and our castle and surrounding village alone, I’ll have to destroy you.” I crossed my arms.
           “Prove it,” he challenged. Being that the time for explanation had passed, and I was running out of options, I turned to the Court Jester, a newly appointed one who I had brought alone just in case, and shot him. The dragon, noting the fire-power, flew off in a huff and a puff. The damsel, freed, offered herself to me, upon which I called her a whore and threw her headfirst into the saddle-bags of the Jester’s horse, to be enjoyed later.
           Well, to be honest, I was getting tired of being right all the time, and longed to return to my days of shitty, under-paid menial labor under the guise of “the corporate ladder”, so I trotted back to the castle. I sought out Merlin, who was unsuccessfully trying to cheat the crowd at some version of three-card monte which involved two pebbles and a robin’s egg. “Hey once and future douche, I need some help,” I told him. He smiled and came over.
          “Oh, so now your time is up, and you wish to return, having cursed our kingdom with the curse of the BLACK DEATH!” He eerily made ghost noises and cast a spell on the nearest court jester. I was now keeping several stationed throughout the city for emergencies.
          “There’s no curse, you just made his internal organs liquefy using some weird Druid-voodoo secret, you old quack!” I then, for a change of pace, ran the court jester through with my sword, which I had not used up until that point.
          “Worth a shot.” Merlin shrugged and beckoned me to follow. We came to a cave, deep in the woods, labeled “supply closet” and I knew what was coming. I knew it so well, that I’m going to skip lots of exposition and come right to the part where I get sent back to my time.
           “Now, I send you back, only, instead of being the best young comedy writer today, with your own comedy site, I curse you to have one really funny guy named Chris Van Orden who really complements your work well and is original all the time, and some other guy who just talks about improv a lot.  Oh, and as much as you try to ingrain yourself with the people on Reddit.com by tagging every piece with the words ‘Ron Paul’ and ‘PIC’ they will probably just vote you down anyway!!!! MUWHAHAHHAHA!” And like that, I was back in the office, a few years wiser, but not much older at all.
            “MIKE, MOVE YOUR ASS AND GET ME MY FUCKING TONER!” my boss yelled. He sounded strangely Arthurian.
            “Okay, but I’m from the few-tour!” I warned.
            “Right. And I’m King Arhur.” He winked at me. I pulled out my Glock and shot a court-jester I had rolled into a horsed blanket I was carrying under my arm.  The police didn’t believe a word, but Dad always said, “Never judge a man by his words, you gotta judge him by his work” and “I’m not paying bail.  You’ve disgraced the family.”  My employment being thusly terminated, I started a humor site, and sure enough, two strangers emerged out of the mists of coincidence to merge into my lane on the interstate Destiny, and here we are, passing in the right lane.

By some few-tour version of Michael J. Weingarth

Casablanca-larious - How The Dopple Gang Was Founded

    It was a dark and stupid night. On a lonely street there stood a lonely bar inhabited by the grumbling stillness of lonely men. The customers of this bar, Roosevelt’s, were, for the most part, assholes. Mr. McNulty crashed into the room with a violent assortment of thuds as his many bags and heavy pockets of his trench coat slapped against the tables and customers on his way to the bar. To the best of his ability he tried to play it cool when his Magnum .357 went off in his pocket, blowing away a pitcher of beer. Although none of the assholes appreciated the disturbance, most were too lulled by the 80’s rock and Eagles game to move their fat heads in his direction.

    Except for two. McNulty took note of those four eyes and moved onto the bar.

    “Cranberry juice and soda.” McNulty’s voice ground out from under his derby hat like gravel being ground in a cylinder of bigger rocks and shaken in a metal tub.

    “Seriously?” The ugly bartender asked. It was the last thing he would ever ask for the extent of this story.

    “Yeah.” With this, the drink-serving troll went to go search the cobwebbed shelves for the cranberry juice, whose location, not being the grog, swill, and horse-piss that the locals usually guzzled, was a mystery.

    McNulty took the opportunity to take stock of his situation. After having killed audiences in all the major cities, the Chuckles Guild deemed him an Enemy of Hilarity and put a price on his head big enough to cover all the drink covers at all the shitty improv and stand-up clubs in New York. Looking to keep his head low, he had to come to this one-horse fuckburg: Philadelphia, PA.

    “That’ll be two dollars.”

    “Shut the fuck up you...drink...jockey...” McNulty paid the troglodyte with two wadded-up, bloodstained bills. Not all your jokes have to be winners, he thought to himself as he massaged the .357 in his pocket.

    Setting up shop in this no-laughs town was going to be rough, but he was going to have to start somewhere. For now, he was going to start with the two men who had seemed slightly alive in this bar. He grabbed his pink fizzy drink, double-checked the safety on his gun, which was named Maude, by the way, and shambled over to the two drunks.

    “Evening. Name’s McNulty.”

    Of the two, one had the head of a giant atop the body of a normal man. His eyes rolled wildly with drink, unable to focus or even coordinate which misdirection to point in. The other had the sinister look of the perpetually young. He was either 12 years old or an immortal demon. As it happened, however, he was 23. The giant head lurched and swiveled to roughly approximate facing his addressor.

    “I know who you are.”

    The hair on McNulty’s neck went up and he closed his hand in his pocket around the grip of his gun.

    “You’re the kind of asshole who thinks he can just come up and talk to the two funniest guys in this town. Well, guess what...you can’t. Not unless you’re a hot chick! Boom." Navigating his arm around his huge head, the drunk raised his swollen red paw up and waited until the feeble infant-man reciprocated the high-five.

    “Mmm…yesssssssss…” The baby hissed and then gurgled a laugh.

    McNulty knew he had sensed some tiny flicker of life inside these sodden losers. “Just who are you guys, then, if you’re the funniest guys in town?”

    The cranio-giant’s eyes expressed amazement towards the exits on opposite ends of the room. “Why…I’m Mike Weingarth, and this is Chris Van Orden…you mean…you haven’t heard of us?”

    “Yeah! We ran a very well-respected literary humor magazine!” Although he was very well spoken, the man-child Van Orden had the habit of throwing up a little bit on himself when he talked. Weingarth dabbed the boy’s mouth with a towel.

    “Well what do you do these days, besides drown yourselves?” McNulty asked.

    “Well, not much of a career in funny is there?” Weingarth said, “We got jobs, like anyone else, and we think about the way things were. You know. In the glory days.”

    “What if I told you there was a place where your writing could be seen by an average of a hundred to five hundred strangers a day?”

    “You mean the internet?” Van Orden piped up.

    “Uh…yeah.”

    “You want to start a comedy website together and put our collected writing up on it, updating daily?” Weingarth belched.

    “Yes. When you put it…yes.”

    “Cool, we’re up for that. Right CVO?”

    “Right.”

    McNulty paused and regained his poise. “Great. Well whaddya say we get out of this shit-hole and talk about it somewhere?”

    “This is the nicest place in town!” Chris protested.

    “Aw, shit.” McNulty groaned and took another swig of his Cran and soda. This was gonna be a long year.

by Bohnny BcBulty

The Singular Vision of a Single Visionary: The Story of the Dopple Gang

Despite consisting of three members, the Dopple Gang owes its very existence to just one man.  If not for the saintly humility of that man, the world would already know the extent to which the now familiar comedic consortium, beloved by millions, is the brainchild of one of the most influential figures of the 20^th century. 

The story of the Dopple Gang begins on June 6, 1984. On that day, in Ridgewood, New Jersey, Patricia and Scott Van Orden welcomed a beautiful, frighteningly perfect son, a son who belonged as much to them as to the world.  A son they would name 'Christopher Scott Van Orden'.

From the very moment of his birth, Chris showed prodigious strength, remarkable comedic insight, and wisdom beyond his years. He was also adorable. Anyway, as the doctor went to present the newly birthed babe to his mother, Chris removed his own umbilical cord with surgical scissors slyly pilfered from the obstetrician’s pocket, delivered a wry quip equating the hospital’s deplorable delivery room with a Bangladesh privy (sadly, the exact wording is lost to history), and scampered from the delivery room to single-handedly save the life of a recently admitted gunshot-wound victim. Witnesses quote the shocked nurse as being the first of many to say, “That Chris Van Orden sure is something”.

The humorist’s young life mirrors his birth in its consistent exhibitions of prowess and wit. In Mrs. Halewicz’s third-grade class, the teacher was forced to cancel class and send the students home, having been unable to stop laughing at Chris’s popsicle stick parody of the key players in the recent milk money scandal. Eight of his female classmates asked him to be his Valentine that year, a Pines Lake Elementary record.

Four years later, Chris’s comedy caused another school closing, this time taking a decidedly tragic tone. The ‘Cafetorium Tragedy’, as it’s now known, saw three classmates actually have their guts busted. Doctors could do nothing for the trio, who echoed Brian Manning’s dying words, “The joke was totally worth it”.

Chris’s university career was marked by similar feats of comedic genius, many performed under the auspices of the respected journal, the University of Pennsylvania Punch Bowl. Highlights include Great New Food Recipes and The Mind of an Insomniac…OF THE FUTURE!. During his tenure at the publication, the history of humor was forever altered, as Chris encountered two youthful, ambitious writers looking to make their big break.

Johnny McNulty was a well-to-do aristocrat, born into the Philadelphia elite, whose modest work with The Onion and Saturday Night Live had gained him a small following among the nerdier classes of blue-bloods. He was well-known at the university for being the final (and thus most patrician) student to spit out his birthright ‘silver spoon’. He then coated the spoon in gold and a second layer of silver, to add two more layers of refinement).

Michael Weingarth was a rough and tumble hoodlum from the wilds of Connecticut, trying to make a life in the City of Brotherly Love by publishing more than any other person in the history of Western civilization. His ‘punching fits’, vitriolic tirades against phonies, and withering comebacks against unsuspecting old women passing by earned him a reputation as a ‘meany’.

Chris, sensing the writers’ implied cries for guidance, took the pair under his proverbial wings and proverbially fed them the regurgitated worms of comedic tutelage. Then, in a moment of foresight reminiscent of Nostradamus, Chris built a proverbial nest that would become the home to the ragtag bunch of proverbial birds – The Dopple Gang. Thus was born next year’s most popular humor website.

By someone other than CS Van Orden