The Dopple Gang: Smart Humor By Dumb People

Maybe You Don't Have Rabies, Maybe You're Just Depressed

Alright, Tom, it’s time we had a talk. You’ve been sitting here for a week, complaining that you “need a doctor”, and frankly, I’m sick of it. We’re all sick of it. And we think you’ve been going about this entirely wrong. We, your roommates, have decided that you are most likely suffering from a chemical imbalance which is causing you to be clinically depressed.

Let’s look at the symptoms. First off, you sleep all day, every day, as if you’re recovering from hideous wound suffered at the hands of a large mammal. Secondly, you claim you’re having nightmares about a rabid bear attacking you when you went camping last weekend. Personally, I think that your metaphorical “bear” is just your job, and you’ve grown quite tired of working in advertising sales. You’re always complaining that you never have time to travel-well now’s your chance! You’re young, you should get off your ass and go for it. Maybe become a travel writer, I don’t know. Anything’s better than sitting there, foaming at the mouth, Tom.

Third, there’s that “rabies test” you had us do. Did you know that depression is the second leading cause of rabies in young people, Tom? I’m sure you’re going to ignore that, and- wait a minute, what are you doing? You’re getting up! That’s great Tom, I’m glad we’ve made a diff-hold on, hey, easy on the hugs there, big fella. Okay, take it easy. I can’t hear what you’re saying, it’s like you have lockjaw or something. What? Oh god, dude, stop trying to give me a hickey-OW! Jesus, Tom! HEY GREG, GET IN HERE! TOM’S TRYING TO MAKE OUT WITH ME!

Jesus, Tom. I think you drew blood. Look, dude, if you’re having some weird feelings about guys, maybe it’s time you came to terms with it. Did you know that depression is the second leading cause of homosexual leanings in young people? Well look, Tom, I don’t think just that acting on these urges in a crazed manner, with dilated, blood-shot eyes and a crazed look on your face is any sort of mature solution. You seriously need to consider the fact that maybe you weren’t attacked by a rabid bear, and that maybe you are just depressed. It’s okay, Tom. Everyone needs therapy. It’s not like you’re the only one. Alright, I feel a little woozy. I’m gonna go lay down for a spell. I hope you can come to terms with his and win the fight, Tom. Oh that’s mature, just roll over and pretend you’re dead. Fine, Tom, deal with this on your own.

By a crazed, lock-jawed Michael J. Weingarth

Really Depressing Nintendo Wii Games

 

1. A.A.S: Aging Athletic Superstar-  An action-packed fifteen minutes of pick-up basketball, corporate softball, or downhill mountain-biking brings that action straight to you!  Feel the vibrations in the controllers as they become your hands, your bat, or your handlebars!  Pop an End-o as you jump a log, or holler in pain as you call your girlfriend to come pick you up after you back gives out.  Combine super challenging button and movement combos to flip off your work buddies as they call you a pussy after you sprain your ankle during the big game!

 

2. Night Janitor Mystery-  It’s a dark building, and around every corner lays a surprise. What’s that bulge in the corner? Is it a rabid dog?  A dead body? Some files documenting a corporations corrupt and evil attempt to destroy the world?  Probably not. Utilizing the Wii’s ability to mimic human movements, carefully turn-on the light switches, empty the trash, mop the floor, and change the toilet paper in the stalls.  By the way, the mystery is why you didn’t finish community college and become an electrician.

 

3. Guitar Loser: You’re the lead guitarist of a struggling new band.  You don’t have any money, and you’re riding solely on faith in your musical ability and your drive to succeed.  There’s only one problem: you have a Wii, and you can’t afford the Guitar Hero controller.  Use the Wii’s movements to paint houses and work part-time as a roofer while living in your parents basement until you can afford to finally buy the damn thing.

 

4. MS Office Suite- Welcome to the exciting world of fast-paced, hardball business! Using your joystick, accurately log in to your account using your keyboard- pointing and clicking never seemed so fun as you peck out the letters, one by one! Carefully use the mouse to left click on an excel spreadsheet and create something you’ve never (or definitely have) seen before- a pivot table. Error-check your immediate superior’s work and mumble under your breath in the break room to that one coworker you think you can trust, and finally, try the new “twist and slurp” real-time system as you drink way too many martinis as the company Holiday party and decide you’re going back to school in a year, anyway.

 

5. Single Mom Hosts Christmas Dinner-  Like cooking?  Too bad, you’ve made your mind you’re going to do it because this is a family, damnit, and you’re tired of people saying you need a man to have a family. You’re independent, right? Stroke your wounded pride and mask your loneliness with the most life-like turkey-basting physics you’ve ever seen, as the joystick commands the spatula, serving spoon, and the SUPER TONGS in the roast potato bonus round. Carefully maneuver your way around the kitchen while assuring your daughter the divorce wasn’t her fault with the “Pat on the head, hug, and give a gift” combo. Ignore your mother as your wrap, wrap, wrap presents (with real-sounds captured from actual wrapping paper!) until 4 in the morning, and eat, eat, eat lots of dark chocolate after the dog pees on the rug and you have a mini-breakdown in front of your estranged cousin Liz.  Pop a couple Ambien/Valium/Diet Pills up into the air and down your hatch as you track their trajectory and try to book a flight to Aruba for next year as Stressed-Middle-Aged-Woman-Vision takes over the screen and your hair goes gray, overnight.

   By a really depressing Michael J. Weingarth
   

Why You’ve Waited Till The Last Minute To Go Xmas Shopping

1. Hate decisions, like to wait until only one gift is available for purchase
2. Seasonal Affectation Disorder prevents you from caring about in-laws too much
3. Honestly, just been pretty drunk lately
4. Allergic to planning
5. Really like hysterical crowds of selfish consumers
6. Waiting for joints to ache, like they always do when bargains are near
7. Didn’t realize knitting an X-Box 360 would take so long
8. Just converted from Judaism on Tuesday

By Michael J. Weingarth

What Turkeys are Doing After the Genocide

1.  Wearing a tuxedo, acting like a penguin.

2.  Writing articles for the Times about the slaughter, hoping Bono reads it
3.  Moving to Turkey

4.  Trying to develop a taste for humans in order to move up the food chain

5.  Raising Bob and Jill’s little baby turkey, like they promised they would if anything ever happened

6.  Living in constant fear and uncertainty

7.  Learning to paint- it’s just something they’ve always wanted to do and life’s short enough as it is, you know?

8.  Waiting in the freezer until Christmas.

by Michael J. Weingarth

The Greatest Loves of All

1. Of the game
2. Woman: Man: Woman’s Sister
3. Mad scientist: Hideous construction that will be our undoing, so much so that he can’t bear to destroy it before it’s too late
4. Brotherly
5. Dog: Fire Hydrant
6. You: a Bargain
7. Heavenly Father: Priestly Father: Altar Boy
8. Aging Former Prom King: Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days
9. Dr. Strangelove: the Bomb
10.   Radar

By Michael J Weingarth

The Norton Anthology of Poetry Interrupted by Alien Invasions

The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could,
Until my new alien masters
Forced me into slavery. Bastards!


The Waking
By Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being ask from ear to ear,
What is that silver ship outside my window?


Ode to a Nightingale That Has Been Vaporized By a Death Ray
By John Keats

Where’d it go?


A Dream deferred
By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it get probed?

 

The Daffodils
By William Wordsworth

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed, but gazed to my dismay
Daffodils! Invading! Today!



The Raven
By Edgar Allen Poe

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `I AM GALTHAMAR- LORD OF THE XANDRAXIANS- SURRENDER AT ONCE OR WE WILL EXTERMINATE YOUR ENTIRE SPECIES!! MUWHAHAHAHAHAHA.'

Originally featured on the best collegiate humor publication in the history of the English language, www.ThePunchBowl.net

by Michael J. Weingarth

 

John Williams Addresses His Orchestra

Originally featured on the best college humor publication in the world, www.ThePunchBowl.net

                  The following speech was delivered by John Williams during the recording of the score for Star Wars: Episode III to his orchestra, on the third take of “Wookie Battle Front/Jedi Death Knell” 

---

      Okay, well obviously people just aren’t getting it. We open with some nice legato notes, I want as much length as you can give me, no more staccato. I mean you, second flautists. These are Wookies, people, big hairy yet majestic creatures that are noble and dignified with a hint of silliness, you can’t just play straightforward majesticness and expect people not to notice!
       Cellos, when you’re plucking, you’re giving it far too much attack, this isn’t Looney Tunes. The plucking is supposed to add some playfulness but you guys are already in the sandbox playing tag and the piece clearly indicates that recess just got out. You are overdoing the playful way too much.
       Clarinets, I am not in a joking kind of mood, keep it down.
       In general I want everyone just to remember exactly what this piece is, and the stages of development we’re going through. Lots of battles, Jedi getting betrayed, this is the pivotal turning point where the Empire starts to really cement itself as the perma-fucker of the universe, and I’m just not hearing that. These are some quick moving montages so I want you guys to be able to really put as much appropriate emotion into each section as you can, and I don’t mean just throw in some heart or some intensity, because they already scored Rudy and that was a second-rate mock up of second-rate melodramatic crap. This is Star Wars, people, space-tragedy. And you’re all professionals. Let’s all sound like it.
       Clarinets, I swear to God, if I hear one more peep out of you for the next five minutes, I am going to send all of you home.
       Basses, no more vibrato, I don’t know what I was thinking when I called for that. Just play it straight, long, sad notes, you guys are doing great otherwise.
       Okay choir, you still with me? We’re going from a magical reverence to a mourning/funereal sadness, I want the sopranos really covering that shift. The minute we go major to minor, you guys dirge your hearts out. Pour everything you can into it. I wanna know what those Jedi would feel like if emotions became sound waves. I want to feel sonically back-stabbed with a harmonic lightsaber, okay?
        Don’t push me, Clarinets. You are on the rope bridge over the Juilliard dropout chasm and I am about to cut those ropes, you do not want to push me right now.
        Alright, Percussion, you guys need to figure something out. The tympanis are not working for me at all, can you guys swap those out with some lower-register steel drums? Okay? Thanks we’ll give you five so you can make the switch, but when you come back, I want less noise, more hits. You guys aren’t punctuating here. Clean hits, you mute it after you hit if you have to, but Anakin Skywalker is not going to fully commit to the Dark Side unless those quarter notes end cleanly.
        Alright, saxophones and French horns, you guys are fine, for now. Trumpets, great job with the mutes. Really made me feel like those robotic drones were in the room, great, just perfect.
        Okay, is that everything? Any questions? Seriously people, let’s just get this next take and go home. You’ve gotta own those Wookies, they’re big and hairy and slightly tragic. If you’re not getting it then no one in the audience wll. Let’s make some magic people, okay?
        Percussion set? Okay, let’s go, roll tape. Remember, comical majesty, nuance people, nuance.
        Get those fucking clarinets out of my sight, you are all so fired.

by Michael J. Weingarth

Ways to Tell if Your New Consulting Project is Actually Mining Coal

1. Every Friday is “jeans and helmet-lamp Friday”
2. Lots of face time with your client, who’s a big coal deposit
3. Lots of “travel opportunities” on the mining cart
4. Free tuition reimbursement for courses in geology, advanced pick-axing
5. All your co-workers are suddenly Asian, Indian or Irish
6. Everyone asks you if you’re union
7. When you go in on the weekends, it’s usually to dig out your co-workers

By Michael J. Weingarth

In This Issue of Mad Scientist Weekly

1.  5 ways to revive your love life with your cloned wives

2.  Labcoats: What to do after Labor Day?

3.  How to keep your army of robot geese from flying south this winter

4.  Precarious ledges not to leave your vase filled with “werewolf potion” on

5.  How to make smoke come out of a graduated cylinder: It’s just dry ice!

6.  Vats of acid: Walkways above them or not?

7.  Killer Lab Assistant centerfold

8.  Evil Genius quiz: Are you an Evil Genius, or just a Mad Scientist?

9.  The benefits of radiation mutation over chemical or natural mutation

10.  Top ten greatest lab accidents that resulted in Supervillains

By Michael J. Weingarth

Beer-oes, Season 1 DVD Release Trailer

FEATURED ON MCSWEENEYS.NET 9/24/07, OUR VERY OWN MICHAEL J. WEINGARTH's Beer-oes, Season 1 DVD Release Trailer

(“Meant to Live” by Switchfoot plays)

Miller High Life:  (on rooftop)  You ever get the feeling you could just…I don’t know…do something incredible? 

(cut to a burning barn)

Citizen 1:  That barn is going to collapse!

Stout:  I’m on it!  (Stout runs in, and using his powers of stoutness, holds up a wall)

Citizen 2:  Look at that guy, he’s so stocky!  He must be really dense to be that strong for his size.

Citizen 3:  He’s not stocky… (cut music, blackout) he’s stout.

(“Cult of Personality” by Living Colour plays, camera cuts to beer bottles around a table set for thanksgiving dinner)

Elder bottle 1:  So Bobby, do anything special today?

Hefeweizen:  No, not really.

Younger bottle 1:  Bobby stopped a stampede.  He said he could control all the cows because he’s a hefferweizen.

Hefeweizen:  I think Susie needs to take her Ritalin.  (whole table laughs, we see Susie give Hefewezien an angry glare, and Hefeweizen shoots Susie a knowing wink.  Cut back to rooftop from opening shot)

Miller High Life: I can fly!  Yeah! YEEEEAH!  IT’S MY TURN TO BE SOMEONE NOW, GARY!

(cut a train station)

Secret Service Agent 1:  We’ll never get the president to the doctor in time!  Someone’s gotta carry all the bags with important government secrets in them!

Secret Service Agent 2:  But who could carry all that?  We’d need a dozen men!

Porter:  (walks out of the shadows, spits out toothpick)  I’m your man. 

Secret Service Agent 1: And what are you supposed to be? 

Porter:  I’m a porter. 

(Cut to a room full of beer bottles)

Miller High-Life:  Look, I think it’s time we all recognized that we have…gifts. 

Pilsner:  What are you talking about?

Lager: He’s right.  My whole life, I’ve known I’ve been…just incredibly tasty.  And 30-pack, he can do a really great Christopher Walken impression.

30-Pack: (In Christopher Walken Voice)  I’m Christopher Walken.  (everyone laughs)

Forty:  Pilsner, you’re one to talk.

Pilsner: Shut up, Abe.

Forty:  He can locate any other pilsner in the world, using only his label.

Pilsner:  I said shut up, Abe!

Hefeweizen:  Please!  There’s no reason to fight each other.  We’ve got to all realize something.

30-pack: (in Christopher Walken voice)  We’ve got to all realize that Lager is seriously, just incredibly super extra tasty, in ways that make my head explode with confetti bubbles.  Crazy.

Lager: That’s really good.

Pilsner:  I don’t care what any of you freaks say!  I’m not banding together with a bunch of degenerates.  Come on, dopple-bock, we’re off to form our own agenda.

Dopple-bock:  (makes grunting noise)

Forty:  It doesn’t have to be like this, Frank.  We can work together, not against each other.

Pilsner:  The day I work alongside of you, you macro-brew fuck, will be the day I get recycled for five cents in most states, seven in the weird ones.

Porter:  Let ‘em go.  They’ve got their own choices to live with.

Stout: Why don’t I just bruise ‘em up real good?

30-Pack:  (in Christopher Walken voice)  Yeah, break their knees, those rat bastards.

Lager:  Okay, now it’s getting old.

30-Pack:  Sorry.

Miller-High Life:  Gentlemen, we’ve all been gathered here for a reason.  It’s high time we realized that were more than ordinary beers.  We are, all of us…

(cut music, fade to black, title screen shows up with name of show emblazoned with lots of blue fire)

Beer-oes.

Voice-over:  Season 1 available Tuesday.  Surgeon General’s Warning:  Women who are pregnant or may be pregnant should not watch Beer-oes.  Beer-oes may impair your ability to drive or operate heavy machinery.  Please watch responsibly.

by Michael J. Weingarth