“God no,” I replied.

“Sir, I really think you need a wake-up call!”

“Fine,” I said. “Call at 11 a.m.”

“Ten a.m. would be better. I will call at ten.”

QUIZ QUESTION: What time did my wake-up call come?

ANSWER: 5:45 AM

The Maldives, the tiniest country in Asia, is a series of 27 coral atolls, surrounded by emerald waters. For centuries it was largely populated by devout Muslim fishermen. Then, in 1972, someone built a luxury resort there. And then two more. And then another 187.

But my wife wasn’t interested in resorts -- she wanted to see the real Maldives, so we visited their capital. The city of Male has many wonderful sights, but you can’t see any of them. The Parliament is under restoration. The ancient coral minaret is shrouded in scaffolding. Sultan Park is filled with quaint bridges, walkways and fountains, but they’re all broken and cordoned off by blue tape. Signs announce they’ll reopen in June 2024. You know, two years ago.

Everything’s busted in Sultan Park!

We visited their National Art Gallery. It’s a big, modern building without a single piece of art: not a painting, not an etching, not a doodle. The National Art Gallery’s acronym – NAG – emblazons the front door: “NAG NAG NAG NAG NAG”. This should be the national anthem of the Maldives because the locals are always yelling at you. They never tell you the right thing to do -- just that whatever you’re doing is wrong.

We wandered into the city’s beautiful Golden Mosque. Immediately everyone was hollering at us. I begged for advice: Take off my shoes? Take off my hat? Put on a robe? Kick out my wife? I never got an answer. I hadn’t been yelled at this much since I was eight.

Most people visit Male for the great snorkeling. We hired a boat and swam the endless coral reef that encircles the island. I saw thousands of fish in dozens of colorful species -- but every time I raised my head from the water, the local guide was barking at me: “You’re moving too slow! You’re moving too fast! Don’t swim there, swim there! No, not there, THERE!”

I was just floating, looking at fish. I wasn’t doing anything and yet somehow I was doing six things wrong.

The native Maldivians are not what you would call people people. This is probably why all those resorts tend to hire foreign workers. This has created even more friction between the Sunnis and the sunbathers – it’s burqas versus bikinis.

Adding to the tension, and it really didn’t need more tension, rising seas are engulfing the islands. You can’t even escape to high ground because the tallest point on the islands -- the Matterhorn of the Maldives -- is just eight feet tall. It’s lowest highest point on earth.

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ALTERNATE TRIP: Skip Male and visit Mahe. It’s another island capital, 1400 miles west, in the Seychelles. The beaches are even lovelier, the snorkeling’s great, and these islands aren’t going anywhere – they’re solid granite, the oldest archipelago on earth. And the Seychelles people are not just happy — they’re constantly giggling.

If they seem batty, well, you are what you eat. The Seychellois eat A LOT of fruit bats.

These monsters have six-foot wingspans and beagle-sized bodies.

IT GETS WORSE: some butchers won’t prepare them, because when they’re skinned they look like little naked people!

Seychellois eat their fruit bats curried, with rice and chutney. Ew! Gross! Chutney!

BONUS FEATURE

Shocking news came out that 70% of Substacks are written with the help of A.I. Not me! I don’t do it. I won’t do it.

Except this once. I sat on the above column for one year because it just wasn’t good enough. So I asked A.I. (Grok) if it could do better. See below for the result:

I never expected paradise to come with a side of public humiliation, but here we were in the Maldives.I’d arrived at this overwater bungalow resort convinced I was living my best influencer life. The water was so turquoise it looked Photoshopped, and the fish practically waved hello. On day three, feeling dangerously adventurous after two piña coladas, I decided to “connect with nature.” Big mistake.I’d smuggled a bag of bread rolls from breakfast (they were free, so technically not stealing) and waded into the shallow lagoon to feed the fish like some benevolent sea god. The fish went feral. A swirling tornado of fins and greed turned the crystal water into a bubbling cauldron. I was laughing, filming it for the ‘gram, when I heard it.“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” A tiny Maldivian man in a crisp uniform was sprinting toward me through the water, arms flailing like an angry windmill. “No bread! No bread! These are protected fish! You’re poisoning them!”I froze, bread roll halfway to a particularly enthusiastic parrotfish. Turns out, feeding marine life is basically a cardinal sin here. The man continued his tirade while I stood thigh-deep in warm water, soaked in shame and regret, bread disintegrating in my clenched fist.By the time he finished, half the beach was watching. A German couple actually clapped. I slunk back to my villa like a scolded toddler, leaving a trail of soggy carbs and dignity behind me.Lesson learned: in the Maldives, even the fish have better diets than I do. And they definitely have better PR.

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Last week we visited Jordan, a country with the remarkable quirk: whatever you ask them for, they give you half. A six-course dinner has three courses, a two-hour hike lasts one hour. This sparked the first (and last) contest of this Substack — I asked you to send in Jordan jokes based on this remarkable property.

I was astounded at the number of entries that came pouring in: eleven. They came from a small but prestigious group: comedians Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling and Christine Blackburn; “Cheers” actor Paul Willson; and Brian Scully, the brilliant writer for “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy”. His submission? “Schindler’s Post-It Note”.

Two college pals entered, as did my funny brother Steve, but his joke was more Iraqi than Jordanian: “Is it a cottage industry to look for large Kurds?”

Amazingly the contest winners were not professionals or even relatives of mine. They are the rare people who read this column, even though they’re not my personal friends.

Honorable Mention, winning a prize of nothing, is someone called Someone. I was impressed how brainy their Jordan jokes were:

Would a weed conviction in Jordan qualify for a royal pardon? No, but a Hashemite.

Why can you not find low upholstered seats without a back or arms in Amman? King Abdullah I revolted against Ottomans.

They had more, but I didn’t understand them.

Runner-Up goes to Brian (not Scully) who submitted these three solid entries:

What’s Jordan’s favorite TV show? One and a Quarter Men!

Baskin-Robbins features 15 1/2 flavors!

What do they put in their coffee? 1/4 and 1/4!

But the big prize — a lifetime premium subscription — goes to Lairbo. He submitted a lot of jokes, they all fit the format, and they were all great:

Around the World in 40 Days

500 and 1/2 Arabian Nights

The Three and a Half Habits of People Who Are Sometimes Successful

It’s a Mad Mad World (would be half as long)

The Lite Monty

The Adequate Gatsby

As for everyone else, if you want a Premium subscription you’ll have to hit this button and pay $5 a month:

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Or just buy my book. “Bad Trips” contains 52 crazy travel tales and doesn’t nag you for money.

We visited the safe area of Iraq, which is like visiting the Jewish area of South Dakota. For the record, there are 250 Jews in that enormous state, comprising 0.0% of the population.

As for the safe part of Iraq, that’s a tiny region called Kurdistan. It borders the mountains of Iran so it is literally between Iraq and a hard place. What a great joke! I should stop right there.

Kurdistan is a semi-autonomous region run by Kurds: they have their own language, they police their own borders, everyone knows everyone because everyone’s related to everyone. It’s almost modern and almost peaceful, like Arizona. It looks like Arizona, too: vast stretches of desert, craggy mountains and buttes, deep winding river canyons. If Italy could make spaghetti westerns, you could shoot Falafel Westerns here: A Fistful of Dinars; The Good, the Bad and the Burqa; Gunfight at the OK Koran; The Man Who Shot Libyan Violence. None of these are good, so I gave you a lot of them. Here’s one that doesn’t even make sense: Al Qaeda on the Western Front.

Iraq: It couldn’t be safer!

We stayed in the capital city of Erbil, in a lovely hotel popular with American spies: they were well-dressed men who sat in the bar all day, nursing a single drink, eavesdropping on conversations around them. Maybe they weren’t spies. Maybe they were just nosy, lazy and bored. By the way, Nosy, Lazy and Bored is a great name for a budget law firm:

“ Nosy, Lazy & Bored: This Bench isn’t Just Our Ad – It’s Our Office.”

Kurdistan felt safe – so safe they built Iraq’s first American-style mall. It was a shiny, spotless 80’s mall, right out of “Stranger Things”. And it had something most Iraqis had never seen before: an escalator. It was cute watching the Kurds navigate this thing: waiting forever before they stepped aboard, wobbling and clutching the rubber railing for dear life on the ride down, and stumbling and being thrown off at the bottom. For most of them, the escalator ride was much scarier than the war going on outside their borders. We also went to a local zoo, where there were no guards. Kids climbed into the monkey cages for selfies. Teens pulled on a lion’s whiskers.

Fun and fear sit side by side in Iraq. One night, we were riding a Ferris wheel – Iraq has lots of amusement parks because Iraqis have lots of kids: 4.6 per household, the most in the world. It was all fun until we reached the top of the Ferris wheel – we could see into Mosul, the next city over, where all hell was breaking loose.

Still, we felt safe in Kurdistan. How safe? One day a black sedan with tinted windows pulled up next to us. The passenger door opened up and the driver said, “Get in.” So we got in! There was an old man behind the wheel – he just wanted to practice his English. He lamented, “When I was boy, everyone here could speak English. Now it’s just BALALALA.” He gave us a tour of the town then dropped us off at a beautiful church -- the last church on earth still giving services in Aramaic. That’s the language Jesus spoke. It was like listening to the original cast album of the New Testament.

If Iraq still sounds intense for you, ease into the Middle East with a trip to Jordan. This country feels so much like America you may wonder why you bothered to visit. Some of this may stem from the king – his name’s Abdullah bin Hussein bin Talal bin Abdullah – yes, it’s got an Abdullah at both ends -- but he’s about as Jordanian as Michael Jordan. The king’s mother was English, and came to Jordan as a production secretary on “Lawrence of Arabia”. This guy went to high school in Massachusetts and college in Britain, and when he became king he couldn’t even speak Arabic.

Still, there’s one very compelling reason to visit Jordan – Petra. It’s been featured in roughly ten thousand Nat Geo specials. If you missed those, you’ll remember Petra from the third Raiders movie, “Indiana Jones and the Old Cup”, or whatever it was. That movie ends with Indy, played by Han Solo, and his father, played by James Bond, riding off into the desert. They stop at an amazing church carved right out of a red sandstone cliff. That’s Petra. People think that’s the whole thing, but when you go around the corner you see it continues for another hundred square miles. It’s an entire city carved out of pure rock, bright red and beautiful. It’s two thousand years old and looks like it was just finished yesterday. Petra should be Number 3 on your bucket list, after the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China. Number four should be finding the schmuck who coined the term “bucket list” and hitting him with a bucket.

Beyond Petra, the most interesting thing in Jordan is the Jordanians – no matter what you asked for, they gave you half. If a city tour was supposed to visit six sites, it went to three. A four-course meal was only two courses.

We were booking a day trip, and they asked if we wanted the two-hour hike or the three-hour hike. We paid for three hours and the hike lasted ninety minutes. It was actually shorter than a two-hour hike except their two-hour hike would’ve been an hour.

We could only laugh about it. It gave rise to a bunch of Jordan jokes.

What was showing at the Jordanian film festival?

-The Five Commandments.

-Snow White and the Three-and-a-Half Dwarfs

-Federico Fellini’s classic film “Four and a Quarter”

And here’s my best Jordan joke:

-Who’s their favorite rapper?

-Fifty Percent

Now it’s your turn! Post a Jordan joke to this Substack. Funniest entry gets a free premium subscription for life! That’s a million-dollar value if we both live long enough!

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Your cheapness has been rewarded!

The very best of NOW I’VE SEEN EVERYTHING is now a handsome book, filled with the hilarious stories and amazing photos you wouldn’t pay for.

Forget the $60 a year subscription price! The book is just $20! You save $40!

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I recently took a cruise from New York to London. There were big musical revues with singers and dancers performing ABBA songs. In the lounges, trios played still more ABBA songs. You could dance to ABBA in the disco and butcher their songs at karaoke. By the end of this cruise. I had heard more ABBA than ABBA heard ABBA.

I got sick of their music, but then, so did they — they broke up in 1982. In 2000 a promoter offered them $1 BILL|ION to reunite — they said no. (Actually, they said ‘nej’ which is Swedish for ‘no’.) This really inspired me: what wouldn’t I do for $1 billion? Work for Ellen Degeneres. Or go through junior high again.

I was really impressed with ABBA’s integrity right up until 2013 when they lost it. That’s the year the band reunited for ABBA Voyage — well, at least their holograms did, in a huge stadium purpose-built for this concert.

The show begins with film of ABBA as they look today, all pushing eighty. Without naming names, let me just say that the beautiful one was now pretty, the pretty one looked okay. The homely guy is still homely, but at eighty, that’s to be expected. As for the handsome guy, in an attempt to look younger, dyed his hair and beard shoe polish black and now looked like an old Swedish Wolfman.

This is the fun of a reunion concert: the musicians they have aged, but the music sounds the same. But then ABBA made a horrible move: they de-aged themselves using holograms. They tried to look the way they did back in their heyday and the effect was frankly terrifying. They seemed to be using software from the late 1990s, the stuff used in movies like “The Last Starfighter” and “Ice Pirates”. The band didn’t look like 1970s ABBA, they looked like robots in cheap plastic masks.

It was an illusion you never got used to. I would have left after 10 minutes, but the ABBA Voyage stadium is so far out of town, I knew I would never find my way back to the hotel.

As the concert began, I chuckled to my wife, “I hear they’re gonna play mostly new stuff.” It was a joke: why would they play new stuff when they have such a great catalog of oldies? But that’s just what they did — they played a lot of new music from their 2021 album“Voyage”. It sounds like what you’d expect from a bunch of 80-year-old rockers who couldn’t stand to be in the same room together for forty years.

A much better way to experience the band is the ABBA museum in Stockholm, Sweden. This makes a good day trip if you pair it with the next-door attraction: the Vasa Museum. In 1628, King Vasa of Sweden built the most ornately decorated warship in history. The day of its launch it sank immediately, and sat on the bottom of Stockholm Harbor for three centuries. In 1950, they finally figured out how to raise the ship and built a museum around it. It’s an astounding sight: a 400 year-old warship perfectly preserved by frigid Nordic waters. it reminded me of the ABBA holograms: really old, yet strangely preserved.

As for the ABBA Museum, they do a great job telling the story in the band. (Fun fact: one of their fathers was a Nazi!) It’s an immersive experience with one room covered floor-to-ceiling with ABBA album covers. But on closer inspection you realize they only recorded 98 songs — which they then repackaged in hundreds of ways.

There’s a jukebox in the museum that plays every single ABBA song. I sampled them all, looking for deep cuts and lost classics. There are none. They made nine original albums and had two good songs on each one. Eighteen is a lot — a dozen-and-a-half more hits than I have — but that’s it. You’ve been hearing the same eighteen songs for fifty years.(The guys from ABBA would go on to write the Broadway musical “Chess” — 29 songs, one hit.)

The Voyage holograms played most of ABBA’s hits, but there were some notable omissions. I assume they are holding them back for a second concert, Voyage 2. But that’s a show I will never see. Not for $1 billion.

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More recently, he wrote the Broadway show “Eyes of Tammy Faye”, which closed in three weeks and lost $25 million. This is more typical of what happens when rock stars write musicals. Paul Simon’s “Capeman” flopped, with just 68 performances. Phil Collins’ “Tarzan” was a rare Disney dud on Broadway. “Randy Newman’s Faust” didn’t even get to New York — it lasted five weeks in Chicago.

I love all these artists, and I love Bob Dylan, but WOW I hated his Broadway show “The Girl from North Country”. This is a jukebox musical featuring the songs of Bob Dylan no one has ever heard of. Even Dylan said, “What? I wrote that?”

It takes place in Duluth, Minnesota, but was written by an Irish playwright so it all sounds like Donegal. The show is set in the thirties and manages to make the Great Depression even more depressing. It was the second worst musical I’d ever see in my life. The second-worst.

Sting is brilliant musician and performer, but somehow he created the most boneheaded musical I ever saw. It was called “The Last Ship” and it’s set in his hometown of Wallsend, England. Here’s the plot: an English ship-building plant is shutting down, and all the workers cry “This is the only work we’ve ever known.” So naturally they lock themselves in the plant so they can produce one last ship. Because we all know how factory work is so much fun, people will do it for free. Of course, steel is not free, and they’re using a hundred million dollars worth to make the ship. But then the local priest says, “I’ll pay for it with the money from the church rectory fund!” Because this small-town priest was about to build a hundred million dollar rectory. But he embezzled it instead

.

All this might be cute in a Brigadoon-type musical. But “The Last Ship” is supposed to be gritty and realistic, like, well, “The Girl from North Country.” This makes the end of the play truly mind-boggling. The workers finish building the ship, and only then do they realize, “None of us knows how to sail a boat.” This was just now occurring to them. Luckily, the local prize fighter says, “I know how to sail a ship!” So the entire town climbs onto the HMS Rectory and somehow sail out of the factory right into the ocean.

This is supposed to be a happy ending, as long as you forget that an entire town is now adrift at sea on a ship without furniture, luggage or food. They’ll all be dead in a week. That’s why “The Last Ship” is the worst Broadway musical I ever saw. The worst!

But it wasn’t the worst PLAY I ever saw. That title goes to one of Sting’s countryman: “The Daughter-in-Law” by D.H. Lawrence. It was so bad even D.H. Lawrence hated it. He wrote it, shoved it in a drawer, and there it stayed for the next 80 years. Then some off-Broadway idiot decided to stage it: two hours of coal miners screaming at their long-suffering wives. What made this truly painful was that they screamed with thick impenetrable accents. What accent were they doing? All of them! Scottish, Cornish, Welsh, Klingon. It didn’t matter what they said as long as the audience couldn’t understand a word. When I left the theater at intermission, I saw a big chunk of the small audience was leaving too. It was the largest mass exodus of Jews since the book of Exodus .

UNBELIEVABLE UPDATE: As I was finishing this column, I heard a commercial for “The Last Ship” — it’s back! After twelve years, it’s rising from its watery grave, playing for a week at the Metropolitan Opera House. Genius move: if it’s too boring and ludicrous to be a play — call it an opera! It’s got new songs, a new book… and Sting is playing the lead.

My wife just bought us tickets.

It’s called BAD TRIPS.

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Eat the world’s strangest food and tour the world’s drunkenest city!

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You’re probably saying, “The World’s Fair? Is that still a thing?” Maybe you remember the great Expo ’67 in Montreal. Or the not-so-great Expo ’74 in Spokane, Washington. Or the just-awful 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. Well, they keep ho…

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I replied, “We came to see Hadrian’s Wall.”

The audience of locals roared — the biggest laugh in the club that night. Clearly, the tourist site I’d traveled eight thousand miles to see was schmuck-bait.

Hadrian’s Wall is also known by the ungainly nickname “The Great Wall …

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My friends think I visit imaginary places.

Patagonia: Travel Poster vs. Reality

His confusion is understandable, because the only reason people visit there is the name: Patagonia. It sounds so mystical. It even inspired a line of sportswear. Patagonia.

Of course, the name loses a little in translation. According to legend, when Magellan first visited here, he saw an Indian’s huge footprint in the snow – the natives stood almost a foot taller than the European invaders. Magellan exclaimed, “These people have feet like ducks!”

Duck in Spanish is ‘pato’. Patagonia just means “Land of People with Duck Feet” -- a terrible name for a sportswear company.

A lot of place names suffer in translation. The Bolshoi Ballet sounds so classy, but bolshoi just means big. Bolshoi Ballet? Big Ballet. Big deal.

Or Spain’s Alhambra: an amazing palace with a romantic name. But Alhambra just means ‘red’. It’s a red building.

You can tell your friends “I just purchased a Bolshoi Alhambra.” Just buy a pack of Big Red chewing gum.

Bolshoi Alhambra.

Patagonia is one of the least-populated spots on the planet. But with its snow-capped mountains, crystal-blue rivers, and sweeping golden plains, there’s no place quite like it. Except Montana. And Colorado. And Utah. And Idaho, I imagine. But Patagonia has one thing they don’t have: persistent gale-force winds. The wind blows all the freaking time, and like Patagonia itself, it blows hard.

(To be honest, the wind stops blowing during the winter, when Patagonia is too cold to visit. But when summer comes and the suckers return, the warm air rises creating a vacuum, which is filled by cold gusting winds from nearby Antarctica. This has inspired my new comedy series ‘It’s Always Sucky in Patagonia’.)

The travel agent who sent us here neglected to mention this. But everyone else couldn’t stop talking about it:

TOUR GUIDE: This was the last place on earth man settled in, due to the persistent gale force winds…

FJORD CRUISE CAPTAIN: There are at least three reasons for Patagonia’s persistent gale force winds…

HOTEL CLERK: You might wear these earplugs in bed to block the noise of the persistent gale force winds…

It’s windy because there’s no other land at this latitude. Even Pangaea knew not to come here. If you don’t believe me, look at a map. Everywhere on earth where there’s land, you’ll find more land at the same latitude: North America has Europe and Asia; South America has Africa and Australia. Patagonia has nada.

Patagonia (in red): Where wind goes on vacation!

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All the wind in the lower Southern Hemisphere hits Patagonia, because there is nothing else on earth to stop it. It’s where wind goes on vacation.

Patagonia has lovely glaciers you can cruise by, but to reach the tour boat, you have to walk across a mile-wide valley where the winds gust at eighty MPH. The gales literally blew my mouth open and began inflating me like a party balloon. When I finally reached the boat, the captain told me, “The water’s a little rough today, but don’t worry, we have a plan B.” A few minutes later, the trip was canceled due to (brace yourself) high winds.

“So what’s Plan B?” I asked.

“We have no Plan B,” he replied.

I complained to our travel agent, “Did it slip your mind that this place is in a perpetual hurricane?”

“Oh come on,” she said. “Patagonia is gorgeous, except for the persistent gale force winds…”

I replied, “That’s like saying ‘I booked you into a beautiful hotel… but it’s on fire.”

She chuckled nervously. “No, you’ll love the hotel I got you. Just one thing… It used to be an industrial slaughterhouse.”

PAID SUBSCRIBERS join us next week at this Slaughterhouse Five-Star Hotel.

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About ten years ago, I got a call from a mysterious Russian: “We would like you to give a speech about ‘The Simpsons’ in Moscow Olympic Stadium.”

“Cool! When?” I asked.

“The day after tomorrow.”

Whenever I get an offer like this, my first question is always, “Who fell through? Who pulled out at the last minute?” In this case, it was Uma Thurman. Of course. If you can’t get the gorgeous, world-famous actress, bring in some schmuck you never heard of. But the weird surprise was they had heard of me – the Russians, for some reason, go absolutely Bolshoi for “The Simpsons”!

We passed this billboard on the way in from the airport. That’s my wedding picture. That’s my name: Mank Penis.

I arrived at the venue the next morning – the stadium was packed with fifteen thousand Russian entrepreneurs. That’s a lot of entrepreneurs for a former Communist dictatorship. Many in the audience spoke English – the rest received simultaneous translation through headphones. The opening speaker was announced: Richard Gere! He strolled onstage to dead silence. He flashed his dazzling movie star grin and proclaimed, “Hello Moscow! I love this city!”

More dead silence.

Me and Richard Gere! So much handsome in one picture!

None of the speakers who followed him got much response either – not Malcolm Gladwell, nor the Ultimate Fighting Champion of the World. We were a pretty random assortment of speakers – the only thing we had in common was that nobody wanted to listen to us. It was seven hours of thunderous indifference, broken up by a lunch where the businessmen downed as much liquor as one can drink without requiring hospitalization.

Auggh! Sideshow Bob! No wait, that’s Malcolm Gladwell.

I was the final speaker — I was all that stood between 15,000 Russians and a weekend of binge drinking. I cut my one hour speech down to a brisk fifteen minutes, and, as BBC Russia reported, “Tonight, Mike Reiss told great jokes to a gravely silent audience.”

I shrugged it off – I figured this was how Russian audiences always were. I asked the Russian organizer how she thought the day went.

She said, “This was a complete disaster. Tomorrow, they are tearing down the stadium.”

That’s a pretty harsh review – you were so bad, they tore down the venue. Still, I felt proud. My ancestors left Russia a century ago without a penny in their pockets. I was leaving with a speaker’s check for ten thousand dollars.

When I got home, the check bounced. It bounced and bounced and may still be bouncing. I’ve lectured on The Simpsons in twenty-eight countries and that’s the only time that happened. You can read about it in my Simpsons memoir “Springfield Confidential”. It’s available in English, Spanish, German, and we recently sold the Russian-language rights.

That check bounced too.

“Combucha” by Mank Penis

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It was invented by Galileo’s father! Not Galileo – his dad! Vincenzo Galilei set out the rules for what constituted opera 450 years ago! Even Galileo, when he listened to opera said, “Eh, ‘ats-a my father’s music.”

I don’t hate opera. It’s bright and colorful, and huge and over-the-top.

Rigoletto has everyt…

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I turned over this week’s text to Omri Marcus, brilliant comedy writer and A.I. guru. Within 5 minutes, he’d transformed it into a graphic novel. Tell me what you think…

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New York has its famous Thanksgiving parade. And their Halloween parade is insane: anyone in a costume can march in it and last year 50,000 people did. That’s like the entire population of La Crosse, Wisconsin, marching through Greenwich Village, dressed as zombies.

I prefer New York’s Easter Parade. Every year, people dress up in their most colorful outfits and mill around Fifth Avenue. It’s like one giant parade that doesn’t go anywhere and everybody’s in it. And New Yorkers have been doing this since the 1870’s.

There are people who carry the theme too far…

And whatever the hell this guy was…

And the traditional visit by the Easter Pervert.

But suppose they gave an Easter Parade and nobody came? It happened in 2020, the year of the pandemic. New York had been in lockdown for about a month. Anyone who could flee the city left. And even though Fifth Avenue was blocked off for Easter, no one showed up.

Even the Easter Bunny was social distancing in Central Park.

The guy I felt worst for was Jesus. He showed up outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, expecting guests. But no one showed up to his re-birthday party.

The Easter Bunny bought this for free! So why not subscribe — just $5 a month!

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I had a driver in Saudi Arabia who had a great joke he just had to tell me: “Why did the foolish man bring a spoon to sleep? So he could eat rice with the angels! (LAUGHS) He is eating rice with the angels! You can use that on your show!”

My tour guide leaned over to me and ex…

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If you’re anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, go see it. Click here for tickets.

Fifty miles away and fifty years earlier, I saw my first play, in my hometown of Bristol, CT.

Our small-town theater company did a production of “Fiddler on the Roof” with an all-Gentile cast. I was completely baffled: why was my dentist pretending to be a Russian milkman? Why was the Methodist minister calling himself Lazar Wolf? Then, when my dentist tried to pull his milk wagon, the handle sliced his hand wide open. Blood spurted out all over the cardboard village of Anatevka. “Jesus Christ!” screamed Reb Tevye uncharacteristically. I watched my dentist, who’d caused me so much pain, slowly bleed out onstage. And I wondered, “Is this part of the show? Because if so, I’m coming back tomorrow.”

The last straw for me, theatrically speaking, was a nasty little playwright named Neil LaBute. This man writes sensitive romantic comedies like “Fat Pig”. One of his plays opened with a married couple screaming at each other, and they continued fighting for the next two hours. I thought, “Why am I here? I can get this at home.”

And that’s when I decided to stop complaining about other people’s plays and write my own. One starred Micky Dolenz of “The Monkees” and Joyce Dewitt of “Three’s Company”. These two are TV legends and yet insanely underrated, with 120 years of acting experience between them.

I tell a fascinating story which scares Joyce Dewitt, bores Peter Tork, and makes Micky Dolenz regret his life choices.

My show featured a tough-talking Massachusetts guy with the line: “In Boston, we call ice cream sprinkles jimmies. Who the Hell is Jimmy?”

Every night, the actor would end that speech, “Who’s the Hell is Jimmy?” I liked it – it didn’t make much sense, but it was good character.

When the play finally closed, I checked the script – it was a typo. When you’re a playwright, actors do your typos.

At last I understood theater. It’s not fun to watch, it’s fun to do! And I was a hot writer with a hit play. Then I met Morty Weinstock. He was an old guy I literally bumped into at JFK airport. He looked me over.

MORTY: You write plays?

ME: Yeah, how’d you know?

MORTY: You got the look. Here’s my card. Don’t Google me.

Of course, I Googled him immediately. Morty Weinstock was a mattress salesman who’d been accused of embezzlement and arson. In other words, a Broadway producer. Morty bought my play for five thousand dollars, making me the highest-paid playwright in America. He had me sign a contract, and then a second contract attesting that the first contract was valid.

Morty never did anything with my play. And he never paid me a cent.

I literally bumped into him again ten years later at the Friars Club. I was now a cold writer with a forgotten play.

MORTY: You write plays?

ME: Yes I write plays! You bought one from me and never paid me!

MORTY: Yes I did.

ME: No you didn’t.

MORTY: I paid you half.

ME: You paid me zip!

MORTY: You get paid when the play’s produced.

ME: That’s not how it works!

MORTY: We didn’t have a contract.

ME: We had two contracts!

MORTY: All right. You got screwed.

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