Titanic 2: The Media Circus!

My wife and I were just back from a trip to Japan. We were exhausted jetlagged, and didn’t quite know where we were. So we turned on the news: a submarine taking tourists down to the wreck of the Titanic had lost communication with the surface.

Denise said, “That’s the sub we took last year.”

And suddenly the phone began to ring.

It rang and rang for four days straight. We found ourselves at the center of a worldwide media frenzy.

I’d started the day as a schmuck and ended it as a Kardashian. No wait -- the Kardashians get paid. I wound up as one of those poor jerks who dates a Kardashian, his life is ruined and he doesn’t even get paid for it.

I’m not sure why, but the first calls we got came from British media. I also don’t know how the hell they got my phone number.

But every London newspaper, and every channel of the BBC interviewed me. The calls started at midnight and ended around 4 AM. When I woke up the next morning, I learned that the missing sub was not just a news story.

It was the number one news story on earth.

The first thing I did was call my mother. Whenever there’s a crisis anywhere in the world, she assumes I’m there. She’s often right.

I left her a voicemail saying, “Mom, I am not on the missing sub. I was on the sub, but that was a year ago, and now I am not on the sub.”

All my mom heard was “sub sub missing sub”. My message to reassure her had sent her into complete panic.

She returned my call just as I was getting on the subway.

I said, “I’ll talk to you, but I may be cut off because I’m on the subway.”

Well, I did get cut off, right in the middle of the word ‘subway’. All she heard was “I may get cut off because I am on the sub.”

Mom went nuts. But enough of her. This is about me.

I checked my email -- again I don’t know how they got my address -- but there were hundreds of interview requests from all over America. I’d achieved worldwide fame by not dying.

I decided to do one news show. Maybe that would get all the others off my back. I went on CNN.

I knew this was serious business -- I couldn’t be funny. And funny is what I do. It’s my job. It’s the only positive quality I have.

I tried to be honest, but not too downbeat. I said that the Titan was built to go where no other vessels could go. If it were stuck on the bottom of the ocean, no one could reach it. If it were lost, no one could find it.

The ocean was vast and the sub was tiny. Locating it would be like finding a quarter you dropped in Lake Erie.

This was not Space Mountain, a ride that seemed dangerous, but was really quite safe. This was an experimental craft – it felt safe but was actually quite dangerous. Before we even got on, we signed a lengthy waiver listing a dozen ways we might die, from asphyxiation to electrocution.

But the media wasn’t interested in any of this. They were selling hope. They were selling hope so they could sell soap

.They glommed onto the notion that the sub had 96 hours worth of oxygen in it. It was an approximation, four days of air. But the news media took it literally -- they treated it like a game show countdown clock. They’d report there were 18 hours of oxygen left; then eight hours; then two. They implied that at 95 hours and 59 minutes everything would be groovy. But a minute later: BUZZ! You lose. Thanks for playing.

Still, I’d done my part. I told my story on CNN and thought this would hold them. But when you do one CNN show every other CNN show wants to talk to you. Plus CNN International and CNN streaming. There’s a lot of friggin’ CNNs. And after you talk on one network, the others never stop calling. I did a show with someone named Ashley Banfield on something called NewsNation, just so she’d stop bothering me. And when I went on, she barely let me get a word in.

I even went on Fox News, just so my rich friends could see me. I don’t like Fox News. In fact, we spent an entire episode of the Simpsons trashing them. A rumor went around that the network was so incensed that they sued The Simpsons. That’s crazy. We were both owned by Rupert Murdoch. It would be like his left pocket suing his right pocket. The truth is, the day after that episode aired, Fox News called us and said “Do it again!” I had a very pleasant interview with Neil Cavuto and stole all the food in their snack room.

My weirdest appearance was with GBN, the Great Britain Network. I didn’t know what they were but they sounded classy. I signed into their zoom waiting room and watched their commentator, Patrick Christys, launch into the most racist attack on Muslims I’d ever heard. Even Alex Jones would go “Dang girl.”

What had I got myself into? It was like agreeing to speak on HLN thinking it was Headline News when it was actually the Hitler Lovers Network (you know, Fox News). Anyway, Patrick Christys finished spewing his hate-filled tirade, then chirped pleasantly, “And our next guest is Mike Reiss from The Simpsons.” He was perfectly kind and articulate -- it was probably the nicest interview I had. Go figure.

Four days after the disappearance of the Titan, they found the wreckage of the sub. It had imploded, within two hours of launch. Captain Stockton Rush and his four passengers were vaporized. It took less than the 20th of a second.

And suddenly, my phone stopped ringing. No one in the press wanted to talk to me. Not even Ashley Banfield.

It turns out my fame only had 96 hours of oxygen. Those four days had been aggravating, exhausting, relentless and cruel.

I miss it so much!

There’s a lot more to the story – recriminations, finger-pointing and whole lot of fake news. I’ll address all that tomorrow, plus my defense of the Titan and its creator Stockton Rush. Ordinarily, that would just go to paid subscribers, but I’d like everyone to see it.