From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things... Once upon a time we used to watch movies on video tape cassettes. The home video market was exploding as people wanted to get the latest release ASAP and for cheap. Enter the video pirates, people who would go into movie theaters and record movies off the screen with their cam-corders. This was before cellphones when sneaking a video camera into a theater could be tricky. I think that's all the context you need to read the bit. It was a hot topic back then and I had attempted to tackle it a couple of times. Just merging the ideas of high-tech and classic pirates was too strong to resist. Who doesn't like a sketch with pirate lingo? PHC, apparently. They didn't bite.
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Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses. These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something. I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work). I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site. First off, I don't know why they misspelled rotten. Anyway, I went kinda nuts on this one. I pulled up a list of "the 200 best rom-coms" and just worked my way down it, until I just got tired. I did like 20 or so and got a goodly number of them included on-site. A couple of them were pretty good, many of them were kinda lame puns, but I try to bury them in content so they'll remember my name. From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things... Well, here's me attempting to humorously addressing Black History Month. It's just one of my standard goofy historical flashback where some significant seems to take some detours. If you every read about the history of gasoline, it's just amazing how gasoline, a waste product in the creation of kerosine, became the the very life blood of the nation. So, it may have been with peanut butter. Nobody gets it right immediately. Nor did I, as this sketch wasn't selected. Here it is, my peanut butter sketch... Peanut ButterFrom 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things... Reading this old piece, I had forgotten (in light of recent developments) how awful the George W. Bush years were. His "Compassionate Conservativism" was a real misnomer. This was the proto-type of what the GOP would devolve into; "small' government bent on slashing the budget, privatizing Social Security (which was only stopped by Bush's Wall Street collapse and "The Great Recession.") and education. War was needed to enrich the military-industrial complex (invading the wrong country was simply collateral damage), Halliburton allowed to run amok, bank collapses, huge corporation failures and a glib cynicism. As long as they had theirs, it didn't matter much if anything trickled down to the working class. And PHC was never shy about pointing that nonsense out. I don't know why I went with a wacky lacky to explain the budget, instead of Bush himself. But I had a lot to say about the budget and the vulture capitalism that was coming home to roost. It's a very topical piece with lots of topical references, some long forgotten. I hope this triggers some of the bleak memories and reminds us the the GOP was always this way, only less rude. Alas, my venting was for nought, as the piece wasn't selected. After all this time, it still irks me that I can't just say rejected, because no one ever told me "No, we won't be using this." I'd have to listen to the show and check the website to see if it was used or not. New Bush BudgetWeekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses. These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something. I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work). I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site. I didn't think I was going to do this one. When they say something like "80s movies" my sense of time is so bad, I don't remember when movies came out. I'm like a toddler who says "yesterday" mean could be "yesterday" or "last Christmas." So, I had to google top films of the 1980s, or if a pun came to me, I had to check to see if it came out in the 80s (like Twilight Zone: The Movie). A lot of puns with the word brie, which is an easy one to do. But I came up with a couple of clever ones I'm proud of (see: Twilight Zone). And there were a number of excellent puns by others as well. So join us now as we... From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things... It was time for the State of the Union address and I decided to go back to that well and see if I could get another skit approved. Reading it down, man, was the GOP already headed down the wrong road. The didn't want to govern, they just wanted to boss people around. The didn't want freedom, they wanted to tell people want they could and couldn't do. Yes, Bush was a buffoon, but the people around him were scary and powerful. State o'Union 2005Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses. These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something. I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work). I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site. Yeah, I’m disappointed this week. Cute topic and I churned out like twenty tweets. They picked 3. And not even my best ones. There were a ton of duplicate entries, and I guess many of them canceled each other out. And then there’s the fact that WH put all their tweets as the “winners,” leaving less room for us freelancers. There are some pretty clever gags here, so check it out! From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things... Again, when all else fails, go with a song parody. Staten Island has a very strong ground hog culture, with our own Staten Island Chuck, who famously bite one mayor and was killed when another mayor killed him by dropping him...allegedly. So, as the month came to a close and Ground Hog Day was within sight, I took the old Elvis song and made it about ground hogs that kinda scans. Anyway, I predicted it wouldn't get picked and it wasn't! Ground HogFrom 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things... Again, quick bit, pop culture, TV parody. Three strikes. I thought maybe the PHC crowd would enjoy mocking the FOX crowd. This was when FOX was deep in it's "When Bad Things Happen to People" phase, with horrible videos of terrible things. It was all based on the idea that you can't stop watching a train wreck, so why not televise train wrecks. I thought by adding some SFX, it might get considered, but no, it was not. Fox Sweeps |
Dan FiorellaFreelance writer, still hacking away. Archives
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