| Dan Fiorella: Writer @ large |
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Everyone talks about the weather but nobody doesn't anything about it...UNTIL NOW! Yes, certain politicians spreading the idea that the government is controlling the weather. Now to stop drought. Not prevent blizzards. But to stop people from voting. Sure, these parts of the country always had hurricanes and tornados, but not like now, when it MATTERS! And there are so many other things we should be doing. Check out what on my latest piece in Weekly Humorist: 
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Remember back in December 2019 when the biggest news was Trump's campaign posting (on purpose) a video where Trump was photoshopped onto the body of Thanos from Avengers: Endgame destroying everyone. Me, neither, until I turned up this bit I wrote and submitted around. Wow, the idea of Trump being responsible for the deaths of a lot a people was just a far-off dream for him back then. And this was on the heels of him submitting a "Build the Wall"-Game of Thrones meme, which neglected to mention the wall there was useless, too. So, for 2024, the gang got together and posted on May 4th, 2024, a meme of Trump holding a red lightsaber. Apparently no one told the gang the Sith, the bad guys, use the red ones. I updated my old bit and submitted it to Weekly Humorist and they published it on their site! Check it out:  How did I not call this the Trump Meme Team?
One of my steadiest gigs was writing for Cracked Magazine. I talked about it here. After Cracked was sold by Dick Kulpa to a confusion of people, we were all out of work. The new owners wanted little or nothing to do with the former crowd. A lot of us wound up on a Facebook group page. Some stories are told, old pieces reposted and vague memories shared. And then, the administrator of the page, author and comic nerd, Chet Jasper Reams decided to try something new. Which was create new content. Back in 2020, there was a presidential election. Maybe you read about it. Reams dropped me a DM and asked if I might consider writing up a short piece about the mascot, Sylvester, running for president. I'm sure I don't know if he contacted anyone else, but I said, "Sure." I tend to to that. I wrote up a bit and sent it in. Then something amazing happened. He got it to artist Bruce Bolinger to draw it! That was in late July, 2020. By the end of August it was posted on the group page. Something new is bubbling now, but it got me to thinking about that article and I figured I should include it on the blog. So, this is Sylvester on the Stump 2020 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... Ah, yes, political humor during the W. Bush administration. It wrote itself. At this time, there was a big scandal that a member of the administration was leaking the name of a active spy. Here's a bit from Wikipedia: The Plame affair (also known as the CIA leak scandal and Plamegate) was a political scandal that revolved around journalist Robert Novak's public identification of Valerie Plame as a covert Central Intelligence Agency officer in 2003 An official tried to undermine the Republicans with the truth about Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction they supposedly had lying around. We got into a whole big war about it. The sketch doesn't get into any of that, but I decided to have Bush visit the show (he had before and would again-their guy did a good Bush impression) and just start dropping spy names all over the place. It was the simplest way to take a news story and convert it into a comedy routine. Oh, and the names he drops? Those all all people I knew, part of the comedy troupe Style without Substance that I had worked with back in the late 80s. I thought they'd get a kick out of hearing their names on air. Too bad it never happened. The sketch didn't make the cut that week... I've got a Secret Agent 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... I was disappointed this sketch didn't make it to air. We were coming up to the midterm elections, with the presidential elections after that. The Bush White House then came up with a plan to handle it. Every time there was good news or exceptional polling for the Democrats, the White House would suddenly declare a "Code Orange" to freak everyone out. After 9/11, the administration put together a chart with levels of alert the population should maintain. It ranged from "Go about your business" to "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!" And every time things would calm down, some bad news would come out about the Republicans and suddenly we were on maximum alert to wipe it out of the news cycle. It was insane and infuriating. And so blatant. And it worked every time. I wanted to call them out on it, in my own little way. This is what came of that. The Adventures of the Code Orange Squad It was a pretty solid week for me on TMI. I got many jokes in. Of course there was some re-working of punchlines; the term "recorded" got changed to "TiVo" (because it's hipper?). My phrase, "We finally find voter fraud and this is it????" became a long winded explanation defining the GOP's actions about the fraud. I was surprised to find "duh" got left as-is. My line, "So he hasn’t even bothered to come up with new material during his down time?" which insinuates that Trump is on the level of a comedian got altered to actually using the term "comedian." But the 18th was an odd day where a lot of my set-ups were used, but the punchlines were flipped around. I am absolutely including them, as my structure and logic are there. For instance, my line about the Texas electric bills being forgiven so that people didn't have to pay was "But, make sure you don't forgive the politicians and businesses who allowed it all to happen in the first place" jumping off the term forgiven. It got rewritten to "the business men who caused it won't pay either" playing off the word "pay" instead and inverting my warning to not forgive them to assuming they won't pay. Different sides of the same coin, right? The "Biden won the election" was reworded for some reason, but the exact same intent. And the Brad Pit joke took my "HBO docu-series" punchline and made it a long, winding sentence to get to the same place and beat you over the head with it. As for the 19th, they took one of my earlier joke punchlines ("another broken campaign promised" and recycled on a joke that very closely resembles a submission from 2 weeks ago. The CDC set up was mine, verbatim, and the cow/seaweed joke. The punchlines were totally different though. The CDC went from "how kids away from school too long think 3 feet is twice as far as six" and the cow joke was simply silly, about getting the cows to the beach instead of some weird knock on LA lifestyles. Is seaweed diets a thing in L.A.? Anyway, you'll have to go to the TMI: Hollywood FB page to hear those, as I didn't include them. Then there was the talk radio joke. I used the word "business" first and changed it to "racket" in the actual submission. Then they changed it back to "business" and added the word recently. Why? It's fascinating to see these changes, big and small, happen. All this time and I really don't think we've created a "voice" for Tonya, although once in a while I try to through in something off speed to see what she does with it. But since I'm not in any writing rooms, I'm totally in the dark as to why it occurs. Anyway, just to remind everyone, TMI: Daily is on the TMI: Hollywood Facebook Page weeknights at 6pm on (Hollywood time). And here's my contributions for last week:  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... 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... This sketch I was really proud of. I went through a phrase of song parodies, writing for ACN and such, but when the Enron sandal hit, I just saw it as the exact plot of The Producers-a company that could make more money (for the owners) failing than succeeding. Power companies were selling off their power plants and only wanted to deliver the electricity without have to concern themselves about producing the power, maintaining the plants or keeping the infrastructure intact. And this sketch just came out of all of that. None of the songs are from the Producers musical. The play opening in April 2001 and ran until 2007. I didn't see until the final years, so I didn't know those songs. Actually, all these years later, I still don't, really. I peddled this skit around to everyone. It was a writing sample for a while because it was too long for my radio outlets and I didn't have a real stage outlet then. I finally just adapted it for PHC. I knew this was a long shot going in and I was right. But, in light of the recent events in Texas (home of Enron), the sketch still seems relevant. Enron: The Musical!No two ways about it, it was a tough week for me on TMI. Only two jokes last week. Maybe they used a couple of my topics, but the punchlines weren't even close to my take, so I'm not going to include them. I've been devoting a hour a day to this (from my day job), so I can't be all prescious about it and I really am just pounding out items. I will admit that I'm adding in my tweets, but, frankly, I've been using Twitter as a joke-creation system, using the topics that come up there as a spark for something. I do now write many of my tweets with an eye toward recycling them on TMI...so if you want to get a sneak preview, go check out @DanFiorella on Twitter. Couldn't hurt. Anyway, to remind everyone, TMI: Daily is on the TMI: Hollywood Facebook Page weeknights at 6pm on (Hollywood time). And here's my contributions for last week: One of my odder writing gigs was a freelance job I had from 2007 to 2013, writing for the conservative news site, Newsbusters.  I have to say, that even though the series was seriously bias (because, you know, everyone else was too bias the other way) Newsbusted did do a couple of things right. They often ended the set with a general pop culture or neutral current events story, so that gave me some wiggle room on submissions. They were open to more absurdist punchlines that came from a less stringent angle. And they let me do some self-referencing jokes about doing the show itself and how little everyone was making. Sometimes just making a joke about the item, inside of being against it, was enough for them. I was going to to their site every day to check the "news stories" that were making them angry. Then I started following some other sites they linked to find out what was annoying them as well and turn it into a joke. There are some scary rabbit holes out there. I wrote about the fine folks over at Gateway Pundit about it once... Even by September I was doubting my ability to keep working for them. I wrote "Saw the bit on "Newsbusted" The guy's delivery is okay. Material is weak. Even my NBC news/illegal immigrant line was stupid. Plus--I'm still kicking myself for not including the topper--"Not only should it increase ratings, they work a lot cheaper!"
In October I write that I got the latest check. "I feel dirty, but" it's a check!  Here's a topical piece and I lost my site that took topical pieces. Maybe I'll turn it into a sketch, but these days with the news cycles, no one will remember...
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Dan FiorellaFreelance writer, still hacking away. 
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