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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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.

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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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On one Alpine tour, we saw six folklore shows and they always played the same number: Edelweiss. I used to love this song; now, I don’t want to hear it again in my next ten lifetimes. Mind you, “Edelweiss” is not even a German folk song. It was created by two Jews in New York in 1959. (Coincidentally, I was also created by two Jews in New York in 1959.) “Edelweiss” debuted in “The Sound of Music”, a heartwarming musical about a sailor who bangs a nun. It was a Tony-winning play, an Oscar-winning movie, and became the worst folklore show I ever saw. This was in Salzburg, Austria, the breath-takingly gorgeous town whose Nazis chased the Von Trapps out of Europe. Unlike the film, the Von Trapps didn’t ‘climb every mountain’ to flee the country; they just hopped on a train and got the hell out.

Salzburg mounts a folklore show called “The New Sound of Music”, which seemed to be the old Sound of Music, but with a cast that included a Filipino man and what appeared to be a Hungarian stripper. During the show, I heard a tourist ask, “Are they the real Von Trapps?”

The only good part of this Thai folklore show was the sign.

In Peru, we were subjected to a two-hour folklore show. This consisted of an elderly man, dressed as an Amazon tribesman, cavorting wildly. He was backed by a two-piece band: snare drum and whistle. Two hours of banging and tooting.

Then the dancing girls came in: eight women in skimpy tribal garb, shaking like go-go girls. Now the weird part, and folks we haven’t got to the weird part yet, is that they performed this entire show in the dark. There were lamps all over the dining room, but this troupe avoided the light like they were barn owls. This presented a problem: in the dark I couldn’t tell how old the dancing girls were. If they were 25 and I ogled them, I was a lech. If they were twelve, I was going to jail.

African dancers with the same hairdo as my wife.

Then there’s the folklore show that broke loose of its regional chains and rampaged through the world like Godzilla. I’m speaking of Riverdance, a tribute to Irish tap dancing that has been disappointing fans for thirty years. If you’ve seen ten minutes of this on TV, you’ve seen it all. They have one basic routine: tap, tap, cross your ankles, tap, tap, high kick, repeat, repeat, repeat for three decades. Everyone keeps their arms plastered to their sides, because, why try hard? Occasionally, they change costumes to convince us we’re seeing different routines. This fools no one.

Still the sound of thirty dancers tapping in unison produces the kind of deafening staccato you can’t fake. Except they do — it’s all prerecorded, distorted, and blasted at ear-splitting volume. And it’s accompanied by wailing Irish bagpipes which make the evening feel like a policeman’s funeral.

Near the end, the action suddenly cuts to Brooklyn, where three African Americans tap and breakdance. It feels vaguely racist, and spotlights how lily-white the other 33 cast members are. Still, it’s everyone’s favorite part of Riverdance because there’s no riverdancing.

If you Google the show, the top question that comes up is, “Does Riverdance have a story?” Thirty million people in 49 countries have seen this thing, and not one knows what’s going on. You get no help from the narration which introduces every dance number. It’s New Age blather capped with Irish blarney. Here are three examples where they go from ‘duh’ to ‘huh?’:

“The thorns scourge me. I have no peace by night or day. Suibne, Suibne, Sirthecháin, Sirthecháin, Suibne!”

“When I’m miles and miles apart from you I’m beside you when I think of you, A Stóirín a Grá.”

“Lady Moon hides her charms by day from her lover Brother Sun. Snorom Rof levird.”

I made up the last one, and you couldn’t tell. Read the Irish backwards.

This overproduced slab of noisy nothing has made Michael Flatley a billionaire. But this Michael flatly hated it. You can skip Riverdance. There — I just saved you a hundred bucks.

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She gasped, “I’m dying – you have to drive me to the hospital.”

To me, the scariest word in that sentence wasn’t “dying” or “hospital”. It was “drive”. I hadn’t driven a car in this millennium.

I climbed behind the wheel: the dashboard resembled the control panel from “Interstellar”. The last car I drove had a cassette deck.

The only car I should be allowed to drive.

This was a rental car and we couldn’t figure out how to work the GPS, so Denise navigated from her phone: “Get on the 5 Freeway!”

“North or South?” asked.

“I don’t know!” she wailed.

We drove up and down the freeway, my wife screaming in pain with every bump and pothole. So rude. After thirty minutes we found ourselves, Blair Witch style, right back where we started.

Eventually, Google Maps brought us to the closest emergency room. We were met at the gate by soldiers in camo with M4 carbines. “This is a Naval hospital!” they thundered. “Are you in the Navy?”

“I’ll enlist,” I said. “Just take my wife!” I wasn’t being noble – I just wanted to stop driving.

Even as a young man, I drove like an old woman. I crawled along at a fraction of the speed limit, slamming on my brakes whenever anyone, anywhere in the world, tapped on theirs. I changed lanes with the deliberation other people change gender.

Then, one day in 1999, I pulled into a gas station so Denise could use the rest room. During the one minute she was gone, I managed to wrap my car around a concrete pole. When she emerged from the bathroom, I actually said, “Honey, I shrunk the car.”

Denise did all our driving after that.

The Navy admitted my wife to their hospital and provided excellent care. They determined Denise had an E. coli infection, though technically, E. coli had a Denise infection – the bacteria were running the show. My wife was a Petri dish in a sundress.

Perhaps our eating tour of Mexico had been a mistake.

While my wife was shedding microbes, I had to shed our rental car. Unfortunately, we’d contracted to drop it off in Los Angeles, meaning the World’s Worst Driver had to make a 120 mile trip. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper for the next four hours… and I loved it. Everybody had to drive like me – twelve miles an hour, with lane changes impossible.

LA has a modern cathedral that everyone hates and no one visits. Bucking two thousand years of church design, the interior has a concave ceiling. Instead of soaring up to the heavens, it hangs down, oppressing and depressing. It looks like the roof is about to cave in.

LA boasts the world’s ugliest cathedral…

…and most beautiful car rental return. Seems appropriate.

To me the true LA Cathedral is the Consolidated Rent-a-Car Facility at LAX. Built at the cost of a billion dollars, it gleams like a magical city, beckoning weary travelers, eager to return their crappy Ford Fiestas. It’s the perfect symbol of Los Angeles, a city that you can only see by car and can’t wait to get out of.

Oh, if you’re interested, my wife nearly died, but didn’t.

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The worst part about going to Harvard – besides EVERYTHING – is that no matter how well you’re doing, someone’s doing better. For example, I had a pal in college named Saul. Every night I’d go out drinking while Saul sat home studying. Now I’m a famous washed-up comedy writer. And what did all that studying get Saul? It got him the Nobel Prize in Physic…

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A lot of annual subscriptions will be coming up for renewal, and I urge you to subscribe at the $5/monthly rate. That’s as cheap as Substack gets.

Do not renew at the ANNUAL LEVEL: that’s $500!

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I set the annual rate exorbitantly high, so only an idiot would subscribe at that level. One idiot already has. Thank you, Ken B. of Dayton, Ohio.

The boring explanation for this is that Substack insists you post an Annual Subscription plan: they will not let me take it down!

I know I have at least eight months of great weekly columns to share with you. I’m not sure I’ve got a full year’s worth, and I resolve to stop the day this gets boring or repetitive. Or repetitive.

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Who writes the Oscars? A Jewish guy, a Black guy, a gay guy, a gay woman, and me (center). I’m kind of ‘all of the above’.

Then, in 2019 I got a call from the Academy Awards: they had a comedy emergency. The show was supposed to open with one of those film packages where they cut Billy Crystal into Oscar nominated films and he says, “I’m Jewish, isn’t that funny, please love me.”

The clip package they had wasn’t working and they asked me to fix it.

This was my way in! I called my wife and told her, “Honey we’re going to the Oscars!”

The producer corrected me: she’s going to the Oscars, you aren’t. When you work for the show you get one free ticket. As he walked me to my office, he added, “You’ll be amazed just how cheap the Oscars can be.”

Denise attends the Oscars. As the wife of a writer, she got the worst seat in the house.

I would be working in the sub-basement of the basement of the garage of the theater where the Oscars were held. Five writers were packed into a windowless room, the size of a small closet or a large coffin. It was so narrow, if you want if you were at the back of the room and wanted to get out, everyone else had to leave the room first. It was the tiniest, most depressing office I’d had since my high school summer job, filing death certificates at City Hall.

Five writers shared this office.

Then, a bright spot. Two production assistants wheeled in our lunch -- a trolley overflowing with gourmet food, four different hot entrées, two kinds of wine. It filled every inch of the writers’ room. I asked the head writer, “Do they always feed you like this?”

He said, “This is a mistake. If you don’t tell anyone, maybe they’ll keep doing it.”

Sure enough we got meals like this three times a day, plus tea and cookies at 4 PM. I’m pretty sure it was a mistake because we had the office next to Lady Gaga. Every day we got gourmet lunch buffets and she got Quizno’s Subs.

I set out to do the one job I was hired for: rewriting the Billy Crystal clip package. As soon as I was finished, they said the bit had been cut. The head writer told me, “Get used to it this -- it happens here a lot.” Sure enough, I wrote Whoopi Goldberg‘s presentation for Best Animated Film. It was fun writing in her voice and style. But the next day they changed the presenter from Whoopi Goldberg to Michelle Yeoh. I rewrote the whole thing from scratch. And when the awards finally aired, the presenter was Pharrell Williams.

I got to write a great opening monologue for Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph. But when the show aired Tina, Amy and Maya came in with their own material.

This became my job at the Oscars: writing comedy for comedians who came in with their own comedy. My jokes were thrown out by Melissa McCarthy, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey. All comedy legends. And Andy Samberg.

Outside of comedians, the number one request we got from celebrities was: “I don’t want to be funny. Don’t give me anything funny to say.” Well, sure. Why be entertaining?

We got another weird request writing for presenters Jennifer Lopez and Chris Evans. Chris Evans’ publicist told us we couldn’t mention Captain America.

Well what else was there? We went on Wikipedia and did a deep dive on Chris Evans – we found out he was from Sudbury, Massachusetts. So we gave him this joke: “Hey J Lo – you’re Jenny from the Block? I’m Chris from the Sud.” It took five people to come up with that. He didn’t use it. Good for him.

One of the toughest jobs on the Oscars is writing the walk-ups. This is the drivel the TV announcer reads as the winner walks up to the podium to get their award. You know, like, “Christian Bale has three nominations for Best Actor and six arrests for malicious assault.“ You have no idea who is going to win, so you have to write these little factoids for every single nominee.

That includes the really obscure categories like “Best Documentary Short”. These are people you never heard of, whose movies you never saw. Plus they always have the worst seats in the house, so you have to cover their five-minute walk to the podium. What do you say about Rayka Zatobchi and her film about menstruation in India?

There would be half a billion people watching this show, but there wasn’t much pressure because nobody listens to this stuff. Take this speech we wrote for Tyler Perry: “Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘community’ as a group of people living in one place or sharing a common characteristic. Every film set is a community. Here are the nominations for Best Editing…”

It didn’t make a lick of sense, but they put it on the TelePrompTer, Tyler Perry read it and nobody cared.

The most fun part of the Oscars was the rehearsal. The day before the ceremony, they do a complete, three-hour run-through of the show, with all the celebrities presenting awards to no one. It’s fun to see these stars who will be so beautifully dressed tomorrow, in T-shirts and shorts and baseball caps. There is no pressure and no audience and they seem to be having a really great time.

Except for one Oscar-winning actress.

We watched her have a screaming fight with her boyfriend in the parking lot; then she marched onstage and glowered through her presentation. Out of respect to her privacy, I’ll just mention her first name.

Charlize.

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