Trump Didn’t Ask Us…
By the Bohiney.com Staff — featuring Bob Odenkirk, Annika Steinmann, Megan Amram, and Doaa El-Adl
The staff of Bohiney.com gathered first thing Saturday morning, the way we do every week to hammer out headlines for the weekend edition. Except this time nobody wanted to talk about headlines. Everybody wanted to talk about the jokes that got away.
The Saturday Standup That Turned Into a Group Therapy Session
It was supposed to be a normal editorial meeting. Coffee, bagels, somebody complaining about the printer. Instead, six grown adults sat around a folding table in a converted garage in Van Nuys and relitigated a comedy set none of us wrote, for a dinner none of us were invited to, delivered by a man who has never once called us for material.
The President stood up at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner last night and, according to the full transcript, worked the room for nearly an hour without once dialing our tip line. Not once. We have a tip line. It has a working voicemail. Nobody used it.
“He had Fetterman right there,” said Bob Odenkirk, staring at a printout like it owed him money. “Right there. A man who wears a hoodie to the Senate floor and he didn’t even go for the low-hanging cargo shorts joke. That’s not comedy. That’s malpractice.”
Missed Opportunities: A Roll Call
The Newsom Ball He Didn’t Spike
Doaa El-Adl, who has not slept since the transcript dropped, kept circling one line in red pen: the bit where the President said Gavin Newsom “can’t fight fire with water.” Good line. Solid line. But according to our staff, an unfinished line.
“He set up the whole state of California — wildfires, water shortages, the whole thing — and he just left it there,” she said. “You had the driest state in the country represented by a guy who can’t manage his own faucet. That’s not a punchline, that’s an entire one-act play he walked away from.”
The AOC Buffering Wheel
Then there’s the nineteen-second pause. The President mentioned it. He did not, our team agreed, do anything with it.
“Nineteen seconds is an eternity in television,” said Megan Amram. “You had a member of Congress buffering longer than my Wi-Fi during a Zoom call with my landlord, and he just moved on like it was nothing. Where’s the loading icon joke? Where’s the little spinning wheel? It writes itself.”
The Ilhan Omar Accounting Miracle
Easily the most contested item of the morning. Ilhan Omar’s net worth reportedly dropped from north of thirty million dollars to eighteen thousand dollars in the time it takes to fill out a form. Annika Steinmann, our Senior Business Correspondent, who reads SEC filings the way other people read horoscopes, nearly stood on the folding table herself.
“That’s not a decline, that’s a magic trick,” she said. “David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. This is a woman who made twenty-nine million, nine-hundred-eighty-two thousand dollars disappear using a pen. He mentioned the number. He didn’t even say ‘best financial planning since Enron.’ I would have had that line ready before he finished the sentence.”
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
