Comedy is hard. Anyone who has performed for three people in the back of a juice bar, trying to land a punch line over the whir of a blender full of kale (for example) can vouch for that.
Right now, no one understands this more than the disgraced pharmaceutical executive and cartoon villain come to life, Martin Shkreli. Mr. Shkreli, who is waiting sentencing for a fraud conviction, was thrown in jail last week after a federal judge deemed him a “danger to society.” Her evidence was a Facebook post that Mr. Shkreli wrote on Sept. 4:
“On H.R.C.’s book tour, try to grab a hair from her,” he wrote, referring to the former secretary of state. “Will pay $5,000 per hair obtained from Hillary Clinton.”
Mr. Shkreli and his attorney tried to explain that it was just a joke! A goof. A prank. A humorous mirror held up to society.
Everyone knows that Mr. Shkreli has incredible business skills, like raising the price of a lifesaving medication by 5,000 percent. Everyone knows that he kills it with the ladies: During his trial he tweeted that a female journalist covering it “caught my eye several times during this process. Love is a battlefield.” But who could have imagined that he’s also a certified comedian?
Here are some of Mr. Shkreli’s other jokes that never made it to social media:
Bulldoze several acres of historic Redwoods. Claim you did it to build a hospital, but instead just build a hoverboard store that never opens.
ADVERTISEMENT
Hold a cock fight and name all of the birds after women who turned you down on Tinder.
Smack an iPhone out of the hands of a stranger you walk by on the sidewalk — even better if the phone doesn’t have a case.
Open and advertise a “fully nut free” bakery. Then secretly add almonds to all of the cookies.
Go on “Jeopardy!” and answer every question with, “What is ‘I’m awesome’?”
Call ICE on your neighbors because you overheard them mention they were thinking about making enchiladas on Tuesday.
Change your Wi-Fi network name to a string of racial slurs.
Go into Whole Foods and spend 20 minutes hovering around the salad bar making a large-size box of prepared foods. Then change your mind and just leave it on a shelf next to jarred salsa for someone else to deal with.
Bring a garbage bag full of stale bread to Times Square and feed the pigeons.
Buy the Hope Diamond and turn it into a medallion necklace that spells out “No Fatties.”
Empty a factory’s worth of pediatric heart medication into a Jacuzzi just to watch it dissolve.
Use a Chapstick at CVS and put it back without paying for it.
Call Nicolas Cage and tell him you have a great script for him in which he plays a man who saves the world by finding the secret second Rosetta Stone. When he replies that yes, he is very interested, tell him: “Never mind. I want to go with Harrison Ford instead.”
Go to a yoga class and during Savasana loudly proclaim, “I’m so rich I could buy the Knicks by accident.”
Fully lean against a subway pole on a crowded morning F train.
Hang out near the dressing rooms at Forever 21 and make meaningful, unbroken eye contact with a woman trying on low-rise jeans for the first time in years.
Send money to Bill Cosby’s defense fund.
Get the entire country to focus, for one brief moment, on the charade that is our political system, the outrage that the person who should be president is instead on a book tour explaining to all of us what went so horribly wrong, and that even in this moment she can still be targeted in a high-profile way by someone whose main claim to fame is raising prices on lifesaving drugs. You know, as a joke!
No comments:
Post a Comment