King of Comedy

In his big, his very, very big, okay, 4th of July address to the nation, President T*ump had some oratory problems, most notably during a brief interlude on the Revolutionary War, which, if you need a refresher, took place from 1775 to 1783, around the time the first editions of the steamboat were being built. We quote the President of the United States of America: “The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter at Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis of Yorktown.” [Editor’s Note: Lord Charles Cornwallis, born in London, was not of Yorktown but positioned there at Sir Henry Clinton’s order. It’s very confusing!]  “Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.” Eh, come again? “...(I)t [as in, the Continental Army] took over the airports.” That’s airports. I repeat: AIRPORTS. My beloved General Lafayette stormed a redoubt at Yorktown, absolutely, you’re damn right he did, but he did not take over the Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport which was built in the wake of WWII a few decades after The Wright Brothers first achieved flight. My friend Mary, meanwhile, noted Paul Revere really erred in failing to take into account three if by air.

Predictably, the President blamed this citation of the Continental Army taking over the purported colonial airports on the teleprompter. “We had a lot of rain. I stood in the rain. The teleprompter went out. It kept going on, and then at the end, it just went out. It went kaput,” he explained. “I guess the rain knocked out the teleprompter. I knew the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter. And it was hard to look at it anyway.” Forget for a moment, as many pointed out, that T*ump once criticized President Barack Obama for using a teleprompter and consider, if you will, the President’s following sentence: “I knew the speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter.” This would strongly suggest his mention of the Continental Army taking over the purported colonial airports was intentional. Like, if President Big Brain “knew the speech very well” and therefore “was able to do it without a teleprompter” this would mean his mention of the purported colonial aiports was actually in the speech as written and not a flub. Unless, of course, the teleprompter, which he was not reading anyway since he “knew the speech very well”, going out emitted some flash that just sort of momentarily short-wired his otherwise tremendously Big Brain and the word “airports” just popped in there because the last thing he saw on F*x News before he took the stage was a comprehensive report about the Denver International Airport functioning as headquarters for the meddlesome Liberal Illuminati. 

Anyway. This movie blog merely brings it up because, as some of our most loyal frustrated followers know, once upon a time Cinema Romantico wrote screenplays like it writes blogs now. And among our most ersatz famous scripts was the epic flamingo invasion movie Paint the White House Pink in which millions of flamingoes run roughshod over the United States, sort of “Independence Day” crossed with “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” Among the most (not) famous scenes was one in which the comically hapless President was tasked with addressing the nation as the flamingos laid waste, a speech which goes awry when — you’ll never guess — his teleprompter goes out.

Friends, I worked hard on that fake speech. I did my best to conceive theoretically humorous lines that a comically hapless President might desperately belch forth in a moment of extreme pressure that he is not in any way equipped to handle, some that even took on this ridiculous sing-song quality. And I have to say, none of them — not a single one — was anywhere near as good as  “Our Army manned the air, it ran the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do. And at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.” I would hesitate to declare anything I wrote qualified as genuine comedy but nevertheless, T*ump, I guess, really has killed it.