So I’m working in the lobby of the Ace Hotel today. Chris Gethard came in and sat down across from me a few minutes ago. Chris and I have crossed paths once or twice in the UCB teacher’s lounge and such, but we’ve never really been introduced. I, for some reason, thought I should yell “Hi!” like we were best friends. He, understandably, did not recognize me, and perhaps wondered if I was some sort of Ace Hotel equivalent of a Wal Mart greeter. “We’ve never really been introduced,” I went on, “I’m Melinda,” doing nothing to dispel that Wal-Mart-greeter impression.

Why didn’t I just go “Hey, good to see you again, I’m a UCB sketch writer, we were both at that meeting yesterday,” instead of sitting here creeping him out for the past 45 minutes? I don’t know. It feels too late for that. I guess my solution is just to put this whole interaction on the internet. That should heal all wounds.

I asked my sister Manda, who is sitting next to me, what to do. This is the IM conversation we’ve been having.

Wife: Here’s your new credit card. It just came in the mail.

Husband: Great. Let me call up a stranger and read him my credit card number and PIN.

Wife: Good idea. That way if you forget, he can remind you.

Husband: Oh, and I’d better conference in an offshore backup stranger in Estonia. Can’t be too careful.

***

Father (to teenage daughter): We need to talk. I just got off the phone with your principal. She saw a picture of you sitting in the quarterback’s lap drinking Smirnoff Ice wearing nothing but your underwear and a marching band hat.

Teen daughter: What? How did she see that?

Father: It was painted on that hot air balloon you flew over town.

Teen daughter: Why did she look up at it? Stalker.

***

A dark and stormy night. A ship is tossed in the ink-black waves. An ensign spots a lighthouse blinking on the horizon in morse code.

Ensign: Look, captain! A message from the shore!

Captain: What say they, Ensign?

Ensign: D-O-E-S-N-T T-H-I-S M-O-L-E L-O-O-K L-I-K-E T-I-N-A F-E-Y?

Captain: What mole?

At that moment, an exhausted carrier pigeon fights its way through the howling winds to land exhausted on deck.  The ensign unrolls a message taped to its leg and brings it to the captain. It is an extremely detailed charcoal drawing of the mole on the lighthouse master’s thigh.

Captain: A bit, I guess.

***

Radio DJ: Caller 5, you’re on the air.

Caller: Hi, Dave. I’m a big fan of the show. I just want to let all your listeners know that I’m downtown at Lanagan’s Pub.

DJ: By the train station?

Caller: Exactly. To repeat: I, Jimmy Quigley, am at Lanagan’s, not at home, which, frequent listeners will remember from my previous calls to your show, is at 54 Elm Street and contains a large flat screen TV and several computers.

DJ: And why are you telling us this?

Caller: I’m hoping someone will be impressed by how often I’m at this bar.

Loving Farms produces old-fashioned animal porn untainted by homosexuality.

I tend to only embed the vids I wrote, because they look so messed up on formatted for this blog. But you should really check out the rest of the Diamonds Wow oeuvre. Caitlin Tegart and Kevin Hines rock my world. And Kevin Hines is a ghostbuster. (Google it.)

Please check out our other videos at UCBComedy.com. As always, this will look better there than pounded into Wordpress with a mallet.

Exterior, Chrysler factory, day.

A whistle blows. Three guys in hard hats enter. They sit on a bench to eat lunch. Clyde takes out a newspaper.

VERN
Hey, you guys hear the penny finally dropped? Yeah, after years of layoffs, Chrysler’s declaring bankruptcy today.

BILL
Ain’t that a hell of a thing. What’s supposed to happen to us, huh? Honest, hardworking guys, the backbone of American manufacturing, who gave the best years of our lives to the Chrysler corporation.

CLYDE
Says here it was a combination of spiraling manufacturing costs and inferior quality of the product.

VERN
Spiraling costs? Pshh, that’s crazy. We’re a well oiled machine. And inferior quality like what?

CLYDE
The example they give is the steering on the Town & Country.

BILL
Nah, that’s ridiculous. I took a new Town & Country off the assembly line last night, steering was as tight as a drum. Vern, how bout the one you took?

VERN
Well, to tell you the truth the steering was looser than I prefer, but the other three I snuck off the assembly line this week steered like a fuckin’ angel dream. Like baby Jesus lived in the suspension.

CLYDE
Hold on, hold on. Bill, you stole four new cars this week? Snatched ‘em right off the assembly line?

BILL
Sure. Why?

CLYDE
You crazy knucklehead, I told you, you’re gonna get caught. You gotta wait till they get off the assembly line to the paint lot. No one misses ‘em there.

BILL
Sound advice as usual, Clyde, which I will heed from now on. But back to this bankruptcy thing. I just don’t see what could be behind this ‘spiraling costs’ notion. We run such a tight ship at Chrysler. Where could that wasted money be going?

CLYDE
Well, I don’t know. When I helped myself to one of them new Sebrings I noticed it had six cupholders. Six cupholders! Who needs that many? I was so dumsquizzled I pulled it over, gave it to a homeless man, and walked back to the plant to take another one just to see if they were all like that. You guys, they are.

Clyde shakes his head.

CLYDE
Six cupholders. Now that’s what I call waste.

BILL
Sheesh. It sure is.

VERN
You been taking a lot of them Sebrings lately, Clyde. Whatta ya been doing with ‘em?

CLYDE
Oh, you know, a Sebring for my mom’s birthday, a PT Cruiser as a wedding present for my daughter, a minivan for my son when he hits a homer in Little League. These memorable occasions, they add up.

BILL
As a family man you have many obligations.

CLYDE
True that, true that. How bout you, Bill? What you been doing with the cars?

BILL
Oh, just the usual, fellas. Still trying to break the record for the world’s largest pile of brand-new cars.

VERN
Yeah? How’s that going?

BILL
Not great. I was so close. The guy from the Guinness Book of World Records was due to come check it out the next week, but then wouldn’t you know it, the pile fell down.

CLYDE
Ain’t that always the way.

BILL
Yeah. Squashed my neighbor’s aboveground pool, he took me to small claims court, it was a whole thing. So the record is still held by some jerkoff from Ford.

VERN
Those Ford trucks are so rectangular, they must stack right up like Tetris. It is not your fault, Bill, that you work for a company that values sleek design.

BILL
Thank you, Vern. How about you?

VERN
Myself, I am very active in our local demolition derby.

BILL
Sure, but that’s just the weekends. What do you do with your Monday through Thursday cars?

VERN
Well, lately I’ve been - aw, jeez, you guys’ll think it’s stupid.

CLYDE
What?

VERN
Well, you know how when you were a kid you’d tape two colored pencils together and make one drawing with two colored lines side by side? Well, I says to myself, if it works with two parallel colored pencils and a piece of tape, might it work just as well with two parallel cars with their windows rolled down and a hockey stick jammed through both steering wheels?

CLYDE
(whistles)
That is very original thinking, Vern. So does it work?

VERN
Not as well as you’d think.

BILL
You know, guys, I been thinkin’. Is it possible that we are, in some small way, contributing to Chrysler’s quote-unquote “spiraling costs” by each taking a car a day?

CLYDE
I don’t follow.

BILL
Well, think about it. A new Chrysler is worth between $15,000 and $45,000. There’s three of us, so multiply that by three. And we each take one every day.

CLYDE
Unless we’re sick.

BILL
Right. And when did these budget problems begin?

CLYDE
Says here around 1986. Hey, that’s when we started at the plant!

BILL
Exactly. A Town & Country here, a Sebring there, you think it’s no big deal, but before you know it you’ve taken eight billion dollars’ worth of cars.

CLYDE
But come one, that’s small potatoes. Chrysler’s in the hole for -

He checks the paper.

CLYDE
… eight point six billion dollars.

VERN
Wow. So what you’re saying is that our benefits have been slashed, our friends have been laid off, and now the whole multimillion dollar corporation has gone plooie - all because three guys from the carburetor quality control department happen to enjoy unwinding by driving to the field by the airport and making pictures for the planes out of cars?

BILL
That is what I’m saying.

VERN
Wow.

CLYDE
Huh.

BILL
Makes you think.

Beat. They contemplate. The shift whistle blows. The guys get up and start to exit.

CLYDE
Well, back to work.

BILL
Yeah. Hey Vern, I’ll give you a PT Cruiser for that turkey sandwich.

VERN
Throw in a Sebring and you’ve got a deal.

END.

Please check out our other videos at UCBComedy.com. (You can see this video bigger there. I’d recommend it, actually.)

Dear Gmail Customer,

First off, thanks for bearing with us. You’ve had a Gmail account since 2004, which makes you one of our longest users. You stuck with us through the years that Gmail was in beta as we worked out the kinks. We’re sending you this email to let you know how much we appreciate your business, and to request immediate payment of $3,384.55.

We know you must have been wondering all these years why you weren’t getting billed regularly for your Gmail use - you must have realized we weren’t making our money off those little text ads no one reads. Our bad. Gmail grew much faster than expected, and we just couldn’t get the structure in place fast enough to send out regular bills. But now Gmail has been out of beta for almost a year and we’re finally ready to send you monthly bills for your gmail use.

By now you’ve probably noticed that your Gmail account is frozen, and that this is the only email you can open. That won’t be true for long - everything will go back to normal shortly, unless you don’t pay your bill and we delete your account entirely, as well as blocking your access to Google Docs, G Chat, and any site that uses Google AdWords (Knew those would come in handy somehow!). Of course we know how important Google’s services are to the modern surfer, so we’ll make sure you don’t lose all your data from the last six years. We’ll do our best to post the emails and search date you’d least want to lose - sensitive personal emails, passwords, account numbers, that sort of thing - on a public site where you can access it whenever you want. And so can anyone else. Convenient!

We’re aware that this is a lot of money to pay all at once. As always, Google’s philosophy is “Don’t be evil,” so if you don’t feel you can make full immediate payment on the outstanding balance on your Google account, we’d like to offer an alternative. Google will forgive your balance if you agree to be a beta tester in our new initiative, Google Scion. As a Scion participant, your family will have a unique educational opportunity to grant legal custody of one of your children to the Google corporation, to be raised in our new code farm in Mountain View, California. We prefer first-born children (tradition!) but feel free to substitute any younger sibling who’s demonstrated an aptitude for C++.

Thanks again for your business!

Love,
Google.

Don’t believe me? Let’s go to the trailer screencaps.

Nice blonde lady: Who’s that wild, troubled creature no one can tame?

Why, it’s a black teenager/horse!

No way can you civilize that black teenager/horse!

Shut up, Tim McGraw!

No one better try to take away my black teenager/horse! You hear me, drug dealers/glue factory?

Wheeee!

I rest my case.

You can find all our fabulous Diamonds, Wow! hilarity at UCBComedy.com.