I Scream You Scream
Biden has a cone and Bolt Upright and our Received Opinion team are ON IT!
BOLT UPRIGHT: Good evening, I’m Bolt Upright, and this is Received Opinion.
[Music. Screen behind UPRIGHT: Limited-animation Joe Biden eating an ice cream cone in slo-mo — chyron: “‘TAKES’ A-LICKIN.’”]
Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s fight for that crucial vibes vote has turned into a cold war over ice cream.
[Insert: Quick silent clips of Biden’s recent appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers.]
The President went on TV and aimed some zingers at Trump, but the part that fascinated our producers, not to mention the men whose phone calls they always take immediately, even at their mistresses’ apartments, is Joe Biden eating an ice cream cone.
[Insert: Tweets about Biden with an ice cream cone.]
You’ve all seen the funny tweets about Biden and ice cream, but this time —
[Insert: Biden’s press gaggle while eating a cone at Van Leeuwen.]
— the President may have entered a “Rocky Road” as Republicans blasted him for talking while eating ice cream. About Israel and Gaza, no less!
[Insert: Headlines and screenshots.]
Time magazine said, “critics blasted the optics and timing.” The Mirror said “Joe Biden’s TV appearance branded a ‘disaster’ with ‘childlike’ ice cream and ‘evasive’ shades” — and that’s an English newspaper, which shows how Biden eating an ice cream cone could damage America’s standing overseas. Our fellow journalists at Fox News took a bold stand: “A grown man should not be licking ice cream in public.”
[Insert: This tweet.]
And here’s Clay Travis, a well-known I’m not sure what exactly, asking on Twitter, “Do you know grown men who go get ice cream by themselves?” I should reveal here that anchors on our network have public image clauses in our contracts that prevent us from being photographed eating ice cream, corn dogs, flan, and a few dozen other foodstuffs. Maybe ice cream cones are alright for people who have no public image — blue-collar joes like plumbers or the guys who clean my septic tank. But is it appropriate for a president to eat an ice cream cone, particularly a president who claims to care about the Israeli and American people? Let’s go to our Decision Desk and talk to our panel of experts!
[The usual ugly music and swirling camera segue. UPRIGHT joins the usual Decision Desk guests: PEONI DOYENNE, wearing a canary Dries Van Noten Bessie Tape trim blazer jacket with forest green trim and matching pants with a frilly white shirt; CHAFE DRAMATURGY, wearing a Pini tobacco suit with an open pale blue dress shirt; and BUFF TOEHOLD, wearing a Ben Silver navy Super 120s gabardine suit with a white shirt and a black tie of the sort they used to give you in nice restaurants if you showed up improperly dressed.]
Buff, I can see by your waistline you’re not one to turn down an ice cream cone.
DRAMATURGY and DOYENNE: Chortle chortle chortle.
TOEHOLD: [Sourly] Another liberal lie, Bolt. My love handles come exclusively from steak, potatoes, and good American beer, lots of it, any kind so long as it’s not Bud Light. And potato chips. And cheeseburgers. But an ice cream cone, Bolt? I mean, for little kids who don’t know the repercussions, sure, but as a grown man — and let me emphasize that talking point, “grown man” — for a grown man, what does a vanilla ice cream cone look like? I’ll tell you what it looks like. For a grown man it looks like a penis, with ejaculate coming out the top — a big fat ejaculating penis — exactly what you would expect from a pervert and a traitor like Joe Biden!
[Long pause, in which only the distant guffaws of stage crew can be heard.]
UPRIGHT: A novel interpretation, surely! And one we must respect in the interests of balance.
DRAMATURGY: [Mischievously] Maybe Peoni would like to address Buff’s point.
DOYENNE: How dare you! You liberals take everything and use it to promote sexual libertinism!
DRAMATURGY: Me! Buff was the one talking about ejaculate.
DOYENNE: [Covering her ears] Ugh! There you go again! Buff was talking about it as something disgusting! You talk about it as if it’s something wholesome and good!
DRAMATURGY: Ice cream is wholesome and good. I know I concede everything to you guys every week — about Gaza and means testing and immigration and everything else — but dammit, this week I’m going to stick my neck out for once and say that ice cream is good! It’s good, people!
TOEHOLD: [Standing up] So you admit it! You admit you like to suck ice cream ejaculate out of a big brown Mexican cone, like a transy-homo-pervert! And another thing, Bolt — what about that Van Losenheimer or whatever that place that Joe Biden went to, in Brooklyn where all the transy hipsters live? He couldn’t even go and suck good old American penis cream like Blue Bell! Or Turkey Hill! It has to be elitist!
UPRIGHT: So, Buff, you’re saying that sucking the ice cream ejaculate out of a cone would be acceptable if it were populist ejaculate, like Breyers or Baskin-Robbins.
DOYENNE: [Stands up, howls] Don’t you see how this is going to get Donald Trump elected again!
TOEHOLD: No! Not Baskin-Robbins, Bolt! You know why not? Because you can’t buy it in supermarkets, Bolt — you have to walk down the street like a homeless person, and walk into a store and buy a little-bitty cup or cone, and you know what that is? It’s urban, that’s what it is, and you know what that means!
[TOEHOLD pushes his nose in with his finger and pushes out his lower lip.]
I be buyin’ me an ice cream cone, whitey! I be votin’ for Kamala Harris ‘cuz she a ho!
UPRIGHT: [To the camera] A particularly fiery round table discussion, and given that tempers flare, maybe I shouldn’t do this at all but frankly I’m out of material so, fellas, here’s our stunt for today and God help me, pages are coming in with ice cream cones for all of you —
[PAGES, looking rather spooked, come in with ice cream cones.]
— but Buff, you don’t have to worry, because they’re not vanilla, they’re chocolate.
TOEHOLD: [Screaming] Chocolate! That’s poo-poo!
[TOEHOLD attacks a small female PAGE, who karate-chops him at the neck, dropping him. DOYENNE screams and collapses; two network security guards approach DRAMATURGY and mutter to him; looking confused, he stands and lets them take him away. UPRIGHT, ever the trouper, faces the camera.]
UPRIGHT: When we come back, we’ll talk about other topics of interest, like woke Google, finger-popping wokesters at the New York Times, and is your 401K too woke. Not joining us will be Chafe Dramaturgy, who after his controversial stand on trans Gaza penis ice cream has taken a leave of absence — but I hear Joe Lieberman has agreed to fill in, so stay tuned!
[Ugly segue music and camera movement, sirens, EMTs, etc.]
Fellas, is it gay to eat ice cream?
I saw the Clay Travis brouhaha on twitter, and all I could think of was a bunch of homophobic rightwing men hankering after an ice cream cone but too frightened to buy one on their own. So they stand outside the ice cream parlor offering random women money to go inside with them like it's the 1970's, they are trying to get into Studio 54, and they know they have a better chance of admittance as a couple than as a single guy.
Making the anodyne antithetical--that's what we've come to both admire and expect from the Right! I'm old enough to recall Barack Obama mentioning that kids should stay in school and graduate . . . only to have the howler monkeys on the Right screech that expecting people to graduate high school is the height of elitism. (Well do I remember seeing Rick Santorum on CNN yakking about how out-of-touch and elitist Obama is because Santorum's grandfather was an illiterate coal miner and why does the president hate coal miners?)
I'm also old enough to recall Michelle Obama saying that kids should be eating healthy foods and not loads of sugar, salt, and fat . . . only to have the howler monkeys scream about elitism once again.
And so here we are, with the howler monkeys now screeching about ice cream cones. I'll bet there are tens of millions of people who do not follow this stuff, and if you told them Republicans are outraged by Joe Biden eating ice cream, they'd either think you were lying or had lost your marbles.