that one really weird thing on your mind that is making you laugh your ass off

Having the opportunity to make this joke.

 

-The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures

 

#goals

 

It gets better - Googling turns up the fact that the wheelchair guy getting up to kick Moose Suit in the crotch was not in the original script, but multiple reviews mention it, so I can only assume the play got away from the actors somewhat.

 

Once we put on a production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, about a man who slips on ice as he leaves a dinner party and plays up his injuries, using the threat of legal action to stay at their house while he convalesces, waited on hand and foot. He is accompanied by a nurse, a dour, competent woman who is definitely not in on this plot. She would not approve. Everyone gradually becomes more and more suspicious of the exceedingly unpleasant guest, and that’s the plot. It’s very funny, especially as a live stage production.

There’s one scene where, seeing no one is around and feeling stir crazy, the guest stands up from his wheelchair, which is noteworthy because he’s actively pretending to be totally unable to stand at all. (It’s not the most modern of plays. I didn’t find it cringy at the time, but ymmv.) He stretches a bit, tests himself, and finding he feels pretty good, begins to do a little dance. Then he hears the nurse coming.

What is supposed to happen next is that he dives back into the wheelchair and blusters crankily through the nurse’s obvious suspicion. What actually happened, in the very best performance, was that the old wooden prop wheelchair was a little unstable and the leap a little too energetic. The nurse walked in to find the chair and guest inexplicably toppled backwards, lying helplessly on the ground like a stranded turtle. There was a beat of pure, genuine shock. Then the guest snapped, “Well, don’t just stand there. You look like a pudding.”

The audience was roaring. The stage manager, stationed at the desk past the stage right wing and unable to see that part of the stage around the set, was frantically comming up to the booth (the little room behind a big rectangular window at the back of the house behind all the seats, where lights and sometimes sound are run) asking what on earth had gone so wrong to cause laughter like that. The audience didn’t know that wasn’t supposed to happen. We couldn’t answer. Between the shock, the audience’s reaction, and the fucking delivery of that grumpy “don’t just stand there” line, the most transcendentally in-character and tone appropriate thing that could possibly have been said (I honestly cannot even remember whether it was ad libbed or not because it’s canon to me forever), we in the booth were reduced to making horrible strangled wheezing noises into the comm. We tried to answer the increasingly frantic stage manager, but it was impossible. None of us could get a word out.

I don’t remember if the curtain was supposed to close on that scene, but it did, so that they could extract our poor comic genius of an actor from that damn chair and make sure he was okay. He was thankfully just slightly bruised, or this wouldn’t be a funny story to tell. The chair had to be glued back together real fast in some places. The show would have ended if the actor hadn’t insisted that he was really truly okay and absolutely wanted to finish it. He was already down with the stomach flu, the poor guy. We had an emergency phrase worked out that he could use if he felt nauseous, so that he could be rushed offstage and handed a bucket we had on hand. He ended up not needing that either, but damn. We would never have arranged a show under those circumstances on purpose because there’s nothing remotely heroic about pressuring performers into working when they’re sick or injured, but his performance was singular despite the fact that having the flu should rightly have negatively affected it. Guess he correctly judged his own limits.

If we could have safely arranged to incorporate the chair stunt into the play, we almost certainly would have. It was fucking hilarious. But that was definitely not an option. We wouldn’t have ever used that chair at all if toppling backwards with a person in it had been a risk anyone had foreseen. It was very lucky that the actor wasn’t injured worse than mild bruising. But if it could be done in a way that wasn’t painful or risky? Yes, absolutely. Anything that can get a reaction like that? Pencil it in immediately, fuck the damn script.

So my guess would be that maybe something like that happened with the crotch kick, it happened spontaneously somehow, people laughed, and a move like that could reasonably be choreographed without much risk of real injury to any actors. But the result was far less universally amusing from the sound of it.

 

tag yourself i’m TEAM RAT

 

Autopsy Victim for President. One couldn't do a worse job than the last guy!

 

Y’know, my question about that one is like…wtf is an autopsy victim? Wouldn’t they be a victim of something else, such as homicide or illness? Is that not kinda the point of autopsies?

…I mean, unless we’re talking a live alien autopsy thing, but they should’ve specified that if so, dammit!

 

That's 'vivisection'.

 

No, autopsies can also be done when someone dies of unknown causes to try and figure out how they died. Sometimes you find the answer, sometimes you don't and you just find a whole bunch of general stuff that might have killed em, might not have.

 

That’s true, but it’s certainly not the autopsy itself that’s killing them.

 

It's the essence of an autopsy, some kind of ghostie

 

Is it possible to actually buy these shirts?

 

I actually do wanna cuddle and watch Cube 2: Hypercube. It was terrible but fun.

 

I wish I knew! I sure hope so though, a lot of them are just *chef kiss*

 

I suppose if a living person were mistaken for a dead body they could be an autopsy victim, but that pretty much only happens in media. People who work with dead bodies are extremely unlikely to ever mistake a living person for a dead one. So maybe a completely unqualified and very drunk person pretends to be a coroner, only for a victim of their horrific mistake to rise up both literally and figuratively, and go on to win a presidential election?

Or, they just sincerely didn’t know what a dead alien looked like compared to a living one, made a terrible error, and though they cannot begin to make up for the trauma inflicted by accident, they are heading the alien’s campaign to win the presidency which is legally valid in this movie for technical reasons. Maybe it’s a phoenix alien who was reborn on US soil?

 

I am here for both of these hypothetical movies.

 

Not sure about the others, but you can buy the autopsy victim one.
https://www.horrorfilmtees.com/view...ent-horror-film-the-silence-of-the-lambs-movi

 

This is my new favourite book.