Vienna, AUSTRIA: For years, the wince-enticing entertainer known has Dane Cook has held a record that few believed was sought after, much less able to be broken. That record is for the longest wait to a punchline for a joke in a public forum.
The first recorded longest wait to a punchline was in 1937, belonging to Emelio Lombardo of Brooklyn, New York, who accidentally stumbled onto a stage in Manhattan and muttered incoherently for close to an hour. The crowd laughed upon his supposed punchline, “…which is why I had an umbrella stuck up my ass in the first-place”, legitimately making the final words a punchline to a joke nobody could understand. Bob Saget attempted to eclipse the record with his interpretation of The Aristocrats, but was only able to last about ten minutes.
Dane Cook eclipsed not only a Laugh Factory record in 2008, but also the longest wait for a punchline in the same set, as he stood on-stage screaming and making weird faces for 7 hours while bribing the audience with food and face-time on the DVD set that would likely be condensed into a 5 minute YouTube video. As was the case with Mr. Lombardo’s Alzheimer’s-induced stand-up, the audience laughed at the end of the set, making Cook’s last words the default punchline.
“Sure, I laughed,” explained audience member Artie Springfield. “I never laughed so hard. Laughing at myself for torturing myself by sitting through that mess. I went home and pulled out all of my fingernails with a Pez dispenser to make sure I could still feel…”
Now, the record has finally been broken, as Austrian citizen Niko Alm extended the wait for a punchline to 3 years. It was then that Alm decided to try to bridge the atheism joke about The Flying Spaghetti Monster into a matter of politics by demanding he be allowed to wear a pasta strainer on his head for the picture to be used on his driver’s license. After the three years, Alm finally obtained his license.
“It was closer to a Dane Cook punchline than even Niko imagined,” stated Manfred Reinthaler, a police spokesman in Vienna. “The license was issued for pick-up 2 years ago. It just took Niko 2 more years to make a point.”
The idea of the joke revolves around an atheist’s rejection of faith. With more and more atheists beginning to allow people of faith to affect their outlooks on religion and needing to make a point, it was inevitable that getting one’s picture wearing a pasta strainer onto a legal governmental document would be an important goal.
“Fantastic. Maybe, if I bitch and complain enough, someday I can wear a George Carlin bobble-head on my head all the time,” stated self-proclaimed agnostic Paul Emmerlan.