Ben Franklin - America's Greatest President

I've often wondered why my one man touring show "Billy Boy - The Untold Story of 1066" never quite panned out on the high school circuit. Turns out that it flopped not because it was a "pompously incoherent piece of garbage," (thank you, critics) but because teenagers these days are just plain dumber than bricks.


Basically, kids these days aren't learning basic cultural references. This presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it will be easier for snobby assholes like myself to make other people feel less intelligent simply by dropping a few references to "facts" found on wikipedia. On the other hand, in a few years I probably won't be able to make jokes about the Italian Renaissance and hope that anyone will laugh because nobody will know what the hell I'm talking about.

That's a lot of balls-out funny Galileo material I stand to lose, people.


So while the literati will feel smarter and smarter by comparison each and every passing year, the field of plausible joke reference material will narrow more and more as an audience knows less and less until the only plausible jokes will be poopy dick jokes.


You have to wonder why it is that people are paying less and less attention to their history and their literature. I wonder if our school systems are failing, or if we're focusing too much on math and science, or if knowledge about history and literature is even valued anymore. I mean I knew my English major in college was going to be a waste anyway, but Jesus.

Maybe it's the amount of stimulus we're hit with day in and day out. Between the Internet, television, radio, portable mp3 players, cellphones that play the latest pop noise and automatically check the baseball scores and weather, advertisements pasted on billboards, buses and buildings, it's amazing anyone is able to pay attention to anything at all, much less sit down and read a history book. I wonder if the brain doesn't just shut down after the eighteenth soap commercial of the day and just refuse to accept anything that isn't absolutely necessary.

Not that I'm complaining. Don't get me wrong; I'm okay with poopy dick jokes. I just hope I don't get bored is all.