The Rewrite

Hey there 'Redheads... Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on the tax jokes from the last installment. I was able to pick the brains of my comedy comrades at Wiseacre's and made some rewrites, edits, and additions to what I had before. And, just so I can make some sense of my chicken scratch, here's the revised version...

Tax time is coming up soon. Taxes are a sticky time of year for comedians because we ride the poverty line like a bear on a unicycle in the Russian circus. My cash flow situation makes Tom Joad look like the Monopoly guy. Unless IRS stands for Internal Ramen Noodle Service, there's not a whole lot I ca kick back to the government. Alot of times, I'm paid in free drinks. Last year, a brewery claimed me as a dependant. I can't exactly put a stamp on a six-pack and expect to be square with Uncle Sam.

Deductions are tough to figure out too. What about all the times I donated my services and was funny without compensation? What's the blue book value of a witty retort? It doesn't help that the tax code is so complicated it makes Shakespeare read like See Spot Run. You need a degree in finance and a black belt in sudoku. Ben Franklin once said, "Nothing is certain except death and taxes." Just to make sure, now there's a death tax. I can only imagine it means if you croak before you file, the government is allowed to take an arm and a leg post-mortem.

If you think you've got it bad, pity my friend, the accountant. Every year at tax time, he locks himself in a bunker and starts crunching numbers like The Count on meth. He becomes so reclusive, he makes Dick Cheney look like Rachel Ray.

But all is not lost because now there's TurboTax. You plug in your tax information and TurboTax makes sense of it all for you. It takes the Rubik's cube of taxes and gets all the colors to line up. It's easy.

I streamlined or removed completely some of the more circuitous references. I feel like it needs one last punch to wrap it up, so I don't seem like such a shill. Any ideas? I'm open to suggestions. It got a decent reaction when I tried it on stage (after cluing the audience in to what I was doing), but it needed to flow better and sound more natural...as natural as tax jokes can sound anyway. Hopefully, I'll have the video recorded and posted for your voting pleasure in the next couple of days.

For you 'Redheads in the Baltimore area, if you've got nothing better to do on Thursday, check out...



Also, please to be focusing any excess positive mojo you might have to spare on getting the Maryland Terrapins through the ACC tournament. They're gonna need all the help they can get, and I'm not above using a mystical monkey paw to get it done. The madness starts Thursday...I'm hiring a family of gypsies to step in front of the Boston College bus before the game.

To be continued...