Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Still Life
Page 53
told, produced only mild throat irritation, and the word "funny" was reclassified as a slur against the emotionally consistent.
A resistance formed - The Snicker Underground. They met in abandoned improv theaters, whispering knock-knock jokes like sacred incantations. Their leader, known only as "The Last Laugh," claimed to possess a relic; a VHS tape of a 1993 blooper reel. It was said that anyone who watched it would remember what it meant to wheeze with joy.
But the Ministry responded with Operation Straight Face, deploying agents trained in anti-humor tactics; pun neutralizers, irony dampeners, and sarcasm detectors.
And so the war began; not over land or ideology, but over the right to erupt, uncontrollably, in laughter.
The defining event was unavoidable. It occurred, and continued to occur whenever the disreputable, deplorable segment of the population broke into uncontrollable spasms, whenever they read or saw that George "Fentanyl" Floyd had become BLM's biggest hero. The howls only got louder when they saw their UniParty politicos take a solemn knee.
The Last Laugh, now a fugitive of feeling, had retreated to the subterranean vaults beneath the Ministry's old Comedy Licensing