Our son Shaun Eli has been missing for almost two weeks.  He is our youngest child and we love him very much.  Please help us find him.  He needs our love and support. He was last seen getting into a blue Lexus driven by a Middle-Eastern-looking woman with dark, curly hair.

Here is a photo of him when he was five years old.

Shaun is forty-three years old, still single and performs stand-up comedy at top clubs in New York and California.  He is a licensed pilot and his interests include rowing and cooking.  He loves chocolate and that's probably how that woman lured him into her car.  We want our son back. We visited the comedy clubs where he frequently appears but they wouldn't let us inside unless we paid the cover charge. It is possible that Shaun was taken captive by the FBI after he told the following joke on stage: "The White House has reorganized the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, instead of reporting to the president, the head of the EPA reports directly to Exxon." We tried to notify Missing Persons but the desk officer refused to take our report, saying he remembered seeing Shaun on stage the previous night and that he was really, really funny.  He said that we were probably just jealous since so many other comedians make fun of their parents but Shaun rarely mentions us in his act.

Help us get our son back.  Please forward this email to everyone you know; it takes only seconds and could save a life.  If you forward this email to at least sixteen people, Bill Gates will put your children through college, you will share in the great Nigerian oil fortune, receive a secret $250 cookie recipe, Martha Stewart will cook dinner for you and Oprah, and Al Gore will plant seventy trees on your behalf.

If you spot our son, please send emails to MissingChild@BrainChampagne.com and while you're on the internet please take a look at his website (www.BrainChampagne.com) one more time; it contains his biography, jokes he has written for late-night television, and a schedule of his upcoming live performances.  Go see him on stage.  We are very proud of him!  And the next time you're praying, please say a prayer that Shaun gets onto The Tonight Show so we'll at least see that he is okay.  And with your help maybe he'll be home for Thanksgiving.  If he doesn't have a show that night.

Thank you all so much!
-The Loving Parents of Shaun Eli

P.S. Bill Gates dropped out of college, so he won't pay for your children to go.  The Nigerian oil claim is a hoax.  There is no such thing as a $250 cookie recipe. Martha Stewart is still in jail and Oprah isn't eating this year.

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Last Candidate Standing

New York City 20 January 2004

This evening at 9 PM, while President Bush was delivering his State of the Union address and the seven remaining Democratic presidential candidates were campaigning for the upcoming New Hampshire primary, I was on stage at Stand-Up New York, practicing two three-minute monologues for the next day's audition for the television comedy/reality show Last Comic Standing 2.

The large number of similarities between the original ten declared Democratic candidates and the ten comedians who will be vying to be The Last Comic Standing struck me as more than a co-incidence.  Each of the two groups of ten was self-chosen from among thousands of politicians nationwide with the ability to raise substantial funding from entities with a vested interest in supporting their success, or, in the case of the comedians, from thousands of comics who could raise the funds to get to one of several cities in which auditions were being held, even if it meant asking our unsupportive parents for help and bearing yet another lecture about why we should be working in our uncle's office furniture business instead of entertaining people who have meaningful jobs like fighting fires, teaching children or writing imaginative excuses about why the trains were late yet again.

On last summer's Last Comic Standing the comedians started out friendly but were forced to challenge and then attack each other in order to eliminate their competition one by one.  The Democratic challengers started out friendly, each bashing the Republican candidate then eventually turning on each other when they finally realized that George Bush wasn't running in the Democratic primary and there could be only one winner, even in a country lacking an accurate way to tally votes.

Presidential aspirants have the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary to narrow down the field, then aspire to winning the Electoral College.  Comedians have showcase clubs in New York City & Los Angeles and aspire to The Tonight Show and Las Vegas.  It really should be the other way around, since comedians frequently talk about their upbringing, do jokes about farm animals and dropping out of college, whereas politicians are well known for... well, let's just say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Comedians don't really want to do commercials but the recognition generated by national exposure can help our careers immensely, not to mention the benefit of remuneration which keeps our landlords from throwing us in the snow.  Similarly, politicians don't necessarily want to accept campaign contributions from tobacco and oil companies and the NRA, but that's where money comes from.  It doesn't grow on trees; it grows on tobacco plants and bubbles up from the ground.  Surprisingly, even the NRA is starting to have financial problems, and that doesn't bode well for today's economy.  I mean, if the most heavily-armed private group in the country can't find money, what hope is there for the rest of us poorly-armed citizens?  The NRA thought about opening a theme restaurant in Times Square, until they realized what a bad combination it would be-- heavily armed tourists and fifteen dollar hamburgers.

The selection process for Last Comic Standing 2 is much more fair and pure than the electoral process in this country.  Practicing comedy is free.  The auditions didn't cost anything either.  And the auditioners don't hide the fact that their selection process is motivated totally by self-interest-- they are interested in ratings, otherwise known as money.  Voters may claim that they want to help the country as a whole, but it is a well-documented observation that they tend to vote their pocketbooks, even the men who don't carry pocketbooks.  Most Americans carry a balance on their credit cards, and the national debt is over $70,000 per household.  Maybe Mastercard, Visa and American Express should be the ones to vote, since more and more Americans are already voting each month on which bills to pay and which to put off until next month's bill primary.

Politicians bring pork home to their districts, and starving comics hope to snag some left-over food from comedy club kitchens.  We may ask for a free meal but at least we're not forcing some guy in North Dakota to pay for our food in New York or for a study of frog-mating habits in Arkansas.  Yet it takes millions of dollars for a political candidate to be taken seriously, even more if he is against war, won't eat meat or didn't go to Yale.  Being rich is no proof of intelligence, as was demonstrated in the movie "Indecent Proposal" in which a man paid a million dollars for a night with a woman and didn't even do it on the night when we set the clocks back.

Furthermore, while rich men have been accused of buying a New Jersey senate seat and the mayoralty of New York City, there has never even been an allegation that any comedian ever bought his way onto Jay Leno's or David Letterman's stage, although still not one scientist has been able to explain the success of Carrot-Top.

If Last Comic Standing hadn't gotten sufficient television ratings there wouldn't be a Last Comic Standing 2.  And if Dennis Kucinich and Joe Lieberman don't get enough votes in New Hampshire, we won't be seeing them on television this summer either.  Furthermore, if voter turnout continues to decline, a presidential candidate could get 100% of the votes and STILL not receive a majority from all eligible voters.  Kind of like my joke about asking when the word "terrorist" lost its middle syllable.  Lots of smiles, but no laughter.  On the bright side, when I thanked them for coming to the club on a cold night instead of staying home and watching TV, explaining that I could say "Nucular" as well as the president, they cracked up.  And to a comedian, a good laugh on stage is like winning the New Hampshire primary.  Without the burdens of having to kiss other people's children, eat food at every stop and wake up in a strange bed night after night.  On the other hand...

Shaun Eli Breidbart performs stand-up comedy at comedy clubs in New York City, is a free-lance contributing writer to the monologue of America's top late night talk show host and was the first comedian in New York City to audition for Last Comic Standing 2.

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An Open Letter to the Vermont Teddy Bear Company

01/22/2005

Ms. Elizabeth B. Robert

President and Chief Bear Officer

Vermont Teddy Bear Company

Dear Ms. Robert:

Enclosed please find one Ms. Claudette Clawbear, one of my favorite bears.  I am sorry to give her up, but a Vermont Teddy Bear can no longer remain a member of my family after what I read in today's New York Times.  I'm a Wharton-trained marketing executive and I understand your need to continue to launch new products.  I am a comedian and comedy writer, so I presume you thought it was funny to launch a Crazy For You bear, complete with straitjacket and commitment papers.  But when the governor of your state, the head of your state's only teaching hospital and several advocates for the mentally ill all asked you to stop selling the bear, and hundreds of people have contacted your company with similar requests, and you simply ignore them all, you lose the respect of this comedy writer.  The mentally ill have enough trouble getting recognized as people with medical problems without your adding to the stigma by trivializing their maladies and reducing them to people who need to be locked up away from society, instead of treated with counseling and medication.  You'd never sell a cancer bear riddled with rotting flesh, or a purple heart bear with missing limbs (I hope not, anyway), so why would you sell a mentally ill bear?  What's next, suicide bear, complete with pills?  How about drunk driver bear?  Autoerotic asphyxiation bear?  How about a gang-bang bear-- what a great marketing idea-- people would have to buy the whole set or it would lose its meaning.  Maybe a shoot the president bear, complete with his own sniper rifle?  With the country so divided, you'd probably be able to sell a lot of those.  Please don't.  Extremely bad taste and teddy bears don't go together.

My own comedy routine has some jokes about alcoholics and the mentally ill, including a long bit about eating disorders.  But I don't trivialize these maladies.  I bring their seriousness to light in an amusing way, and I hope that my calling attention to them may cause some suffers to seek treatment, to understand that they aren't the only ones, and that they can get help.  After they stop laughing.

So please take care of Claudette.  She was a gift from a girlfriend who loved me, who in fact was a director of a bear-like company I'm sure you're familiar with: Bear, Stearns, one of America's top investment banks.  We thought it was funny that when she called your company to order a businessman bear, they heard a female voice and sent a businesswoman.  Which was fine with us so we kept her.  But now she's going back home to Vermont.  Her brother Bear Clawbear, her cousins AquaBear, MiniBear, MicroBear and their dogs Beebee and Suzy will miss her.  Well, they would if they weren't inanimate objects, anyway.

I'll be posting this letter on my web site, which gets thousands of unique hits every month, so you may start to hear from my fan base.  If you ever plan to be in New York City, please check the Schedule Page of my web site, come to a show and hear what comedy is supposed to sound like.

Sincerely,

Shaun Eli Breidbart

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The New York Times has reported that the American government has rebuilt and reopened an Iraqi cigarette factory even as that country lacks adequate electricity and medical supplies and even suffers from the inadequate protection of Iraqi ammunition dumps from saboteurs, terrorists and thieves.  But we shouldn't rush to condemn our government before we have all the information, including details that have remained secret until now.

Reopening the tobacco factory is only the first step in a clever strategy to safeguard the lives of American troops, Iraqi police and civilians and the fortunes of Haliburton and Exxon.  Just before the factory restarts cigarette shipments, special squads of American tobacco executives will remove all "No Smoking" signs from ammunition dumps, ensuring that any insurgents attempting to get their hands on explosives will blow themselves up, eliminating the insurgents and the dangerous ammunition dumps along with any evidence of our secret plan.

The second stage of the strategy involves having American troops teach Iraqi children to play poker and blackjack, using candy as currency, utilizing the decks of cards with the pictures of wanted Iraqi military and political figures.  When the children realize that the troops have left them short of a full deck because soldiers held onto the ten cards depicting the enemies we have yet to capture, the Iraqi children will rush to turn in those ten so that they can resume their gambling.

The third stage, after ensuring that all of Iraq is as addicted to cheap cigarettes as Americans are to cheap oil, involves raising tobacco taxes to such a high level that Iraq will have no choice but to export as much oil as possible to generate enough money to feed their habit, thus ensuring that we have enough oil to feed ours.

Two hundred years ago the American Revolution started with colonists dumping tea into Boston Harbor.  But we don't have to worry about an Iraqi Revolution starting with dumping tobacco into Bagdad Harbor-- Iraq is a desert country and Bagdad is hundreds of miles from the nearest sea.  More importantly, tobacco is much more addictive than caffeine.  If we can raise the price of cigarettes in New York City so that a 2 pack a day habit costs $400 a month without starting riots, imagine how compliant Iraqis will be when we reassure them that they can smoke all they want, in exchange for something so far underground that they rarely ever see it.

Iraqis will soon be addicted to junk food, gambling and tobacco, proving that no army in the world is a match for the ingenuity and greed of American capitalism.