A Pope and Two Dopes, by Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia – Pop Art… and Chris #14

March 10, 2009 Arthur Tebbel & Chris Toia 6 Comments

Dear Art and Chris,
Recently I’ve decided it’s okay for the Catholic Church to start selling Indulgences.  In return for a negotiable sum of money Catholics are pardoned for their sins, which may or may not reduce the time they spend in purgatory.  We’ve been looking through this website’s archives and, how many can we put you guys down for?
-Pope Benedict XVI

Benny,
According to the Bible, “…It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:23-24)  We’re assuming that’s just because the rich man failed to purchase enough Indulgences.  Unfortunately your God wasn’t smart enough to realize that one day people would be rich enough to build a needle big enough to drive a whole circus parade through.  We enter and exit our apartment every day through the eye of a giant needle, on camelback!  How’s that for a loophole, your Holyness.

This is absurd the bible states that ,”whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven”, Matthew 16:19.  If we don’t expect the rich to be held accountable for their crimes on Earth, why should we think they’d be held to task for their sins in Heaven.

We don’t want to bore you with 95 complaints, but here’s one, stop fucking selling indulgences.  It just cheapens your whole religion.  We don’t care what crazy fairy-tales people chose to blindly worship without question.  Selling the EZ-pass to salvation further deprives your religion of its tenuous grasp on the moral high ground.  Just tell your people to treat one-another with civility.  That should be more than enough to prove to their God that they’d be good guests in his awesome (in the biblical sense) post-mortem party mansion.

Dear Art & Chris,
I just signed a deal to star as Richard Pryor in a biopic.  Isn’t that great?  I, the preeminent black comedian of my generation, will play Pryor, the preeminent black comedian of all-time.  I plan to bring all of the depth I brought to my roles in The Nutty Professor and The Haunted Mansion.  What do you think I should focus on for this film?
-Eddie Murphy

Eddie,
We think you should set yourself on fire.  What?  Richard Pryor did that too?  Oh, well then maybe it could even help you out a little.

Seriously, this could probably help you out.  We can’t imagine they would do a movie about one of the three greatest stand-ups of all time without telling a few jokes.  Maybe it’ll help you remember what it was like to be edgy.  Or funny.  I mean Pryor is still relevant and he’s dead.  I mean even your brother Charlie was on Chappelle’s Show.  The last time you made us laugh was when you were being impersonated on Chappelle’s Show.

You can’t mess this up.  Like it or not movies are a defining part of our culture, if you mess up the biopic there are future generations that’ll never properly appreciate the work of a great comedian.  You need to show up as the Dreamgirls Eddie Murphy or even the Trading Places Eddie Murphy.  At the very least don’t make us wish they had picked Chris Tucker.

Dear Art and Chris,
I’m the service provider for a renowned pop culture website that features columns by many talented writers, including two especially hot young writers from New York.  Unfortunately last week for several days their site went down, what should I do to make amends?
-Name Withheld

Anonymous,
Let us get this straight, you want to make up for depriving the millions of readers of your website from the sole source of quality entertainment in their otherwise bleak and existence.  You don’t need to make amends, you need to pay reparations.  Top scholars often recommend that the U.S. Government provide funding to schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods in order to provide relief for the historic evils of chattel slavery.  While that opinion is controversial; its incontrovertible that you should back up a dump truck full of money to our apartment.  Or the apartments of readers of this unnamed site.  Whoever.

Money can only get you so far in this life.  Though we are in ardent opposition to the death penalty some sort of corporal punishment appropriate to the crime must be enforced.  Our thought here was that you should voluntarily turn yourself in, and then we would put you in a cage.  But this is no ordinary cage!  For you see that buzzing you’re hearing is not the sound of your own guilt filling your ears but millions of bees.  One for each visitor that felt the sting of their favorite website being offline. Also there’s a bear. Also this cage is on fire.  This is the least severe punishment we feel is appropriate for a crime of this nature.

Bottom line, don’t let this happen again.  We love… whatever anonymous site that you happen to represent that also went offline just like MichaelDavisworld.com, and we know our readers would have the same passionate reaction we’re having.  Wouldn’t you guys?