[I woke up this morning with this almost-fully-formed idea in my mind for what I guess would have been a trailer for the upcoming season of Last Week Tonight.]
We open on a close-up of a newspaper with the banner headline
INAUGURATION TOMORROW
and the subhead
President-Elect Announces National Socially-Distanced Hot Dog Cookout
The newspaper then doubles and flies into both sides of a split-screen.
On the left side, the person holding it puts it down, and we see that it's John Oliver. He nods and goes the refrigerator and gets out a package of hot dogs. As he puts it on the counter, we see that the brand is "Hebrew Multinational". He rummages around in the fridge looking for buns.
On the right side, the person puts the paper down, but the camera follows the paper in a POV manner, and thus we see only a pair of small but chubby and slightly orange hands. The hands go to the fridge. It is mostly empty, except that the door shelves are completely full of Diet Coke bottles (all of which have been partially drunk to different levels), the bottom shelf has some crumpled Big Mac wrappers, and the vegetable drawer has the discarded lettuce from a few dozen burgers. And on a middle shelf there is a single lonely package labeled "MyPillow Tofu Pups". This is crossed out in sharpie and "TrumP SteAks" is written over it. The hands hesitate for several seconds before drooping resignedly and taking out the tofu pups.
On the left, John Oliver's voice says, delightedly, "I'll make some buns!", and he opens a pantry to get out a bag of white flour, and then a cabinet to get a mixing bowl.
On the right a defeated voice just mutters, limply, "buns...". The hands open a pantry-like door, but there's nothing inside except 3 crusty bottles of unrefrigerated ketchup and a single bag of white flour. (If you look closely, this says "power" on it instead of "flour".)
Both sides then show quick montages of dough-making activities.
John Oliver mixes water into the flour with quick motions of a wooden spoon until it starts to stick together, and then dumps it out on a cutting board and kneads it with earnest but tentative motions.
The hands dump some flour directly on the formica countertop, pour a blurp of Diet Coke on it, and then poke at it desultorily.
John Oliver, reading aloud from a recipe, says "Allow dough to rise." Animated clocks appear in the corners of both sides, the cameras both zoom in on the blobs of dough/flour, and the clocks spin through an hour or two without any visual change in either blob. The clocks disappear and the cameras zoom back out.
On the left, John Oliver frowns, and goes over to a computer sitting on a table by a bright window with floral drapes. He clicks to a site labeled, in large letters
UPRISING.COM
and the subhead
Saving America's Bakin'
Somewhere below this is a picture showing the exact close-up we were just watching of Oliver's non-rising dough, with the caption "Buns won't rise?" and a big cheery "GET HELP!" button.
On the right, the hands go over to an old DOS computer next to a slightly grimy window. At the blinking prompt they haltingly begin to type. It goes like this, with an audible thud at each Enter.
Awkwardly, with frequent backspacing, the hands type
Both cameras then do focus-pulls out the windows, and we see that there are taco trucks outside on both street corners.
The one on the left is painted in colorful, tie-dye-like swirls, and labeled "Bernie's Tacos For All". Bernie is sitting next to it, in his mittened meme image from the Inauguration. Happy puffs of cooking smoke emerge from a pipe on the top. The truck has a long line of excited looking customers of jubilantly varying ages and races and shapes, all of them masked and properly spaced apart. The first two people in line are a woman in a purple coat wearing Converse sneakers, and a woman in a yellow coat with a red hair-wrap.
The one on the right is painted military-surplus green, and labeled "Rudy's Taco's and Landscaping", with the extra apostrophe. There are no customers. The only sign of life is a tarry black substance slowly dripping from one corner of the truck onto the ground.
Focus pulls inside as John Oliver clicks "GET HELP!" and the hands hit Enter again, and then back outside to the trucks again.
A siren on the top of Bernie's truck starts flashing, triggered by the GET HELP!, and a little plume of glitter spews out of the smoke pipe. A door in the back of the truck opens, and two figures emerge, their details obscured in the shadow of the truck. They start to walk purposefully towards the house, and we thus lose sight of them as they move out of the frame of the window.
Rudy's truck doesn't react. After the figures move out of view on the left we hold on both scenes for a few more moments, and then a black drone carrying a package buzzes over the Rudy's truck towards the hands' door with an ominous, sputtery noise.
Both sides of the screen now cut to front doors from inside.
John Oliver opens his door, and standing there are John Cena and Adam Driver. Both are masked, but shirtless. Cena carries a big bag labeled "Self-Rising Multigrain Flour". Driver carries a package labeled "Vader BratWorst", containing absurdly large sausages.
The hands open their door. There is nobody there. After a pause the camera pans downward, and sitting on the doormat (which, if you can quickly read upside-down, you will realize says "UNWELCOME") is a cookbook titled "Making America Gluten Again".
The left side then shows a dreamy montage of proper bread-making. At one point we see a close-up of Oliver's hands again awkwardly kneading the dough, and then Driver's hands slide in on top of his in an electrifying homage to the Moore/Swayze ceramic scene in Ghost. After a few moments Cena's hands also join. The clock appears again, and the dough rises...emphatically.
The right side shows the hands occasionally poking at the same blob of flour and Diet Coke. The clocks appears here again in sync with the left side, but the blob of course still does not rise or otherwise change.
On the left we see John Oliver putting a large pan of bun-shapes into the oven. While they bake in appetizing time-lapse, the right shows the hands going into the next room. This is completely full of MyPillow boxes, stacked haphazardly, in a wide range of sizes and shapes. The hands push aside a couple of the stacks in the front and from behind them extract a single tiny MyPillow box the shape of a hot-dog bun.
Both sides cut back to the kitchen counters.
John Oliver has a row of six beautiful hot-dog buns, somehow complete with grill lines, neatly spread open. He puts steaming, shiny hot dogs into the first five, and then an outlandishly oversized sausage into the sixth.
The hands fumble with the small MyPillow box, but eventually manage to get it open and take out a single slightly-mushed white-bread bun, which they place down next to the flour/soda sludge. They put one lumpy tofu-pup into it. They angrily shake a ketchup bottle over this, then open and squeeze it. A large blop of red ketchup, speckled with blue and white spots of mold, splats out across the middle of the pup, bits of it getting on the counter and onto the edge of the flour/soda sludge.
On the left, John Oliver is holding two ketchup-shaped bottles. One is labeled "Joy", the other "Relief". He holds them both over the row of hot dogs, and with an elegant two-handed flourish, squeezes them across the row. Through CGI magic, this extrudes a beautiful, perfectly sine-waved, rainbow-striated ribbon of condiments onto each hot-dog. He puts down the bottle and picks up one hot dog in each hand. From out of the frame on one side, Driver's hands come in and take a hot dog each. From the other side, Cena's hands come in and take the last two. Oliver salutes the camera with his left-hand dog as he bites into the right-hand one. He chews with obvious enjoyment.
On the right, the right hand picks up the forlorn tofu pup, raises it slightly, and then falters. The left hand joins, and two-handedly they lift it up past the camera and out of the frame. After a few seconds they put it down again with a small bite taken out of the end. A couple moments later there is a small coughing noise, and very small bit of chewed tofu-pup lands on the counter in between the tofu pup and the flour/soda sludge.
The screens fade to white, the split dissolving. The words
Last Week Tonight
A New Season
appear, centered. Driver, in Vader costume, leaps into view and slashes the "A New Season" line with his light saber, which turns it into a slightly smoking "A New Administration". After he disappears, one of the small chubby hands appears holding a sharpie. It crosses out "Administration" and writes in "SeAsun". The other hand joins it, and together they attempt to break the sharpie in half, but after several ineffectual, obviously-straining attempts, give up, throw it out of view, and themselves retreat.
That is all.
We open on a close-up of a newspaper with the banner headline
INAUGURATION TOMORROW
and the subhead
President-Elect Announces National Socially-Distanced Hot Dog Cookout
The newspaper then doubles and flies into both sides of a split-screen.
On the left side, the person holding it puts it down, and we see that it's John Oliver. He nods and goes the refrigerator and gets out a package of hot dogs. As he puts it on the counter, we see that the brand is "Hebrew Multinational". He rummages around in the fridge looking for buns.
On the right side, the person puts the paper down, but the camera follows the paper in a POV manner, and thus we see only a pair of small but chubby and slightly orange hands. The hands go to the fridge. It is mostly empty, except that the door shelves are completely full of Diet Coke bottles (all of which have been partially drunk to different levels), the bottom shelf has some crumpled Big Mac wrappers, and the vegetable drawer has the discarded lettuce from a few dozen burgers. And on a middle shelf there is a single lonely package labeled "MyPillow Tofu Pups". This is crossed out in sharpie and "TrumP SteAks" is written over it. The hands hesitate for several seconds before drooping resignedly and taking out the tofu pups.
On the left, John Oliver's voice says, delightedly, "I'll make some buns!", and he opens a pantry to get out a bag of white flour, and then a cabinet to get a mixing bowl.
On the right a defeated voice just mutters, limply, "buns...". The hands open a pantry-like door, but there's nothing inside except 3 crusty bottles of unrefrigerated ketchup and a single bag of white flour. (If you look closely, this says "power" on it instead of "flour".)
Both sides then show quick montages of dough-making activities.
John Oliver mixes water into the flour with quick motions of a wooden spoon until it starts to stick together, and then dumps it out on a cutting board and kneads it with earnest but tentative motions.
The hands dump some flour directly on the formica countertop, pour a blurp of Diet Coke on it, and then poke at it desultorily.
John Oliver, reading aloud from a recipe, says "Allow dough to rise." Animated clocks appear in the corners of both sides, the cameras both zoom in on the blobs of dough/flour, and the clocks spin through an hour or two without any visual change in either blob. The clocks disappear and the cameras zoom back out.
On the left, John Oliver frowns, and goes over to a computer sitting on a table by a bright window with floral drapes. He clicks to a site labeled, in large letters
UPRISING.COM
and the subhead
Saving America's Bakin'
Somewhere below this is a picture showing the exact close-up we were just watching of Oliver's non-rising dough, with the caption "Buns won't rise?" and a big cheery "GET HELP!" button.
On the right, the hands go over to an old DOS computer next to a slightly grimy window. At the blinking prompt they haltingly begin to type. It goes like this, with an audible thud at each Enter.
>: TWITTER.COM
**account blocked**
>: UPRISING.COM
**account blocked**
>: QANON.COM
welcome to
Questions
ANONymous
Enter your embarrassing question:
Awkwardly, with frequent backspacing, the hands type
>: FLABBBY BUNS
Both cameras then do focus-pulls out the windows, and we see that there are taco trucks outside on both street corners.
The one on the left is painted in colorful, tie-dye-like swirls, and labeled "Bernie's Tacos For All". Bernie is sitting next to it, in his mittened meme image from the Inauguration. Happy puffs of cooking smoke emerge from a pipe on the top. The truck has a long line of excited looking customers of jubilantly varying ages and races and shapes, all of them masked and properly spaced apart. The first two people in line are a woman in a purple coat wearing Converse sneakers, and a woman in a yellow coat with a red hair-wrap.
The one on the right is painted military-surplus green, and labeled "Rudy's Taco's and Landscaping", with the extra apostrophe. There are no customers. The only sign of life is a tarry black substance slowly dripping from one corner of the truck onto the ground.
Focus pulls inside as John Oliver clicks "GET HELP!" and the hands hit Enter again, and then back outside to the trucks again.
A siren on the top of Bernie's truck starts flashing, triggered by the GET HELP!, and a little plume of glitter spews out of the smoke pipe. A door in the back of the truck opens, and two figures emerge, their details obscured in the shadow of the truck. They start to walk purposefully towards the house, and we thus lose sight of them as they move out of the frame of the window.
Rudy's truck doesn't react. After the figures move out of view on the left we hold on both scenes for a few more moments, and then a black drone carrying a package buzzes over the Rudy's truck towards the hands' door with an ominous, sputtery noise.
Both sides of the screen now cut to front doors from inside.
John Oliver opens his door, and standing there are John Cena and Adam Driver. Both are masked, but shirtless. Cena carries a big bag labeled "Self-Rising Multigrain Flour". Driver carries a package labeled "Vader BratWorst", containing absurdly large sausages.
The hands open their door. There is nobody there. After a pause the camera pans downward, and sitting on the doormat (which, if you can quickly read upside-down, you will realize says "UNWELCOME") is a cookbook titled "Making America Gluten Again".
The left side then shows a dreamy montage of proper bread-making. At one point we see a close-up of Oliver's hands again awkwardly kneading the dough, and then Driver's hands slide in on top of his in an electrifying homage to the Moore/Swayze ceramic scene in Ghost. After a few moments Cena's hands also join. The clock appears again, and the dough rises...emphatically.
The right side shows the hands occasionally poking at the same blob of flour and Diet Coke. The clocks appears here again in sync with the left side, but the blob of course still does not rise or otherwise change.
On the left we see John Oliver putting a large pan of bun-shapes into the oven. While they bake in appetizing time-lapse, the right shows the hands going into the next room. This is completely full of MyPillow boxes, stacked haphazardly, in a wide range of sizes and shapes. The hands push aside a couple of the stacks in the front and from behind them extract a single tiny MyPillow box the shape of a hot-dog bun.
Both sides cut back to the kitchen counters.
John Oliver has a row of six beautiful hot-dog buns, somehow complete with grill lines, neatly spread open. He puts steaming, shiny hot dogs into the first five, and then an outlandishly oversized sausage into the sixth.
The hands fumble with the small MyPillow box, but eventually manage to get it open and take out a single slightly-mushed white-bread bun, which they place down next to the flour/soda sludge. They put one lumpy tofu-pup into it. They angrily shake a ketchup bottle over this, then open and squeeze it. A large blop of red ketchup, speckled with blue and white spots of mold, splats out across the middle of the pup, bits of it getting on the counter and onto the edge of the flour/soda sludge.
On the left, John Oliver is holding two ketchup-shaped bottles. One is labeled "Joy", the other "Relief". He holds them both over the row of hot dogs, and with an elegant two-handed flourish, squeezes them across the row. Through CGI magic, this extrudes a beautiful, perfectly sine-waved, rainbow-striated ribbon of condiments onto each hot-dog. He puts down the bottle and picks up one hot dog in each hand. From out of the frame on one side, Driver's hands come in and take a hot dog each. From the other side, Cena's hands come in and take the last two. Oliver salutes the camera with his left-hand dog as he bites into the right-hand one. He chews with obvious enjoyment.
On the right, the right hand picks up the forlorn tofu pup, raises it slightly, and then falters. The left hand joins, and two-handedly they lift it up past the camera and out of the frame. After a few seconds they put it down again with a small bite taken out of the end. A couple moments later there is a small coughing noise, and very small bit of chewed tofu-pup lands on the counter in between the tofu pup and the flour/soda sludge.
The screens fade to white, the split dissolving. The words
Last Week Tonight
A New Season
appear, centered. Driver, in Vader costume, leaps into view and slashes the "A New Season" line with his light saber, which turns it into a slightly smoking "A New Administration". After he disappears, one of the small chubby hands appears holding a sharpie. It crosses out "Administration" and writes in "SeAsun". The other hand joins it, and together they attempt to break the sharpie in half, but after several ineffectual, obviously-straining attempts, give up, throw it out of view, and themselves retreat.
That is all.