It is very tempting, at occasionally serious times in history such as those in which we know find ourselves embroiled, to get all serious about things, and believe that whatever is going on now is The Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened.  Fortunately, our great nation’s founding fathers realized that there would now and then be dark times ahead for their young republic, and they took it upon themselves to make sure that, whatever else were to happen, there would always be one man in America who was elected and paid primarily to make Americans laugh.  By which of course, I mean the President.

 

            Some of you, no doubt, think this is going to be about George Bush, but you would be wrong, because however comical his frequent grammatical lapses may be, he cannot for a moment compete with some of the great and preposterous men who have held the office before him.  Let us then, gird up our metaphorical loins with the figurative loin-girders or history, and assay to smite to and fro the notion that Presidents are serious fellows.

 

            First, of course, was George Washington, who, like his Secretary of Periwigs, Bob Newhart, was a great master of the deadpan delivery, an example of which can be seen in virtually every portrait of Washington, in commemoration of the many times he would stand up before all the other founding fathers at their monthly cookout, looking all Presidential, before intoning in sepulchral tones such immortal phrases as “My pantaloons are teeming with ferrets” and often donning his hippopotamus teeth moments before a major address, only to run around the room pretending to eat people.

 

            Thomas Jefferson, great innovator that he was, developed an early chemical process for the fabrication of dissolving pants.  Though the details are lost to history, many now believe that this was somehow instrumental in getting Napoleon to sell us Louisiana.

 

            In addition to getting drunk and driving the Presidential carriage into the Presidential swimming pool at his inauguration, Andrew Jackson was known to carry a valise with him at all times, which contained nothing except for a comedically large rubber catfish, with which he would smack everyone who dared to criticize his wife.  He was also the first President to hire a fellow to follow him around, and every time he’d get into some shenanigans, which was often, to say “President Andrew Jackson!” in an exasperated sort of way, at which point he would produce a small trombone and go “Wah, wah, waaaaaahhhhh”

 

            Martin Van Buren would always trip over the ottoman in his living room, to great comedic effect, when he came home in the evening to his wife, Mary Tyler Van Buren, and his son, Bob Dole

 

            Zachary Taylor could swallow his own forehead, and that is the primary reason he never got to be on any money.

 

            Chester A. Arthur, due to an acute facial hair shortage during the 1880s, lead the way in conservation of vital resources by combining his sideburns with his mustache.  This had the added advantage of acting rather like a chinstrap and keeping the rest of his hair from blowing off when he rode on trains.

 

            Grover Cleveland was affectionately known to his friends as Uncle Jumbo, and was known to entertain neighborhood children by catching peanuts with his mighty trunk.

 

            Benjamin Harrison mastered the art of throwing his voice at a young age, whilst he was but a boy working in the mighty cheese refineries of Ohio, or as it was then called, “New Michigan”  He later put these skills to use during boring political dinners when he would sit behind pompous, silly English persons, with which Washington DC teemed in those days, as verily as if they were ferrets in George Washington’s pantaloons, and make humorous flatulent noises, to the delight and embarrassment of all present.

 

            Grover Cleveland II, Revenge of Grover Cleveland, would call up Grover Cleveland, Original Recipe and the two of them would have great fun at the expense of everyone who didn’t know that there were two of him running about.  He would also frequently disguise himself as a large cake, and nudge people who walked by him in the street, following them home and filling their shoes with pistachios as they slept.

 

            William Howard Taft, in addition to getting stuck in bathtubs, (and on one memorable occasion, the Capitol Rotunda) was fond of peddling around on an amusingly diminutive bicycle, as well as straining millions of krill through his mighty and glorious baleen (it is said that under water, his resonant mating call, to deep to be heard by the human ear, could travel for over a hundred miles).

 

            Calvin Coolidge would wear an Indian Headdress around the house, but after it kept getting caught on the light fixtures, he discarded it favor of a big foam rubber Mayor McCheese head, Which is why to this very day Republicans still control more that 80% of the giant cheeseburger vote.

 

            Harry Truman would take off his glasses in times of great need and fly around saving people, only to leave everyone confused when he put them back on again and looked completely different.  Also, after the surrender of the Japanese, he would spend hours on the deck of the aircraft carrier, making motor boat noises and burping out the alphabet backwards.

 

            Richard Nixon somehow convinced an entire nation to call him “Tricky Dick”.  He also could put a whole box of Teddygrahams in his mouth, and then shoot them out of his nose at speeds adequate to knock small rodents out of trees on the White House lawn.

 

            Jimmy Carter was once attacked by a swimming rabbit.

 

            And finally, not to be outdone by his predecessors, Ronald Reagan, while at a major disarmament conference with Gorbachev, would sneak into the latter’s room every night and replace all his clothes with slightly larger ones, so that by the end of the week, Gorbachev was convinced he was shrinking.  Historians now believe this to have been the turning point of the Cold War.

            So, Al Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize, as you have most likely heard by now (assuming you’re not still angry because Canadian dollars are worth more than ours now), and the question on the I minds of all good people who only read headlines and then remain blissfully ignorant about everything else is what exactly Al Gore won the Nobel Prize for, anyhow?  Sure, he doesn’t like global warming, but then most other people don’t either (except for Dick Cheney, who rides to work every day on his mighty pet Lava Monster, Buttons) and all of them have cut down waaaaaaaaaaay fewer trees to publish their books that Al Gore has.  So what then, if not for his work in the vital field of saving polar bears (without which Coke would have to get a new mascot, such as the water buffalo, the stoat, or the great wild and wooly late President William Howard Taft)?  It is with this in mind that I here present a list of other things that Al Gore has done to help humanity over the years.

 

            First, he invented the Internet.  Yeah, you don’t hear much about that one anymore, but it’s all true.  You see, back in the 60s, Al Gore used to hang out in his secret lair built deep beneath a rain forest full of super-intelligent lemurs and lament that his mighty UNIVAC computer, for all its vacuum tubes and totally sweet lights on it, was incapable of bringing up his myspace page and sharing it with the cute little multicultural children of the world (and it was totally sweet, he had like, a list of all his favorite emo bands, and which cheerleaders at Municipal Rainforest High School he was totally crushing on, and a cute video of a cat falling off of a television).  So, one night, Al Gore, blissfully unaware that his name could be rearranged to spell “Ear Log” built the first internet out of environmentally friendly pandas and 60% post consumer recycled beer cans.  Alas, the next morning as he stood out on his front porch admiring his mighty new invention, a blue-butted baboon descended from the trees, distracted Al Gore for one crucial second with his butt of many colors, and stole the prototype Internet, which he later sold to Bill Gates for beer money.  Which is why to this day, Al Gore does not all baboons at his speeches and Betty Crocker cook-offs.

 

            Then in the 70s, Al Gore was one of the Superfriends for a while.  Like, one time, Solomon Grundy was totally trashing this village full of grass huts and stuff in like, India or something, and Apache Chief was supposed to go over and do that thing where he got all huge and chase him off, but unfortunately, Apache Chief was, at the moment locked in the bathroom crying softly to himself because Hawk-Girl said he looked like a total doofus.  So Al Gore quickly leapt into his resplendent chariot made of rainbows, pulled as it was by a jillion and three butterflies of all sorts of lovely colors and hummed his personal theme song in a quiet, serious sort of a way as he flew to India, where, using a tactic he learned from his old nemesis, That Baboon In The Previous Paragraph, he used his blue butt to frighten Solomon Grundy away.  And then an elephant absent-mindedly ate his chariot of rainbows, which totally killed the moment.  For a second there though, before that last part, it was pretty sweet.

 

            Then there was the one time where, as Al Gore had long predicted, so many Americans bought SUVs that a rift into that mirror universe where everyone is evil opened up, and before Al Gore could destroy it by throwing a Prius into it, Evil Alternate Universe Al Gore came through, with a goatee and a twirly villain mustache and all came through, and immediately set about messing up all of Al Gore’s good work saving the world by building a giant mechanical spider that ran on non-renewable fuels.  Fortunately, Al Gore knew that at our current rate of oil consumption, we’ll probably run out of oil in the next 80 years, so he just sat back to wait until that happened and meanwhile let Evil Twirly Mustache Al Gore and his mechanical spider go and utterly destroy Wyoming, which they did.