Republican COVID-19 outbreak yet another poor American remake of British series

Humor by Kathryn Zheng
Oct. 11, 2020, 9:30 p.m.

After learning of the COVID-19 outbreak among some of the most prominent Republican officials in the United States in what has been dubbed the Rose Garden Massacre, Bristol resident Jamie Lewis scoffed at the news, deeming it “yet another poor American attempt to replicate a British series.”

“First it was ‘The Office,’ then ‘Skins’ and now this? Your show runners need to get some new ideas,” Lewis said, pointing to what he condemned as a lack of originality in American media. “Look, I get that our humor is superior. But at a certain point, you’ve got to start making your own content. Why don’t you broadcast a comedy about talking dinosaurs or something? The BBC doesn’t have a series about dinosaurs.”

“It was funny when Boris got the coronavirus because of the irony,” Lewis said. “Saying there’s nothing wrong with shaking hands, after being warned by every scientist not to do so, and then immediately coming down with the coronavirus? That’s hilarious. But your producers barely even changed the joke when you remade the episode in the States. The premise and punchline were almost exactly the same. Yeah, Trump said he didn’t think the coronavirus was a big deal, and then he got it. So what? BoJo did it first.”

Lewis also complained that the American remake had confused quantity with quality.

“Of course it’s realistic for some of his advisors to get sick, but more than ten of them? Come on! At this point, you’re just suffering from diminishing marginal returns,” he said.

When asked how America could improve, Lewis’s words were clear: “Just drop this already. Keep doing what you were doing with that arc on Trump’s taxes.”

Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.

Contact Kathryn Zheng at kszheng ‘at’ stanford.edu. 

Kathryn Zheng ’24 is from New Jersey. She is majoring in Economics and currently writes for Arts and Life as a columnist under the Culture desk.

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