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According to my research, the average I-Mockery reader makes
less than $250,000 a year. This was shocking to me. As both a
populist comedy writer and an extremely wealthy businessman with
his own private island, I realize that
my time has come to give back to the community that has given me
so much already, and who continue to give to me in the form of
fan mail, cash donations, and spa packages. I present to you,
the beloved reader, a short list of
get-rich-quick schemes
ideas that I guarantee will probably get you a lot of money
maybe really quick unless it doesn't in which case I don't.
Idea #1: Become a political pundit
I'm told that in times past, politicians would put aside their
differences in order to do what was best for the country, and
not necessarily best for themselves politically. Thankfully,
those days have long since passed, and with the advent of cable
news, you can make a successful career out of little more than
being passionate about something and hating everyone out there
that disagrees with you/seeks compromise/is able to refute
everything you say as being total bullskite. For starters, you
need to pick a political affiliation: Left or Right. It's a
purely aesthetic choice that pretty much boils down to how you
part your hair. Whichever side you pick, make sure you learn all
of that particular party's positions on the key issues of the
day, including but not limited to abortion, church and state,
immigration, and a potpourri of other issues guaranteed to
enflame your constituents. Once you've got those down, go on the
attack! Does the opposition favor gay marriage? Say that they
won't stop until churches everywhere have to sanction men
marrying livestock, and women marrying inanimate objects. Is
there a columnist in the local paper saying that you're a little
overzealous in your approach? Start a campaign against that
columnist, and tell your audience to boycott any paper that
carries the column. Are members of your own party claiming that
you poison bipartisan debate with your hyperbolic assertions and
vitriolic rantings? Call those namby-pambies out and say that
they're "[your party] in name only".
Really, anything you can do to draw attention to yourself is
going to help you. If possible, you'll want to ratchet up your
antagonism whenever you have a new book, TV show, or
Pay-Per-View event. Just target someone famous and bring to
light some embarrassing event in their life. Once you've done
that, assume the moral high ground and condemn them for whatever
it is that they did. If you're lucky, said celeb will be looking
to generate a little free publicity of his/her own, and will
play along for as long as possible. All in all, being a pundit
is a great way to make money, and there's no real downside,
apart from knowing deep down that you've made a career out of
being a petulant, screaming child who's willing to con your
loyal followers into believing whatever it is that will benefit
you the most financially.
Idea #2: Marry into wealth
If you can't generate any wealth of your own, then you'll have
to settle for someone else's wealth instead. Find yourself a
well-to-do sugar daddy/mommy, and shackle yourself to them with
that most wonderful of all financial institutions: marriage. If
you're a woman, you'll probably want to go for an older man.
Really older. In fact, the older, the better. Age is going to be
the focal point of your relationship; the more feet your hubby
has in the grave, the better. The nearer he is to death, the
more willing he'll be to part with his fortunes in exchange for
a little feigned interest from a member of the opposite sex. The
competition in this particular field will be particularly high,
however. Before you can secure that wrinkly, ashen cash bag,
you'll have to battle your way through a veritable army of
gold-diggers and ho-bags. Plus, you'll also have to face the
reality that at some point, you'll probably have to... go to the
geriatric carnival and ride the wrinkly bone rollercoaster. For
this unpleasant task, your solutions range from simply "grin and
bare it" (you see what I did there?) to cobbling together a
MacGuyver-like contraption made of plastic baggies, a bicycle
pump, an electric toothbrush, and some cooking grease.
Personally, I recommend getting your significant(ly older) other
into autoerotic asphyxiation. This way, you often won't have to
lay a hand on your man (a belt on the neck, perhaps, but that's
it), and you can play off any "accidents" as real accidents.
Don't get me wrong, though; I'm not here to endorse murder. I'm
only here to endorse marriage as a way to make a quick buck.
If you're a man, you're going to want to do exactly the
opposite. Instead of tying the knot with the most decrepit old
crone you can find, you're going to want to find the richest,
youngest woman that you can legally marry. This can vary from
state to state, so be sure to read up on your marital law before
you start. Don't worry if the law makes you into some kind of
pedophile. Just bide your time until your sugar mommy, or sugar
girlie, or at the very most, sugar fetus, reaches the age of
consent. Showering her with cheap compliments and inexpensive
gifts is one way to win her affection, but younger women tend to
prefer the sort of man who is just as likely to give her a
present as he is to give her a reason to make sure her doors and
windows are locked at night. You'll want to make yourself not
unlike my sister's ex-boyfriend: ill-tempered, self-involved,
unkempt, and surrounded by an assortment of colorful characters
who may or may not be involved in any number of criminal
activities. You should treat your target like crap for a while,
and then you should buy her a cheap gift and tell her that she
means the world to you. Rinse, and repeat. Soon, you should have
a nice on-again off-again romance going, with just enough
disapproval from her parents and the general public to keep her
totally interested in you despite your behaving like a complete
douchebag. Incidentally, you may be tempted to start a career in
rap music, and perhaps give yourself a clever new hip hop name.
DO NOT go through with this. Nothing good will come of it.
Idea #3: Invent something the world needs
Some of the wealthiest men and women on the planet are people
behind some of the most critical inventions of our time. Bill
Gates helped spawn the Windows operating system, Ted Turner
created Captain Planet, and Noah Webster gave us a book
cataloging and defining nearly all of the words and phrases in
the English language. If you really want to make some serious
scratch, you should come up with something that world really
needs, and then patent the hell out of it. Unfortunately, the
patenting is the easy part. The problem is that many of the most
obvious inventions have already been invented by other
inventors. Electricity, refrigeration, high-speed travel, these
are some of the categories that have already been pretty
well-covered by guys like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Don't
get me started on Edison, by the way. That guy was a fucking
invention HOG!!! I mean, every other day he was yanking the rug
out from other some other cash-starved schmuck with his
incessant inventing. Hell, I would have been content to just
create a single light bulb, but this guy had to invent the light
bulb, the phonograph, and the electricity on which they run!
Total innovation monger, that guy.
If you can't invent something that the world needs, you should
create the need itself. Experts call this "marketing". You see,
it doesn't matter if you invent a car that runs on used diapers
and produces cool spring water if no one thinks that they need
such a thing. Tropical fish, for example, would want a car that
produces saltwater instead of freshwater. They are what we in
the business would call a "target public" because of their high
spending power due in part to all the Spanish treasure galleons
sunk during the early 18th century. For them, you would need a
slick marketing campaign to introduce them that would turn them
on to the idea of driving around on land in a car that was
giving off the liquid so close to the kind they need to stay
alive. Perhaps a TV campaign that featured a popular fish
celebrity appealing to the tough, inner-city fish population by
talking about how "funky-fresh" this new "ride" is. I'm kind of
getting off track here with the metaphors, but my message
remains clear: to make some real money, you'll need to either
invent something useful, or invent something and just make it
seem useful.
Idea #4: Write a book
By now, you've no doubt accrued a sickening degree of wealth by
following my award-nominated money-making ideas. You've turned
your life around, and now it seems like you can do no wrong.
Everything you touch seems to turn to gold, in a non-literal
sort of way. Now, there's only one thing left to do: write a
book about it. With all the success you've had, the book will
practically write itself. If it doesn't, you can always use some
of your obscene wealth to hire a ghostwriter to help you crank
out the last hundred pages or so.
Of course, not everyone has the gumption necessary to convert my
list into sweet cheddar. If you're still struggling to make ends
meet, consider writing your autobiography anyway. Sure, reading
the autobiography of someone rich and famous may unlock the key
to becoming rich and famous yourself, but there's also a certain
draw to stories from the lives of the less fortunate. If nothing
else, your life story could help someone else feel better about
their crappy life. If your own life is not suitably crappy,
however, you'll want to "spice it up" a little. Instead of
saying that you ran a lemonade stand when you were eight years
old, say that you were serving as a lookout for the neighborhood
pusher. Instead of going on and on about how loving and
supportive your family was, talk about how sometimes you didn't
own a pair of shoes because you had to pawn them to get enough
money to buy socks. Instead of regaling your readers with the
details of the happiest moment of your life, tell them about the
time you had to undergo dental surgery without any anesthesia.
However, if someone who knows you decides to inform a major
media outlet that you were not a crack baby born sent out onto
the mean streets of Detroit, and that you've never been outside
of your suburb in rural Illinois, then I'm afraid the clock
counting down your fifteen minutes is nearly finished. Deny
everything and do your best to disappear into obscurity.
Conversely, if your story is so disgustingly manipulative that
one of the more shameless television networks decides to give
you a spot on some new celeb-reality show. During your tenure,
try to cultivate a corny, but campy, character, and with any
luck, you'll wind up as a sort of ironic pop culture phenomenon
like Chuck Norris, at which point you'll be able to put aside
your sordid past with the help of your new exercise machine
infomercial money.
Can you believe I'm giving you this kind of information for
free? Believe your eyes, my friends, because your days of
squatting in the alley like an animal are over, thanks to me. As
I mentioned early on, I'd like to think of this as my way of
saying "thank you" to you, the readers, for turning me, Dr.
Boogie, into the 5th largest economy in the world. I only hope
that you'll soon be joining me in the coveted number 6 and 7
spots. 'Til then, I wish you the best of luck in enacting all of
my childishly simple money-making programs.
If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to check out:
Video Game Censorship!
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