Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield

Thornton Melon forever

This is Issue #5 of Shaun’ Bad Advice of a new series on this platform. For more on what Bad Advice is and why it’s in Worcester Sucks now, head to issue #1. This column as well as the overall Worcester Sucks publication are sustained exclusively by reader contributions. Please consider a paid subscription!

Dear Shaun,

I’m a mother of two. My children are now both in school starting this fall. I made the choice to stay home after our second was born and I loved it. Now, I will have all of this free time with the kids in school. I was thinking about going back to school. I really miss taking classes and I think it would be a fun thing to do in my free time. Should I go back to school?

-Studious

Dear Studious,

This sounds like a wonderful idea! I don’t know what your hesitations are, because there should be none. You have the ideal educational Greek schedule: time to sit and contemplate. I mean there was also time to have sex and drink a lot of wine and eat a lot of food. Hope you have time for those too, like in general. But you’ve got all this free time now to focus on something that interests you! How exciting.

Have you ever seen the movie Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield? It is a classic that kind of holds up! The gist is that Rodney Dangerfield is a self-made millionaire. He learns that his son is having a bad time at college, with grades, friends, and extracurriculars. So Rodney decides he’ll go back to college and he just throws his money around to make it more amenable for his son and of course for himself as well. Lots of potential for gags and hijinks. Robert Downey Jr. plays an anti-capitalist post-punk kid in it. Harold Ramis re-wrote the script to make it what it was. It was the 6th highest grossing film in 1986 (just behind Crocodile Dundee)!

The thing that always got me about this movie is that the antagonist is the star diver for the school’s diving team team. Rodney’s son is the towel boy and desperately wants to be on the team. DIVING. So funny. This leads to Rodney and a very non-believable body double doing some Olympic-level dives in the climax of the movie.

All of this is to say you need to go back to school and have your Rodney Dangerfield moment. You have so much real-life experience and while that can be unrelatable to a lot of college students, it can also be the thing that makes you cool with them. Now, do you have to renovate an entire floor of a dormitory to make it look like a penthouse suite? No. Do you have to throw giant keggers, and buy your children onto the diving team? No. You don’t even have to join the diving team yourself. You can just go back to school and create your own hijinks! Bring in a vape that’s bussin’ or whatever kids like. That’s for you to figure out. Oh yeah and like, earn the degree. Don’t waste your money. You’re a mother for god’s sakes!

Send any and all questions to woocomedyweek@gmail.com with the subject line "Bad Advice."

NEWS

Thanks to all who came out to Pepe’s Dolce Bar, that was a fun one. I’ve got just one show this weekend over at Clover Road Brewing in Hudson. You can find tickets here.

Big announcement from WOOtenanny! We will be hosting a comedy contest at Ralph’s Diner on Tuesday August 29th. 50 comics will have 2 minutes to tell their best jokes for the chance to win $2,000 for 1st prize, $1,000 for 2nd and $500 for 3rd place. Sign ups are going fast but you can sign up here. This is real money and it is going to be very fun.

We also have some fun shows coming up this fall, with Eddie Pepitone coming on August 13th to The White Room. Dan Telfer (Nerd Poker Podcast) is coming in September, stay tuned for details on that one. Plus we’ll be putting on our wonderful show Hot Dog! on August 18th, which is the night before The Worcester Hot Dog Safari, venue to be announced. Finally, we have the hilarious David Gborie (The voice of Comedy Central) coming to Ralph’s Rock Diner on October 22nd. That’s it for now! See you next week!