Dogs doing lists #17: Awards in Slapstick High Achievement

1. Dogs removing a pie tin delicately from your custard-covered face to find a perfect, miraculous cast of the weeping visage of Jesus Christ.
2. Dogs heaving the embalmed head of Wendi Deng head in between Jonathan May-Bowle’s foam pie and Rupert Murdoch’s wrinkled visage, and turning to the actual and completely shocked Wendi Deng to beam with obvious pride at having saved the day, boasting, “NEWS OF THE WORLD.”
3. Dogs enticing Boris Johnson across a field of banana peels with a medal for Best in Show and offering encouragement as he stumbles and weaves blindly, his vision occluded by his unkempt mane, teetering this way and that while testing the ground for signs of slippage, barely skirting the banana peels strewn beneath his feet, knees and ankles wobbling unsurely while the splayed fruit skins lie in wait; and snatching the medal back at the last second beyond his searching grasp as a wrecking ball descends from the sky with a slow, low whistle and grinds him into wall, leaving nothing visible or intact except for a springy sponge of yellow hair.
4. Dogs nervously attempting to defuse the embalmed head of Wendi Deng as it lies inert in the middle of a Baghdad plaza, and gasping in horror as the eyes suddenly blink rapidly and the mouth sputters and repeats over and over again, “A LIONESS ALWAYS PROTECTS HER CUBS.”
5. Dogs cutting the live feed as Viktor Yushchenko races onto the stage at the Latin Grammys and removes the bag covering his head, revealing his jaundiced, pockmarked face to the world for the very first time, and stammering mindlessly as the sonic wave of a thousand cameras clicking simultaneously washes over the dais before blurting out, “Viktor Yanukovych doesn’t— Viktor Yanukovych— Viktor Yanukovych does’t care about black people!” and quietly exiting stage left, head hung in shame.
6. Dogs rummaging around backstage at the Kodak Theatre and stumbling upon a cache of Oscar statuettes mixed in with several dozen embalmed Wendi Deng heads, and turning to address a live television audience as the conductor swells the orchestra, confessing with lower lip atremble, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
7. Dogs thoughtfully watching your acclaimed performance in this, your most recent film, and promptly scrawling a response on the base of a statuette, tongue jutted out in careful concentration, and happily imagining your reaction when you receive a honorific engraved FUCK YOU, YOU ARE THE WORST.
8. Dogs lurking on the boardwalk as Snooki attempts and fails to mount a bicycle, and turning the dials on an event sequence modulator so that the booze-addled attempted bicycle mounting can be seen at various speeds, rewinding Snooki’s spill so that her face ascends from the floor, and sending her crashing in fast-forward to the boardwalk again; then replaying the scene in slow motion, from the contorted moment of Snooki lifting her leg up to the bicycle seat through to the groaning realization of hopelessly lost balance; and then rewinding and forwarding, in alternation, to send her face crashing-and-rising, crashing-and-rising, crashing-and-rising up again, wham, wham, wham; then slowing reality almost to a stop as her cheek impresses itself on the boardwalk and warps her face into a contorted rictus of confused pain, a hint of skin tanning agent trailing through the air; and then rewinding and forwarding a few times more, wham, wham, wham before allowing the natural sequence of events to resume under a descending neon sign, looming enormously and feverishly blinking: APPLAUSE.
9. Dogs switching on an applause track to award a full-scale replica of empirical reality to the Real Housewives of New Jersey, but switching the applause off after deciding to withhold it, but deciding after all to award empirical reality to the Real Housewives, along with an applause track, but then deciding that the award is undeserved, and switching off the applause track, definitively, to face an unhappy cadre of Real Housewives with bared teeth and clenched fists as somewhere, a cricket emits a single chirp; and succumbing then to a furious onslaught of limbs, which, in their indiscriminate punishment, unleash and rend the full-scale replica of empirical reality, causing the permanent mutilation of everything, everywhere.
10. Dogs presenting a troupe of Imperial Walkers at the Ice Capades Awards Ceremony to perform a ballet: Hulking box structures step up to the ice and immediately collapse; or they step tentatively onto the ice and then crash over; or they wobble onto the ice and then falter, only to regain stability, turn a half-circle, and promptly collapse; or they glide swiftly past the jutting box corners of other fallen Walkers before sailing over the wall and into the shrieking audience; or they trot at a clop and slip-jig, whirring legs kicking helplessly, before collapsing backward; or they careen, or they swivel, or they crash, or they crash, or they crash, crash, crash, crash, crash until everyone gives up and walks out and decides never to do this again.

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