TV show described as “acting masterclass” by most annoying person you know

/ Joe Molander / Leave a comment

A TV show has been dubbed “an acting masterclass” by the most irritating person you know, The Lampoon can reveal.

The incident occurred at a pub in Gateshead on Saturday. Our linguist team has confirmed literally any other phrasing would have been less insufferable.

“‘The cast are good’, literally just say ‘the cast are good’,” our head linguist said in a statement, or – as the police are insisting on calling it – suicide note.

“My back-and-forth discourse about religious symbolism in the comments sections of clips from The Sopranos has sharpened my wit to a fine point,” he told The Lampoon. “So it’s perfectly understandable that in real life I talk in a way that’s too articulate for some of my peers to understand.”

“It would be ridiculous to consider myself a critic,” he continued, while straightening his beret. “No, mine is the lot of a simple polemicist.”

Featured image: Adrian Scottow on Flickr

Liz Truss declares war on Ukraine

/ David Spain / Leave a comment

Following a series of intense negotiations with Russian diplomats, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss officially declared war on Ukraine.

Speaking to The Toon Lampoon’s Meme Correspondent, Liz Truss explained her motivations for what many in the Foreign Office have described as, “Wait, Jesus Christ, what?”

“It has become clear, after a frank exchange of views with my Russian counterpart, that Vladimir Putin is thoroughly in the right on this issue,” Truss stated. “The Ukraine is currently in possession of Ukrainian territory, in open defiance of the wishes of Russia. This is a disgrace.”

“By defending Russian interests, not only will we deepen the ties of friendship between our countries, but we might also not need to give back the £2.3 million that they donated to the Conservative Party.”

The Foreign Secretary’s announcement has been hailed as a triumph by different sectors of the British political scene. The Prime Minister today acknowledged the “sterling work” that Liz Truss had done in distracting everyone from the topic of Christmas parties. Meanwhile, Nadine Dorries, glassy-eyed and tottering, explained how Ukraine had only existed for ten years, to what would later turn out to be a marble bust of Disraeli.

The left-wing Stop The War Coalition also applauded the Foreign Secretary’s actions, with a spokesman describing the move as “a much-needed rebuke to the international terrorist organisation known as NATO” before his mother called him in to finish his GCSE coursework.

Featured image: Flickr

Opera stars of the 1880s: where are they now? (Dead)                

/ Joe Molander / Leave a comment

Content warning: white people

Emma Engdahl-Jägerskiöld

The omlaut-tastic star of the Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian stages opened her own opera company at the tailend of the 1880s. Nowadays, she struggles to keep up with the rigours of the job, because she is dead.

Sir George Power, 7th Baronet

Sir Power, the Kilkenny-born Gilbert & Sullivan star, is the only entry on this list to have been awarded a knighthood. A whole lot of good it did him, seeing as he is dead.

Emma Howson

The Australian soprano is another Gilbert & Sullivan veteran, renowned for creating the principal role of Josephine in H.M.S. Pinafore. Like a lot of veterans, she is dead.

Marcella Sembrich

A native of Vyshnivchyk, a tiny village in what is now western Ukraine, the coloratura soprano came from humble beginnings. More recently, she met an even more humble ending. She is dead.

Adolf Kozieradski

We’re not entirely sure if he was big on the opera scene of the 1880s, but we wanted to include him because of his funny name. Whoever heard of a Kozieradski?

This Polish bass-baritone sang the lead in the world premiere of Stanisław Moniuszko’s The Haunted Manor in 1860s Warsaw. Now, the only thing he’s haunting is a cemetery. He is dead.

Lorenz Nikolai Achté

This next entry requires plenty of introduction. Born in Pori, on the west coast of Finland, Achté was one of the first artists attached to the Finnish National Opera and Ballet. His dedication to his homeland is such that he now fertilises some of it. He is dead.

Ernestine Schumann-Heink

Enrapturing audiences professionally since the age of just 15, we’re glad Schumann-Heink, raised in the environs of Bohemia, got started early. She is dead.

Klementina Kalašová

Following her shock eviction from the Big Brother house, the Czech opera singer successfully transitioned into a career as a media personality and pop star one-hit wonder.

That was a bit of levity. She is dead.

Francisco D’Andrade

I wonder if anyone’s made it this far. How much information is buried at the end of listicles? How many acutely personal truths are gathering dust at the bottom of blogposts, met with the same apathy that greeted the 1853 premiere of La traviata?

Anyway, he is dead.

Fyodor Petrovich Komissarzhevsky

Komissarzhevsky is best known for his versatility, proving adept not only as a leading tenor, but also for giving skull-splitting headaches to any critic trying to spell his name. Now comfortably into his twilight years, he divides his time equally between the Protestant Cemetery in Rome and nowhere else. This is because he is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. He is dead.

Featured image: Openclipart

Cancer patient bravely speaks out against “institutionalised smokeshaming”

/ David Spain / Leave a comment

Lindsey Croaker (35) today told The Toon Lampoon that the UK’s anti-smoking culture has made hospital visits a tremendous emotional strain.

“I go in to see how the tumour on my lungs is responding to the treatment,” Lindsey told our reporter, “and the first thing that the doctor asks me is how many cigarettes I’ve smoked that day.”

“That sort of narrow-minded interrogation leaves me emotionally weakened, extremely depressed, even short of breath. I can’t imagine them ever asking that question to a non-smoking patient.”

Lindsey is a part of a both growing and shrinking (depending on chemotherapy effectiveness) group of individuals who believe that lung-nicotine content is no indication of a person’s health.

“The Healthy At Every Respiratory Stage organisation is committed to ensuring that smokers around the world are not made to feel embarrassed or ashamed of their body’s perfectly natural tendencies to grow cancerous tumours in their lung tissue,” explained the movement’s founder, Nicola O’Teen. “We see these incredibly harmful stereotypes being perpetuated of women walking, singing, taking in huge breaths of air, and we felt that we had to correct the record.”

The HAERS’s aims include replacing the current warning on cigarette packets with “Real Women Smoke”, creating a safe space within hospitals where smokers don’t need to feel threatened by statistics or X-rays, and renaming the existing four stages of cancer to “Real Woman”, ”Brave and Beautiful”, ”So Inspiring”, and ”Goddess”.

“I dream of a day when people will recognise that we smokers are just as healthy as them, and far healthier than those virtue-signalling preachers who inhale nothing but oxygen,” O’Teen concluded, from the Palliative Care Unit in the Royal Victoria Infirmary.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons

Fabian Hamilton spends rest of PMQs sat cross-legged after Johnson photo question

/ David Spain / Leave a comment

Following his question to the Prime Minister about the newly-released photograph of Boris Johnson apparently attending a Christmas party, Fabian Hamilton allegedly crossed one leg over the other and spent the remainder of Prime Minister’s Questions quietly trying not to attract anyone’s attention.

“I mean…it’s understandable,” said Keir Starmer, when questioned about the Labour MP’s behaviour. “If I’d had the chance of the drop that sort of bomb on the Prime Minister, I’d have drilled a hole through the despatch box.”

Hamilton himself assured The Toon Lampoon that any sign of physical arousal was purely related to slinging yet more evidence of the Prime Minister’s duplicity onto the towering pile, rather than anything sordid.

“Does it make me feel… well, grubby, knowing that, most likely, Dominic Cummings had a hand… metaphorically speaking… in my erection?” the Labour MP for Leeds North East wondered aloud. “I tried very much not to think about that, but the source of political dynamite is not a choice, after all. For my part, I simply did my best to focus on the Prime Minister.”

“It still felt dirty, but I can at least live with myself.”

Following the end of Prime Minister’s Questions, Hamilton was able to bring an end to his embarrassing condition after two seconds of looking at Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries.

“Fortunately, she didn’t notice that I was gazing at her,” Hamilton assured The Lampoon. “Then again, at this time of the day, she’s probably seeing in pure double vision.”

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons

Keir Starmer champions British values, smashes up bus stop

/ Joe Molander / Leave a comment

Labour Leader Keir Starmer has today proven his tireless dedication to British values by smashing up a bus stop in Birmingham.

The incident took place after a respectful debate with Angela Rayner in a pub, wherein she smashed a pool cue against his head.

A witness remarked, as a pint glass whizzed past her head, “The two of them tumbled out into the car park outside, and that’s when Keir locked wide, mad eyes with the bus shelter. It’s proven to me how wrong I was.”

“Before this afternoon, the way he held a press conference every time he got a poll lead reminded me of a pensioner cheering every time he sustained an erection. Now, I see he’s a red-blooded patriot, just like you or me.”

“If he breaks enough laws, who knows? Maybe he’ll be prime minister.”

The incident was confirmed by a number of party insiders, namely the stag party that joined in.

Featured image: UK Parliament on Flickr

Boris Johnson spotted holding boombox outside Christian Wakeford’s house

/ Joe Molander / Leave a comment

Somehow-still-Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been spotted by onlookers, holding a boombox outside Christian Wakeford’s house.

According to eyewitnesses, the boombox was playing what most set Johnson’s heart aflutter, namely an audiobook recording of The Rise of Rome by ancient historian Levy. Johnson is understood to be heartbroken after the MP for Bury South left the party, and is suspicious that another man is involved.

“It’s that homewrecker Keir Starmer,” Johnson told our reporter, through tears. “But I will not let go of what is mine: I can’t allow Christian Wakeford to become Christian Wokeford.”

“I can change,” he insisted. “It’ll be just like the way things were. I won’t break Covid rules anymore, just corruption ones.”

“I want Dishy Chrissy back in my arms and, like with all my lovers, I promise I’ll never cheat on him, on weekdays.”

The attempt to woo Wakeford was apparently not enough to convince the MP to return to the Conservative backbench. Not one to give up, Johnson was later seen in Bury South town centre shopping for a box of chocolates, flowers and a £325,000 public sector contract.

Featured image: Movieclips Classic Trailers on YouTube

Comedy is about free speech, says comic best known for material about dick and balls

/ Joe Molander / Leave a comment

Comedy is a bastion of free speech and expression, according to a comic best known for a set about his dick and balls. More recently, the comedian is known for bemoaning the rise of cancel culture, after spending the 2010s berating feminists for focusing on problems that don’t exist.    

The comic agreed to speak to us, after we told him that The Toon Lampoon is a podcast.

“Stand-up can be used to accomplish powerful things, like giving a stadium full of women the ick simultaneously,” he said.

“I mean, no wonder comedy was banned by the Nazis.”

“Sorry, did I say Nazis? I meant to say feminists,” he continued, before raising his eyebrows at our reporter until she forced a laugh.

“I would be nothing without the penis and testicle soliloquy. Creatively, it’s my bread and butter.”

“Or should that be bread and boner?” he asked, before scribbling what he’d just said into a notebook labelled ‘Gold dust’.

Earlier this year, the comic had declared he had been cancelled, which, funnily enough, made headlines.

Featured image: 4753994 on Pixabay

Hero father of three resists googling Ariana Grande nude leaks during Christmas lunch

/ Alan Atë / Leave a comment

In an act that has been described as showing an inhuman level of restraint by several Cabinet ministers, a father of three today resisted the urge to covertly search for leaked nudes of popular music star Ariana Grande.

“To be honest, when I saw the news alert pop up on my phone, I was all set to slam on Incognito and get down to some serious cracker-pulling, right under the table,” Darren Smike, 37, told The Lampoon.

“But then, I thought about how it’s the kids’ first Christmas without their mum, what with Covid and everything, and I realised I had to be there for them, rather than grabbing a fistful of cranberry sauce for lubricant and painting the underside of the table as white as the first new snow.”

Mr Smike has been recommended for an OBE in the New Year’s Honour 2021 list by a Government insider who wished to remain anonymous, who told The Lampoon, “I have to applaud this individual’s restraint. I, for one, plunged the clunge at least seven times to that story about the drowning migrants over my starter.”

When approached for comment, Prince Andrew stated that he would, for one, would never feel the barest hint of arousal at the haggard visage of Miss Grande, and that he pitied any individual who would.

Featured image: Pxhere

Boris Johnson told to await visits from 147,857 spirits

/ David Spain / Leave a comment

Sources indicate that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been warned to await a visit from 147,857 spirits on the night before Christmas.

“We are to understand that the Prime Minister received advance warning of these visitations from the ghost of Margaret Thatcher, who appeared in Boris Johnson’s redecorated residence to deliver a warning,” a civil service source told The Lampoon.

“Unfortunately, the old girl was pretty fucking ravaged by dementia, so the message got a bit lost in translation. She kept calling the Prime Minister ’Denis’, cried a bit when she didn’t recognise her former home: it was a shocking display all round.”

Thankfully, the Ghost of Privatisation Past managed to relay the important message to the Prime Minister: that he should expect to be visited by the 147,857 spirits of those his Government allowed to perish of Covid.

“Of course, the Prime Minister was very firm on the fact that this would not be a party,” our source was keen to state. “No: this is more of an opportunity for a bleary-eyed and barely-present Boris Johnson to be told quite how badly he’s fucked up by grey and insubstantial critics.”

“Thankfully, Mr Johnson’s ample experience of Prime Minister’s Questions has made him well-equipped for the ordeal.”

Early reports indicate that the Prime Minister means to deliver a statement prior to the visitation, urging the 147,857 spirits to visit the former Labour government instead.

Featured image: Number Ten on Flickr