L'EDgendary

by dobanochi

A few years since we last saw any of them, the Peach Creek Boys and the Merry Men run into one another at just the right time, working together to undermine an oppressive city government as well as their burgeoning insecurities. An action-comedy-drama character study about friendship, leadership, self-esteem, and the divide between who we're born as and who we choose to be.

64. The Sheriff Instigates a 1A Crisis

64. "The Sheriff Instigates a First Amendment Crisis, and Other Stories"

I'm a fucking monster…

That's what our favorite registered sex offender thought every time he got on the subway to go to work at The Chuckle Bunker. And the worst part about this particular insecurity of his was that he really wasn't wrong, even by polar bear standards he was huge, the guy was like… [Googles average male polar bear height] twenty-three inches above the norm. Not as dramatic proportionally-speaking compared to Big Red himself, but whereas Robin was a giant of a rather small species whose great size just brought him closer to mammalian society's mean, median, and mode (and really still falling quite literally short of that), Thorbjorn Hviid was a goliath among goliaths, and every time he had to do something as mundane as squeeze into a TAN traincar, he simply found his size a hindrance at best and a not-so-subtle hint that he wasn't meant for modern society at worst. I swear to God, like, seventy-five percent of our named male characters have expressed some amount of dissatisfaction with their size at one point or another - Robin, Johnny, Eddy, Eddy's brother, Eddy's father, Ed's father, Double-D, Double-D's Uncle Ward, Charles Hess, Mayor John Norman, I'm probably still forgetting some - hell, half of those dudes are already significantly above average size for their species, but all these cocksuckers have conveyed at some point that they have at one point or another felt insufficiently large, meanwhile big-ass Thor here would trade bodies with any of them in a heartbeat. God, you gotta love male body issues in a sizeist society. Ladies, I see y'all and I acknowledge the bullshit you all go through, but us boys nevertheless have our own issues we're trying to sort out over here.

And you also gotta love when the guy who's freakishly huge isn't even confidently gigantic and is just an awkward nerd towering over everyone, feeling violated as everyone stares at him. Thor, my man, I know a dozen dudes who'd trade with you, hombre; maybe start putting that science-minded head of yours toward figuring out a way to body-swap. But this was in the past and we can't now erase the fact that all the other animals in the Yellow Line car couldn't help but at least glance if not outright stare at the damn-near eleven-foot ursid, at least a few vindicating his fears that they hated him for taking up so much space on the train.

But at least one of the other passengers didn't harbor any resentment toward him.

"Thor!"

He looked around the swarm of creatures below him, but he couldn't discern where that voice had come from. Thankfully the ocelot was waving at him so he could eventually locate him. He'd thought that voice had sounded familiar.

"Oh! Uh… how's it goin', Elio?" Well, apparently they were just having a conversation in public now.

Not that Thor's coworker much cared for the opinions of all the people between them as they spoke. "Alright, man, alright… you ready for a busy night?"

"Aw, man… as I'll ever be." Simply small talk. Thor and his fellow dishwasher at The Chuckle Bunker weren't super tight or anything, but they were perfectly friendly to one another while the rest of the crew mostly ignored them.

"Should be fun," Elio said warmly.

This was how most of their conversations went while they were sequestered away from the rest of the staff, the friendly but reserved ocelot speaking every so often to make the polar bear feel seen and the polar bear answering to make the ocelot feel heard, sometimes just remarking on the work, sometimes extrapolating how well or how poorly the performers were doing as gauged by the servers' chatter and attitudes, sometimes the Mexican trying to teach the Canadian a little Spanish and the Canadian returning the favor by sharing what little Danish and Faroese he remembered from his father. They weren't super tight or anything, but as far as work relationships went, they had a pretty good rapport. And it was a good thing they had each other's company to get through their soul-crushing job together, because Elio was right, this would indeed be one hell of a shift.

-IllI-

"All done?"

"Almost…" the otter murmured as he dotted his I's and crossed his T's on his paperwork, looking up and giving the documents to his new boss.

"Alright!" said the hyena as she received them. "Congrats, Cody: you're officially an usher at The Chuckle Bunker."

"Thanks," Cody replied, forcing a look of enthusiasm that clearly wasn't there. A job was a job.

The manager turned to a jaguarundi who was getting changed into his uniform on the other side of the breakroom (which apparently wasn't too weird at this workplace). "Jaime? When you're done, I want you to show Cody here around. You're gonna be training him this weekend."

"Alright," the shirtless cat answered boredly before going back to pretending they weren't there.

"In the meantime, Cody, grab yourself a radio and an earpiece," the boss said with a gesture toward a table full of walkie-talkies in their stand-up charging ports. "We'll always be tuned into channel 10, subchannel 1. If you have any other questions, ask Jaime or any of the other ushers, they'll help you out. I gotta talk to Jackie now - she's the GM." And with that, she got up and left the new guy there to sit there awkwardly until his trainer finished getting dressed.

The hyena walked into the windowless office where a black bear was sitting and doing some bookkeeping. "The new guy's legal now," Karin said to her own boss as she filed the otter's papers away.

"Sounds good," Jackie said, staying quiet for just a moment until she came to a good stopping point in her work and turned around. "You're doing a good job pushing through this, Karin."

But Karin only gave her a quick glance of disinterest before going back to the filing cabinet; Jackie's expression of warmth and encouragement wasn't working on her. "I come to work to escape my personal problems, let's not bring it up, yeah?"

The bear just nodded solemnly. "I understand," she said as she turned back to the computer. "Last thing though before I let it go: is Pat still doing alright?"

"He's doing fine," the hyena said flatly. "He's keeping busy at work. He's just like me, work is an escape."

"Well…" Jackie said with a heavy sigh, "we'll have plenty of work tonight."

-IllI-

If you had told the Irish-American wolfhound sitting in the greenroom that he had three years to live as of that past Wednesday (which he would), he'd likely snark back that he didn't care because the world was headed to hell in a handbasket and he had no problem getting off the ride before it arrived there, giving you some remark so witty that I can't even come up with an approximation of what he'd say.

But that would be assuming he was in-character. He was a real person who did indeed have friends and family and things he cared about. He'd actually probably be fairly upset if you gave him an exact date that he could expect to die, though in his old age he'd probably find a way to make peace with it. But if you were to poll your typical member of the audience currently lining up outside - and the idea that they'd be this simple probably wouldn't surprise him whether he was in his stage persona or not, not because his fans were stupid but because people were stupid - they'd likely express belief that George Snarlin, and any stand-up comedian for that matter, was exactly the same individual in everyday life as he was on stage, and not an ounce less.

Some of that rough personality was based on his real life, however. The plan had been that he make his start in radio, transition to stand-up, and then make the jump to television and movies. Well, the first two steps went splendidly… but he never became a movie star like he'd hoped. Yeah, he'd had a few memorable roles, he was in Bill and Ted, he was in a couple Kevin Smith movies like Dogma, and children of a certain generation might remember him fondly from his time as the narrator of the American dub of Thomas the Tank Engine. But if anything, he'd been too successful as a professional complainer and had gotten stuck there. Not to say it was a terrible place to be; he'd spent the 80s and 90s racking up HBO specials like it was nobody's business, and every other comic in the game had nothing but respect and reverence for the way that he could toss out all his material every year, come up with new stuff every year, and have that new stuff be brilliant each and every year (and when those comics found out that the only reason he worked that hard at his craft is because he had to because he was indebted up the ass to the IRS, they just chalked it up to necessity being the mother of invention).

And why shouldn't he have been a big deal? In his early years, he'd been a close follower of that bravehearted iconoclast Lenny Brutes, and inspired by that bear's fearless drive to point out everything that was wrong with the world, George was inspired to do the same. And whereas Lenny had been arrested in the 50s and 60s for using nine different naughty words on stage, in the 70s George famously came up with a list of seven dirty words you could never say on television, or the radio for that matter - in a bit that was subsequently broadcast on the radio, and while American broadcasters to that point had just chose not to use profane language, the outrage subsequently caused the FCC to formally ban certain coarse language on the air, thereby proving Snarlin more right than he was before in the worst way possible. (Yeah, a lot of people were surprised when this was the same guy who'd eventually wind up playing Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station.)

All in all, at the end of the day, old George here was now regarded up there was one of the greatest comedians in the annals of American standup history, he and Richard Prowlor frequently being 1a and 1b, the tiebreaker in people's heads frequently boiling down to simply whether one's own ancestors came out of Africa or Europe. And that comedian that America had fallen in love with (and I do mean America, I found some British TV program[me] ranking the 100 best comedians of all time and George was, like, 80th? Meanwhile Bill Hicks was fourth, go figure, Rest in Power, Bill)... that fearless and heroic comedian everyone knew him as was someone who knew exactly how the world was, and because he knew it sucked and that understandably made him unenthusiastic, that made him a grump, a cynical old curmudgeon who didn't want to be a cynical old curmudgeon but who was molded into one as a result of the environment he called home. He was the original self-proclaimed disappointed optimist, and goddammit, that was what the people were going to get tonight.

But as the old dog sat there, donning his famous black shirt and pants so as to keep his appearance as neutral as possible, peacefully reading a book as he awaited the show, there were some others who were desperately hoping that they were right to buck the trend and say no, George can't be as much of a dick in real life as he is in his act.

Up at the sound booth overlooking the showroom, another comic, the feature, was conversing with The Chuckle Bunker's sound and tech guy.

"...Alright, now how about we try to sweeten the saturation a bit?" the fox asked the sloth.

Rico tried not to look annoyed as he messed around with the lights to the comedian's liking. It's a shame, because most everybody agreed that Todd Klass was a cool guy, but Rico couldn't help but associate his name and face with how fussy and particular this guy was about lighting during different parts of his set.

"Alright, that's looking good, now let's bring them down a little…"

Knock knock. "'Scuse me," said the slender brown wolf in the doorway.

Rico and Todd both glanced at him.

"Hey, how's it going?" the fox asked warmly, leaning as far as he could from his stepstool to give the local comic a handshake, which the wolf reciprocated. "You the opener?"

"Yeah," he said, nervous but eager. "Name's Kellen Huffman, nice to meet you!"

"Todd Klass, and the feeling is mutual."

Kellen nodded with an awkward smile before realizing he ought to regard the reason he came here and giving a handshake to the sloth as well. "Hi. Kellen. Jackie told me to find you so we could set up how I want my part, um… set up."

"No problem, name's Rico, by the way," the sound guy replied, glad to have a break from the fox's anal-retentive requests.

"Rico, could you give me and Kellen here a moment?" Todd asked as he climbed down from his stool. "I wanna have a talk with him, comic to comic."

"Sure thing," said the sloth, grateful to have an out for this situation.

"Kellen, come with me," said Todd as he led the wolf out and around in front of the sound booth.

"By the way, I loved seeing you on Last Comic Standing last year," Kellen said, trying to stifle his childish excitement to be around somebody he admired.

"Aw, you don't need to butter me up, kid," Todd scoffed jokingly. "I'm sorry, I'm calling you kid, how old are you?"

"Thirty-seven."

The fox chuckled. "I was right! You're basically a baby in stand-up terms. Hell, I'm forty and I'm just now starting to get my feet in this business, you and me aren't too dissimilar."

"Well, you've been on TV multiple times and nobody outside of Nottingham knows who I am-"

"Yeah, now," Todd insisted, "but look at you, you're opening for George Snarlin! You're taking all the steps you can to advance your career! Hey, while you're up there, I'll be making a point to watch you so I can give you some pointers. And I wouldn't be surprised if George was willing to help you out, too!"

"Ge-George!?" Kellen stammered. "B-but why would George care to watch me? I'm some nobody who happened to be on good terms with this place's management! Hell - if I'm doing my job right as an opener, I shouldn't do too well, being an opener is more about just warming the audience up than knocking their socks off. I mean… am I wrong?"

The fox nodded a wise nod. "And it shows that you know the game pretty well that you know that, but seriously, I've had the pleasure of meeting George a few times before, I can't say that he's my best friend or anything, but he's a perfectly friendly guy who's sympathetic to rookie comedians. Just like Lenny Brutes helped him out, he's paying it forward."

But the wolf knew well the warning against meeting one's heroes. "Aw, no, no, I can't, I can't, he- he's probably not gonna like it if- if for no other reason than, hey, let's be honest, I'm nervous to meet the guy, my act's probably gonna suffer for it-"

But Todd was deep in thought. "You know what? Let me amend my previous statement. I'm sure he'll help you if he likes you. But I think he will when you meet him. C'mon, let's go," he passively urged as he made his way down the steps to the greenroom.

Kellen took a deep breath before following the fox, telling himself that if he were ever to be as gutsy as George and Lenny before him, he'd have to be able to handle small challenges like this.

The old dog looked up when he heard a knock at the door, and took his glasses off when he saw the familiar fox walk in. "Todd!" George greeted as he put his book down and stood up from the couch. "Great to see you! Is this our opener?"

"I found us a live one!" Todd joked as he gave the wolf a hard pat on the back. "You wanna introduce yourself?"

"Uh- hi, sir, um… Ke-Kellen. Kellen Huffman." He offered his idol a shaky handshake.

"George Snarlin," the wolfhound said warmly as he returned the gesture, "and you don't have to call me sir."

"Uh-got-got it. Um… I'm sorry, man, I just… I just never thought I'd be able to meet you, es-especially not like this, as a fellow comic, sharing a stage with you-"

George put up a paw to slow the poor wolf down. "Kellen. It's alright. You don't have to be afraid of me. In this room, we're equals. Hey, tell me, how long you been doing this?"

Kellen looked like he'd just forgotten his entire history with this craft. "Uh… like… since high school? So about… twenty years? But it's only been in the last five or so that I've started to see any money from it, and I still have a day job as a copywriter-"

"Ah, I get it, I get it," George said with a wave of a paw, "this shit we do is hard, gotta grind for years and it never pays off for a lot of talented people. But hey, I tell you what. I can tell you've got some nervous energy right now, so we'll save it for after the show, but I want you to show me your best five minutes, alright? I'll critique you, give ya some pointers."

And the apprentice's face lit up. "Y-you will!?"

"Of course I will!" the dog said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "If you're actually good, you deserve to have some help. And you know what? If it turns out that you go on to be the greatest comedian of all time and people completely forget about me and my shit after I'm dead, then fine! I've had enough of sycophantic creeps goin' fuckin' gaga over me without ever realizing that I'm saying right there in my material to question things but they never stop to question whether I'm actually the person I make myself look to be for a paycheck! Only psychos want to be at the top forever, kid. Maybe it's your turn."

The local comic was damn-near shaking from the excitement and encouragement he was feeling. "Oh, thank you, Mr. Snarlin-!"

"Aw, enough with that Mr. Snarlin shit, Kellen, call me George!" the elder scoffed. "I'm not your fuckin' boss, I'm trying to be your friend here!"

"Hey George," Todd cut in, "we'll let you get back to your reading, we've gotta talk to the tech guy to set up our parts of the show."

"Certainly," George said as he sat back down, "I'll see you boys later."

The fox and the wolf exited, Kellen still reeling from the surreal experience. "I can't believe he was actually that… friendly."

"I told ya," said the fox. "The guy has an entire bit about how he hates guys named Todd, but he seemed pretty friendly to me, didn't he? Just think, is the person you are on stage the same as the real you?"

Kellen had to pause. "...I've never actually thought about that."

And Todd was confused. "What, you never thought about whether you're your real self on that stage?"

"Not really, I… I just write jokes and tell them, keep the good ones, ditch the bad ones, and I just assume that's all me-"

"Well, first tip - I might not be George, but I'm a working comic - don't be afraid to be someone you're not up there. None of this shit matters, everybody with a brain understands that you're not the person you are on stage. If you can be funnier by being unlike yourself, go for it."

Kellen kept his mouth shut as he tried not to feel foolish for thinking George, Todd, and all the other comedians he loved were the same as civilians as they were as entertainers. "Makes sense… Man, I really gotta come up with something good if I'm gonna impress George-"

"Don't 'come up with something.' Just give him the best that you've already got. If you're ready, you're ready, if not, then you can't fake it."

Again, this made sense. But Kellen Huffman couldn't help but think that he'd be wasting the opportunity of a lifetime if he didn't jump at the chance to impress his hero.

-IllI-

So this chapter is gonna be confusing as all get-out, because our other friend named George is also going to be in it.

"I'm proud of ya, Wolfie," he said in a tone that was equally likely to be interpreted as genuine as it could be seen as snarky, "you actually cleaned up pretty nice for this."

The Sheriff gave his deputy a look that made clear he indeed couldn't tell whether that was legitimate or sarcasm. "How'd ya expect me ta' be lookin'?"

"I dunno, a ratty old t-shirt or something?" Nutzinger mused. "Probably with the name of an obscure beer company on it?"

Indeed, the two of them had followed the same strategy for this off-duty event: dressing decent, but not too fancy. Ward was dressed almost like a 1980s office worker with beige suspenders over a collared red button-down while George donned a baby-blue polo with his cleanest pair of Levi's. Honestly, the infamously slovenly sheriff was looking more well-put-together than the deputy was.

But the wolf didn't much care to talk about men's fashion with the squirrel, so he changed the subject. "Who is this guy, anyways?"

"Who, George Snarlin?"

"Yeah. He any good?"

Nutzinger found this question surprising. "He's a pretty famous comedian, I thought you'd have at least heard of him."

"Name kinda rings a bell, but I ain't recognize him from anywhere. He funny?" Woodland had been asking all these questions very matter-of-factly, with a tone that sounded bored and a face that almost looked annoyed.

The deputy was starting to get a sinking feeling that this night was going to go exactly as badly as he'd feared. "I mean… I think so, but-"

"What kinda stuff's he talk about?"

Our George took a deep breath through his nose and prepared for a rough moment. "...I was about to say, if you don't know who this guy is, I don't think you would like him."

"And why's that?"

Time to tread gently. "Well… his schtick is that he's pretty hypercritical of… everything."

"Ain't nothin' wrong with that," Ward shrugged, still looking disinterested in the answer to his own question as he kept his eyes on the road.

"I'm just saying, he's probably gonna question some of your beliefs about things you hold dear-"

"That's within his rights. I'm a cop, I gotta know that."

And as a preventative measure in case this became an issue later: "...Okay, but for, like, example, he's a pretty outspoken atheist and you're… from the Bible Belt, no?"

The wolf just grunted. "I won't agree with him on that, but my sister already married a Catholic Eye-talian guy and I don't think either one a' 'em is practicin', I know how to play nice with people who ain't believe the religion as me…" Another shrug. "'Sides, he's a comedian, there was a pretty good chance this guy'd be Jewish-"

"Naw, man, he is from New York, but he's New York Irish, not New York Jewish," Nutzinger explained, looking around the cabin of Woodland's Lincoln Blackwood pickup truck with a confused look on his face, surprised by his boss's relative tolerance. "Well… I'm glad you're cool with that… but, like, he just generally questions authority and the status quo, and you and me are authority and the status quo, so-"

"Nutsy, how sensitive do you think I am?"

The squirrel just threw his hands up. "I dunno, man, just don't take anything he says personally-"

"Wasn't planning on it."

"Yeah, but it might be a different story when he's talking shit about cops or the government or whatever and he's got the whole rest of the crowd laughing and cheering him on."

"Won't bother me. I ain't the one who paid for these tickets." Woodland still wasn't taking his eyes off the road very much. "Just got me wonderin' why they thought this'd be something we'd both enjoy."

"I don't think they did, man, I think they were just looking for something two guys could do as acquaintances on a Friday night in the summer, and for lack of options that didn't seem to suit one or the both of us as people, it was either this, or, like… a minor-league baseball game or something, and even that's more of a family activity than a grown-up activity, y'know, parents taking kids to see if they give a rat's ass about sports before ponying up to take them to Camden Yards or… or whatever you call the Phillies' new stadium." A pause before he decided to get back on topic and come to a more conclusive ending point. "So yeah… comedy show seemed like a safe bet, they probably didn't even care who happened to be playing here the weekend between your birthday and mine…"

"Wouldn't be surprised," the wolf muttered.

But then the squirrel had a thought. "...Well, then again, these tickets were probably a hot sell, and they couldn't have been cheap or easy to come by… shit, who at City Hall did buy us these tickets and how much did they spend to get them?"

"How expensive would they be?"

"Pretty fuckin' expensive."

"Hm…" was all the sheriff said for a time, but soon seemed to perk up in attention. "Is this it? This the place?"

"I can't tell ya, man, I can't see anything from way down here," said the tiny squirrel in the passenger seat.

"Well, there's a big line goin' around the building."

"What's the building?"

"...A hotel?"

"Is it a Marriott?"

"...Yeah?"

The Ballast Point Marriott on the banks of the Indian River on the border of the swanky Mountaire and Oak Orchard neighborhoods, with space in the basement for a large unrelated venue. Sounded about right.

"Yeah, this is the place," Nutzinger confirmed.

"...Where am I supposed ta' park?"

Good question. This was a downtown area right along the water, parking was at a premium.

"...Those idiots didn't get us parking vouchers, did they?"

"Nope."

"Goddammit."

-IllI-

"Ight, so this is the kitchen…" the jaguarundi said boredly as he showed the otter around, gesturing to a few mammals prepping but not greeting them. "...And here in the back is where all the trash goes, we're gonna have to be the ones to clean it since no one else wants to. At the end of the night we gotta break down these boxes and-"

"Holy shit!"

Thor and Elio both nearly dropped the plates they were washing when Cody suddenly yelped.

"What happened?" asked Jaime, more annoyed than worried.

"I- sorry, I just…" Cody was staring straight up at the polar bear who was about eight feet taller than him. "I-I didn't see you at first, and you, uh… kinda blended in with the scenery - y'know, your fur matches the walls and your clothes match the machinery - um… and then you moved, and it was like, in my brain, why is this huge piece of the world moving suddenly?, and it just… scared the bejesus out of me. Um…"

Thor, meanwhile, looked twice as scared as the new guy did, fearing that his monstrous size and stature had permanently scarred someone into fearing him forever.

But the jaguarundi found this incident to be fucking hilarious. "Oh, Jesus Christ!" he wheezed as he keeled over laughing at Cody and Thor's awkward encounter.

That left the ocelot, who decided to be the adult this situation needed. He walked over to the otter and put a paw on the kid's shoulder. "Don't worry, this guy wouldn't hurt a fly - maybe a mouse, but not a fly."

"Elio!" the bear growled under his breath as he gave the cat a light but firm backhanded doink on the side of the head.

This made Cody seem frightened all over again, but the ocelot decided to take control and calm him down.

"Elio," said the feline dishwasher, offering a handshake.

"...Cody," the otter reciprocated.

Elio gestured for the polar bear to offer as well.

"Thor," he said as softly as he could. "Sorry for-"

"No, no, you're fine," Cody insisted as his hand was lost in the bear's giant paw.

Off to the side, the other cat had regained his composure and gave the otter a firm pat on the back to signal it was time to leave. "Alright, I still gotta show you the rest of this place before the meeting starts." And he began to lead his trainee back out of the kitchen before one of the dishwashers stopped him.

"Uh, J?" asked the neurotic giant.

Jaime stopped and looked up at him. "Yeah?" he asked skeptically.

"Uh… are you gonna have a chance to…" Thor came to a complete stop to rethink his syntax. "...At some point tonight, can I talk to you?"

"About what?" The jaguarundi almost seemed to find it amusing that this dork wanted to talk to him.

"I'd… rather not discuss it when we got other people around," said the polar bear, gesturing to the ocelot and otter.

"Well I gotta train this guy all day, so, prolly not."

Thor had a look on his face like he was realizing he'd been right to be afraid of asking a stupid question like this. "Oh… well, uh, if you get a chance-"

"I prolly won't."

"Uh… well if things change…"

Jaime winced as he led Cody off. "I'll let ya know. See ya around."

"Alright, bye…" Thor said as he watched the two ushers walk out, then turned to his fellow dishwasher: "I scared that kid all over again with the sound of my voice, didn't I?"

"Oh, absolutely," Elio said, trying to sound warm and devil-may-care about it so as not to make Thor feel embarrassed.

It didn't work.

Jaime and Cody, meanwhile, continued touring the facility. All around the showroom with the sections for various sizes and the hundred or so tables with numbers Cody would have to memorize; up to the sound a tech booth, where Cody met Rico, the sloth who was perhaps a little too chill and lazy, who would double as an usher in his down time; down the hallway past the bathrooms with no signage indicating that they were bathrooms, so as to obligate the ushers to provide excellent service when patrons were forced to ask for directions to the lavatories; and the lobby and the front bar, where one usher was stationed by himself for the whole night, an older peccary named Art who apparently was gainfully employed with a day job but maintained this as his side-hustle because he was just that much of a workaholic. And because Art was stationed in such an important strategic location, he was the only one of the employees in all of The Chuckle Bunker who didn't have to attend the team meeting in the showroom.

The staff members squeezed into as small of an area as they could around where the three main managers, Jackie, Brett, and Karin, were sitting. The underlings were mostly twentysomethings or in their early thirties, but there were some older folks in the mix, some career waiters and waitresses. The club had seen its busy nights before, but this one was off the charts. 'All hands on deck' was an understatement. In extreme circumstances, management was known to pull some strange strings, and tonight they had even brought back some servers and bartenders they'd previously fired for infractions such as unexcused absences and showing up drunk to work; there was no place to be picky tonight.

Before the meeting got underway in earnest, Jackie was looking around and tallying her crew, making sure everyone was there. Most of them didn't want to be, but all of them were. The ushers, the servers, the bartenders, the food-runners, everybody except Art in the lobby, the four people running the box office, and the cooks and dishwashers getting everything ready to go for the pre-show dinner service. Few of them had good attitudes about their jobs but all knew they needed them to survive.

"Alright," the bear began, "so before we begin, we have a new member of the ushering staff…"

"We've got Cody here," said Brett, the ram gesturing a hooved hand at the otter, "he'll be training under Jaime today."

Cody gave a weak smile and timid wave to everybody, who replied with tepid applause.

"It's gonna be a hellish first couple nights," Karin remarked with a smirk, the hyena trying to be funny but instead just confirming the new guy's fears.

"Alright, everybody," said Jackie, "I know not all of you care that much about standup, so for those who don't know, George Snarlin is one of the biggest names in comedy, maybe not today, but historically, he's basically a legend. It's his first time here, but he has a reputation of having a pretty respectful crowd, but it's gonna be a big crowd all weekend - both shows tonight, both shows tomorrow, and we're adding a second show on Sunday-"

The staff murmured in frustrated acceptance.

"-and we might be adding a third show on Saturday."

The staff more audibly grumbled in protest.

"I know it's annoying, guys," said Karin, who was once a server here herself, "but think of it this way: more work, more money."

"And one more thing…" Brett said with a rather morose tone, "we're gonna use this busy weekend to help our Chuckle Bunker family out."

Everyone looked confused except for the three bosses.

"So… some of you might not know this…" The ram was looking straight at the new hire as he said this, "but Karin's son is currently in the hospital and has been for a few weeks now, doesn't look like he'll be getting out any time soon. The bills are piling up, so to help out, servers, bar staff, twenty percent of your tips are gonna be going to Karin and her family to help alleviate some of the debt. Sound good?"

Brett asked that with a firm and confident tone that made it clear he was expecting compliance and obedience. But perhaps it wouldn't surprise you, Dear Reader, to hear that the wait staff were much more vocal in taking exception to this.

"I… don't think I agreed to that," said a gopher named Audree.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's illegal," said a silver fox named Nick.

"It's only twenty percent of twenty percent," said Jackie in the tonal equivalent of a shrug, "it won't be very much, maybe a few bucks per table."

"Yeah, but that adds up!" said Robert, a buck.

"That's a few bucks we need to pay our bills!" said Jessica G., an opossum.

"'Twenty percent of twenty percent,' that's assuming they even tip twenty percent!" said Jessica V., a civet.

"You three are the only ones here even getting insurance from this job, you don't need any more help!" said Josephine, a gerenuk.

"Guys, that's enough," Brett said authoritatively as he put a hoof in the air, "it's for a good cause, this is not open for discussion." In his mind, this was a good showing of leadership. He clapped his hands together and slid off the ledge of the short wall he was sitting on. "Alright, finish setting up your stations. Jackie, did Art open up yet?"

"I'll tell him to," the black bear said as she raised the mic of her radio up to her mouth and pressed its button. "Art, we're ready to open up."

"Got it!" said the peccary on the other end. He went up the elevator next to the staircase and ascended to the ground level, walked up to the revolving door and stuck a key into its mechanisms. He unlatched it so discreetly that the people waiting outside hardly realized what he'd done for a moment there, and that bought him time to take the elevator back down to the lobby before the crowd could come down the stairs. When they finally did, Art was ready for them.

"Welcome to The Chuckle Bunker! Please have your IDs ready!"

-IllI-

"Well, looks like the line is moving… kind of…"

Deputy Nutzinger had a pretty decent vantage point from his sheriff's shoulder. By the time they'd parked the wolf's truck, the line was around the block.

Woodland was pondering something. "Do we even need ta' wait in this line? We already got our tickets!"

"So do we," said a ferret at his feet in front of him.

"We do too," said a Barbary sheep behind them.

The sheriff grumbled. "What exactly is preventin' us from just skippin' the line and sayin' 'hey, we're the Sheriff and Deputy, let us in'?"

"Because that would be shitty," the squirrel answered.

"But look at the line, Nutsy…" Ward moaned, gesturing to its length.

George did indeed see how long it was. "It's tempting, but… you and me gotta set a good example, partner."

The wolf just growled a little under his breath again.

To this, Nutzinger nudged Woodland's neck with his foot and whispered into his ear. "Maybe if you do it anyway while I loudly protest, I'll come away looking good."

"Aw, c'mon, Nutsy!" Ward shot back at full volume. "Why do you get to look good and I gotta be the bad-!?"

"Shhhhh-shh-shh-shhhhh!" George pleaded. "Because it'd be good for PR if the public didn't totally hate at least one of us, aaand… it's kinda too late for you."

The sheriff just stood there looking annoyed for a moment. But not long after, those waiting in line were soon passed by a hulking wolf with a squirrel tugging in vain at his ear.

"No, Sheriff, no, you can't do that! No, Sheriff! No, you can't! That's mean! No, Sheriff, Nooooooo!"

They pushed through the entryway and took the elevator down so as not to jeopardize the sheriff's balance of his little buddy by taking the stairs.

"...How they gonna seat the two of us, anyway?" George wondered out loud.

-IllI-

And just how do you arrange seating for mammals of all shapes and sizes in a facility with permanent seating? Well, there was no easy answer, so you had to get creative.

What The Chuckle Bunker and a lot of similar venues did was this: arrange seating for the very small on one side of the auditorium towards the front, scale up across the middle (with the main aisle running through the most medium-sized sections) and get as many large-species seats up front to seem fair compared to those of smaller sections while taking the extra supersized tables (and there'd always be extras because being larger meant they'd take up more space and you couldn't fit as many in an equivalent area as others) and wrapping them around the back. Therefore the seating of the showroom was completely asymmetrical, kind of in the shape of a WiFi signal, with a disproportionate quantity of the physical floorspace going to gigantic species' chairs and tables all to tally up to probably fewer than there were for rodents in the front-left corner. This way, members of all size groups had a chance to sit up front or hide in back if they so chose, and the bigger ones could still see over the smaller individuals in front of them who likely felt proportionately at least as far away from the stage, if not further.

But then you had to actually seat these people and just hope things fit well into what you had set up. At The Chuckle Bunker, tickets were by size class, and if they ran out of your size class first, then you were just S.O.L. But there could be exceptions. If a mouse or an elephant was playing the club, one could imagine that one size group would make up a large portion of the audience on a given night, in which case the staff could switch the seating options up accordingly with ample time to spare. But you always had those cocksuckers who either begged for a seat out of their size range and verbally accepted the terms and then complained that the seat they got wasn't serviceable, or the ones who complained that there were better seats in other size classes, or didn't clarify that there were people of different sizes in their party and made it a logistical nightmare for everybody.

Oh, don't get me started about the mixed-size parties; it was nice to see, say, a wolf and a squirrel hanging out together, but it was just way too much of a bitch to find them seating that didn't seem to be taking up space that could be used more efficiently. And then on busy nights like this, you had to double up, putting parties of two with other parties of two at the same table and both groups protesting, and this was especially complicated during the first show of the night which was the show with dinner service, so you get these groups of two who suddenly find out they're gonna have strangers sitting right in front of them after they'd had the table to themselves for an hour or two before the show even started, and oh my God the people who showed up early but were too cowardly to sit up front in the "splash zone" were almost as bad as the ones who showed up late and had the audacity to demand a seat in the front and threw a legit fit when you explained that there weren't any and…

…You can tell that the Chuckle Bunker staff were frustrated in their recollections of working there way back when and that that frustration rubbed off onto me, can't you, Dear Reader? Man, I don't wanna be so easily flustered and neurotic, God knows Robin clearly already secretly thinks I'm pathetic but he's too polite to say it, but it's hard not to hear all these tales about the sheer hell people give each other out of both malice and stupidity and not let that affect you if you have the heart of an empath. God, I sound pretentious, but I think I made my point.

Cody was learning firsthand just how hellish dealing with the public could be. When seating began, one member of the ushering team stayed at the podium to keep track of all the people who'd be joining parties late, while all the other ushers, servers, and food-runners who had nothing preoccupying them were expected to make themselves available and ferry guests to and fro. Guests were not to seat themselves.

In this, Cody was tasked with shadowing Jaime, keeping his mouth shut as the jaguarundi dealt with all the bullshit: guests completely disregarding Jaime's directions and wandering around the showroom; guests asking if they could seat themselves, being told no, pretending they misheard and asking again if they could seat themselves in a tone as if to confirm an affirmative answer to the first time they asked, and then seating themselves anyway; guests complaining that they weren't getting service when they'd gone ahead and sat themselves in a section that wasn't even open yet; guests saying they had friends who'd be coming later to join their party, Jaime explaining the staff would record their table number so they could escort them to there, and the guests promptly moving the second Jaime and Cody turned their backs, ensuring that the staff lost track of them forever. All through this, Cody had to commend that Jaime was keeping a rather professional demeanor. The cat wasn't smiling, but he wasn't frowning or scowling, either.

After dealing with one guest who had asked out of the blue whether flash photography was allowed and promptly getting angry when she was told it was not, the otter and jaguarundi walked back to the podium by the showroom door, having heard Brett grumble something on the radio about VIPs, to which Jaime muttered that they weren't even doing VIP tickets for this show. The two arrived back at the seating station and didn't have time to comment further on the strange message before Jaime seemed to notice something coming down the hallway.

"Shit," he said sharply under his breath to Cody, "is that the fuckin' county sheriff!?"

Cody didn't know what the county sheriff looked like. "Uh, I… I don't know…"

"Jaime! Cody!" said Brett, walking the wolf in, and in turn the squirrel on the wolf's shoulder. "This is Sheriff Woodland and Sheriff's Deputy Nutzinger, could you give them the best seats we have left in the mixed-size section?"

"Uh… sure, sure thing," Jaime said sheepishly as he led the duo in. "Hi, welcome to The Chuckle Bunker…"

The fine details of the small-talk they had on their way to their seats are lost to history, but it's remembered that the wolf wasn't very talkative, the squirrel doing most of the replying to the simple how are you doing?'s and How was traffic on the way here?'s. They soon got to a seat that was a few rows back from the stage.

"Will the comedians be able to see us from this far back?" asked Nutzinger.

"Uh…" Jaime looked at the stage and back to gauge an answer. "I'd say probably not, with the stage lights, after the first couple rows, it's all darkness from the comic's point of view."

"Ya hear that, Wolfie?" said the squirrel in a faux ebullience. "They won't be able to say fuck the police to the police's face!"

"Hrm," Ward grumbled as he sat himself down on the booth running along the terraced row of tables, "I can handle it if I need to… but I'd rather not need to."

"Uh, sir," the cat said to the rodent, "would you like a booster seat or would you like, uh, your own table and chair on… this table?"

"A booster seat, what am I, a child?" George scoffed. "No, I'm gonna sit my dirty ass right down on the table where food goes, like an adult!"

"Alright, I'll be right back," Jaime said without even blinking at the squirrel's comment, and he and his trainee walked off.

The cops were quiet for a moment.

"...Was my tone off?" asked Nutzinger. "I feel like that sarcasm came across too… mean-sounding. Shit, I hope I didn't piss them off. And not just because I don't want them spitting in my food. I'm single-handedly handing the PR for the both of us here."

"I'd be more concerned with them wonderin' why you got such a dirty ass," Woodland quipped in reply.

The otter and the jaguarundi arrived back at the podium shortly afterwards.

"Man, why did that squirrel have such an attitude?" philosophized Cody. "What's his problem?"

"Eh, you'd probably be in a bad mood too if your ass was as dirty as his," Jaime muttered tiredly, not having the energy to get angry at yet another misbehaving customer. "Hey, Nelson!"

"Yeah?" asked another usher, a bull about to take a pair of gnus in.

"Could you drop this off at 123?" said the jaguarundi as he reached under the podium to pull out a rodent-sized table and chair and handed it to the bovine. "For the squirrel with the wolf."

"Got it," Nelson said as he led his guests off.

As soon as he left, another usher, a lynx named Aleks, walked out of the showroom without stopping to pick up more passengers. Instead, he just gave a weird side-eye to the people at the podium.

"Hey, Jaime," said Aleks with a sort of diagonal nod.

"Oh. Hey, Aleks," Jaime replied as the lynx walked off.

"Alright, so, uh… are we gonna take more people?" asked Cody, jerking his head to gesture to the line.

"Uh… actually, dude, I gotta go to the bathroom," the jaguarundi said, walking off without even looking at his trainee. "You stay there and, uh… Brendan, show him how to run the podium."

"Sure thing!" said a moose towering over them. Brendan turned to the otter and gestured for him to climb up the stepstool to the top of the podium. "So how's it goin', new guy?"

"Alright," Cody said meekly.

The podium was still too short for the lanky guy, so Brendan was hunched over with his arms crossed on the top surface. "Corey, right?"

"Cody."

"Cody! Right, right, my bad…" the moose chuckled. "How you liking it so far?"

Cody shrugged. "Seems fine. It's a job."

"Ain't that the truth…" Brendan quipped with a scoff. A moment passed and it became clear that their services weren't needed for the time being, so Brendan carried on the conversation in a new direction. "You smoke weed?"

The otter was taken aback by how forward the question was. "What, would you like me better if I did?"

"Naw, man, that's not what I meant," the moose apologized, still clearly a little less interested in talking to this guy now since Cody was being such a defensive square. "I'm just asking, because if you did, get on Jaime's good side, he's your guy."

"My guy?"

"Brendan!" said a server, a tamandua named Miranda who was leading in a group of three goats. "Got a party of four, waiting on a Carol!"

"Got it!" Brendan replied as he picked up a pen and scribbled down the relevant information. "But yeah, dude, Jaime's a dealer. I mean, you saw that look Aleks gave him and then they both walked off."

"...Is that what they're doing!?"

"Yeah, man, no time like the present. Hell, we used to have this supervisor of the usher staff, this older dude named Scott… he and Jaime got busted smoking weed in the greenroom-"

"In the greenroom?"

"Yup, right before a show. But this place has such a high turnover rate that they couldn't afford to fire them. They got bitched out by Jackie and Brett, but nothing happened to them. Only reason Scott doesn't work here anymore is because his parents moved to Hilton Head and the guy still lived with his folks. Shit, I guess some people just never get their lives together."

Cody was still processing how brazen his new coworkers were. "...Is that why Jaime freaked out when the county sheriff showed up!?"

"I dunno, did he?"

"Yeah, he and the… deputy I guess came in for the show just a few minutes ago."

"Oh, they were just here for the show? Aw, alright. Yeah, that makes sense. Wouldn't be the first time the cops showed up here. Lots of ornery customers taking it too far, dude. Cops don't usually come here for us, though."

The otter wasn't totally new at being an adult, he was twenty-two and he'd had a few jobs before, but none so far where the work environment was like… this. "Would they… have a reason to?"

"I mean, how often do people get arrested at work in general? Only time I know of it happening here…" Brendan twirled a pen and rolled his eyes up in his head as he tried to recall. "...This was before I worked here, but I think a food-runner got busted for C.P. when he took his computer to Best Buy and the Geek Squad guys found it. He happened to be at work at the time, so they came and got him here."

"C.P.?"

"Yup. If you don't know what that stands for, I'm not gonna say it out loud. I don't know the guy's name, I never met him, but I think he was like… nineteen? When they first told me about this guy, I thought it meant he had a girlfriend who was seventeen or something and he had pics of her and he just got unlucky, but no, apparently there were some hardcore images in there."

Cody shuttered. "What kind of people work here!?"

"Oh, dude, this place needs all the help it can get," Brendan said nonchalantly. "As long as you're not a domestic terrorist or… like I said, a convicted pedophile, they'll hire you. As long as you don't have multiple recent felonies, they'll give you a uniform and put you to work. You're gonna meet some interesting faces here." He stopped to himself reflect on the place he'd come to be employed. "I… actually think one of the guys in the kitchen is a registered sex offender."

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah, but don't worry, he didn't do anything to children, I hear he just got unlucky with a public-urination charge-"

"Brendan!" Miranda was back. "Carol's party is at 241!"

"Got it!" The moose scribbled the number down next to 'Carol'. Back to the conversation at hand: "You smoke cigarettes?"

"You really want me to smoke something, don't you?"

"Naw, dude…" Brendan chuckled and shook his head, but seemed to only be smiling so as to maintain a benign work environment. "Just asking because if you do, you're allowed to take smoke breaks outside. Hell, you should lie and tell them you do just so you have a chance to get some fresh air every now and then."

The otter was starting to tune out. "I'll keep that in mind."

-IllI-

"So whaddya think?"

"Hmm…"

Kellen took another drag off his cigarette as he waited for the fox to answer. "...You can be honest with me."

"Oh, I like it, don't you worry. But…" Todd was smiling and seemed to be trying to find a way to phrase it that would be constructive and not just disheartening. "...I like it because I'm a comedian. I like it because I can hear the influence George had on you in it. But I don't know if your typical audience member's gonna like it. Reason being: observational like George does is tricky. High risk, high reward. It's either gonna be a big hit or the audience just won't be able to connect with you. You with me so far?"

The wolf took another drag, looking nervous. "...Kinda."

"So think of it this way: audiences are at once the most sociable and the loneliest people in the world, and that's why observational comedy works best when you have an established voice. You're not talking about yourself, you're just narrating the world you live in. These people aren't gonna laugh if they can't connect with you, and they're not gonna connect with you unless you tell personal stories they can relate to - and they want that so badly because everybody in this world is so goddamn lonely. That's what I mean about personal bits going over better - especially if you're just here to open."

"I don't have any interesting stories, though!" explained Kellen, hoping he didn't sound whiny. "For Christ's sake, I gotta spend a huge chunk of every weeknight hitting up open mics to practice my craft and get some traction in this freaking business - doesn't really leave me enough time to do relatable things!"

"Oh, Kellen, you're preaching to the choir," Todd insisted, "I'm still playing the game myself, I know the paradox. Ya gotta seem relatable when you're working so much that it makes you unrelatable to most people who just work nine-to-fives and call it a day. But I've been talking to other comedians about this, and I prefer the observational style myself, so I don't like this, either… but all the signs are pointing to observational being on its way out, personal and relatable being the way of the future. I'm in the same boat you are."

The wolf didn't know what to say. He just stared across the alley as he took another puff and reflected on this harsh wisdom from someone he respected.

"Because our entire job is to read the room and adapt to our audience, isn't it?" the fox continued. "It is. We gotta be malleable if we wanna keep paying our bills doing this shit for a living. And it's a cool thing we get to do, so I for one am totally fine bending so I don't break in the hopes I can keep doing this."

Kellen still couldn't look at him. "All of observational standup is dead?"

"Oh, not all of it, and it's probably never all gonna go away," explained Todd, "but like I said, you're still trying to make a name for yourself and you're only here tonight to butter up the audience for me and George. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, especially when that basket's got a sizeable hole in it."

"You realize I've done that set before, right?" asked the wolf, looking down at the fox and seeming irritated. "At open mics and shit. I've gotten laughs with it. What makes this different?"

Todd Klass stayed calm and simply shrugged. "I'll be honest… I'm kinda wondering why you asked me then if you didn't want to know my actual thoughts."

Kellen puffed some smoke out again and let out a groaning sigh. "I'm sorry, I'm just… yeah, I shoulda waited till after the show for this, now I'm just overthinking."

"You'll be fine, man. I was just saying that for an opening act, observational seems too risky and too overkill. Hey, maybe you're a standup prodigy and I'm just an idiot who doesn't know that he's gonna be a C-lister for the rest of his career, don't listen to me if you don't want to."

"I want to, and I appreciate the advice, I just-"

"How about this: if you wanna go with observational, make sure it's either an observation people can relate to… or something just so blow-'em-out-of-the-water funny that they won't be able to help but laugh."

But Kellen was deep in thought again as he kept sucking in that square in his hand.

"You wanna run any other material by me? Maybe it's not too late to switch things up."

"...I gotta do something about the mayor getting arrested," the wolf murmured like he was having an epiphany, smoke wisping gently out of his mouth with every syllable.

Todd seemed cautiously intrigued. "Oh, do you have something written up and tested already?"

"I'll think something up. I'll come up with something."

The veteran comedian tutted his tongue. "Love the confidence, but you don't wanna go up on a stage that big with material you just came up with five minutes prior. Even the best in this line of work need to work out their bits before putting them before a paying audience, giving a crowd like that unpolished jokes is just disrespectful to them."

"Well how am I supposed to stay fresh and relevant if I take a year to work a bit out!? How does anybody in this industry joke about current events when they're still current!?"

"That's the trick. They either work fast, work sloppy, buy the joke off of somebody else, or they're like George and they just lean into their character and hope it turns out alright. And sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Even George has had bad sets before - and not just in his youth."

Kellen just kept staring across the alley. "I got into this line of work because people told me I was witty and that I could crack a decent joke off-the-cuff… that's gotta count for something, right?"

"Well, Kel, if you wanna have an even tougher time keeping the lights in your house on, you can go and be a professional improviser," Todd quipped, and then began to walk off. "But you do what you're gonna do. I'm gonna let you finish your cigarette; I'm gonna go talk to the crowd waiting in line. We're goodwill ambassadors, Kel, that's our job as opening acts. Don't forget that."

"Please don't call me 'Kel'," the wolf muttered as he leaned back against the wall of the Marriott and crossed his right leg over his left foot, getting comfortable for a quick brainstorming session.

-IllI-

"Hey there! My name is Lori," greeted the sheep server, "thank you for joining us for dinner tonight here at The Chuckle Bunker! Can I get you guys started with some drinks?"

"Sure, what's a comedy show without some drinks to set the mood, eh?" asked Deputy Nutzinger as he looked over the menu. "Hm… is there a social stigma against guys drinking a Tequila Sunrise? Is that too girly of a drink?"

"Aw, you're the top law officers in this city, nobody's gonna judge you," Lori insisted with a saccharine smile and a little dismissive wave. "And for you, sir?"

Sheriff Woodland was awestruck by the goofy pun names that the establishment had given a bunch of their house cocktails. "Ya call these drinks some funny things… 'Sex on the Stage'?"

Lori just smirked and shrugged, unallowed to get cynical and agree that the name was stupid lest she risk losing that sweet, sweet tip money.

"Uh… I'll just take a Bud."

"Bud Light, got it!"

"A Bud," the wolf repeated firmly.

"A Budweiser," the ewe corrected herself with a smile that couldn't have been even remotely genuine at this point, "got it! And do you boys know what you'd like for your entrées yet? Some appetizers, maybe?"

"Uh, maybe, let's see…" the squirrel murmured as he buried his face in the menu again. "Vodka di Beretta pasta, sounds fancy! Vegetarian version, of course."

"Oh, it's a favorite among the staff!" And while the dish of rigatoni in vodka-infused pasta sauce with optional pepperoni and chicken sausage was actually pretty good, most employees would eventually come to like it less when they figured something out about it. Lori had already found out that "vodka di beretta" pasta was not an actual Italian dish, beretta in this case being as good as gibberish, and she'd also discovered a while back that the manager Brett was also the one in charge of curating The Chuckle Bunker's menu, but it was relatively recently that she'd put the pieces together and realized that the ram had named it after himself. Having this moment of clarity was like a rite of passage for the wagers of the staff, and it would forever taint their feigned enthusiasm when a guest ordered what was otherwise a pretty solid entrée.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff knew he'd soon be asked what he wanted since stupid Nutsy had gone ahead and initiated the order without his permission, so he glared at the menu and tried to quickly find something that didn't look too fancy for his tastes. "I'll just take the chicken tenders."

"Oh, Jesus Christ, Ward, that's not even an actual meal, that's just an appetizer!"

"All this other shit looks too ritzy fer a guy like me!" the wolf protested. "It looks like stuff the mayor'd eat just ta' try ta' convince himself he's royalty!"

"Something the mayor would eat?" asked Lori. "Oh, I'd like to imagine what we serve is better than prison slop."

That got a nasal chuckle out of the squirrel. "Okay… that was actually a good one."

The sheep chuckled bashfully in reply. Here came that sweet gratuity.

Woodland did not acknowledge the joke. He just kept scrutinizing the menu.

George leaned over and looked at the menu with his superior. "C'mon, Wolfie, ya don't even have to get something prim and proper, you can at least get something meal-like. Like…" He pointed to one listing. "There's a pulled-chicken sandwich where the barbecue sauce is made with Coca-Cola. Even comes with a side of fries for the grown-ass man you are. Don't you dare tell me that doesn't tickle your fat-ass fancy."

Ward pondered it and came to agree. "Y'know what? Gimme that sandwich. Extra sauce. And I'll take the tendies, too!"

"Sure thing," the waitress said as she scribbled it down, "did you want the tenders to come out first, or-?"

"As fast as they can get here in any order," the Sheriff replied, looking like the prospect of food was starting to lift him out of his grumpy mood just a little.

"Alright, I'll put that all in!" And with that, the ewe left them alone.

"You sure went from not wanting anything to wanting a lot of things pretty quick," Nutzinger observed.

"That happens sometimes."

"Hm…" George was pondering what to say. He didn't like that he was at a comedy show with someone who was extremely grumpy, and he wanted to cheer his boss up for selfish reasons, but to make it work, he had to frame them as un-selfish reasons. "You got something specific on your mind that's preventing you from getting into the mood?"

"The mood?"

"Jesus, dude, I didn't mean take me to your fucking bedroom-"

"Not with your dirty little ass, I won't."

"I meant we're at a fucking comedy club, dude, lighten up. For your own sake. Hey, be honest. Did I put a bad taste in your mouth when I-?"

"Yer double-en-tenders are killin' me, Nutsy."

"Shut up. Did it put you in a bad mood when I said this comedian likes making fun of things people hold dear like… your profession? Or authority in general?"

Ward seemed to be examining the empty stage. "Naw, Nutsy… I know that li'l lamb didn't mean nothin' by it, but when she made fun of the mayor gettin' arrested…" He shook his head in frustration. "...You know I got my problems with that ornery ol' kitty-cat mahself, but goshdarnit, I made it my job to uphold him, and I feel like I failed when I let him go out and make a damned fool a' himself."

"Oh, c'mon, Ward," his deputy scoffed, but seemed to do so in a friendly manner. "You're gonna have to wake up and smell the coffee sometime, man. He's a jackass, don't sweat letting him dishonor himself."

"It's not him I feel like I failed, Nutsy, it's…" Either a groan or a sigh, maybe both. "...I feel like I failed mahself when I failed ta' fulfill the duty I signed up for. I'd feel this way no matter who was mayor or what I felt about him. I ain't got much more than my work, Nutsy. I wanna believe I'm good at this. And…" He looked like he was about to admit something embarrassing. "...goshdarnit, he makes me feel like I'm actually kinda good at this. He might be a whiny little bitch, but he picked me ta' be his chief a' police over er'rybody else he coulda picked, and when it came time to get Elky and Goldy outta town, he trusted me ta' be the guy who took 'em out and took their spots."

And George found this strangely compelling. Some part of him absolutely wanted to let Ward know that he'd been strung along by the mayor as a patsy, a useful idiot, but another part of him wanted the wolf to stop killing the jocular mood of the evening, and a third part of him thought that bringing this up when the Sheriff was down would just unambiguously be an act of cruelty. So he refrained.

"I ain't blindly loyal ta' Prince John and I wouldn't normally be that subservient ta' anybody," Sheriff Woodland continued, "I'm loyal ta' what he represents: me bein' at the top a' the mountain at sumpthin' while still havin' someone with the authority ta' officially say, officially… 'Ward, ya did good.' That's all I want, Nutsy."

Nutzinger nodded. "I understand." And he wasn't lying. He'd always known there was some part of Ward that wasn't a complete asshole, it was just often hard to see it.

"The Chief of Police is such a fucking asshole!" Lori grumbled as she walked in through the kitchen doors. "Or- Sheriff or whatever the fuck his title is!"

"What he do?" asked another server, an arctic fox named Yuliya.

"Giving me attitude when he said 'Bud' and just expecting me to know he meant 'Budweiser' and just being bitchy and swearing at me for our menu being too fancy!" the ewe explained with a groan as she tossed her notepad on the bar.

"Guys, let's watch the language," said Brett, as loud as he could without actually yelling. "The customers can hear us through the door."

"Uh, 'scuse me, Brett," came a voice from above sounding like a demon with cold feet.

"What's up, Thor?"

"Can I run to the bathroom really quick?"

The ram just shrugged. "You're an adult, you don't have to ask," he answered, sounding almost embarrassed that he had to explain that.

"Yeah, but I just thought it'd be best to ask-"

Brett put his hooved hands up. "Thor. Just head to the bathroom. We're wasting time here."

The polar bear looked mortified, but he got the hint. "Uh… thanks." And off he went.

Brett shook his head tiredly as he let out a soft groan. He looked around the kitchen to assess whether there were any pressing issues to be attended to. There didn't seem to be anything urgent, but he could tell by the way that the third-in-command was moving around order tickets with an air of frustration that something must have been up with her.

"Karin, how you holding up?"

The hyena didn't look up from the register she was fiddling with. "Fine, why do you ask?" Her tone betrayed her fib.

Brett was speaking gently, but wasn't smiling or anything, just looking calm to the point of boredom. "It was Lori coming in and mentioning the County Sheriff is here, wasn't it?"

"I'm not thinking about it." Still not looking at him.

"...So you heard it."

That was enough for Karin to stop what she was doing, put her paws on her temples, and let out a long breath before turning to him. "Brett, I know you mean well by checking in, but I'm trying to keep it out of my mind here."

"And as your own boss, I have to point out that I can see in your body language that it's not as fine as you want me to think it is. We can't have you making mistakes because your mind is fogged over." He gestured to the door. "Do you need to take off for the night?"

"No, no, this night's too big for you two to go a woman down-"

The ram held up one hoof and put the other on the hyena's shoulder. "Karin. Let's step aside for a second."

He gestured again, this time to the back of the kitchen past the dishwashing area near the growing heap of trash. She followed.

When they were decently out of earshot, Brett continued: "Now you're under no obligation to tell me anything, but I encourage you to do so so that I can help you work through this. I still don't know what exactly you're feeling about all this, you've mostly talked to Jackie about it-"

"I haven't said much to Jackie, either, just like I said, I work to keep stuff like this off my mind." And indeed, the hyena hadn't told the black bear very much at all besides the basics.

"Well, what did you tell Jackie? Let me help you."

Karin just seemed more frustrated. "Brett, we're packed, we don't have time for this-"

"Then let's be quick about it. What are you feeling? What does Jackie already know? How about Pat, how's he taking all this? This is all to help you, Karin."

She still seemed frustrated, but one could see her coming to resign to this fate. "I just told Jackie that… Pat and I don't know how this happened… we always raised Kevin to be a good boy, we always raised him to respect authority, we… we always…" Her eyes were glassing over, and it sounded like she was staving off sobs brewing in her throat, but she was indeed good at pushing through her emotions, just as she touted herself to be. "...I just still don't… still don't know how to feel about this happening to my son."

Now, Brett knew that it wouldn't be very tactful to put thoughts in her head when she was having trouble processing the ones she already had, but as Karin had suggested, time was of the essence. "I mean, tell me what you felt when you heard Lori bring up the Sheriff. I still don't know how you feel about that guy's role in what happened. Do you… do you want to thank him for making sure the old sheriff and deputy got arrested, or do you want to kill him for standing back when it happened and not doing more?"

Karin looked confused more than anything. "I mean, what else could he have done?"

To which Brett was confused by her confusion. "...Stopped them as it was happening… somehow?"

The hyena winced, then shook her head. "I don't wanna think about it. This is all just so embarrassing-"

"Embarrassing?" Suffice it to say, not the choice of word the ram was expecting, and his tone made his surprise clear.

"Of course it's embarrassing! Nobody wants to be the parent of the idiot who runs his mouth off to the cops or assaults them or… whatever my stupid son did!"

Brett was finally starting to show some emotion. That emotion was horror. "I'm sorry - did he do something to provoke them!? I-I just thought that they mistook him for a criminal they were looking for."

And on the other hand, Karin was looking at him like she was talking to a child. "Brett… c'mon. Of course he must have done something. I don't know what the hell he did, and part of me wants to go up to that sheriff and ruin his night by asking him to recount what exactly Kevin did to press their buttons, but I'm not going to because it doesn't matter."

The ram knew this was none of his business, but at this point, he was itching with curiosity to know whether he was interpreting her words right. "Then how do you know he did something… belligerent?"

The grieving mother looked about done with this conversation. "...Brett. Police don't beat a kid into a coma unless he did something good and well to deserve it. You know that."

Brett was stunned.

And something about that stunned look on the sheep's face made the hyena suddenly feel compelled to stretch the conversation a little further. "You're looking at me like you expected me to assume they beat my son up for no good reason."

"I… I just sort of assumed the parents of a kid who got… um… I-I just assumed you'd do what most parents would do and presume your son's innocence-"

"Don't you think I want to?" Karin pressed. "But I have to face the facts. Cops aren't that stupid, they wouldn't risk their reputation doing stuff like that."

Brett's stunned-ness intensified.

And then a lightbulb went off in the hyena's head. "Oh… oh, I see what this is… You're assuming I'm anti-cop because of this," she said as she gestured to her face and the spots on her exposed fur. "You think I'm one of them who just assumes that the world is out to get them because they don't want to take responsibility for their actions."

"What!? No, no, I-"

"Well, listen, Brett," Karin hissed, "maybe… maybe if I was someone like him…"

She pointed to one of the servers loading up his tray with dishes, another spotted hyena. He looked more like a 'standard' hyena than Karin did, not having any of the physiological or phenotypic quirks that she and her family had that other hyenas could spot a mile away. And his name just happened to be Isaiah.

"...Maybe if I was a hyena like him," Karin continued bitterly in a growling near-whisper, "who calls a hyena like me a 'squarehead' or a 'blockhead' even though our heads aren't fucking square, someone who thinks he's more of a 'real' hyena than me because his people were too stupid to leave that shithole continent… he'd probably say that the police beat my son up for no reason, someone like him would probably assume my retarded fucking son was innocent without any goddamn evidence of it… hell, if I were like him, I'd probably be burning down the city screaming in the streets that they beat up my son because he was a hyena! But hyenas like him and hyenas like me aren't the same. We're not fucking idiots. Because we know how to behave ourselves and we take responsibility for our actions, like adults."

Interestingly enough, in interviewing all the former Chuckle Bunker employees I could find for this story, a good number of them say that Brett was himself a very conservative guy, probably a consistent Republican voter, most assuredly the type of guy who spent a decent chunk of the 1990s getting angry that the American cultural zeitgeist was allowing musical artists who hollered 'fuck the police' to get famous, and several just said plainly that he just struck them as mildly to moderately racist. Speaking with Brett myself, he does admit that he leans conservative, but steadfastly refutes that he harbors any malicious prejudice based on species or ethnicity or anything like that. And to prove it to me for this story, he shared the security footage from that night with me. The footage of the back of the kitchen from all those years ago is grainy by modern standards and has no audio, but I can vouch for one thing, Dear Reader: I've seen the look on his face. I don't know whether this guy is actually a bigot or not, but I can confirm that his mouth was genuinely hanging open just a little that night, almost like one would from the utter shock of hearing the most racist thing you've heard in a while.

Seeing that Brett had nothing left to say, Karin scooted past him. "I've gotta get back to work. And so do you."

The ram stayed there for a moment and processed what he'd just heard. Never had he ever been witness to such a bold statement of intra-species hatred. But before too long, he came to the conclusion that there was nothing he could do about it, and that they had business to attend to that night, so personal politics would have to be disregarded in favor of team effort.

Though as Brett was standing there in the back of the kitchen, his eyes did pass over the one-size-accommodates-most single-user restroom, and that jarred something in his brain to ponder another encounter he'd had recently that now seemed incongruous.

-IllI-

Somewhere along the line, Jaime had come back to the podium and sent Brendan to go do seating while he and Cody stayed there by the door. The jaguarundi was scrolling through a BlackBerry with a modified OS that was used to keep track of tickets for shows, showing the otter how it worked.

"So, yeah, you can search for the show… here we are tonight, 7 p.m., June 24th… here's a list of all the parties coming, listed by the person who bought them… doesn't have the names of, like, every single person in the party, but it says how many… you can click on their names… say they tell you they got four tickets but one flaked on them, check off three of the four of them… click click click… and you gotta do this because the comics get paid by how many people show up, not how many tickets we sell, between all the no-shows or people getting free comp tickets, that's almost never the same number… you gettin' all this?"

"Yeah…" Cody murmured.

"Alright."

And with that, it seemed to Jaime that his job here was done for the moment, so he went ahead and scrolled ahead through upcoming shows to see their stats so far, leaning over with his elbows on the tabletop, not saying a word.

Cody, however, found something fascinating. On the podium was also a clipboard with a photocopy of a handwritten roster of all the employees scheduled to work that night, everyone from the box office crew to the dishwashers to the ushers themselves. And upon realizing this, the otter realized his trainer's name wasn't spelled the way it was pronounced, and wasn't pronounced the way it was spelled, and Cody figured that maybe he could break through this guy's icy demeanor if he showed interest in getting his name right.

"Oh!" the otter said deliberately, pretending he'd just noticed what he'd discovered a few moments prior. "Your name isn't Jamie, it's Hi-may! It's Spanish! Sorry, man, everyone's been calling you Jamie, I've just been assuming they were right! You want me to call you Hi-may instead?"

Jaime (not Jamie) looked up from the BlackBerry to give Cody a strange look, one that seemed part confused, part pitying, but more than anything just disinterested. "I mean… yeah, that's how it's supposed to be pronounced, but everyone calls me Jamie anyway, even… half the fuckin' time, even other Hispanics call me Jamie, so…" He shrugged and went back to scrolling. "...Call me whatever you want, Jamie, Hi-may, Jay, just don't call me a… little fuckin' punk bitch."

Cody turned to stare off into space so he could process the fact that he'd just tried in earnest to make someone feel good by showing he gave a shit about getting their name right and was thoroughly shot down in response. This rejection would not help his struggles with social anxiety and awkwardness one iota.

"Man, Aries Shears, your show's in two weeks and you've only sold fifty-three tickets!?" the cat spat all of a sudden, addressing the BlackBerry. "Tigga, kill yo'self!"

Well, that certainly snapped Cody out of his inward focus. He looked around worriedly to see whether anybody was angry at him for standing next to the guy who just dropped the fucking T-bomb. Heaven forbid the bosses were around.

But no, the other staff and the customers passing by the podium either didn't hear him or didn't care. And Jaime just kept scrolling through the upcoming shows, not a care in the world. Well, perhaps Cody shouldn't have been so surprised by the lack of response; Jaime was a jungle cat himself, wasn't he? He was probably allowed to say it. But this strange moment had Cody wondering now more than ever where the hell he was working where employees could use the T-word and nobody'd even blink.

Not to say nobody wanted a word with that cat, though.

"Uh… Jaime?"

The jaguarundi and the otter both looked up - way up - to see a giant polar bear had somehow snuck up on them and was now towering nervously over them.

"Yeah?" was all Jaime said.

"Uh… you don't look too busy right now, you got a second?"

Jaime squinted and shook his head. "What do you want?"

Thor took a deep breath. "I want a moment to talk with you alone. I… might need your help with something."

"My help with something?"

"Yeah, um- b-but there's something in it for you! I'm not asking for a favor on the house, you'll have an incentive to wanna do it… I think."

The cat seemed to be warming up to the idea, but he still had a job to do. "I mean, I'd be willing to hear ya, but I can't leave this kid alone," he explained, gesturing to the otter. "And we can't have nobody at the podium."

"Uh, so… I get that, but I had to excuse myself from the back of the kitchen, I can't be gone for too long."

Jaime nodded, and looked around until he had an idea. "Hey, Aleks, can you cover me and Cody at the podium?" he asked into the speaker of his headset. "I wanna take him to see how the lobby works."

Aleks, however, did not answer.

"Aleks, do you copy?" Jaime repeated.

All the while, Thor stood there looking nervous about all the precious seconds ticking away.

"Aleks?" third time's the charm, one supposes.

The answer came from Jackie of all people. "Ushers, anybody have eyes on Aleks?"

"Uh, no?" said Nelson.

"That's a negative from me," said Art.

"I have not seen him in a while," said Brendan.

Jaime groaned off-frequency. "Aw, don't tell me the motherfucker walked on us."

"Walked?" asked the naive new guy.

"Yeah, people just walk off this job every now and then," Jaime explained. "God knows I've wanted to."

Once again, Cody found himself wondering where the hell he'd just agreed to work.

"If anybody sees Aleks, let us know," said Karin over the radio. (Nobody there would ever see him again.)

"I can cover you, Jaime," replied Stephan, a deer who was another member of the ushering department.

"Thanks, I appreciate it," answered Jaime.

Then Brett suddenly piped up on the radio. "Hey, any eyes on Thor? He said he had to use the bathroom, but the one back here's wide open."

The jaguarundi gave the polar bear a side-eye glance; Thor hadn't overheard the transmission. "Naw… haven't seen him," Jaime said, knowing that the bear had no idea that he was the him. Just as the cat let go of the button, the buck showed up.

With that, Jaime led Cody to the lobby to join Art while telling Thor to head out the back exit so that by-the-books peccary wouldn't snitch on him. While the otter was left to be regaled by Art's theories about how cigarettes were not carcinogenic, the jaguarundi snuck out to the alley to join the polar bear.

"Alright, what's up?" asked Jaime, sounding as impatient as he was genuinely curious.

Thor was nervous to pitch his proposal to the infamously standoffish jaguarundi, but he knew that he had to be quick before his absence became inexcusable (and that he could probably dropkick the cat at any time if need be), so he pushed through his anxiety and cut to the chase: "So… I don't talk much about this with people here, but I… I kinda-sorta deal in… substances."

The jaguarundi looked skeptical. "...Substances?" he asked, making sure he heard correctly.

And the bear did that thing where he pantomimed weighing things up and down in his paws as he searched for a suitable synonym. "...Drugs. I deal drugs."

A beat passed as the cat's face started squirming, and then he burst out laughing like a hyena. "...YOU!? YOU!? HA HA HAAA!"

Thor's cheeks were burning as he looked around the alley, hoping nobody else could see or hear them, his jaw hanging open as he desperately hoped for words to come out and salvage him from utter embarrassment. They did not.

"I didn't think ya had it in ya, man!" Jaime cackled as he wiped a very real tear from his eye. "You just don't seem like the type! Ya gotta network to be a dealer, you never struck me as a people person! Hell, you still don't!"

The polar bear rolled his eyes. "Well I'm networking with you now-"

"What, you want me to be your fuckin'... affiliate or something? Ha ha! No thanks, man, I don't think I need a partnership right now, and I definitely don't need competition-"

"Jay. Jay. Can you just hear me out for two seconds?" Well, that's one way to get over your anxiety: replace it with frustration. "I don't think you and me deal in the same market. Or… products. What do you sell? Just dope?"

The jaguarundi actually looked taken aback. "Huh? Aw, naw, man, I don't fuck around with heroin. Just weed."

Thor winced. "I said dope."

"...Yeah, and I said I don't mess with dope."

"You said you mess with weed. That's the same thing."

Jaime looked like he didn't know whether to laugh or give a dirty look. "Maybe if you're fuckin' forty, but everyone who buys off me would tell you that dope means heroin."

The ursid put a paw over his face and groaned; he did not have time for this. "Look: pills. I deal in pills. Like prescription medications. You don't sell pills, do you?"

The cat mellowed out and began listening again. "Uh… naw, dude, I don't fuck with pills, either. But, uh, hey, cool that you're in on such a niche market. Uh… where do you get your supply from?"

"I make it myself," Thor said directly. "I was at USD for pharmacy school before I ran out of money. And I was wondering if-"

"Man, I thought you got kicked outta school when they slapped you with that sex offender charge!"

Deep breaths, Thor, deep breaths. "...And I was wondering whether you could help me out with a new product I came up with from scratch."

"Aw, y'know, man…" Jaime mumbled, actually sounding rather bashful, "I appreciate the offer, but I only do this as a side hustle, I don't need to expand my stock too much, I don't need to be dealing pills-"

"No no. I'm not looking for sellers. Hell, I'm not even looking for buyers right now. All I'm looking for…" The bear trailed off as he started digging in the pocket of his work-mandated cargo pants. "...is a focus group."

"...What's in that?" the jaguarundi asked about the seven-day medication organizer.

"If I made these correctly… these should be painkillers that are completely non-addictive," the giant explained. "Various sizes and doses for various species, if you need me to write out what sizes are appropriate for who if you're not sure, that's fine. And I couldn't make very tiny ones for small rodents or anything because my big ass can't physically make 'em that small. But that's okay for now - I just need volunteers to test these on."

"Non-addictive painkillers, huh?" Jaime pondered.

"Mmhmm. I dunno how much you know about opioid painkillers already, but long story short, the way they work, they're inherently addictive; if they weren't, they wouldn't be working correctly. A friend of mine broke his arm and doesn't have insurance. He could probably get oxy or something off the street easy enough, but I don't wanna ruin his life."

"Ah, I get that, I get that, but, uh… I gotta ask, if painkillers are addictive by their very nature, what did you do to make them… not?"

"Fair question. These things I made are a hybrid of a bunch of different 'scrips. It's only a little bit opioid, that's the dangerous one, the rest is part nerve-blocking agents, part antiinflammatory, part just regular ibuprofen and acetaminophen. If I made these right, they shouldn't be giving you over-the moon euphoria so much that you'll be hooked because you never wanna feel pain again, they should just make you feel… okay. Fine. Alright. Not in pain… but I might not have made them right. That's why I gotta test it first."

The cat nodded slowly. He seemed to be giving this genuine thought.

"Now,"Thor continued, "you might not let your guard down much, but I get the sense that you at least have a good head on your shoulders, so I'm gonna trust you to know that it's in everybody's best interest if you find people who volunteer to give this a trial run, people who understand it's a work in progress, instead of springing it on unsuspecting people who might lose trust in you if they get hit with a nasty surprise if my formula turns out to be off. So that's why I'm here: I'm asking whether you know anybody who'd be a willing participant."

Jaime was pondering, rolodexing through his mind as he tried to think of any suitable candidates.

"Y'know…" the jaguarundi began, "...it's not that I'm opposed to it, it's just that… y'know, that's not my market, maybe I sell to some pillheads already, but they don't tell me about it, they just come to me for weed, they go to other people for other stuff…"

The polar bear looked disappointed.

"...But it's a damn good idea, man, I'll give you that much. Tell you what, I think I know some other people in the game who might be interested in… not taking it themselves, but they might know people who'd be down to try it."

The polar bear looked excited.

"Oh, thank you!" he said. "Do you wanna give them my contact info, or do you want to give me theirs-?"

But the cat suddenly shushed him and put a finger up, other paw to the receiver in his ear. "We gotta get back inside, dude," said Jaime, "they're looking for ya."

"They are!?" the bear yelped. Maybe one day he'd develop an effective antianxiety drug for himself, but for now, his sights were set on this current project.

"Yeah, let's get you back in there. But hey, if I think of somebody who might have some interested customers, I'll find you and give you their deets."

Thor simply nodded as he followed Jaime back into the building, hoping that this could be a breakthrough. His worry about getting wrung out for being AWOL was almost offset by his good feelings that he was one step closer to what might be the biggest success of his life, the one that would show the world he was here to heal it in ways it couldn't heal itself. This was gonna be his moment to shine. He could almost taste it.

-IllI-

"Large chicken tenders, large pulled chicken, extra small Vodka di Beretta?"

The lawmen nodded as the food-runner, an okapi named Jakob, dropped off their orders.

"Thaaank you," the squirrel said on his and his partner's behalf, then turned to the wolf as soon as the food-runner was gone. "I don't recall you actually saying you wanted large, large implies, like, cows and horses and bears and shit, right?" He glanced at the enormous portions laid out before the sheriff. "...Yeah, you're definitely supposed to be in the medium category. Did she just assume you wanted a ridiculous quantity of food?"

Ward just shrugged as he checked under the bun of the sandwich for any impurities. (Hey, in all my interviews with former servers at The Chuckle Bunker, I dunno if they're all telling the truth or if they're all lying, but while there are definitely restaurants in this world that will spit in your food if you agitate the wait staff like the two cops had earlier, all former employees insist that The Chuckle Bunker's kitchen wasn't one of them. Ain't nobody suing me for libel.) "Hey, as long as it costs the same price, I'll take it."

"Pretty sure that more food costs more money." Aw, I don't need to explain to you the quandary that is selling the same food at different sizes for different species and trying to price it fairly, you live in this world, too.

The wolf just grunted as he closed the bun, picked the sandwich up, and got to eating. He honestly looked like his mood was getting worse, just glaring vaguely off into space as he ate.

"I… noticed that you didn't say thank you to the server when he dropped our food off," said Nutzinger.

Woodland swallowed before answering, still not looking at his deputy. "Didn't even cross my mind."

"...Well that's not very nice."

"Didn't claim it was." Bite.

George stared at him for a moment before speaking. "I wanna accuse you of being an asshole, but I've got a funny feeling your head just… I feel like your head's in other places right now."

Swallow. "Where else would it be?" Bite.

Was it worth bringing this up again? George figured as long as he was stuck with this guy for the night, he might as well make their coexistence tolerable. "Well, for starters, there's the thing you brought up earlier about how you feel like you failed at your job-"

"I did say that." Bite "Whahhh abowww ihhh?"

"...Is it still bugging you?"

"Mehhhbehh." Swallow. "...Since when do you care? You just think I'm a stupid asshole who deserves to feel like a failure. How am I sure you ain't just tryna get me ta' lighten up so you can enjoy the show?"

…Okay, truth be told, it was a little of Column A, a little of Column B, but while the evidence for the latter was ample, the squirrel could stand to prove the former.

"Being willfully ignorant or being an asshole in your interpersonal conduct are valid reasons to mock and disparage a person," George explained, "but failure… contrary to what some crazy workaholics might say, that's not a choice, and that's something that can really fuck a person up. Honestly? …I wouldn't wish failure upon my worst enemy." Then he stopped to ponder that statement. "Okay, actually I would. All of my enemies, actually. Actually, I'd wish it upon anybody I just don't like."

"Which includes me," the wolf muttered between a gulp and a bite.

"Welllll…" The deputy had to think about that. "...Sometimes. But I don't despise you, Wolfie. I woulda fucking quit by now if I did. You think I like these insane hours we work!? If I hated you nearly as much as I hate my schedule, I'd've shitcanned this job a looong time ago. And…" Jesus, was he actually saying this sappy shit? In public? "...You certainly seem to treat me better than you treat other people, so it seems like the feeling is mutual. And as much of an ungrateful Gen-X manchild as you think I am… I won't take that for granted that you seem to have a soft spot for me for whatever reason."

The sheriff's eyes were still fixed on the last little piece of his once-humongous sandwich, looking even tinier in his thick paws. "...Well… talkin' to ya might not always be the most enjoyable thing, but at least I can talk to ya without gettin' bored outta my mind."

"Yeah, and as much as you can be a jackass, at least you're a jackass in interesting ways." The deputy couldn't be too nice with this - if for no other reason than a hick like Ward might reject it for being gushy and girly. "And let me put it this way: I'm not holding my breath that you'll turn into a saint one day, but… people can change; doesn't happen too often, but it can happen. And having seen a lot more sides of you than most people, I'm open to the idea that maybe one day you can be a decent person. And maybe… fixing your understandable frustrations with your position in life can clear your head and allow you to stop taking your anger out on the world and stop being such an asshole."

Woodland nodded as he polished off the last of the sandwich and got started on some fries that he hadn't touched yet.

"So there," Nutzinger shrugged, "that's my roundabout way of saying I actually kind of give a shit about you because you're an asshole: because I know the only way to fix you is to help fix the problems inspiring you to be an asshole, and if nobody else is gonna do it… well, shit, then I guess it's my job, eh?"

The wolf finally gave the squirrel a glance in the form of a skeptical side-eye. "Ain't nobody tellin' ya it's yer job if ya don't care. It ain't nobody's job but mine ta' fix my problems."

"Yeah, but… we're cops," said the deputy with an awkward smile, a line that made me briefly wonder whether I got this dialogue mixed up with the more-recent story about cops that Eddy's Brother is putting me up to writing on the side, "...it's our job to step up to the plate and do what nobody else is gonna do to help our people."

And that actually got a nasal chuckle out of the sheriff. "Hm… ain't that the truth?"

"Yeah…" George murmured as the conversation seemed to peter out for a moment.

But Ward, now going to town on his chicken strips, had more to say. "It ain't just the failure a' my job, though, it's… y'know… that, plus what ya said about how this comedian is prolly gonna piss me off, and just… remember why we're here again. The occasion."

Our birthdays. We're getting older. "Gotcha, gotcha," was all Nutzinger said.

"So… whaddya propose?" Woodland asked between bites. "Ya wanna fix me bein' a failure? I remember ya already preached to me the other day that I should think through what the county sheriff oughta be doin' before I do it, and I do do that as much as I can, but…" A sigh. "...Ya also said ya'd help me if I wanna be a better person, and I ain't gonna beat around the bush, Nutsy, I had my doubts 'bout what a kid like you could teach me, but…" He dropped his half-eaten chicken strip and took a sudden swig of his beer. "...Hell, after fuckin' up with keepin' ol' John-Boy outta jail, I'm open ta' hearin' new ideas about what I could be doin' better."

…Wow. George was not expecting that. As such, he was completely unprepared and had no idea what to say. But he might not get this opportunity again, so he had to say something. And he wound up saying something meta.

"Well… how about this?" Nutsy began. "Instead of just approaching a situation and trying to figure out how ya oughta handle it… how about… you start, uh… seeking out ways to do more and, y'know, go above and beyond, just like we said? Make your own opportunities to prove your worth!"

Ward pondered that. "Make my own opportunities, huh?"

"Or something like that," said George, less enthusiastically this time and admittedly aware that he didn't know where he was going with this advice. "Y'know, just… instead of thinking what you should do, also think about what you can do beyond that."

Woodland nodded. "Not a bad idea, Nusty… I'll be thinkin' on that." And he did indeed seem deep in thought as he picked and chose some french fries on his plate, silent for a moment before he offered a sizable one to his squirrel deputy. "Want one?"

The rodent winced. "Uh… I appreciate it, but I don't think I have enough physical space in my intestines for all that. Like… not enough cubic volume."

The wolf just shrugged and tossed the fry in his mouth.

"Jesus, dude, at least eat your fries with ketchup like a fucking adult," Nutzinger remarked.

But the sheriff only responded by offering George another french fry, this one less of a fry and more of a shred of potato crisp so thin you could almost see through it.

"Okay, fuck it," said the deputy as he accepted it and went to town on it, holding it in both paws as his buck teeth seemed to chomp down on it at a million repetitions per minute as it slid into his mouth like paper into a shredder.

"Heh, it's funny when you eat like that," the sheriff guffawed.

"Fuck you!"

-IllI-

Kellen did indeed come back from smoking in the alley, but Todd Klass hadn't seen him, so as far as he knew, Kellen hadn't. After fulfilling his duty of talking to the crowd waiting in line, the fox made his way back out the rear door. Here there was evidence that the wolf had in fact come in eventually: he now had his jacket with him laid out on the asphalt for him to sit on the dirty ground against the wall, which he did as he chewed on a ballpoint pen and contemplated the aggressively empty notebook page open before him.

"Kellen, what are you doing?" asked Todd, sounding both embarrassed and concerned.

"Trying to get some alone time to come up with new material," said Kellen, not even looking up from his journal. In fairness, there were some things scribbled on the paper, but they were all crossed out or otherwise stricken from the page.

"You're on in less than an hour, man, that's not a good idea," the fox said as he walked over to the wolf and put an arm around the poor rookie's back, the seated Kellen still towering over the standing Todd. "I understand you wanna make an impact and impress George, but you're setting yourself up for failure here. Do you even have anything good here?"

"No," Kellen said dejectedly as he stared at the minefield of ideas that weren't up to snuff.

"Of course you don't," Todd chuckled, giving the local comic a dose of tough love. "Some of my best two-minute bits took over a year to work out, if you can strike gold in twenty minutes in the alley behind a club, you wouldn't need to still be opening for bigger comics, you'd already be famous." He finished with a pat on the wolf's shoulders.

But Kellen still looked crushed. "It just feels so… shitty not to even try. Like, this is my chance, what kind of man would I be if I didn't do all I could to make the most of it?"

"And in life, that's not a bad way to think, but in this particular instance, you're just overthinking it. Have faith in the material you already have; if it's good, you're good, if not, accept that you weren't ready for success anyway. Now c'mon," Todd said with a few more pats, "let's get you inside. Wanna talk up the crowd with me? The line's about to start moving as they let General Admission in."

The wolf sighed and slammed his journal shut, then stood and picked his jacket up off the ground. "I guess I oughta." All he knew was that he couldn't go to the greenroom; George was there. Kellen couldn't handle being left alone with his idol.

And so he did join Todd in his ambassador mission to the waiting guests, but all of the audience members we can track down who met him that night all say the same thing about when he and Todd Klass met them before the show: Kellen Huffman was not very engaging. One individual who met the openers while waiting outside even recalls Todd taking Kellen aside and admonishing him for his sheer dearth of presence, reminding him that it was his job to capture the audience's attention and that being so charmless could ruin the night before it even started. Not to say that Kellen was completely lacking in interesting qualities as a person, but all who saw him immediately before the show that night agree that his head was clearly elsewhere.

-IllI-

The minutes immediately before opening the showroom to General Admission were at once the most mellow and most stressful for the Chuckle Bunker staff, especially for the ushering crew. General Admission seating began half an hour before the posted start time, an hour and a half after those with dinner tickets were first allowed in. By the time this moment rolled around, basically all those dinner customers were already seated and eating if not already done with their meals while an ever-growing line of normies was getting longer still, the patrons waiting in it growing all the more restless. To make things more annoying, the bar area in the lobby actually had a very small capacity (which is to say, like, how many people could be in the room before they'd be violating the fire code), so a majority of those waiting actually had to do so outside the entrance along the side of the upstairs hotel, and since having animals of all varying sizes line up on stairs would be a terrible decision, there was a distinct cut between the lucky few who were able to get into the lobby and bar and those who had to wait outside the door, so a few of the ushers (invariably the bigger ones who were harder to ignore) would be tasked with waiting outside and managing the line as it got rowdier and grumblier, often taking a lot of verbal abuse from the ones they were sent to watch. And woe betide you if the rest of your party was in the building while you got there late after the doors closed, you'd have to wait in line outside like everybody else - though you'd probably be one to pitch a fit about it to the ushers outside. So while there was very little movement of people to supervise, the mood was very tense.

Then six-thirty rolled around and it was time to get to work seating all these people. If it was difficult enough to seat a bunch of people of different sizes and species, doing so on a night like tonight where the theater would be at capacity was a guaranteed migraine. Not only would they be putting strangers at the same table to make sure as few chairs were wasted as possible, but the ushers were tasked with going back to the tables of those who were there for dinner, turning the unused seats around, and gently explaining that they would be putting complete strangers who'd shown up ninety minutes later directly in front of them, always giving the option that they who'd gotten here two hours early could move in front and they'd just put the new people behind them, but knowing that the luck of the draw might make things an even bigger headache if the sizes of the guests meant that the arrangement had to be fucked around with to get it to something close to tolerable. As you can imagine, guests were often displeased to learn this and often protested, but the staff had to do what the staff had to do. We don't even have time to get into the madness that ensues when it's found out that someone bought tickets for the wrong size section or a scalper sold tickets to seats that did not exist.

In the mixed-size section where the assortment of patrons was always a crapshoot, trying to pair up sets of strangers at the same table was especially tricky, especially since "mixed size" could mean anything from a rat with a skunk or a horse with an elephant. But sometimes, you get lucky, like when Jaime and Cody (exempt from having to corral the line outside due to their small frames) happened again upon the County Sheriff's Deputy sitting by himself, the wolf he came with presently in the bathroom after consuming a ridiculous quantity of food, the squirrel being much mellower than earlier, saying that he understood completely that they needed to use all the seats they could and being totally cool with them seating a mouse and a brown bear at their table with them.

Many misadventures were had during seating, but eventually they got enough people in that Jaime and Cody were allowed to park up at the podium while the other ushers conducted the seating. There was still a healthy flow of latecomers arriving as the clock wound down closer to showtime, but the long line outside was now gone, and the jaguarundi and the otter waved at Brendan as the moose walked past them, now allowed to come inside to resume seating the guests.

"But yeah, man," said Jaime, "there might come a day where you gotta help one of the big guys with the line outside. It's not usually too bad, but…" The cat made a funny face as he remembered some less-than-pleasant experiences. "...if it's ever raining, or if it's just too cold out, we'll have to line them up inside the lobby of the Marriott."

"The lobby of the Marriott?" asked the incredulous trainee.

"Did I stutter?" Jaime muttered, staring straight down at the BlackBerry atop the podium, completely unaware of his surroundings. "Yeah, when that happens… we have an agreement with the management of the hotel that we're allowed to do that when we need to, but it's one of those things where the hotel staff don't know that, because they don't stick around at their jobs long enough to learn all the rules either, and man, the hotel security are espehhhcially bad. Because remember, they're in cahoots with the cops, but they're not cops, but they wanna be cops, so they wanna go off on a power trip to fuckin' prove themselves. There's been at least… two?, two occasions where the crowd was getting out of hand in the hotel and Security wrote us a ticket for inciting a riot-"

"Inciting a riot!?" Cody knew he sounded dorky constantly repeating all the shocking things he heard Jaime mention, but Jaime just kept bringing up increasingly more shocking things.

"Mmhmm. Stupid motherfuckers decided to-"

But something possessed the jaguarundi to look up and see whether there were any customers around who might be offended by his language (seemingly unlikely at a George Snarlin show, but you never know with these crowds). He was glad he did, because he saw the Nottingham County Sheriff waddle on by the podium just at that moment, walking back into the showroom from the bathroom. The wolf didn't seem to be looking at them, but he was wearing a very annoyed look on his face, and Jaime (who may or may not have had an active warrant for his arrest in a neighboring state) didn't want to risk bringing up crimes in Woodland's presence.

The cat let out a sigh of relief when the sheriff disappeared.

"...You alright?" asked the otter.

"Yeah, I just… remembered something." And he actually did; seeing the lawman made him recall that he had business to attend to with a certain polar bear in the back of the kitchen. "So for training you, you and me both get free meals, so we gotta get our orders in before the kitchen closes."

"What time's the kitchen close?" Cody asked before checking his watch. And that's when he realized something. "Wait… it's seven-oh-two."

It was indeed 7:02 p.m. The show was scheduled to start at 7 p.m. Therefore anybody who knows basic math could tell you that there were eight minutes until the show began.

"Shouldn't the show be starting now?" the new guy asked for clarification.

His trainer just scoffed. "Naw, man, they don't even attempt to start the show on time. Never do. Their philosophy is, like… they wanna start a little late because it gives us extra time to seat the late people and it's just better for the show to have as big a crowd as possible."

"Hm…" Cody murmured. "I guess that makes sense."

"Mmhmm," Jaime concurred disinterestedly as he grabbed his radio. "Hey, can someone cover me and Cody at the podium? I wanna take him to the kitchen to order food."

Karin answered: "You can just order over the radio, I'll put it in for you."

…Fuck. "Uhhh, we were kinda hoping we could get a drink while we were at it." Working at The Chuckle Bunker wasn't all bad, you had access to free unlimited Coke and Sprite since they were in abundance as mixers at the bar anyway - but you had to be in a position where you were allowed to be at one of the bars, such as the one in the kitchen, to be allowed to actually get it.

The radio came back to life: "...Alright. Can somebody cover Jaime and Cody at the podium?"

A response came soon after: "Yeah, I gotcha, be there in a sec." It was Brendan.

"Thanks, we appreciate it."

A few moments later, the moose came to relieve them, and the jaguarundi led the otter back into the bowels of the theater to its kitchen, and as Cody looked over a menu to see what was good, Jaime snagged a piece of paper off a server's notepad and wrote down a name and phone number for one of the dishwashers to contact at his greater convenience.

-IllI-

Ward got back to his table to see there were now two others there, a bear about his size sitting on the booth-back facing the stage and a mouse sitting at a smaller table on top of the main table, not far from George with his own. The mouse and bear seemed to just be palling around as friends, but they stopped their witty banter when the wolf came back. The bear specifically seemed surprised, almost nervous as he saw the sheriff slide behind the table and sit next to him; maybe he was afraid to sit next to a cop, maybe he was intimidated that a wolf could rival him in height and girth, but in any case, Woodland didn't care, and at no point did he make conversation with the two random gentlemen at his table.

"Who're these guys?" the sheriff asked his deputy. Despite the look on his face, he didn't sound annoyed or anything, just confused.

"They need to use every seat they can, so they sat them here," Nutzinger explained. "I hope you washed your hands after taking a dump for… what was that? Forty minutes?"

"Hey, I wan'ned ta' make sure I had it all outta my system before the show started," Ward calmly protested.

"That doesn't answer my question."

"What I wanna know is… I'm glad I'm not late for the show, but why ain't I late? Ain't it past seven?"

"So they're a few minutes late, so what?" the squirrel shrugged, not looking at his boss sitting behind him.

"I'm just sayin' my momma didn't raise me ta' leave people waitin'."

George rolled his eyes, knowing that that simply wasn't true. "Well, listen, man, they're not gonna keep us waiting here forever, just hold your horses."

"Excuse me?" asked a mustang sitting at the next table. "I'd very much appreciate you didn't use that terminology again."

"Yeah, ya racist!" Ward goofed as he playfully backhanded the rodent behind the shoulders.

Vexed, Nutzinger just shrugged and mumbled "Alright." He certainly wasn't expecting to run into somebody so easily-offended at a George Snarlin show, but it just goes to show how frequently people showed up to these things not knowing anything about the comedian and setting themselves up for a bad experience. Therefore George just reassured himself that he'd soon be having a better time than this mustang would as he kept his eyes locked on the empty stage.

But the stage wouldn't be empty for long. In the greenroom, the fox and the Irish wolfhound were hanging out, shooting the shit, perfectly calm, while the brown wolf stood near the curtain to the stage, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, one foot up against the wall and the other out at an angle supporting him like a buttress, looking around the room at nothing in particular, trying not to look nervous but clearly looking nervous.

"You nervous, kid?" asked the legend himself.

Kellen was able to give his hero a few quick glances as he spoke, but overall kept switching between giving George eye contact and staring at the opposite wall. "I mean… it's kinda good that I'm nervous, right? The day that I stop feeling nervous about whether I do a good job or not is the day that I don't care anymore. Right? I mean… that's what I've heard."

"Oh, that is bullshit." The old dog stood up and walked over to give his protégé some words of wisdom face-to-face. "Look, kid… think of it this way. You got the opportunity to do some cool shit tonight. Shit that other people would kill to do. Have some fun with it. And not just because the audience ain't gonna have a good time if they can tell you're not having a good time, have fun for yourself. Don't waste this opportunity shitting your pants, you might never have another like it. And I don't necessarily mean you might not because you're not good enough, I mean you might get hit by a fuckin' bus or drop dead from a heart attack tomorrow for all you know." George paused for a moment to look into Kellen's eyes to make sure the young comic was listening. "...I know I play an ornery old fuck on the stage, but… more often than not, I like being alive. Some neat shit happens to you. Beats the alternative. And now that I'm runnin' outta years… I can't help but think of the time I wasted. I don't dwell on it, because that'd be wasting even more time, but I certainly have my regrets. For me, it was all that time spent gambling and indebting myself to the government for the rest of my life; for someone else, it might be time spent not feeling good when they oughta been feeling great, just because a bad moment of life is preferable to a good moment of death. Take some advice from an old man: don't waste time not enjoying yourself."

The wolf just stared into the eyes of the man he admired almost like a god; he was speechless.

"Now that's some wisdom from a legend right there!" the fox added from the couch.

"Aw, Todd, will you stop being such a fucking suck-up?" the hound spat as he turned around to face his other opener.

Todd took it in good humor. "Shoulda seen that one coming!" he chuckled.

George turned back to Kellen and gave him a pat on the shoulder. "Have fun with it tonight, kid. You're gonna do great."

The wolf had to ask: "...Do you really think that?"

"Well, fuck, I dunno!" the old dog said as he threw his hands up. "But you know what? Even if you don't, so what. You're up there, and they're not. Who're they to judge you!?"

Kellen had to nod at that, staring at the wall behind George's shoulder. He didn't know how much he could fake confidence tonight, but if his hero was giving him damn good advice, he knew he'd better do what he could to take it.

"...I appreciate it, George."

"Don't mention it."

And then the music started playing.

"Helllllooooo, ladies and gentlemen, to the onnne and onnnlyyyyy… CHUUUCKLLLLLE BUUUNKERRRRR!"

"WOOOOO!"

One might be surprised that the dull and boring sloth in the sound booth could elicit such a lively response from the crowd, but elicit it he did.

"Tonight, for your opening act," Rico repeated into the mic, "you've seen him in comedy clubs all over Delmarva! Let's show some applause for Kellen… HUFFMAN!"

"WOOOOO!" Considering the vast majority of the audience had no idea who this person was, they were pretty nice to cheer for him as loud as they did.

While Rico was making the announcements, Jaime was leading Cody to a spot in front of the sound booth, a perch from which they'd have a good vantage point over virtually the entire showroom.

"So this is one of the main spots we stand at during the show," the jaguarundi explained as he and the otter leaned over a ledge to look at the audience below. "There's here… right next to the stage, at the door to the greenroom, in the back by the entrance… that's all the best places to watch and make sure nobody's being disruptive or recording the show because… filming a live event without permission is technically a form of piracy I think?"

"For your feature," the sloth continued, "you've seen him on Comedy Central, and last year on Last Comic Standing! Give it up… for Todd… KLASS!"

"WOOOOOOO!" the crowd cried again, louder this time.

"What do we do if they are recording?" asked Cody.

Jaime's face scrunched up at the stupid question. "You go down, tell 'em to stop."

"And for your headline performer…"

The crowd grew ever eager.

"You've seen him on countless HBO specials! A living legend of standup comedy! Please, put your hands together… for GEOOOOORGE… SNAAARLIIIIIIIN!"

"WOOOOOOOOOO!" The crowd was going absolutely nuts.

And speaking of nuts:

"Wait… Nutsy," Sheriff Woodland asked his deputy, "how many guys we gon' see tonight?"

"What, you ain't never heard of an opening act before?" the less-famous George scoffed.

The crowd's raucous applause simmered down as they kept their eyes fixed on the empty stage that wouldn't be empty for long.

"And now, please give a warm welcome to your opening act… KELLLLLENNNNN… HUFFFFFMANNNNN!"

The claps and cheers weren't as loud or passionate as they were for the old dog, but as the unknown brown wolf walked onto the stage, the welcome was warm enough. He strutted on slowly and coolly to his walk-up song of choice, a somewhat obscure relic of the grunge era that the comic associated with a time when he was a young man ready to take on the world:

San Francisco!
Where the flowers bloom in spring…
I said, fade to winter…
And see what disease brings!

Augustino!
With his eyes once a shining sea…
I said he's half shadow…
God, don't let that be me, yeah!

…I'm a stardog champion!

"Yeah, he's prolly more a dog than a wolf, I reckon," the much larger wolf in the third row grumbled to himself, "I could take him in a fight, I know it-"

"Jesus, Ward, is this constant hypermasculine dick-measuring contest all that goes through your head!?" George asked in a harsh whisper.

"It's hardly even that. He's callin' himself a dog with his music," the sheriff explained. "A real wolf'd never do that. We don't care fer puppies. I already don't like this guy."

Oh, you are not gonna like the headliner then, Wolfie. "He probably just picked it because it sounds cool, stop overanalyzing the lyrics and watch the show."

Kellen really didn't look nervous. He looked like he was a man on a mission. With very smooth and deliberate motions, he walked up to the mic stand, picked it up with his left paw, grabbed the microphone itself from its slot with the other, and placed the stand off to the side and out of the way. With his mighty weapon in hand, he uttered the magic words:

"...How's it goin', Nottingham?"

And the crowd cheered. They loved it. They always did.

Now it was time to get to work. Todd was completely spot-on with what he told Kellen earlier in the evening: opening comedians aren't supposed to knock it out of the park, they're just supposed to warm up the audience and get them in a good mood so as to set up the heavy hitters. Literally just like baseball, the first two batters in the lineup just have to get on base so that the cleanup guys can have more of an impact when they smack a home run. The task of the opener was to present easy, accessible material, and to do a whole lot of crowd-work so the audience knew they were being spoken to and not spoken at. Simple enough, nothing this wolf hadn't done before. He had ten minutes - for an opener, an extremely charitable allotment.

"So… what brings you here tonight?" he asked coyly, with the tone of someone confidently but cluelessly hitting on a potential mate.

The stupid question got a decent amount of light chuckles, not bad for a setup rather than a punchline.

"Hey, where's those people in the crowd who don't even know who George Snarlin is and they just wanted to get out on a Friday night? And now they don't understand what the hell they've just gotten into?"

The Snarlin fans in the audience giggled, unaware that there were indeed members of the audience who were exactly as the comic had described.

"C'mon, show yourselves!" Kellen dared as he paced slowly back and forth on the stage. "Every show has those people, I know you're out there! They're just thinking ugh, I'm having a midlife crisis, I need to go out and do stuff! Ughhhhh, but what!? I'm just gonna buy tickets for the first guy playing at The Chuckle Bunker without doing any research into him! Who is it? Some old guy? Aw, that should be good, old people are mellow and unchallenging!"

The crowd laughed gently at the ridiculous but plausible notion. They weren't going to pieces, but they weren't bored either.

Kellen stopped and began hurriedly looking around to imitate a confused patron. "Wait… why is this place so crowded? Why does everybody wanna see an old guy talk!? WAIT… does this mean I coulda seen somebody cheaper if I waited another week!? I WANT MY MONEY BACK!"

This got a bigger and better reaction, but still not vicious laughter. But that was okay; he wasn't supposed to burn the house down.

"C'mon, for real, where's the people who don't know anything about George Snarlin!?" the wolf dared.

Deputy Nutzinger smirked as he pointed his thumb over his shoulder to indicate his boss, to which Sheriff Woodland flicked him behind the head with a fat finger, but the squirrel was too small for the comedian to see in the darkened showroom. Instead, Kellen saw the horse next to him raise a hooved hand with a bashful smile.

"You, big guy!?" asked the comic. "Why'd you come here if you don't even like this guy!? That's a seat someone else woulda killed for!" His smile and jocular tone suggested he was joking, but those who knew could tell he meant it.

The mustang chuckled nervously. "...My friends dragged me here," he replied sheepishly, gesturing to a badger, a ram, and a bull sitting with him.

"So…" Jaime said to Cody up above the floor of the showroom, "...if the comedian addresses them, then they're allowed to shout back. Only then."

"Your friends dragged you here?" Kellen repeated in disbelief. "Well, shit, at least they have good taste!"

The audience cheered at this.

The horse kept chuckling through his anxiety. "Yeah, I…I don't really like standup-"

"You don't like standup!?" asked the comic, to which several audience members booed, directed at the horse rather than the wolf. "Well you are in for a hell of an introduction!"

The audience again cheered at this.

"For real, dude, you didn't even have to say that last part!" Kellen continued. "You coulda just stopped after saying your friends dragged you here! If you're looking to bury yourself, I know some cemeteries that're selling plots!"

The crowd liked this rip on the poor pony, who now looked thoroughly embarrassed. It wasn't the cleverest joke, but in context, it did the trick.

The mustang tried to speak again to save face. "Well, no, I've been to comedy shows before-"

But Kellen was on the clock and he couldn't spend it all bantering with this one guy who was already in over his head. He had to move the act along. "Alright… anybody here to get away from their families?"

Some more chuckles, mostly from those in the audience who were indeed there to get away from their partners and children. The bear sitting next to the sheriff guffawed deeply at this line, giving a very imbalanced high-five to his mouse friend. The sheriff himself, already deciding he didn't like this comic, found his neighbor's reaction utterly annoying.

"Because that'd be a genius strategy! This show ain't family-friendly! If you wanna get away, what better place to go than somewhere that's family-hostile? Hell, I came here to get away from my family!" And then a pause with a very rehearsed moment of faux reflection. "Actually, I just said that to make you think I was cool, they already got away from me."

Some laughs and claps from the divorcés in the crowd.

"Like, it pisses me off, but I can't blame them? Like, lemme put it this way…" He seemed to spread his feet and plant himself sturdily on the stage. "Here's the scenario: you're a woman. You're married to a guy who's trying to become a standup comedian even though he's thirty-seven and still not famous. Would you stick with that guy?"

Bigger laughs; the audience agreed this sounded pathetically unattractive.

"I mean, have any of you people heard of me!?" he barked, and the audience loved it. "...The fact that I'm so bitter about it was also something she found unattractive."

They laughed in agreement.

"And to be fair, I can see how she thought it was kind of annoying when my nonexistent comedy career bled into regular life. We have two daughters, a nine-year-old and a six-year old, and my wife always hated how when they were younger, I'd turn storytime into an opportunity to practice my material." He squatted down to lean over an invisible pup in an invisible bed. "Daddy, tell me a story! Of course, Evelyn, sweetie! So the other day I was at a show in Rehoboth Beach and I ran into this hooker with a wooden leg…"

A touch on the stupid and random side, but that got the biggest laugh up to that point. Of course, not everyone found it funny, and Sheriff Woodland certainly thought it was rather obnoxious that his deputy dared to be amused by such a bit.

And yet there was someone else in the audience who proved even more obnoxious because he didn't like the bit:

"WE WANT GEORGE!" some male voice hollered, a few muttering in agreement.

The wolf froze and glared out into the audience, trying to find the source of the dissent.

"Now that guy shouldn't be shouting," the jaguarundi explained to his trainee, pointing out the culprit with a laser pointer. "Go down there and tell him not to do it again or he's getting ejected."

"Me!?" asked the rookie. "By myself!?"

"Yeah," Jaime shrugged, "just go down there and tell him he doesn't get another warning."

"Anybody got eyes on that guy?" asked Jackie over the radio.

"Yeah, it's table 157," the cat replied, "Cody's on it."

The otter didn't see any way out of this, so he went down to tell the ornery goat to knock it off.

Now, truth be told, Kellen was nervous about a lot of things that night, but the prospect of a heckler wasn't one of them. George Snarlin had a reputation for having pretty well-behaved audiences, so this genuinely never even crossed his mind as a possibility. Of course, now that this had happened, it was his obligation to stand his ground and put this guy in his place, and for lack of a better piece of ammunition, the wolf decided to say exactly what was on his mind:

"Hey, man, you say you want George, but do you think George wants you disrespecting his openers like that? Everybody else in the audience understood except for you! Because the rest of his fans are fuckin' cool!"

The crowd praised his praise of the crowd.

"Yeah, shut the FUCK up, ya stupid prick!" some other guy in the audience yelled at the heckler.

"Seriously, man," the comic continued, "do you even like George Snarlin for the right reasons? Or in your fuckin' five-year-old brain do you just hear him say all the naughty no-no words and think that's funnier than shit?"

This line also landed decently with the audience; Kellen's comeback hadn't been the funniest or most devastating, but George's fans seemed to appreciate how he'd mostly kept it classy while adding some scathing wit in there too. As for Kellen himself, he let off the poor dumb bastard upon noticing that he was already being confronted by one of the ushers. Besides, he had a set to perform; letting this cocksucker sidetrack him would mean the goat won.

And off hidden in the doorway to the greenroom, a fox and a wolfhound were nodding in approval.

"I like this kid," the old dog mused, "he ain't the funniest, but he's got the heart for it."

"Couldn't agree more," concurred the feature act.

"Aw, will you stop trying to fucking fellate me, Todd!?"

"Fuck, where was I!?" Kellen chuckled to himself as he genuinely struggled for a moment to recall his place. This was not a death sentence, however; he played it cool enough as he paced quietly for a moment while wearing a confident smirk, and soon enough he did indeed remember his bit:

"Oh yeah! So my wife wanted out of the marriage because she just generally thinks I'm not good at being a family man? …I agree! Man, the way I was raised, I have no frame of reference for how well-adjusted families are supposed to act!"

A healthy quantity of laughs. He'd made his argument well.

"Hey, who else here grew up in a fucked-up family?" he asked. "The kind where instead of growing up and realizing you were stupid to hate your parents as a teenager, you grow up and realize even fucking more reasons to hate them! C'mon, make yourselves known, we're all in this together!"

A good number of the audience cheered in solidarity of their fucked-up childhoods - which out of context would probably have been alarming, but in this case it was a sign that the wolf was succeeding.

And in the crowd, an older, larger, grayer wolf kept his mouth shut, but upon hearing his squirrel buddy whoo at the stage and seeing the bear and mouse next to them both sheepishly raise their hands, he found himself begrudgingly raising his paw as well. He'd concede, the comedian had found their common ground despite their species rivalry - even if he cringed at the first of many pop-culture references the man on the stage was about to drop.

"My family growing up wasn't like Leave It to Beaver, it was like All in the Family! It was like if Married with Children just incidentally took place during the timeframe of The Brady Bunch! And I'm willing to bet that more people can relate to the crappy TV families than the happy TV families. Hell, with the way I grew up, if you saw a news report saying something like… 'Tonight on FOX Nottingham News at Ten, a local man stabs his brother over a turkey sandwich!'... when you were raised in a family like mine, you hear that and you just automatically know that it was not just the turkey sandwich! That's just the latest in a looooong line of transgressions!"

The crowd seemed to be digging this, and Kellen dug that.

In the kitchen, the server who'd taken the trainer and trainee ushers' orders, a boar named Mia, approached Karin with their orders.

"M.S. asiago chicken, M.S. pulled chicken sandwich for Jaime and Cody," said the waitress as she brought the dishes to the ready.

"Jaime, Cody, your food's ready," Karin said into the radio.

"Karin, mind if I go out for a smoke break?"

"Are all your tables covered?"

"Yeah."

"Go for it."

"Can we get someone to cover Jaime and Cody by the sound booth so they can eat?" asked Jackie over the radio, standing in the sound booth herself right next to Rico.

"Hey, Jackie," asked another server, a dromedary named Khalil. "My tables are all good for a while. Can I take my break?"

"Sure, thanks for asking," replied the bear before speaking into her radio again. "Any ushers who can cover them?"

"Yeah, I'm on it, I'm just getting a drink in the kitchen," answered Nelson, putting his empty glass in the to-wash crate. The bull headed out as another server, an orangutan named Paul, approached Brett, the ram conveniently out of the hyena's earshot.

"Hey, Brett, I just checked in on all of my tables, they're good, mind if I take a smoke break?"

"You may," the boss answered flatly.

"I'm still learning new things about how fucked-up my family was," Kellen rolled along. "Like what's this I'm just hearing now that… it's illegal to spit on other people's cars!?"

The crowd laughed.

"Because, hey, the way I was brought up, I thought… is it not commonly agreed upon that if someone takes time out of their life to spit on a car, that that person probably deserved it!?"

The crowd laughed harder.

"No one's doing that for fun! And yet it's vandalism!? VANDALISM!? Hey, someone spits on your car? Take a fucking paper towel, it's gone! Hell, you spit on someone's car right before a rainstorm and there will be no evidence that it ever happened! None!"

He'd admit every day of the week that he didn't even think this material was a surefire success, but here they were, eating him up. If asked about it, he'd attribute a lot of it to his energy. But one way or another, there seemed to be a good chunk of the audience enjoying this comic most of them had never heard of.

And yet he couldn't stop thinking about that goat. We want George!

He'd performed this set so many times that he was able to perform it again on autopilot as his brain got to pondering: was he really that much unlike his hero that this guy found him to be unpalatable? I mean, yeah, the guy was an asshole who'd hollered at him amid a crowded house and many would say that Kellen shouldn't care about that guy's opinion…

…But goddammit, Kellen's goal had been to be the George Snarlin of a new generation. And that's what he'd been trying to do on that stage that day. So the fact that even one person felt he was failing to capture the old dog's essence had Kellen wondering whether he'd failed at this endeavor.

At this point, many would again say, disregard what that guy thought, he's an outlier in this data set, the rest of these people think you're doing pretty well.

But that was just the thing, Dear Reader: he was doing well, but not great. And strange as it was that this was the impetus for such a thought, he now found himself wondering - was he not succeeding as much as he could because he was trying to be someone else instead of himself?

Of course, again, it was not his job to have people keeling over laughing, he just needed to do okay and butter them up. But that sneaking feeling was back in his head and heart again: he had a chance now to do something to put himself on the map. And the operative word there was himself - as opposed to an imitation of someone else. (In this narrator's opinion, his standup didn't seem nearly as observational-heavy as Snarlin's, but the fact remains that Kellen Huffman caught himself red-handed trying to copy someone else's style to whatever degree of success.)

He sneakily checked his watch. He had five minutes left. That was more than you'd get at a lot of open mics. The wolf had an urge screaming inside of him to make the most of this and say what he really wanted to say - the way he and he alone would say it.

On the spot, the comedian scrapped the planned bit about how his dad would frequently spit on other cars in traffic when his mom was driving and explicitly painted this to his son as a gentlemanly thing a man should do to defend his woman, and decided to get… topical.

"...Aw, fuck it, you guys don't wanna hear about my fucked-up family, we're all thinking about the mayor getting arrested, aren't we!?"

Some laughed, some cheered.

Sheriff Woodland stayed silent and paid attention to where this was going.

Not to say that the comedian knew where he was going with this himself as he went entirely off the cuff. "So… correct me if I'm wrong, I don't watch the fuckin' news, I just heard it through word of mouth like everyone else, so for all I know I could actually be wrong here, but… he was arrested… for trespassing… on a beach after hours? Okay, I've got a lot of questions, first among them… man, I'm not even trying to be racist, but I thought cats don't like water!"

Biggest laugh of the night. Easily.

Not everybody was laughing, of course. Kellen might have briefly gotten a connection with the sheriff over the broken families part, but he hadn't gotten much further than that. And yet, much to Sheriff Woodland's displeasure, that wasn't the only commonality that the wolves had in each other.

"I-I'm trying to think of something funny to say here, but sometimes life just makes a perfectly funny moment and you can't build on it!" And despite plainly admitting the limitations of his cleverness, the audience still agreed with him. "No, seriously, what the fuck was he doing there? Did he realize his political career had no future in this country and he decided to swim back to England!? Because God knows with the way he dresses, he's probably afraid to fly on one a' them newfangled airplanes!"

The crowd laughed and cheered even louder.

Ward wasn't a complete moron, there was enough electric activity in his head that when he heard the rest of the showroom cackle around him, he could at least stop and wonder why he was taking these insults of his boss so personally. And he even came up with a pretty simple answer: did this mean they were also laughing at him for allowing himself to serve John Norman? Would they think he was stupid not because of his accent or vocabulary but because of his choice to allow the lion to personally govern him? If so, he didn't care for being made fun of.

And the fact that his deputy, a guy well-known to detest his own job, was going to pieces with the rest of them just seemed to confirm this hypothesis.

But wait. Somebody in the front row said something.

"Wait, what was that?" the comic asked for clarification. "Hey, uh, ushers, don't, don't bother this dude, I think he actually has useful information." He held out his mic towards the patron just to give him a little more volume.

The room went quiet enough that everyone could hear the donkey answer without much amplification: "He said in a press conference right before we left for the show that he was there trying to find some wanted criminals."

"He was looking for criminals!?" Kellen asked incredulously as he stood back up and looked around the room, utterly dumbfounded. "PERSONALLY!? Who does this guy think he is, some fancy British Boss Hogg!?"

And yet another pop culture reference that hit close to home for the sheriff. He felt his claws digging into the wooden table.

"Like, this guy knows that we call him 'Prince John' to make fun of him, right?" Kellen continued. "Because we think of him as a spoiled rich kid who has delusions of grandeur - which he fucking is!? He has to know by now, right? I think he's even leaning into it! I think if you saw him at a public event and shouted 'PRINCE JOHN!' he'd probably look in your direction!"

The crowd laughed and cheered louder still.

What Sheriff Woodland was seeing was not simply somebody mocking the office he'd sworn to defend, but someone doing it successfully. As this skinny brown wolf on the stage rallied the people against the city's leader, he was clearly demonstrating leadership of his own. And as a man who cared deeply about being manly, Ward didn't like that. He saw it as competition. He saw it as a threat.

"And that's another thing, fuck his brother who we've retroactively nicknamed King Richard! How quickly we forget that we didn't like him that much either when he was around, he just seems like a saint now compared to his bratty baby brother! It's Dubya Syndrome all over again! Bush Senior seems tolerable now that we've seen how much of a stupid asshole his son is! Seriously, what did Rich even do? He just used his classy British charm to fucking bamboozle us into thinking he was a good leader when he was all charisma and personality and no substance! …Actually, wait, I'll tell ya what he did! He's directly responsible for sticking us with Johnny! Because when Rich went to Washington, he made sure his friends back in Nottingham gave his retarded little brother something to do! …Excuse me, I shouldn't say that, that's not fair to actual retarded people, actual retarded people aren't as stupid, childish, and maladjusted as that hoity-toity cocksucking lion!"

The crowd laughed and cheered louder still.

It was a threat not only to the office of the mayor but also to those who stood to protect it, and in the broadest but arguably most important sense, it was a threat of a whiny but sizable group of dissidents against the authority that gave them everything they knew. As the lambasting went on, Ward couldn't help but keep thinking… it should have been him up there.

"For real, this guy is an asshole in ways that don't even make sense! Like how whenever there's an issue with the crappy parts of town, he implements a tax just for them? Which - shit, growing up here, you don't realize, most of the country doesn't do that! I looked it up not too long ago! Only a few dozen cities in the country collect income taxes at the municipal level, and we're one of them! I've lived in this city my whole life, Phil Hill born and raised, I made it thirty-odd years of my life before realizing that paying income tax to your city wasn't fucking normal!"

The crowd laughed and cheered louder still.

Ward should have been the one up there, he could feel it in his bones. While this crowd was busy audibly agreeing that they'd never realized that their city was an outlier for collecting income tax, Sheriff Woodland couldn't help but hate them. This comedian was inspiring rebellion and unrest and doing so spectacularly. It should have been Ward up there, being the one receiving praise and adoration as he stood for law and order to an audience of mature adults well past their pointlessly contrarian adolescent phases. That, Dear Reader, was the other thing the two wolves' had in common: they were both seeking to lead their communities - and yet while Kellen didn't even seem to realize that was what he was doing, Ward felt he had a right to it and had no success in acquiring it. The fact that the public adored this wayward malcontent and openly loathed their county sheriff struck Woodland deep in his heart as something deeply, deeply troubling with the values this town's citizens held. It should have been him they lauded, and a stupid complainer like this they rebuked. It was enough to draw blood as he bit his fangs down into his lip.

"But fuck, where was I? ...Oh yeah, Prince John's stupid-ass tax strategy! He taxes the poorest parts of town on the grounds that it's only gonna benefit them… motherfucker, they are POOR! They're defined by the fact that they don't have any fucking money! How much wealth can you even expect to tap!? And we know he just pockets it to fund his lavish lifestyle, but Jesus dude, you could be embezzling so much more if you just taxed the people who actually had money! He's not even good at being evil! But wait! Everybody and their deaf, blind, and senile fucking gramma can see that he's trying to get the rich people to like him because he doesn't know how else to make fucking friends!"

And the crowd laughed and cheered louder still.

At the doorway to the greenway, George Snarlin and Todd Klass, neither of whom were from Nottingham and didn't spend much time here, murmured amongst themselves as they tried to decipher how much Huffman was exaggerating for humorous effect or whether this John Norman guy really was this bad.

The wolf on the stage was insulting everything that Sheriff Woodland - literally, as part of his job description - stood for. He didn't always love his job, but it was his province to take issue with it, not this guy's. This madman was sowing the seeds of anarchy, and you know what? Seeing as this guy was a broke struggling wannabe comedian, Ward wouldn't be surprised if Kellen Huffman actively supported the poor-friendly enemies of the state living in Sherwood Forest; in fact, he believed this so deeply that he started to get angry about it as if it were already proven true.

In the kitchen, Jaime and Cody were beginning their meals, eating in silence as they stood in an empty corner, when they couldn't help but overhear Brett start to show some actual worry.

"...Where is everybody?" asked the ram, just now looking up from the long list of orders and realizing that it was oddly quiet in there and that the line of ready dishes was getting long. "...Where's all the servers? Where's Alicea? Where's Kourtney? Where's Hannah and Devon and Curtis and Christian? Where's any of them!?"

Karin had also been busy tabulating checks and was just now herself looking around the kitchen which was much more vacant than it should have been. "...Well, I know a few of them went on a smoke break-"

"How many did you let go out at once!?"

The hyena didn't care for the accusation of negligent leadership. "How many did you let out?"

Brett didn't answer. He simply turned his attention to the five cooks in the room. "Brad, Colin. When's the last time you saw any of the servers?"

"We dunno," said the beaver.

"We've been busy with this shit," said the kangaroo, gesturing to the ovens.

And for the chefs who didn't speak English: "Antonio, Marcos, Lorenzo, ¿ustedes saben dónde están los servidores?"

The culpeo, tayra, and grison replied with a smattering of no's and no sé's.

To the back to interrogate the dishwashers: "Thor, Elio, any of the servers come through here?"

"Uh… no?" said the polar bear nervously, not because he'd seen any of them but because he'd been snapped out of mentally rehearsing what he'd say when he called a phone number written on a scrap of paper in his pocket.

"Can't say I've seen any," said the ocelot, much more calmly.

The ram grabbed his radio mic: "Jackie, ushers, box office, any of you guys see any of the servers out there?"

Silence for a moment as they all presumably asked themselves the same question.

"...Huh, I actually don't," said the black bear, "where'd they go?"

"I actually just had table 252 complain they weren't being served and couldn't find any other servers to ask," said Stephan.

"I think I just saw Audree and Robert go upstairs for a smoke break," said Art.

Brett seemed to put the pieces together in his head. "Karin, hold down the kitchen, I'm heading outside." And thus he stormed out of the kitchen for the alley.

"And now I feel obligated to make fun of his fashion sense, but… again, how do I build on that?" Kellen goofed. "I mean… yeah, I could make a bunch of easy jokes that he dresses like fuckin'... Ebenezer Scrooge, but… I'm gonna throw the poor son of a bitch a bone: when you look like him, does anything look good on you!? He's skinny as a goddamn rail, his head is wide and flat somehow, so you know he's not an African lion… fuck, he doesn't even have a mane! Not even trying to be mean, not even trying to be a sicko… does he have fucking cancer or something? But he's too image-conscious to say it!? If he does, he oughta say it, then he'd have a valid fucking excuse for looking like a mess! Hell, at that point, might as well experiment with random wacky outfits! It'd probably be less embarrassing than trying to wear something that makes anybody else look cool and just utterly failing at pulling it off!"

"WOOOOOOO!" While a lot of the crowd was still genuinely laughing, much of the audience was simply cheering in agreement with the iconoclastic comic.

"FUCK PRINCE JOHN!" someone hollered.

And several chanted in agreement: "FUCK, PRINCE, JOHN! FUCK, PRINCE, JOHN! FUCK, PRINCE, JOHN!"

In his periphery, the sheriff noticed the bear next to him clearly staring at him, obviously recognizing who the old gray wolf was and wondering what his reaction to these cries of protest would be. Woodland turned to look at his neighbor, but the bear quickly turned away and played dumb, staring at the stage with an expressionles countenance.

The sheriff glared down at the squirrel loving every second of this vilification of their boss. But Ward decided to let him enjoy himself. If this immature little delinquent wanted to have a laugh and a half at the concept of authority, then he could go right ahead, American society would never follow the lead of a dinky little shit like him anyway. This culture finds inspiration in leaders who are big and strong, and Sheriff Woodland thought it was about time that he showed this city how big and strong he was. After all, what was it that Nutsy had said earlier about taking initiative and coming up with his own opportunities to do good for his community? And what had the sheriff overheard some of the ushers mentioning when he was walking back from the bathroom?

Hey, speaking of the Western World's obsession with the aesthetic properties of its leaders:

"Honestly, as a man of a similarly-sized species… I can understand why he's such a bitchy little shit," Kellen explained. "Not even trying to be mean! Man-to-man, I could probably say that I'd be an asshole to everybody too if I had a more successful brother who was six-foot-eight while I was a loser who was… what, five-three? Five-five!?"

"HE'S FIVE-SEVEN!" Sheriff Woodland howled back (because of course he knew that offhand).

Elsewhere, the three managers of The Chuckle Bunker were preoccupied searching for absent servers who were all collected outside in an impromptu roundtable, the ushers were spread thin, the cooks and dishwashers were oblivious to what was happening outside the kitchen, the sloth in the sound booth was zoning out as he just watched the timer, the feature and headliner looked on in awe of a young comic rallying his community against a common enemy, and somewhere on the other side of Sherwood Forest, a vixen began walking towards her destiny. But as for the audience, they all went silent as they saw a much, much larger wolf stand up among them and start making his way to the front. Even Kellen himself was frozen in place.

"Ward, what the hell are you doing!?" his deputy asked in shock and horror.

"Exactly what ya told me ta' do," the sheriff muttered darkly under his breath as he walked away from his table.

"Hey, buddy, what's goin' on?" the comedian asked into the microphone, trying to project confidence but letting slip that he was indeed kind of intimidated by this monster coming towards him. He'd never been personally attacked by a heckler before, but stories of comics being assaulted by audience members, while rare, were not unheard of.

"You been runnin' yer mouth about the mayor fer way too long, boy!"

This confrontation was especially frightening to those who knew what their city's former chief of police and current county sheriff looked like.

The usher at the side of the stage was not one of those well-informed individuals. As big as this big bad wolf was, he was no match for a moose, and Brendan wasn't afraid of him as he stepped out of the shadowy nook and into the half-light of the showroom to confront him. In his head, this morbidly obese wolf was just a stupid drunk, a redneck who sucked up to rich people like Mayor Norman because he wanted to be a millionaire himself one day and consequently wouldn't stand for rich people to be dishonored.

"Alright, let's simmer down, buddy," Brendan said calmly as he walked up to intercept the ornery man, hooved hands up to calm the wolf down. "Let's take you back to your seat-"

"DO NOT IMPEDE ME FROM MY DUTY!" the sheriff shot back, and as he delivered this line, in one swift motion that would probably look cool if not for the grim context of the situation, he pulled out his gun from his holster and spun the barrel to ready ammunition meant for megafauna, pointing it square between the moose's eyes.

Even the bravest of the crowd gasped in terror at that. And Brendan, whose hands were already up, raised his arms even higher as his eyes popped open as wide as they would go.

"What the fuck is going on out there?" Karin asked aloud as she left the kitchen to investigate the enormous collective gasp she'd just heard. Jaime and Cody subsequently decided they'd probably better stop eating and likewise investigate what was going on.

Sensing danger, the tech guy turned the house lights up for everyone's safety. This was when the third manager decided to step in.

"SIR!" Jackie said sternly over the sound booth's microphone. "PUT THE GUN DOWN AND STEP AWAY FROM THE STAGE! THE POLICE ARE GOING TO BE CALLED!" The black bear turned to the sloth. "Rico, run to the phone in the bar and call the police-"

"I AM THE POLICE!" Woodland yelled at the top of his lungs; absolutely everybody in the showroom could hear him loud and clear. He pulled out his badge with his free hand and stuck it in the moose's face before turning around to show the rest of the crowd. "WARD WOODLAND, SHERIFF OF THE CITY AND COUNTY OF NOTTINGHAM POLICE DEPARTMENT! AND I THINK IT'S-!"

When Brendan went for it, the crowd's solidarity actually worked against him. The big moose made a move to put his arms around the wolf he dwarfed and to hopefully disarm the guy, but the sound of many in the audience gasping clued Ward in to the fact that something was happening. Before Brendan could get a good grasp to incapacitate the sheriff, Woodland was spun halfway back around, got his gun arm free, and

PBBBT!

"GAHHH!" Brendan collapsed backwards onto the floor; he hadn't been shot anywhere vital, but getting a decent chunk of his left antler blown off still hurt like a bitch.

"Should I still call the police?" asked Rico.

"...Yes," replied Jackie, though it was clear by her tone that while that certainly seemed like the correct decision, she didn't know what police reinforcements could actually do.

"AS I WAS SAYING…!" the sheriff continued, addressing the crowd, "I THINK IT IS DOWNRIGHT SHAMEFUL THAT SO MANY A' Y'ALL DON'T RECOGNIZE YER SHERIFF WHEN Y'ALL SEE HIM! I PUT MY LIFE ON THE LINE TO PROTECT Y'ALL, BUT HERE Y'ALL INGRATES ARE PRAISIN' THIS LITTLE SHIT WHO WANTS TO RUIN ER'RYTHING WE GOT SET UP TO KEEP Y'ALL SAFE!" He began to ascend the small, moveable wooden stairway that was next to stage right, and sensing that he had everyone's attention, he stopped blowing out his vocal cords. "Yeah, the mayor is a mess-up! But the fact a' the matter is that there are dangerous criminals he was tryna find on that beach last night, and people like he and I are doin' er'rything we can ta' stop 'em! What are y'all doin' to stop them!? Why the hell are y'all fawnin' over a loser like this when I'm tryna be yer alpha who protects my pack!? If I do everything right ta' earn y'all's respect and y'all still won't give it to me, then DAMN RIGHT I'm gonna start ta' demand it!"

Gun still in hand, he came to a stop and glared out onto the crowd of Nottinghammers who had laughed in the face of his efforts to serve him. The time had finally come for them to be personally admonished for their insolence.

"H-hey, man," Kellen stammered, "if you want us to cool it on the John Norman jokes, that's fine, I've got other material-"

"WILL YOU SHUT THE HELL UP!? I'M TIRED A' YOU TALKIN'!" He turned back to the crowd and made eye contact with as many members of the audience as he could. "I bet a bunch a' y'all know exactly who the outlaws are! Hell, I bet a bunch a' y'all support them! It sure seems like all y'all like their kind a' reckless behavior, seein' as y'all're supportin' it comin' from a guy like this advocatin' for it!" He turned and pointed at his fellow lupine, then slowly made his way over, his glaring face progressively lowering as he approached the wolf who was about a foot shorter than him. "You. I dunno what the fuck yer name is, but I don't care! You're under arrest for incitin' a riot!"

If the gasp that the audience let out when Brendan's antler got shot wasn't dramatic enough, you should have heard all the sound of all the oxygen in the room being quickly sucked into the mouths of every last person in the showroom as Sheriff Woodland violently shoved the smaller wolf down with one big paw, put a knee square on the small of his back as Kellen screamed from the crushing weight, and whipped out his handcuffs to arrest the comedian.

Believe it or not, the mood out in the alley was even more tense as Brett had confronted his servers attempting to unionize. Exactly which of them hollered what in the ram's face is lost to history, but by all accounts, it went something like this:

"You don't get to take money out of our fucking tips like that, especially not without our permission!"

"Guys, that's enough! It's a crowded house tonight and you're all going to be making plenty of tip money, you can afford to spare-"

"We can afford to SPARE!? Motherfucker, are you the one who pays my bills!?"

"No, but I am the one who signs your paychecks-!"

"No you don't, asshole, Jackie does!"

"-and if you want to keep getting paychecks from us, you're going to come inside and do your jobs!"

"Brett, you are breaking the law!"

"You guys are servers, not lawyers, let's not pretend you know the law."

"What, so you're telling us to our faces that you think we're stupid!?"

"I'm telling you that your skill-sets lie elsewhere, like serving. And if you want to keep working as a server here, you're all going to come back inside and stop talking about unionizing-"

"Bitch, you can't fire all of us!"

"I most certainly can if it comes to that. Don't tell me what I can and can't do."

"You said yourself that it's a busy weekend, cocksucker, you really think you can get enough servers hired by tomorrow!? Hell, for even the rest of the shows tonight!?"

"Me, Jackie, and Karin will do the serving ourselves for the entire house if need be, because we have work ethic, something you all seem to be sorely lacking."

"We work harder than you do! What the fuck do you even-!?"

"H-hold on…"

"Don't you put your hoof in my face!"

"No, no, I'm getting something on the radio. Uh… repeat that, Jackie?"

"Brett, you gotta get in here, the county sheriff was in the audience and he's arresting the opener for speaking ill of the mayor! He's saying Kellen incited a riot!"

"WHAT!?"

"YES! GET IN HERE!"

"Okay…" Brett said nervously as he dropped his lapel mic, "there's a situation happening in the showroom and I need all of you to help control a tense situation-"

"We're not working for you until you stop stealing our fucking money!"

"Guys, this is an emergency! We don't have time to argue-!"

"Stop trying to change the subject, you fucking asshole!" hollered the ewe, Lori, who I am reminding you was a ewe so you understand it wasn't a hate crime when in her fit of passion she threw her lit cigarette at her fellow sheep, whose wool promptly caught fire.

Long story short, Brett survived with second-degree burns, but all of the servers had worked together to extinguish his flames and call him an ambulance, and therefore a large segment of The Chuckle Bunker's staff was absent during the climax of this hectic night.

Back in the showroom, the tension was still more of the silent kind. Employees and staff alike were steadfast and speechless, not knowing what they could say or do that wouldn't just make the situation worse. Even Kellen himself was finding his gift of gab eluding him, having seen what the crazy sheriff had done to the poor moose and not having the guts to be a smartass right about then.

There was one, however. Someone who had power in the situation and knew it. Someone who felt like their life was already behind them and had nothing to lose anyway. Someone who famously just didn't give a fuck.

"What's goin' on here, copper?" asked the old New Yorker, the wolfhound stepping out from the greenroom doorway just as the cuffs were being tightened on the opener. Several dozen in the audience actually found the courage to cheer as their hero entered the stage.

But Ward Woodland did not recognize this man. All the wolf saw was a dog.

"BACK OFF, PUPPY!" he growled, pointing his gun now at George Snarlin's face.

The audience didn't gasp this time. This time they screamed. They screamed in horror as they were sure they were about to see their favorite comedian get executed by the law.

The old dog, however, cavalier to the very end, simply raised his hands to placate the sheriff. "Now, now, Officer-"

"THAT'S SHERIFF WOODLAND TO YOU!" Everyone in that showroom that night swears you could hear hatred dripping from Woodland's fangs as he shouted at the dog, and knowing what we know about his opinion of dogs, this narrator doesn't doubt it. Several insist that they're surprised to this day that Woodland didn't shoot him on the spot.

"Sheriff…" Old George resumed calmly, "we're both old fucks, we can talk this out like grown men-"

"I AIN'T GOT NOTHIN' TA' TALK ABOUT, GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE, YA OLD MUTT!"

"But you see, Sheriff, there seems to have been a misunderstanding. This young man here wasn't inciting a riot, he was just giving this crowd some catharsis and helping them have a good time."

"I DON'T KNOW WHO THE HELL YOU ARE, BUT YOU ARE NOT GONNA TELL ME HOW TA' DO MY JOB! YA WANT ME TO ARREST YOU TOO!?"

The wolfhound couldn't help but smirk just a little. "Well, wouldn't be the first time. Maybe you'd've known that if you knew who I was. Let's just say, Sheriff, that if you arrest me, it'll certainly make national headlines-"

"OH, YEAH!? WHAT THE HELL KINDA BIGSHOT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE!?"

"WARD, YOU FUCKING IDIOT, THAT'S GEORGE SNARLIN, HE'S THE FUCKING HEADLINER!"

Not many people made out the tiny voice clearly beyond the first few rows, but everyone was able to hear enough to see the squirrel deputy struggling up the stairs onto the stage.

"It's the guy with the dirty ass," Cody murmured to himself in the back of the showroom when he realized who it was.

"Back off, Nutsy!" the sheriff barked. "Don't pretend you little tree-rats get along with dogs, either!"

But Little George was going straight for the microphone that had been dropped on the ground. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announced to the crowd, "my name is Sheriff's Deputy George Nutzinger of the Nottingham P.D., it is in my professional opinion that this comedian has done nothing wrong and has not in any way consciously attempted to incite a riot, he has done absolutely nothing warranting a criminal penalty, I do not approve of my boss's actions and I am using my powers as the second-highest ranking police officer in the county to call upon my boss to let this comedian go and to stop harassing him and George Snarlin!"

Perhaps it goes without saying, but the crowd loved that. They cheered like it was going out of style.

"YEEEAAAAAHHH!"

And perhaps this also goes without saying, but the sheriff wasn't keen on being called out like that. Fuming, he addressed his deputy while still pointing his gun in Old George's general direction.

"Nutsy, don't you DARE ever try ta' contradict me like that ever again!"

"Motherfucker, he is not inciting a riot!" Little George shot back, very deliberately keeping the mic close to his mouth. "He is not, you're just objectively wrong about that! Inciting a riot would be if he was encouraging the crowd to start trashing the place or smashing storefront windows downtown or something! This guy was just making criticisms of the mayor - which were valid! You are blatantly taking away his freedom of speech!"

"YEEEAAAAAHHH!" went the crowd.

"Yeah, everything I'm doing is protected by the First Amendment!" Kellen piped up from the floor, hoping that it was safe to speak now that he had the deputy on his side. He rolled over to plead to the man he admired above all others. "Ge-George! You tell him! You fought for this! They're-they're arresting me for saying things they don't like, just like they did to Lenny Brutes!"

When the wise old dog heard that name, his expression went from stoic to something almost nostalgic. "That's right, Sheriff. Back in the Fifties, they arrested that old bear multiple times for so-called 'obscenity' - and I was there! They cuffed him right to me when I got busted for being in the club underage! This battle's been fought before, Sheriff, and history has vindicated that Lenny Brutes was in the right and those who arrested him were in the wrong."

Some woot!s and yeah!s could be heard from the crowd as Sheriff Woodland narrowed his eyes at the old dog, trying to hide that he didn't know what to say.

"...And you," Old George continued, addressing the wolf on the ground. "Comparing yourself to Lenny Brutes? A man who spoke truth to power and stood up for what he believed in!?"

Kellen was nervous. George didn't seem happy. He looked like this wannabe comedian had just committed blasphemy.

"I went to jail with Lenny Brutes, I knew Lenny Brutes, Lenny Brutes was a friend of mine. And you, young man…"

Oh no. The old Bentsen/Quayle line. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. Kellen emotionally braced himself. He'd pissed off a man he worshipped. He knew where this was going.

Old George's face softened. Kellen was wrong.

"...You remind me of Lenny."

And every single person in the crowd who knew their comedy history cheered as loud as they could.

"YEEEAAAAAHHH! Kel-LEN! Kel-LEN! Kel-LEN! Kel-LEN!..."

…Wow. Kellen didn't know what to say. His idol had just compared him to his own idol, his hero's hero. Man, as far as worst days of one's life go, this was pretty cool.

Ward was fuming. He'd just been put in his place. And there was nothing he could do about it besides change the subject.

"I am here ta' stand for law and order!" He hollered, quieting the crowd all over again. "If y'all oppose me, ya opposite law and order er'rywhere! And if y'all would grow the hell up, y'all would realize that ya need law and order to function in this godforsaken world!" He turned and gave an evil yellow eye to the wolfhound once again. "And the nerve a' ya thinkin' I'd listen to a puppy who admitted he went to bars underage-"

"WARD!"

"HUH!?" The sheriff was surprised to see that the squirrel had crawled up his person, clambered down his arm, and was now on top of the gun and holding his face right in front of the hole. "The hell are you doin', Nutsy!?"

"Put the goddamn gun down and stop threatening to kill George Snarlin! And let the fucking comedian go!"

"Why you puttin' yer face in front a' my gun, Nutsy, you want me ta' fuckin' shoot ya!?"

"YES, you stupid asshole, that's the entire point of this! My life sucks as it is and I would literally rather fucking die than let you kill somebody for no goddamn reason! You shoot George Snarlin, you shoot me, too."

The wolf's eyes pierced into the squirrel, but Nutzinger was unafraid. He hadn't been exaggerating. He wasn't content with his life, and if this was how he had to go out, he was fine with that.

"C'mon, Ward," said the deputy, "you know you don't wanna lose me. I'm the closest thing you have to a friend."

In the greenroom doorway, the feature act snickered. "Yeah, that's not emotionally manipulative or anything."

"Todd, you're not helping," Old George muttered to the fox.

"C'mon, Wolfie," Nutzinger kept egging on, "you really mean to tell me your fat ass isn't getting pins and needles from having your arm up this long?"

And to a certain extent, that actually worked. The wolf relaxed his arm, keeping the gun up but retracting his elbow. "...I'll compromise, Nutsy," he said rather calmly. I'll put the gun away and I won't arrest this old mutt here. But I'm still takin' in this guy. He might not a' told 'em ta' rip the nails out a' the goddamn building, but he was gettin' them riled up, and shoutin' fire in a theater ain't protected by the First Amendment. You know that."

"Compromise nothing!" the deputy retorted. "He didn't shout fire either! You're jumping to insane conclusions, you fucking retarded psycho!"

Ward remained calm. "Ya really shouldn't talk ta' yer boss like that, Nutsy." And with that, he grabbed the squirrel, yanked him off the gun, and tossed him into the audience, much to their horror.

The sheriff holstered his gun and pointed at the old wolfhound. "You stay outta my way." He then walked over to Kellen and picked him up off the ground to lead him out of the building. "You're comin' with me. Ya have the right to remain silent. Anything ya say can and will be used against ya in the-"

"Wait a minute!" said a sudden voice.

A particularly deep voice.

Coming from the megafauna section.

"...Let's just rush the stage!" said the elephant. "He can't shoot all of us!"

Well, Ward got his vindication: Americans really are inspired by the leadership of the physically big and strong.

Partially afraid but mostly angry, Woodland pushed Kellen along as he ran away from the charge, consisting of creatures big and small but led by those bigger than he was, many of whom chanting "FREE KELLEN!", "FUCK THE SHERIFF!", or "FUCK PRINCE JOHN!". First he ran into the greenroom via the curtained entryway, running through to the opposite door. But he didn't know the layout, and didn't realize that that door just let back out to the showroom. Upon opening it, several audience members noticed him and shifted direction to come upon him that way instead, but he quickly slammed the door shut and ran back to the other door in the room: the door to the comedians' private bathroom. He made it in with his suspect just a few feet out of reach of the foremost of the crowd, and immediately locked it behind himself. Not much protection, but enough to work with.

It wasn't much longer before the banging began, the crowd trying to break the door down, initially not getting too far but soon making good progress once a rhino stepped up to the plate to crash into it repeatedly with his horn. The door started splintering, and the holes were big enough for the light of the greenroom to illuminate the two wolves' faces. One was terrified, the other was pissed. But there wasn't quite enough of a gap to see the latter holding a gun to the former's head.

"In the name a' the law, stop what you're doin'!" Sheriff Woodland demanded. "IF YA BREAK THE DOOR DOWN, I'M KILLIN' HIM, I SWEAR TA' GOD I WILL!"

But once again, the crowd being on Kellen's side worked to his detriment. They were all screaming so loud that they couldn't hear Woodland's threats. And they were almost through the door.

But then - from the perspective of Kellen as well as Ward, oddly enough - a miracle happened.

"Attention!" came a female voice over the loudspeakers. "Attention, everybody!"

It was Karin.

"Please do not resist the sheriff's demands," said the hyena into the sound booth microphone, doing a good job of seeming strong in her voice despite being on the verge of an emotional breakdown. "More NPD officers have arrived and are at every exit to the building."

Those in the back could see that there were indeed officers rushing into the showroom from every entrance, largely megafauna decked out in riot gear. This was a consequence of Rico deciding to mention Ward's accusation of Kellen starting a riot when he called 9-1-1 and the operators clinging onto the word riot.

"Do not impede the officers as they escort Kellen Huffman out of the building," Karin continued as the goon squad started making arrests en masse. "If you were trying to… if you were trying to storm the stage and the greenroom, you will also be arrested. We at The Chuckle Bunker respect the police and… and…"

She trailed off as she started silently weeping for her son who never learned the lesson she and Pat had tried so desperately to teach him, Jackie putting an arm around her and letting her cry into her chest. The black bear picked up the microphone:

"We here at The Chuckle Bunker respect and honor the brave men and women of the police and defer to their authority on matters of law and order."

A chorus of dissent filled the showroom:

"Aw, speak for yourself!"

"Are you fucking crazy!?"

"FUCK THE POLICE AND FUCK PRINCE JOHN!"

But their protests fell on deaf ears, and many of them were arrested. Those who were not arrested were forced to stay in the building as the authorities began the painstaking process of interrogating every single patron and employee as a witness, a process that stretched well past midnight. Many of those who were free to go decided to wait outside the building near the various exits, waiting for the moment that a large gray wolf would be escorting a smaller brown wolf out, hoping for a chance to say goodbye to their unsuspecting hero as he was taken away.

*A.N.*

Hoo boy, this one was a looong time comin'. Glad to get this one out of my system, I hope you enjoyed it. A lot of memories of the most memorable job I've ever had in this one - but thankfully nothing quite like the dramatic event displayed above.

Okie dokie, now to address another part of reality: shit, a lot has happened out there in the real world since the last update, huh? Yeah, I'll keep it brief since this is hopefully obvious, but fuck Putin, he's a bitch, Ukraine has a right to sovereignty without having to worry about the whims of a senile bully. I hope this doesn't escalate into a world conflict, but if it does… man, everybody stay safe out there, and let's hope good prevails over evil.

And one more thing… I finally did it, guys. The thing you could have reasonably assumed I'd done at least once years ago, but I actually hadn't because - well, to be frank - mental and emotional unwellness with how I see a certain fictional character in relation to my deep-seated issues with myself. But I finally did it. I'd previously seen Robin Hood either with the sound off with closed captioning on, or in totally-illegal YouTube uploads where people turned the audio down and commentated over it (back when you could post such a thing, those were the days), or in clips here and there featuring relevant characters. But in the early morning hours of February 16th, I finally watched it all the way through, with the sound on, unblemished. It was Robin's VA's birthday, I'd gotten the notification on Tuesday that Robinhood had my tax documents ready (not that I even use that service anymore after you-know-what, YOU BESMIRCHED HIS NAME!), it just made too much sense. Apparently I've made at least two other people watch the movie as a consequence of this fic, it was an obligation at this point to make sure I actually knew the property I was writing about. I was nervous going in, fearing I was gonna once again be consumed by thoughts of "goddammit, this fox straddles the border of plausibly and implausibly great as a person, I don't know how I can compete with this nor do I know whether I should even try," but once it actually started… I was fine. It was fine. It was actually pretty nice. Time for some thoughts:

-I still maintain that Robin's/Brian Bedford's voice, while a very good voice, just didn't match that fox's character design. I've previously called it too deep for the little guy, and I still think that's kinda true, but it's also too posh (he clearly says his A's as "ah's" instead of "aa's", between this and his history of knowing Marian as a kid, they were clearly going for the "he's a former nobleman" interpretation) and too… *aged* for my liking. Bedford was in his mid-to-late-30s when recording this, but he sounds at least a decade older. All for a character who they hint even more than I remember is indeed a young adult (man, this dude's out here being a legendary outlaw in his early twenties, I'm 27 and I still haven't moved out yet; well, that's the millennial plight, I guess things were easier for 1170s kids lol). Unsurprisingly for a guy with a theatre background, it just sounded way too theatrical and less realistic (I'm thinking of one scene in particular where Tuck just showed up to announce the archery tournament, Johnny says Rob could win it standing on his head, and Robin gives a bow and says "THAAANK YOUUUUU, LITTLE JOHN!" in a particularly deep tone like he's projecting to a crowded house). And while he's totally a chill dude, I still don't totally get what's so jump-off-the-page magnetic and memorable that makes grown adults in the real world go gaga over him. Is this bad that I don't get what's so widely appealing about him? Is this good that I'm an individual with my own tastes and I don't fall in line with the mainstream quite so easily? Is it a little of both? Hell if I know. And I still rolled my eyes when Skippy's sister says apropos of nothing that Robin was so handsome; I don't know what else to conclude from that other than Disney really did want little girls in the 70s to think that fox was hot (they succeeded). Oh, and fuck me, there are indeed instances where Robin has to sing and use an American accent briefly a few times each, and he does a pretty decent job of both of them; there go my attempts to give this guy some more relatable flaws.

-Other characters whose voices I honestly think don't match: the Sheriff (whose voice was still high and scratchy, but not as high and scratchy as I remember and that oddly enough makes it seem less fitting on a big dude like him) and… to my utter shock… Little John? I was more right than I knew on the couple of occasions in this story when I alluded to both of the boys having cases of "Voice Doesn't Match Face" Syndrome and Johnny in particular having teddy-bear face; while Phil Harris's voice seemed right at home as Baloo… I dunno, man, it just didn't match like I remembered it matching. He also frequently sounds… bored? Less energy than his lines would have you think he should have. Recall that Phil was pushing seventy when the movie released, so I'm thinking he might have unfortunately just been old and tired after his third straight starring role in a Disney movie, after which they stopped using him. Still, he doesn't sound nearly as lethargic as he did in Rock-A-Doodle (1991, when he'd have been 87). Secretly still wondering whether Disney has already cast him for the live-action remake everyone (THANKFULLY) forgot about or whether I should shoot my shot and hit them up, my on-and-off vocal coach insists I have a similar voice type to him even if I don't necessarily hear it myself… and even if stupid Robin's got me wondering whether I should instead be yearning to sound as classy as him lol.

-You know whose voices matched perfectly, though? Prince John's and Sir Hiss's. Brilliant chemistry between them, too. No wonder their actors got top billing over that of the titular character (some say that adults would enjoy the movie more if they watched it as a tragedy from PJ's perspective, y'know).

-I also totally dropped the ball by assuming Otto had an American accent - fuck no, he's got perhaps the most accurate folksy-English accent in the movie. Dude don't even pronounce his H's ("Robin 'ood"). Honest to God, I never saw his scenes with the sound on. Same thing with Mother Rabbit, but her English accent is much milder and I think it made sense to Americanize both of these characters for the story. Kluck's Scottish accent is also a lot less pronounced than I remember. And one last thing about Robin's voice: although he passes himself off as a stork from Devonshire, I'd like to imagine that the country accent he was putting on was fairly close to something Brian Bedford would have heard (if not himself had) in his and Robin's native Yorkshire.

-General audio question… Jesus, did all Disney movies from this era have such poor sound quality? Especially with the voice recordings. Years ago a web reviewer called The Cartoon Hero pointed out one line of Little John's that sounded like either a flub or a glitch ("Hey loverboy!" at the top of the laundry scene), but I heard several more of those and I don't think it was either, I think they were just sloppily splicing takes together. Johnny actually gets it pretty bad: in the opening scene with Robin in the tree (wherein his lines barely sync to his face), Phil and Brian don't sound like they're even in the same room, and Johnny's last two lines after Robin turns out to be alive ("You had me worried there," "I thought you were long gone.") are said back to back - one sounds so good that you forget he's a cartoon character, the other it sounds like he's six feet away from the microphone. There's also a part where Prince John is making funny noises when he's asleep and there's some weird distortion on the mic that they just left in there. And in general, the background sounds really do sound dated, but not just old. When PJ's bed gets ripped out of his castle and the final chase begins in earnest… I swear to God the music sounds disco-y like something you'd hear in the background of a cop movie. This is definitely a product of the 70s. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

-Everyone complains about the cheap animation quality because Disney was broke at the time, but… naw, man, the animation was beautiful, aside from that one part where they had too much audio for one sequence and added a duplicate two-second clip of an elephant trumpeting immediately before playing it again. The animation is one of its strong suits in my opinion.

-And I still get why some people see this as a particularly juvenile Disney movie (talking animals, slapstick violence with no injury or death, Alan's/Roger Miller's very silly and simplistic lyrics, Johnny literally teeing up Robin to let him explain that they're not the bad guys right at the top of the movie, etc.) but no, if someone thinks this movie is too babyish for them, I think they're just being cynical. I'm honestly pleasantly surprised by how much I genuinely enjoyed the experience without any intrusive thoughts coming in. I still had to pause for an extended period of time, but not to take an emotional breather, instead because I just got giddy thinking about the fun things I could do with these characters in this story - and in that way, it made me feel like a kid again in the best way, watching my favorite cartoons (let's say, for example, Ed Edd 'n' Eddy) and just letting my imagination run wild with the stories and adventures I could come up with for them. Goddamn, what I'd do to be in a position where I could lead a TV series about these guys, I can all too easily see my two boys having a gonzo Sam & Max -esque dynamic in a screwy comedy while still staying true to their characters. But back on topic, it's a good movie and I think I can say without hesitance now that this is probably my favorite Disney movie. (Emperor's New Groove still gets my vote for the funniest, though, I still can't believe that's a Disney movie, and of course I gotta show my love to Zootopia for being an amazing spiritual successor to Robin Hood and that would be my favorite 3D animated movie - coming from a guy who strongly, strongly prefers 2D. The Iron Giant is definitely still my favorite animated movie overall though, I need to grab that on home video sometime).

Because what can I say? This silly talking animal movie just means something personal to me that other media doesn't. I've said this before and I'll say it again, you can see this as me embarrassing myself and coming out as a hopeless manchild or you can see it as a damning indictment of the cynical world we live in, but even as an adult, I have never encountered a real person, nor a fictional character meant for children nor for adults, who serves as a better role model for everything one ought to try to be in this life - in terms of goals one should strive for, values one ought to hold, and how one ought to conduct oneself interpersonally - than that goddamn cartoon fox. It's ridiculous, and it only came about as a result of Disney making him too squeaky-clean to offset the fact that the hero of their children's movie was a criminal, but hey, whatever works, works, and this works for me. I only hope you all can find someone - real or fictional, it doesn't matter - who you can see and be inspired by and feel hope that you can be like that too. Don't give up on yourselves, folks.

(...I have asked my therapist point-blank on more than one occasion if he thinks I'm on The Spectrum or something, he swears I'm not, okay, whatever, go figure, I guess I'm just weird.)

Of course, I don't expect any of you critters to think I'm anything resembling Robin Hood, you've been witnessing me geek out over cartoon characters over the course of years at this point, but you know what? That's okay. I have elected to use this corner of the internet to be an open book and semi-anonymously share my weird, neurotic, unflattering side with strangers, all in the interest of (among other things) painting a classically charming gentleman like Robin as also being capable of having weird, neurotic, unflattering thoughts. And maybe you think there really are people out there who don't have a side like this, effortlessly adult-cool people who never waver in confidence, and maybe you'd think that Robin would be one of them if he were real, and that's well within your rights, but I'd like to imagine that if you'd made it this far, then by this point you're with me on this and are of the belief that having such a side does not preclude one from being… worthy of being worthy. You just happened to see this side of me before anything else, and you might never see the other sides to me, and that's okay. We're adults, we understand that we all contain multitudes. (Now if older millennials could just chill with telling us younger millennials that our life is basically over when we hit thirty because we'll already be old and crippled, so that I don't have to worry that I need to become more like That Goddamn Fox right fucking immediately now lest I squander my youth, that'd be fantabulous.)

OH, and look at this bootleg pin from Spain I found on eBay:

itm/203446198010

.

Dude, that is a fucking arrow sticking out of the alligator's chest with blood coming out while Robin grabs the sorry sum-bitch by the collar. That man is dying and our hero is still manhandling him. That is hard-fucking-core. Needless to say, I bought it.

I love y'all. -Doby