"Bubblegum Brigade," a full-length play I wrote, is going to be put on in the University of Iowa theatre department during the last week of January. Spencer Griffin will be directing.

As such, Spencer and I have been sitting in on general auditions, looking for our cast. There's been some good auditions... which are good. And there's been some bad... which are BETTER!

There was this one audition that was so bad that it made me want to laugh. Hysterically. But I couldn't do that because it would be rude (as opposed to secretly making fun of somebody, which is fine and acceptable). But as you know, stuff is 100 times funnier when you can't laugh. And then stuff gets even funnier when the person beside you starts to chuckle. I had my head down on my lap, biting my lip.

So I planned to do the thing where I would laugh at a joke said within the audition. That way, I could extinguish all my laughter AND it would be approrpriate. The thing is... even the comedic monologue wasn't good enough to constitute a laugh, so I had to keep it in.

I held the laugh so long that my shoes blew off my feet and my toupee spun on my head.

Fart!