By Joe Bob Briggs
Time for the 1987 Drive-In Year in Review, except I had to spend so much time last year trying to save everybody's soul that I forgot to review all the movies. First I started off my now-famous weekly radio ministry with oral Roberts' unsaved half-brother, Anal Roberts, and me and Anal tried to get you people to pony up $400 million after God told us that if we didn't get the money, he was gonna allow Oral to live forever. And, of course, you didn't come up with the jack, and so Oral will probably get Methusalized into a 950-year-old billionaire.
Next thing, I made actual contact with my fifth past life, where I was an Indonesian bamboo stripper named Felix and I worked for the Rajah of Punjab and I had a pet weasel named Shirley MacLaine. Even though I rammed 17 punji sticks through the weasel's throat and watched it die a long, slow, agonizing death, we still had the goldang miniseries and a new book.
Then I named the top five party school sin American and got permanently banned from the campus of Northern Arizona university in Flagstaff for exposing the popular tradition of "grease-monkey window-dancing," which I still don't know what it is, I do not condone it, and I'd like some.
After that I had the all-night prayer vigil for Jimbo Bakker down at the Church Under the Rock in Grapevine, where we tried to tell Jim that $240,000 is way too much money to be paying for nookie--even Presbyterians don't pay more than a hunnerd bucks, and that's for around -the world--and that was not good stewardship with the Lord's money, and Jimbo admitted that we had it right, but Jerry Falwell still said he had sin oozin out of his britches and so he wouldn't give him his show back.
Then, of course, there was the embarrassin "Tailgate" episode, where nerds from the MIAMI HERALD followed me around for two weeks solid to prove that I never had sex with anybody anywhere at anytime. I was humiliated, and will be considerin a lawsuit.
The summer was tough, cause Jimbo and Tammy weren't around for the grand opening of Six Flags over Jesus in Fort Mill, South Carolina, and they closed down my favorite ride--the Jessica Hahn Double Loop-the-Loop Over-and-Under Holiday Inn Coaster. I used to ride my brains out on that thing.
There was one bright spot, back in June, when I started the "Just Say Yes" campaign and single-handedly reduced the operating expenses of five NBA teams by an averages of $1.5 million. But that was completely wiped out by the Harmonic Discharge, where 36 million goonies from Marin County jumped in their BMW love sedans, motored their hineys out to Idaho, and waited for the total eclipse of the dog star Fido so they could play some wind-and-surf treefrog music on their Sony Walkmans. What as depressing about it is that none of these people died.
Then the pope came to Texas, and to prove how much we Babtists admire him even though he's just a man, we sent a delegation down to the San Antonio airport and we put up this giant piñata and we gave the pope a baseball bat, and when he hit that piñata, 47 illegal aliens came tumblin out. It was a beautiful sight. But the pope was like Elvis on this last tour, paunchin up around the gills, playin to half-filled rooms. It was pathetic even if he wasn't Polish.
And so after that, I figured, hey, if the pope can't do it no more, who can? We lost Oral, we lost Jimbo, we lost Jerry, we lost the Polish pope. Shirley's hopeless. Where's our spiritual leader these days?
And so who shows up?
That's right.
He's bad. Michael Jackson gets $4 million worth of plastic surgery, buys a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles, spends $ million on a music video, puts on some parachute pants with King Tut shoulder straps on a "Captains From Tortuga" gold-braided jacket, has his chin changed into Kirk Douglas's chin, and says, "Okay, all you sweetie pies! I'm ready to kickbox!"
We finally find a spiritual leader for this country, and he has hair that looks like purple linguini. The only guy that came along that looked like he had half a chance to do the job was the original maniac mass-murderer from DIRTY HARRY, who did such a great job in HELLRAISER that people could actually stand to look at him for three, four minutes at a time.
That's why, after the total collapse of spiritual values in this country during the year of 1987, I propose myself as Drive-in Pope. Here's my theology:
(1) People that got more than one life should be instantly sent to their next one.
(2) Preachers that don't have sex oughta be kicked out of the church.
(3) The correct answer to "does God exist?" is "Hey, does the pope have bullet holes?"
(4) Anybody that talks to rocks or chimpanzees should be given their own congregation at the Nevada State Hospital for the Criminally Insane..
And finally,
(5) The Big Guy don't need any help.
Joe Bob says hang in there.