Happy Tax Day!

April 13th, 2006 Posted in Off-site Articles

Man, if there’s one thing that’s funny, it’s taxes.

I lie, of course. Filing your taxes is boring and painful, which is why no one I know bothers to do them. For some reason, though, I get harassed on a yearly basis by an editor to write something “hilarious” about tax season. Let’s forget for the moment that this is like asking someone to write a touching poem about long division; as a writer, it’s all about those paychecks. When an editor asks you for a funny article about doing your taxes, your answer should be “That’s a savvy play, sir! I’ll get right on it!”

So it’s not the tax articles themselves bothering me. It’s the fact that I’ve now been asked to write one two years in a row, and I’m genuinely concerned about what I’m going to do next year. How long can I keep this shit up?

Anyway, here’s this year’s entry, entitled How To Do Your Taxes, and up over at Cracked.com. You can get to it by clicking on the WWF Superstar IRS action figure below, with Real Wrestling Action (in this case, his patented “Write-off Slam”):

Last year’s entry can be found over at the website of my previous employer, and goes by the original-sounding name Tax Primer. Hope you’ve got your pop-up blockers on for this one, since NL.com seems to think you’ll enjoy three highly intrusive pop-up ads along with your comedy. At least they seem to have abandoned their previous strategy, which was, I shit you not, to have their own site appear as a pop-up while redirecting the main page to an advertising site. If there’s a better way to illustrate your open contempt for your own audience, I’d like to hear about it. Possibly giving you a virus that replaces the contents of your hard drive with email spam for cialis every time you try to click the index page.

Anyway. Happy Tax Time, everybody! And a Happy Death of Christ Our Lord Day to everyone whom that applies to. I hope I’m not spoiling anything when I tell you not to get too down about it. You’re in for a pleasant surprise come Monday!