I realize that I’m writing in response to a zombie, but it needs to be pointed out that:
1.) Richard Haydn did it earlier, playing poet Edwin Carp in the episode “The Return of Edwin Carp” on The Dick van Dyke Show first broadcast April 1, 1964 (April Fool’s Day, appropriately). He called the poem “Perseverance”, and I lacked the “bloody” in the last line.
MAD Magazine did an article along these lines called “Twisted ***MAD ***Tales for Twisted ***MAD ***Readers.” Each inspirational short story featured a trope like “The Homebuilt Racer,” “The Genie in the Bottle,” and “The Gambler’s Last Quarter.” None ended the way you’d expect.
One of the more understated bits I recall was Benny as a French film director (“Claude Le Twit”) being interviewed and the host kept asking about all the artistic elements in his latest film, each of which turned out to have a banal explanation, i.e. the film suddenly shifts from color to black-and-white because, it turned out, they just ran out of color film. Some scenes are shot with a hand-held camera because… the tripod was broken. And the lead actress, otherwise perfectly beautiful and flawless, was directed to play her character with a lisp:
Benny: Non, non, you misunderstand. I don’t give 'er a leesp. The actress who play the part, she have always leesp.
Host: You searched all France for an actress with a lisp?
Benny: Non, non, I don’t find her, she was discovered by our producer. Who was living with 'er at the time.
And Jane Leeves showed up occasionally, I hear.
