This is the Babylon Bee New Year's Special 2021. In this episode of The Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan do a rundown on 2020's biggest and best Babylon Bee stories that gave the world fake news they could trust. They talk about all the big changes at The Babylon Bee and give a behind-the-scenes look into the creative process behind the top ten Bee articles of the year. Even though the year was a crazy one, Kyle and Ethan want to end 2020 with a little Chestertonian awe, wonder, and gratitude. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans The Babylon Bee 2020 In Retrospect This year, The Babylon Bee: Got a real studio Launched video podcasts Launched animation Grew tremendously in # of subscribers We shifted to full-time coronavirus jokes for a while First annual BeeCon Got attacked by Facebook, banned by Twitter Hired more people (it was basically just me and Ethan a year ago) Trump shared our article, thinking it was real? New York Times profile Interviewed some really big names! Published The Sacred Texts Of The Babylon Bee, Volume 1! Top 10 Bee Articles of the year 10 - Inspiring: Celebrities Spell Out 'We're All In This Together' With Their Yachts 9 - Trump Announces He Has Hidden 5 Golden Tickets Among Stimulus Checks 8 - Biden: 'I Am The Only Candidate Who Can Beat Ronald Reagan' 7 - FBI Hires Top-Rated Italian Bodyguard Hiluigi Clintonelli To Protect Ghislaine Maxwell 6 - Walmart Now Requires All Shoppers To Wear Pants 5 - NBA Players Wear Special Lace Collars To Honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg 4 - Biden Campaign Says He Is So Close To A VP Pick He Can Smell Her 3 - Bernie Tests Negative For President 2 - Cracker Jack Changes Name To More Politically Correct Caucasian Jack 1 - Biden Cuts Hole In Mask So He Can Still Sniff People's Hair One last "G.K. Chesterton!" for 2020. Subscriber Portion: Bonus Top Articles #11-15 15 - Miracle: Coronavirus Passes Over Houses With Chick-Fil-A Sauce Smeared On Door Posts 14 - With Statues Gone, Pigeons Forced To Poop On Rioters 13 - In Bold Anti-Trump Statement, Pelosi Rips Up Bible 12 - Podiums At Next Debate To Be Equipped With Life Alert Buttons 11 - Democrats Warn That American People May Tamper With Next Election
In a world of fake news, we bring you up-to-the-minute factual inaccuracy and a heavy dose of moral truth.
With your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
This is the Babylon Bee.
Fake news you can trust.
Oh, hello, everyone.
We won't see you until next year.
Oh, oh, me.
Oh, me.
I do that one with my kids every year, of course.
They never find it amusing.
I don't know if there's any age at which they find it amusing.
Like, I think there's that one second where their brains go.
Like, the very first time they're like, why?
Why did I?
Oh, I get it.
And then never again.
Is there any thought to that?
But it's okay.
I'll keep telling it.
I'm Kyle Mann.
I'm the editor-in-chief of the Babylon B.
This is Ethan Nicole, Creative Director of the Babylon B.
And we are your hosts for the Babylon Bee Podcast, a podcast where you get to hang out with the Babylon B writers.
I'm saying the word Babylon B a lot.
Yeah.
Babylon Beef.
It's going to become meaningless after a while.
Well, this is our year-end show.
This is the end of the year.
We're recording this a week before, and we're going to put this up so that we can just be off hanging out with our families for a week.
Hanging out.
Hanging out.
You'll see a lot of reposts from us.
We're going to post our best of the year on social media throughout the next week or so.
So you'll be seeing that.
And then on this podcast, we're just going to do a quick retrospective.
Throughout the next week, from when this goes up or from right now?
From when this goes up.
When does this go up?
Friday?
I guess we can put it out before then.
Who knows?
The week surrounding this podcast.
So if you're on Facebook and you're like, hey, these are old.
I laughed at this joke six months ago.
This just happened.
I like the guy, the commenter on Facebook is always like, repost.
Yeah.
Good job.
I've heard this one before.
Repost.
It's like the guy at a party when you start saying, okay, so the minister and the priest and the rabbi walk to a bar and he's like, heard this one.
And it just sits back.
Repost.
Repost.
I don't say that with like food.
I know.
You're like, oh, we're having chicken again.
Repost.
Oh, done this one before.
Yeah.
Can we enjoy it again?
We can enjoy it again.
Some people missed it.
That's the idea.
Yeah.
Well, we were reposting on social media.
You know, we'll repost articles from like a year before because our social following, you know, it's like a year later, we might have double the subscribers on a particular platform.
It's like, all these people did not get to enjoy our great joke about someone identifying as something that they're not.
So we get to repost it.
That's what we get to do.
And it's identifying as a new post.
It identifies as a new joke.
That's the same joke, Ethan.
No.
So anyway, yeah, we're lazy, so we decided to record this a week ahead of time so we didn't have to do much work.
Yeah, it's been a big year here at the Babylon B. Wait, do we have stories meeting?
So what we're going to do is we're going to talk a little bit about what happened at the Babylon Bee this year.
Well, reminisce.
And then we're going to count down our top 10 stories, top 10 shared Babylon Bee stories of the year.
That'll be fun.
We'll count from 10 to 1.
We did this last year and saw that I didn't make any.
You made the list this year.
Oh, did I make the list?
Yeah, I didn't even write anything this year.
You wrote a lot less because you were doing more cartoons.
I was busy with the book and podcast and stuff.
But yeah.
So you made it.
We should have done your top cartoons.
We could throw that in the subscriber portion there.
All of them.
I can't believe I've done.
Have I done 10 yet?
I think so.
I think there's like 12, 13 on the animation list.
Number one is Gavin Newsome on Impractical Jokers.
Just broke 100,000 views.
That's our first 100,000 view cartoon video.
We're very proud.
I know we'll look back on that in five years and be like, remember when we were all excited about 100,000?
Yeah.
Hope so.
Or we'll be like, remember when we used to get 100,000 views on one video?
We really peaked with that Gavin Newsom video.
All right.
Well, this year at the Babylon Bee, we got a real studio.
Yeah, this is real.
Some stuff that happened.
Yeah.
We were in my garage a year and a half ago.
Happened fast.
We were in my garage recording.
You weren't even working for the Babylon Bee.
No, it was right after I started working for you.
Like, I started showing up in your garage.
That was the workplace.
Maybe a year and seven months, a year and eight months ago is when you started working for the Babylon Bee.
Like three, four months later, we launched the podcast in my garage.
And then a couple of months later, we got the office.
First office, yeah.
So we had our office about a year and three months ago or so.
And that was our little one that you were like, that's the Babylon B.
And we're sitting like a very small white room.
And all the disappointed people who would come by and be like, oh.
I think Kevin Sorbo was our last.
Oh, yeah, he was our last.
I think it was our last, like our last recording there.
Was he?
Or at least one of the last.
Close to.
And it was just like this big name showing up.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the funny thing was it was more impressive on the outside because it was this corporate building.
Giant skyscraper.
Oh, wow, this is nice.
But we rented one tiny room in there.
This place is like less assuming on the outside.
You're just like, it's more willy walk.
You walk inside, it's like a skyscraper in here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's bigger on the crazy.
We launched video podcasts in the last year.
Yeah.
That's been a huge undertaking.
Good job.
I did not know how much was involved on a video podcast.
I know, it's like, well, you just turn on some cameras and you can have visual.
We are doing the audio.
Just throw up the video.
Yeah.
Don't throw it up.
That is not the case.
Which is also the same with audio.
It's going to just throw up the audio.
Yeah.
Well, to me, I just come here and talk and you guys take care of it.
Yeah, our YouTube channel grew tremendously.
I think we're up to close to 60,000 subscribers now on there.
Thanks a lot to the animation, also the video podcast.
Yeah, there was nothing there before.
I mean, it was like, we started one and then.
We started one, didn't do anything with it.
I think we started throwing up the audio tracks.
Yeah, we started throwing up the audio with a picture.
So, hello, YouTube people, YouTube land.
Hopefully, you've discovered the Babylon B through YouTube.
Hopefully.
Launched animation this year.
It's a big one.
We'll look back on these days.
It's like the steamboat Willie days.
There'll be a whole documentary about the impractical jokers one.
You can see the animation.
He used to animate the whole thing.
By hand.
Yeah.
He was a racist.
No, it's kind of Walt Disney.
People say he was a racist.
Anybody old and famous that ruled an empire?
So he's like, there's a racist, anti-Semite.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know.
But there was a darker side.
But there was a darker side.
Yeah, something like that.
They all want to start utopias once they get really rich.
Yeah.
Like Epcot.
Yeah, it grew tremendously.
Number of paid Babylon B subscribers.
Thank you, people who are paid subscribers.
Huge growth.
Huge growth there.
Couldn't have done this without that.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, and Facebook really squashed us for like the last two months.
They just announced that now you can, now they're not going to squash as many posts.
They keep announcing, we are squashing posts.
And then they come out.
We are not squashing as many posts.
It's their whole post-election coverage.
We are prioritizing content from trusted sources.
And now they said we're rolling.
Now that Biden's in there.
Now that Biden's in there.
Okay, we're going to relax it.
You guys can make your jokes now.
But because we had the paid subscribers, it didn't affect us.
I would have been sweating pretty hard if Facebook was squashing us that hard.
When we were purely ad-driven?
And we're purely ad-driven because they have the power to just turn off the faucet.
Speaking of, we got some posts deleted from Facebook, Instagram.
We were banned by Twitter, suspended by Twitter for a few hours.
And we still have no idea what that was about.
But that like drove drove more subscriptions than anything.
This one day that they suspended us for a couple hours or whatever.
Yeah.
And what was the first Daniel Becon on here?
What's that?
That happened?
I miss it.
You missed the Becon.
I was in Florida with Seth.
Oh, that's called Becon.
That's like a staff getaway trip.
Becon seems like people could come to it.
Yeah.
Nope.
No.
They could if they knew where it was.
That was fun.
Well, yeah, for the first time, a bunch of us actually met him.
We actually met Babylon Bee writers in person.
Great group of guys.
I was impressed.
Yeah, they're all impressive.
Picking a bunch of people just offering them.
There's like one or two.
There's a lot of weirdos, but yeah.
Yeah.
You know who you are.
It was just amazing to see people kind of pair off in a group and be like, oh, I like, you know, we're all our family.
Yeah, it was just, it was incredible.
Well, in March, we shifted to full-time coronavirus jokes.
Full-time.
I woke up one morning and I was writing jokes about transgender people for politicians.
And then the next morning I woke up and I was like, six coronavirus jokes today, because that's all anybody wants to read.
This was fun for like a month, yeah.
But it launched, you know, we have done some launched us doing song jokes.
We did the Go Down Moses song.
I think that was our first ever Babylon Bee song of any kind.
Well, yes.
Although I think, didn't Austin do that one with the Grinch and Newsom?
Or he like narrated a song.
It was like a narration.
Yeah, that was just like a poem.
Yeah, so that's been fun.
Yeah.
Broadening the bee.
Oh, and I forgot.
I thought, didn't Dave D'Andrea read that night before Christmas, The War on Christmas?
Yeah.
That was like one of our first videos.
Yeah, just that.
That was kind of, I guess that's the other thing we've launched into doing other video content.
Yeah.
It's kind of just random.
Do a lot of new stuff.
I like it.
We got more people on board.
We got hired more people.
It's brewing.
I was thinking a year ago, it was me and you.
And it seemed unimaginable to be able to hire anybody on.
Yeah, because we had just started having Dan do part-time work then.
And we're thinking, well, maybe we could get him full-time at some point.
And then we'd have four.
Well, the way to get Dan on was we were like, we just, there's a lot of stuff that me and you do that we don't necessarily have to be doing it.
And we're so busy.
It's like, we're thinking like a high schooler assistant or somebody who could kind of come and just like carry papers around or something.
So, but Dan's job quickly went from being like an assistant who just does our extra work to like full-on position.
I guess that's how this grows: you become the assistant, and then you have so much, you get an assistant for the assistant, and you get an assistant for the assistant.
That's what a company is.
That's how a company is born.
Yeah.
Kids gather around.
We're going to tell you how a company is reproduced.
So it's amazing.
I mean, yeah, now we have a full team.
It feels like a company now.
I don't know if you were to chart like the last few months.
It suddenly started to feel like a company.
Yeah.
A real deal.
The real deal.
Another big thing that happened, Trump shared our article.
Yeah, it's weird.
Where we said that Twitter shut down the whole network.
You might have thought it was real.
Slow the spread of negative Biden news.
And yeah, we weren't.
Biden knows it.
Biden knows it.
You just think Biden, you think knows.
And yeah, it wasn't clear if he thought it was real or not.
But that was a big day for us.
Yeah.
It was funny how little of a blip that was for us.
Yeah, it was weird that wasn't really that like Trump shared our stuff before, though, right?
Yeah.
Or is that the first time he directly shared us?
That's a good question.
I think, I know, because it was kind of big.
It was definitely the first time he shared a share.
It was definitely the first time he was sitting on the gold toilet in the White House with the iPhone, and he like he offered his commentary.
He clicked on the Babylon B article, hit copy of the URL, pasted it in his Twitter.
Oh, really?
So it wasn't a quote tweet.
It wasn't a quote tweet.
He pastes it and then he goes, I can't believe that they're doing this.
That was the first time.
Okay.
So, thank you, President Trump.
May he live forever.
We got a profile in the New York Times, which ended up being fairly fair and balanced.
I didn't like the way they framed it.
It was like the Babylon Bee was a site that used to make fun of Trump.
Now they're on his side.
That was like the headline or the caption or whatever.
Maybe these Trump jokes got old a long time ago.
Well, at least that angle of Trump joke that he is moving.
We still tell drum jokes, but they don't.
The angle of Trump joke that he's bad.
That got old very fast.
Yeah, it gets pretty old.
But we did one on Saturday saying that he got the Dark Saber, which is a Star Wars reference.
Did really well.
Because it's just you roll with his personality.
You don't tell him all the time, and it works.
I have a confession that I watched the first three episodes of The Mandalorian.
Oh, hey, how'd you think?
What'd you think?
It's good.
Good.
Good.
I'm glad.
It was enough for me to watch three episodes.
Good times.
Okay.
Cool.
Just a Western, Space Western guy walking around.
I like the giant rhino thing.
Yeah, that was cool.
I like cool creatures.
Yeah.
It's so imaginative.
I love it.
Imaginative?
Imaginative.
I just like to mock how you talk.
Anytime Ethan makes fun of how I pronounce things, take a shot of grape juice.
This is actually Diet Coke.
This is actually empty.
And I didn't think it was.
We interviewed some big names this year.
I got to talk to my hero, Ron Paul, this year.
Did we start the podcast this year?
No, we didn't.
We started in a year.
We started a year and a half ago, but we were like, we had Michael Malice on Zoom.
We had Kevin Max on.
I had Allie Beth Stuckey on.
And that's when we were like.
What was our first in-person interview?
Was it Bridget Fetasy?
Yeah, we would have been Bridget or Kira or Greg.
Greg Cochle, no.
It would have been one of them.
I swear it was.
I think it was Bridget Fettis.
Could have been.
Oh, no, no.
It's probably Godawa.
Oh, it could be, yeah.
You might be right.
No, we haven't had him on a long time.
He moved.
I know we tried to get him local.
He's like, I'm currently in a U-Haul leaving California.
Yeah.
So sad.
It's like everybody we try to interview now, they're like, I'm currently packing my U-Haul.
Yep.
So.
All right, well.
We're holding it down here.
That was just a brief retrospective.
Do we want to go to the top 10 B articles of the year?
Let's do it.
Everybody, do we have a consensus?
All right, here we go.
And now, the Babylon Bee's topic of the week.
We published a lot of content this year.
If you can say anything about the Babylon Bee's jokes, it's that there were a lot of them.
Relative to, yeah, the regular thing.
Whatever.
What do you think of the number of jokes that the average person tells in a year?
Yeah.
Yeah, like Soup Plantation makes more salads than the average person.
Well, not anymore.
Not anymore.
Because they're out of business.
That should be on our list somewhere.
Soup Plantation.
My son asked us if we could go to Soup Plantation yesterday.
Let's shout out of the blue.
Can we go to Soup Plantation?
I'm like, sorry, son.
I would feel this mirth as I told him that no.
Because it sucks and the business model fell apart.
It's a garbage place.
He said, oh, yeah, was that, he was like, they used to have dirty plates, right?
Because remember, they would just, well, they would take their plates and they would just like pressure wash them and then set them in the front of the restaurant.
Oh, he's pressure washing them.
You go grab a plate at the front and it's like, you know, you try to find a clean one.
That's always how it felt in the film.
So you go camping and like nobody cares.
Yeah.
I eat everything with the same knife.
I'm not crazy about it, but at a restaurant, you're like, oh.
Yeah, it's weird at a restaurant.
There's always weird people.
All right, so here's the top 10 B articles of the year.
At Sioux Plantation.
In terms of shares.
Starting from number 10 and counting our way up to number one.
Oh, yeah.
The ultimate countdown.
Number 10.
Inspiring.
Celebrities spell out, we're all on this together with their yachts.
A classic.
This is a classic.
This one was great because it got retweeted by Patton Oswald, We made fun of in the article.
In the article, and he called us magnificent porpoises, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, he was like, I disagree with you.
But they made the point in a clever way.
But did he know he disagreed with?
I don't know if he knew that we were conservatives or not.
Well, he knew we were making fun of him at least.
Oh, yeah, he knew we were making fun of him.
I don't know if he knew it was conservative or what.
Or whatever we are.
Not, you know.
If he dug in deeper, he'd be like, burn this website down.
And again, I don't even say the bad one is conservative.
It's not leftist.
And we make fun of leftists.
It makes jokes that are off limits if you're on the left.
Sure.
That's the main thing.
Yeah, because I think Patton Oswald had tweeted out some joke like, remember something about Fud Ruckers?
He said, that's why we put him in the article because he said something like, you know, oh, all these, all these poor people knocking on the door, Fudruckers, like, open up, open up.
Like, that was his vision.
That was his vision of people that were upset at the lockdowns.
They just wanted to eat it Fudd Rucker.
I remember.
And so he kind of got like ratioed on that tweet.
Yeah.
Oh, easy for you to say sitting in your mansion.
But anyway.
But we do want Fudd Ruckers though.
I will say it's not really a mansion because I've actually.
Oh, what is it?
This is a big house.
What's the definition of a mansion?
Have you been in like Los Felas, kind of the regular area down there?
No.
Big house.
Really?
Yeah, it's just like.
What did you say?
In fact, your house might be around the same size, actually.
It might be a little bit bigger.
But my house is so much more expensive.
When we made Axe Cop, it was in a house right next door to Pat Noswalt.
Gotcha.
What's the address?
I can find it.
He's still there.
The way he ended up on the show is he was jogging by.
And Nick Offerman's like, you want to be on Axe Cop?
And I told this story, I'm sure.
We're doing a top 10 right now.
He goes, You magnificent.
Porpoises.
So he says to everybody.
I just saw someone repost this article on Twitter just recently again because people still think this is real.
And he goes, Oh, people think it's real.
He debunked it.
And he's like, You know, they did the thing that they all do where they go, actually, you can tell these boats are Photoshopped.
And this guy, he posted, he goes, There is no place near Malibu that looks like this.
You know, I've looked at the oceans and I just love people scouting.
I'm looking at the shadows.
All you gotta do is look at the shadows.
Or just read the headline and be like, oh, I see what they're doing.
And there's only four different boats repeated.
True, true.
All right, what's our number nine?
I wasn't trying to be too sneaky.
Photoshop.
Trump announces he has hidden five golden tickets among stimulus checks.
Drop it.
There's your Trump humor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
See?
Trump owned it.
Trump destroyed.
He's so dumb.
He's so dumb.
He's just like Willy Wonka, candy magnate.
Yeah.
Is that the right use that word magnate?
Magnate.
A candy tycoon.
Yeah.
Are there tycoons?
Chocolate bar.
What's another word like that?
Hey, you know, in the Charlie Chocolate Factory movie, there was that spy guy that was like trying to get the goblins.
I just snuck him in.
He's not in the book.
He's not in the book.
Okay.
That's what I was wondering because it was weird to me that there's like all this espionage between candy companies.
Yeah, that's all from the movie.
Okay.
That wasn't in the book.
And then Charlie, like having a bad side and stuff, him and his grandpa sneak, mean sneaky or whatever.
They worked that in too.
They got to give him a flaw.
He's like perfect in the book.
He's the perfect child.
You mean with the root beer when they like drink the chips?
Yeah, they go and they drink this and they float.
Yeah.
That was movie home.
That was purely movie.
Yeah.
You're like me watching Lord of the Rings where I'm like, that's not that bad.
I don't have like, you know, Willy Wonka's cane on my wall.
Like Airhorn's sword is the equivalent of Willy Wonka's cane.
The Gobstopper machine.
Look at this.
Replica.
A replica gobstover.
Not that bad.
Nope.
Denied.
Number eight.
Biden.
I am the only candidate who can beat Ronald Reagan.
And then in the distant future, people will have to look back.
The funny thing about that joke is that they were pretty far apart in time.
Yeah, because it won't.
Yeah, if you were to read one now that was like Garfield.
Yeah, Garfield said something to Lincoln.
Well, I would know that one, I guess.
I'm trying to think of someone who's like 20 years apart or something where you would be like, what?
Oh.
Teddy Roosevelt.
Oh, okay.
I published this story when I was still going to Disneyland.
This was like early March.
And I was like, I gotta think.
But it did that good.
It's because probably people thought it was real, right?
No, I think people just like the joke.
I mean.
Well, I remember because if it does well off our Babylon B page, then it's that people thought it was funny.
If it starts spreading through like a Ben Shapiro share or something, that's when people think it's real.
But I published this and then I jumped in the car and drove to Disneyland.
And then I was like, looked at it.
It was doing really well.
Which was a daily thing until this was like March 3rd or 4th or something.
I was looking at the date and that was like a week before Disneyland closed.
We probably owe a lot of our growth to coronavirus.
Because Kyle wasn't at Disneyland all the time.
Because yeah, you were at Disneyland like three or four days out of the week there.
I was just talking to my wife last night.
She's like, I missed Ghisneland.
Sad.
Number seven.
FBI hires top-rated Italian bodyguard Hiluigi Clintonelli to protect Gilane Maxwell.
How do you say that?
Ghilaine.
Like that you weren't sure, so you just added an accent to it.
Ghislaney.
Ghislaney Maxwell.
A series of.
Soft G or a hard G?
I don't know.
Gif or GIF.
I guess this was our top performing Hillary Clinton in disguise joke.
I don't know why this one rose to the top from all the other Hillary disguise ones.
It's a whole series.
It's a series.
So I think we have maybe 10 that we did.
Wow.
And I've retired it.
I think the joke is.
We've avoided every culturally sensitive.
Well, have we?
We never did Blackface or anything.
We never did Blackface.
We did do an Indian one.
Native American.
I don't remember if we did a Chinese one.
I don't think we did.
I think we talked about it.
Of course we did.
And then I was like, no.
We did a Jewish one.
What would her name be?
No, I remember one writer pitched a very name that we could not use.
But yeah.
Oh, no, we did a Jewish one.
And then we got some hate mail people saying, like, why do you hate Jews?
Yeah, it's like, it's a small world, but with Hillary Clinton.
But, you know, every nationality.
Well, and I think the reason we didn't get in trouble for all these is because the caricature is so over the top.
Like, it's got this massive Tour Lumo stick.
Yeah, but if it was.
Sure.
Yeah.
If it was what?
If it was a race thing.
Say it.
Say it.
Worse.
You can do it, I guess, a subtle disguise.
It is strange how there are certain ones that you can do.
And we just knew going in, oh, we can do Italian.
We can do Scandinavian.
We can do a Russian.
Do we ever do a Viking?
But why would it.
Disguised as a Viking.
Hillary Clinton with the horns on the tanker.
Clintersen.
Clintinkelsen.
Yeah, something like that.
Clinton Steiger.
Yeah.
It's not.
Is it my turn?
Number six.
Walmart now requires all shoppers to wear pants.
Classic.
Just a classic joke.
Classic.
I think that was right when they said that everybody had to wear masks.
All the masks.
Pants.
Yeah, how many of these are pandemic-related?
So far, two.
Two.
Of five.
So that's not too bad.
Two of five?
Two of five.
So the celebrities one is that pandemic related?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the golden tickets is stimulus checks, but which is, but I say that's a tangential, you know, thing.
Yeah.
So is that all we have to say about that one?
Walmart now requires all shoppers to wear pants.
Well, I think some of these we covered on the podcast, and I've told all my good.
I think I told the story where I walked in Walmart and there was a smell, and I looked down one of the freezer aisles, and there's just feces spread.
And they've got like a yellow cone thing there.
Like, don't come in here.
Faces.
Are you making fun of how I pronounce that?
Take a shot of grape juice at everybody.
Yeah, I guess I was.
I was trying to think of why I did that.
Walmart now requires all shoppers to wear punts.
Punts.
You never know what word I'm going to slip in there some weird pronunciation.
I don't remember you telling me that story.
I might have just brushed it over, like, oh, I've seen feces in the aisles.
No, yeah.
Yeah, you know, moving on.
Yes, moving on.
How weird would it be to go back a year from now and tell yourself, so next year, like, you're going to be wearing masks in the stores.
And you're going to see feces in Walmart.
You get your one chance at time travel.
And that's what you do with it.
Prepare yourself emotionally for this.
I'm allowing you to talk to yourself in the past one time.
You get to say one thing.
On August 3rd, you will walk into Walmart.
There will be feces.
They will be the feces of Hitler.
Save those feces.
Okay, what am I?
Just move on.
Number five.
Number five, we're halfway there.
NBA players wear special lace collars to honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Now that one was big because people thought it was real.
Yep.
So they're looking for ones that got big not because they were funny, even though.
There is a video of us going over this whole thing, reading many of the tweets of people.
Oh, man.
You got to go back and watch that if you haven't noticed.
I don't remember what episode that was, but oh, man.
Yeah, and we isolated that clip.
I think we might have decided that this was the only article to ever go big on the left because the only Babylon B article ever to go big on the left because they thought it was real and because they thought it was inspiring.
Yeah, they're happy about it.
Like sometimes we did the Trump stained glass one and they're like, that was terrible.
And then they drove that one.
Trump, I have done more for Christianity than Jesus.
They share that one.
I'm like, oh, this is terrible.
But then they share this one and said, this is inspiring.
I've never seen.
I'm crying right now.
I'm trying to even think of one that's happened on the right where the right thought of Babylon B art was real.
And inspiring.
And inspiring.
Like, oh, this is amazing.
Yeah, I don't think so.
Like, Trump, I've done more for Christianity than Jesus.
If the right one's like, oh, yeah, this is great.
He really has.
Yeah.
I'm sure it's happened, but I can't think of one.
Yeah, go Trump.
Because I can think of somewhere that they're like, yeah, go Trump, get him.
But I can't think of specifically.
Ones where people are all excited.
Oh, this is great.
Yeah.
Maybe some new product.
We did a joke about a new product, like a new thing introduced, and they call the store.
Like, I want to buy one of these.
I guess that would be the closest.
Like, we did the MAGA helmets.
And they're like, oh, they don't think it was real, but they say I would buy that.
So I don't know.
All right.
Number four.
Biden campaign says he is so close to a VP pick, he can smell her.
That's my dad.
There you go, man.
So proud of you, dude.
Number four.
You made the list.
Fourth up there.
How many of these Photoshops did you do?
You did The Yachts?
You did Hiluigi?
Yeah.
That's all.
That's it.
You're so close.
So you did 20% of our best photos.
Success.
Good job.
But see, there's a thing like if these went big because people thought they were real.
Your Photoshops don't do that, usually.
The stained glass window.
That's true.
That's completely fabricated.
But it tends to be where your Photoshops, like if you're on video, you can look at some of Ethan's Photoshops behind us.
I try to make them look real.
They're so real looking.
Ethan's got this eye for cartoon humors.
That's very Looney Tunes, and you wouldn't mistake it for being reality usually.
Usually.
Usually.
I think the Trump Last Supper is pretty convincing.
Yeah.
But you wouldn't think it was real.
Yeah.
Because they didn't have cameras back then.
Right.
Trump isn't actually Jesus.
Yeah.
So that wouldn't make any sense.
A lot of sleuthing you have to do.
Yeah.
I mean, that one you did Biden campaign says he's so close to a VP pick you can smell her was perfect because of the timing.
I think we released that the Saturday before he announced on Monday.
You know, it was like everybody was waiting for the pick and you threw that up and it was just cool.
Good job, Ethan.
Thank you.
I'm so proud of you.
That was at a time when I wasn't writing many articles.
Yeah.
Number three?
Yeah.
Bernie.
Bernie tests negative for president.
That's another timing one.
Yeah.
It was right in the middle of coronavirus.
Jokes were huge.
Bernie dropped out and we threw it up immediately.
I think we had it ready.
It was in the hopper.
Oh, yeah.
Was this the one that we maybe not?
Remember, there was one where we were above like CNN and all these news outlets for like the most short.
Yeah, that was the same thing.
The way people got this info was us.
Yeah, that was all the others.
This one was shared.
I think it was more than any other article about Bernie dropping out of the race.
More than CNN's official report.
More than the New York Tesla official report.
On social media, it was shared the most.
I like that we're like the number one source for news.
That's just fantastic.
Awesome.
Number two, Cracker Jack changes his name to more politically correct Caucasian Jack.
So you can see why we have our three conservative jokes.
Because look how well it does for us.
I remember sitting.
Did you expect this one to do as well as it did?
No, but there was a timing thing.
I was just like, are you kidding me?
This is doing that well.
There was a timing thing.
I like this joke.
I mean, it's not a bad joke.
It's just to me, it's like the joke that you would make while you're in the grocery store.
Like, go get it.
I don't know.
It's not a bad joke.
It's just, yeah.
Yeah.
The joke that the crazy guy would make in the grocery store.
Not crazy guy.
Uncle.
You're cursing or something.
I don't know.
It's not, you know.
Anyway, it did good.
There was a timing thing here, too, because this was right when Aunt Jemima was getting pulled.
It was like right on the same.
Like they had the script.
Okay, this is the month where we are pulling the bands.
It just all happened at the same time.
So there was a timing thing here.
But I think of all the jokes, like if you're going to tell this joke, that's a pretty good version of it.
Sure.
Can we agree?
Sure.
I'm a snob.
A total snob.
And look where it gets you.
One out of ten jokes.
One out of ten.
How many of these are the rest years?
Pretty much, yeah.
I can tell you in a second.
Okay, let's do our.
So number one, number one joke of the year.
Kyle's your joke and your Photoshop.
Biden cuts hole in masks so he can still sniff people's hair.
The visual does make it.
It looks like a little thumb tip sticking out of the nose.
Yeah, so I don't know if we do some analysis here, like mostly political.
Right.
Yeah, there's like no Christian jokes.
No Christian jokes.
Biden is three of them.
One, two, three.
Very current event-heavy.
Like, if there was a huge topic everybody was talking about and we made the perfect joke, boom, it's going to rise up to the top.
That doesn't necessarily mean these are our 10 best jokes.
Yeah.
These are the 10s most widespread shared.
So that's going to be like I'd have way more in here if this was our funniest.
Yeah.
That's what we should have done.
You want to start over?
Okay.
I wrote one, two, one, two, three.
The top three are mine, I think.
Wow.
Fourth.
Four.
Five.
I wrote five of the ten.
And I actually probably wrote more, but of the copy, but five of the ten were my down from last year.
Sad.
I think I had like six or seven last.
You're losing it.
Losing my touch.
Losing your tail.
I'm going to come out of retirement to tell one last joke.
All right, well, we're going to count down five more jokes in our subscriber portion.
It's going to be a shorter episode because we're lazy.
Are these the next top even better or the last two?
No, these are like worse.
These are 11th or 15.
Okay.
We'll do that on our subscriber portion.
But I wanted to just tell you guys all to have a great new year.
Be thankful to God for all the good things he's done for us this year.
We're really blessed.
Very blessed, indeed.
No hate mail this episode.
Yeah, this is.
We don't want to end on that.
Let us read this GK Chesterton poem to close out the year.
GK Chesterton.
Here dies another day during which I have had eyes, ears, hands, and the great world around me.
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed to?
So good.
It always took me a second to think.
Yeah.
Excessive.
We got a backup hand.
Backup eye.
All right, everybody.
God bless from the Babylon B. You have a great new year.
If you're a subscriber, we're going to go do five more stories.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
In the subscriber lounge, we're going to do five more of our top stories.
I mean, I think this was, in some ways, this was the beginning of the coronavirus jokes.
And this was the end of an era with Chick-fil-A.
So we did the article that Chick-fil-A.
Oh, wait, now you're going to tell.
Yeah, I will.
Do we ever talk about this?
We might not.
We might not have talked about the podcast.
We kind of avoided it.
It was sensitive at the time.
Time to tear all the statues down because we don't need history anymore.
We are history.
Wondering what they'll say next?
The rest of this podcast is in our super exclusive premium subscriber lounge.
Go to BabylonB.com slash plans for full-length ad-free podcasts.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.