Legend has it that Lenny Bruce had to play a gig soon after the assassination of President Kennedy. The audience was stiff with anticipatory anxiety: would Bruce risk the crowd’s anger and disgust by making fun of the traumatic event, or would he go soft in the face of national tragedy, and which of those options would actually be worse? Bruce marched out onstage, looking pensive and upset about something, and then finally blurted out, “Boy…poor Vaughn Meader!” The Vaughn Meader of Billy Mays’s sadly foreshortened life was “JaboOody Dubs”, whose deceptively simple formula for redubbed Billy Mays videos, as seen at the JaboOody Dubs site or at YouTube, consistently struck me as just about the most inexplicably funny things on the web. I don’t know what Mays thought of them, though I’d like to imagine that, as a proper pitchman, he was grateful for anything that made his face a little more familiar, and I can honestly say that I have a degree of affection for the fellow that I wouldn’t have if these things did not exist. Rest in peace, and check the archives.
–Phil Nugent
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