Saturday Night Live writers could have stayed up all night long at Burning Man, eating peyote and howling at the moon, and they wouldn’t have been able to write a sketch as funny as the body cam video of Rep. Bill Allemand getting busted for (allegedly) driving drunk.
Please don’t construe this column as condoning the behavior of a politician who drinks better when he drives, but material like this doesn’t present itself all that often. So, I feel it’s my duty as a responsible satirist to pounce right on it like a ravenous tomcat on a three-legged mouse.
Allemand, of Natrona County's House District 58, is running for re-election as a torch-bearer for the Chemtrail Caucus, and as a self-styled “conservative.”
His re-election platform appears to be “draining the swamp” in Cheyenne one beer at a time, protecting our Second Amendment right to bear arms while sloshed behind the wheel, and fighting the woke mob so a man can get shit-faced when he wants.
I think he’ll lose that race; if so, we should keep him around just for laughs.
Comic talent like Allemand’s is generational. As you watch the video, keep in mind that it was done in one take, with no rehearsal. Unbelievable!
First we see Rep. Allemand pulled over by a Johnson County deputy sheriff. Allemand exits his pickup with a bleary gaze and unsteady gait. He engages in folksy banter with the deputy, speaking with a liquor-thickened tongue while he sways.
The officer asks if he has had anything to drink, and the legislator answers, “two beers.” Allemand does not specify whether those coupla brewskies were li’l ol’12oz Bud Lights or man-sized PBR 40s.
Within a few minutes of the stop, the deputy suspects inebriation and spots a gun on Allemand’s pickup seat, so the legislator is detained and cuffed. Then Allemand explains to the deputy that driving on interstate highways gives him anxiety, and drinking beer helps calm him. It’s a novel excuse, but the officer doesn’t seem to buy it.
Another plank in Allemand’s platform is evidently keeping the motoring public safe from anxious drivers. And he leads by example.
Several minutes follow of Allemand, with slurred speech, pleading his case as if he was on court TV, while the cops secure the scene and help the detainee into the back of a squad car for the trip to the hoosegow.
This has been covered well already. So, I’ll just hit some high points, if you’ll pardon the expression.
On the drive to the jail, Allemand tosses out that he is a legislator. That’s an odd thing to say at that moment, unless he wants to impress upon the deputy that he swings a big stick in Cheyenne. But it’s really comedic genius...a straight line that sets up the jokes later in the act.
During booking, Allemand is asked to surrender his belt - pretty standard jail protocol. He then bragged about his “Honor Wyoming” belt buckle, because it’s one of a very few in existence. Maybe he thought is was some sort of secret talisman, a Chemtrail Caucus get-out-of-jail-free card. Anyhow, I got a chuckle out of that.
Getting a DUI will cost Allemand a few hundred bucks, but getting busted for DUI while wearing an Honor Wyoming belt buckle is priceless!
Later, while being questioned about his health history, Allemand blurted out “I wish an old girl had given me herpes a couple days ago, but she didn’t.”
That made me snort and reach for the popcorn. And the penicillin.
Allemand finished his slapstick routine during his booking photo, when he told the officer that his mugshot would show up on Cowboy State Daily, and suggested that the sheriff’s office could sell the photos for “many dollars.”
That’s pretty funny, because law enforcement shares that stuff with what the Chemtrail Caucus calls the “radical left-wing media” in Wyoming free of charge. So it made me snicker.
Stand up routines may be dead in comedy clubs all over our republic, but all it takes is one drunk legislator to prove that humor is alive and well in the Big Empty.
Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
