Thank you. I’d like to say something while we’re all pitching ideas for Brent’s funeral. I know this may be an unpopular opinion, but please hear me out on this because I think it’s a worthwhile conversation to have. Brent was a rebel, and a maverick, and I think we’d be honoring his memory by moving away from a few cultural traditions. Namely: funeral karaoke.

Yes, obviously I know everyone loves funeral karaoke. I’m not here trying to ruin the good time. I’m just starting to think it might be disrespectful to the dead person.

My first big concern is with DJ Jay, who brings the equipment and that giant binder full of song options. DJ Jay routinely puts drinks on the coffin, hits on the bereaved, and I don’t want to work against my own argument but his binder really only covers 1969 through 1998, which means he has all of Aqua’s “Aquarium” but none of “Odyssey and Oracle,” which is insane.

Secondly, I think your song choices are getting more and more inappropriate. Maddie, I don’t want to yuck your yum or anything, it’s just that “You Oughta Know” is a pretty vengeful pick for this kinda thing, considering it’s your ex-boyfriend on the slab. They’re also getting repetitive. I know we have a lot of funerals to cover this month, but Eli, you can’t do “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” every time. It clocks in at a ruinous twenty-six minutes over nine movements and barely has any lyrics. Let someone else have a turn. Burton. Wendy. You can’t do a duet of “Something Stupid” as Jean is lowered into the ground in an even sicker inversion of Maddie’s situation. She was your soulmate, Burton. Honor her.

In fact, I’m not so sure we should be bringing the karaoke machine to the grave site, period.

We can’t advertise the funerals in Time Out. We can’t sometimes hold the funerals on the fifth floor of a Koreatown restaurant instead of a church. And when we do somehow make it to a church, DJ Jay needs to stop pulling chalices off the fuckin’ tabernacle and giving them away as prizes.

Guys, guys, I don’t know, you know, I’m really not trying to mess up our rhythm here, but with each passing funeral we’ve been pushing the karaoke earlier and earlier, and it’s been going longer and longer, to the point where at Angelique’s funeral we didn’t really get around to the service. In fact, call me sacrilegious, but I think regardless of how we execute funeral karaoke, funeral karaoke is gonna be a problem!

Yes, western civilization has been practicing funeral karaoke since Roman times. But I just think as the sole survivors of the boating accident that killed Brent, Jean, Angelique, Leonore, Norman, May, Keith, Winthrop, Karen, Karen Ann, Edmund, Shelle, Olin, Adele, Duke, Nikki, Apoch, Kiran, Ziobrowski, and many, many others after I abandoned the wheel to give “I Shoulda Known Better” a shot, we at least owe them a few moments of quiet reflection.

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