WARNING: Contains graphic depictions of the birth of a new joke. Parental discretion is advised.

"What we need," said Matthew Legare, "is a new joke."

So the thinktank went to work. Empirical eugenicists were called in from across the world to evaluate potential parents for the new joke. Tens of thousands of comedians, amateur and professional, were considered.

Finally, two anonymous unknowns--he from Manhattan, she from the heartland of Kansas--were selected and brought together. Under carefully controlled conditions, they procreated. But then...disaster struck.

What you are about to witness is the actual scene of the delivery. It is not a dramatization.

[Cut to the delivery stage. Several surgeons are clustered around the joke's mother. The father waits anxiously by.]

Father: Come on, you can do it! Come on, honey...

[The mother gasps.]

Surgeon 2: That's it...that's it...it's coming out now...yes...

[Finally, the delivery begins. It is long and difficult, lasting almost ten minutes.]

Mother: *CENSORED* [by authority of the Censor's Bureau. The delivery has been deemed too upsetting, too shockingly terrible, to be presented on national television.]

[No one can believe what they've just heard.]

Surgeon 1: Oh my God.

[The father looks horrified.]

Father: My God...what can we do?

Surgeon 1: I don't think we have any choice.

Father: What...you mean...

Surgeon 1: Yes.

[The father stares at the ground for a few moments, then looks up decisively.]

Father: Yes. We don't have a choice. But...God help us.

[Cut to interview with father a month later.]

"Everything seemed okay, we kept practicing for the delivery, everything was fine. And then we got onto the delivery stage, and she started to bear down, and what came out...it...you can't imagine..." [Breaks into sobs.] "...a horrible, twisted thing...a grotesque travesty of a joke...We had to...to..."

"You had to...kill it?"

"No--no--I want to make this perfectly clear, we didn't kill anything. It wasn't a joke, it couldn't have been. If it had had any semblance of humor in it, we might have been able to live with its defects, to...to carry on. But there was no way it could ever have been funny. We didn't `kill' whatever it was, we...we `terminated' it. And we have no moral qualms about it. But we still feel the loss, even now, a month later..."

"Do you think you'll ever get over it?"

"We have to, we have to get past the pain. Life goes on...and things don't always work out. We can't just quit, we know that...and we've already talked about the possibility...it sounds horrible, so soon, but...we've already talked about, maybe, just maybe, trying to create another one."