The moment Victoria delivered their baby, Brad’s life changed forever. He told his very first dad joke.

Victoria looked at baby Allison with beaming eyes. “Brad, she’s perfect!”

Gazing down at his daughter, he said, “She gets that from me.”

Brad jumped back and placed his hands on his head. Stunned by his new wit, he looked around the room to see if anyone laughed. They did not because the joke was… fine.

Victoria continued to gawk at her baby. Her whole world was blissfully-

“Did you hear that?!” Brad asked, staring deeper and deeper into the eyes of everyone in the room, challenging them to deny his new personality.

Victoria and baby Allison gave Brad a small laugh, but he wasn’t satisfied.

Brad quickly came to the conclusion that he would need a bigger audience because Victoria didn’t understand comedy and Allison was a dumb baby. He had to make a tough decision, one that was best for him and his brand-new dream.

Less than thirty seconds later, Victoria heard Brad’s Ford Fusion peel out of the hospital parking lot.

He drove eleven hours to the nearest talent agency in Utah. $3,000 cash down and an eye scan later he was represented at the Von Trapp Family Slingers. He told them his plan to tell hilarious, butt-clenching jokes before thousands of people, staring them down to laugh until they did. “That’s how comedy works,” he professed.

Upon hearing his demented plan, Von Trapp Family Slingers passed Brad off to their sister agency, Trump’s Institution for Talent Stars. At TITS, Brad immediately booked a fifty-state tour with huge stadiums and guaranteed sold-out crowds. He was instructed to deliver his jokes just as he had in his voice memo audition. However, what TITS didn’t tell Brad was that when he would peer into the vulnerable souls of the audience, everyone would be too concentrated on babysitting his ego to notice TITS slipping ‘Donald Trump for President’ propaganda into their bags and purses. Their partnership was perfect, stupid and perfect.

Before Brad embarked on his tour, he went home to practice his material on Victoria, but she was, of course, a new mom and hadn’t slept in days.

“Please, just go. I’m exhausted”

“Hi, exhausted! I’m Brad!” Brad made a note on his Android. He would reuse that joke in Tampa.

Three weeks into his tour, Brad, who didn’t read the news, assumed he was fucking crushing it until a doorman slipped a newspaper clipping under his hotel room door after his show in Fort Worth, Texas. The headline read, “Fort Worth in Flames After Trump Rally.”

Looking for something related to him, Brad found a review for his show at the bottom of the page “Instead of doing this, we would prefer if Brad would go home and whisper his jokes into a box.”

Gutted. Defeated. Honestly, actually, literally shocked. Brad canceled the rest of his tour. Nothing mattered anymore, so he made plans to rejoin his family.

Gutted. Defeated. Honestly, actually, literally shocked for the second time, Brad returned home to find that Victoria had married a hot new man. Staring through the dining room window of his house, he saw Victoria, baby Allison, and the hottie eating a spaghetti dinner and laughing. While Victoria was talking, the sexy new dude was laughing so hard he was clutching his stomach and crying. Brad was unfamiliar with that reaction. Victoria is horrible at comedy, he thought to himself.

Brad hung his head and sauntered back to his car. Sometimes it was lonely at the top.